Dwarf Fortress Steam Updates – Release Roadmap

And there are of course the timeless classics that inspired these- nethack, angband & dungeon-crawl.

http://www.unrealworld.fi/

oh and Aurora4x...probably no really a game:

https://aurora2.pentarch.org/

Check out UnReal World, which Tarn cites as a source for his own inspiration (and is itself still under active development and also now available on Steam): https://www.unrealworld.fi/

As a person struggling with day-to-day due to mental health issues, all the people working on such projects truly are an inspiration - and on top of that we get good games :)

[0] https://rayfowler.itch.io/remnants-of-the-precursors

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/rotp/

[2] https://www.gog.com/game/falling_frontier

In school I remember finding project files students in the past had left on the servers. Mostly like digital art files. Sometimes papers or a miscopy from a flash drive or a small game. I thought that was cool, like uncovering artifacts from the past.

Social media groups of the recent graduate classes were just starting at the time. A couple of times, I remember uncovering a couple years old discussion from my school after I went down the same path and wound up in that online space. They were just old enough to be seniors or still be friends of current students.

There was also the flash games everyone played in computer classes. Everyone must’ve gone to the same few sites and played the same games. Just about everybody could probably relate to stories of playing flash games in the computer lab although there’s no real record to share of the sites are even still around.

Anyway, I thought it’d be cool if there was a digital world designed around leaving notes and things like this.

In Mario Maker, you can see where everyone died in the world. In dark souls, you can leave messages behind. I always thought it’d be interesting to see everyone who was in your position in a world like that somehow.

Imagine the history of stats/deaths/playtime. The story of John Smith and the orange goblin skin with 14 deaths over 53 minutes, 14 seconds he played of jump hero 6 years ago. The English teacher still talks about that guy!

There’s an educational Minecraft version now. If that was more than a trend and became a standard lesson for a week, it would be interesting to see a persistent world students from the past left behind with their trolling to each other, inside jokes, and houses temporary classmate friends built together. The teacher could show off their house from when they played as a student.

In the last 20 years though, I wonder if this would have the same interest. There might just be too much online presence social media for anyone to care about the past worlds.

It also might lose appeal if everything is from long-since graduates that feel distant to relate to instead of current seniors and recent college goers. It may also just get too crowded in the game world to make new things or have them actually stand out. I also wonder if trolls would just destroy the creations of the past— I think modifications are cool but just destroying everything would ruin the purpose.

I actually quite like that paradigm of requiring mods and other tools to play. Dwarf fortress is not a game it's a kind of sometimes fun job.

I still prefer the denser sim titles like SS13 and DF, but I'll almost always reach for Rimworld if I want some no-fuss fun. Just be careful around the modding rabbit hole...

Factorio is also an excellent game, but I don't play the mods for the same reason I would not play DF. Too much things, and often the game design is a bit hairy for no good reason that would make some sense.