I love the idea of Dwarf Fortress and I think the internet purest mission is to disseminate works of passion such as this, not to sell me ads instead. That said, I can't get past the ASCII interface -- I'm a huge fan of IF games (which used to be called "text adventures" in the olden days) and I can deal with spartan UIs, but for real-time strategy/sandbox games, I absolutely need some sort of graphics. Tiles, at least. The same happens to me with Nethack, which fortunately does have graphical tilesets. I'm glad to read Toady One is working on such a UI!

Something I found insightful about TFA was this:

> Q: With your ~90 side projects, have you explored any other programming languages? If so, any favorites?

> A: Ha ha, nope! I’m more of a noodler over on the design side, rather than with the tech. I’m sure some things would really speed up the realization of my designs though, so I should probably at least learn some scripting and play around with threading more. People have even been kind enough to supply some libraries and things to help out there, but it’s just difficult to block side project time out for tech learning when my side project time is for relaxing.

This is interesting. I constantly feel the temptation to learn new tools, new languages, new stuff. I get sidetracked by the tech. But the key to successful games seems to be designing them and sticking to the work of making them work no matter the tech or language. If Toady had kept playing with programming languages and frameworks instead of sticking to his actual project -- creating a game -- maybe Dwarf Fortress wouldn't exist, or it wouldn't be as featureful.