Comment by munk-a | Hacker News Reader

Comment by munk-a | Hacker News Reader

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If you can stomach the adjustment period for ASCII I'd really recommend it. I think it does something a lot of modern games miss out on - it encourages imagination first. The information given to the player is extremely dense and easy to parse once you've adjusted and you're giving your brain a chance to try and play inside your own head. I've built a glorious six floor tavern (slowly) with engravings on every surface - even those not reachable by pathing, why? because I had an image of a tavern floor full of rowdy miners with opera boxes circling the room above them for dwarves of a more refined taste... in the end it's just a box you need to floor scroll to see on the screen but the carved pillars in the middle of the room - the enclaves for dwarves to, in hushed voices, discuss just how beautiful gold is - and the grand skylight in the middle of the ceiling casting a rainbow of different colored light on the ground below... that's awesome.

Dwarf fortress is the first thing since MUDing that's really scratched the imagination itch in quite that way and, as someone who has worked in game development themselves, I think it's something that is only possible if you keep to the lowest tech. If you use words or abstract symbols then each player will fill in the details themselves, usually in their head but sometimes in artwork (see Kruggsmash as an approachable example here[1]) which can be extremely fulfilling.

I hope to see the non-ASCII version work as a gateway drug to get more people into the imagination of what they're building. And I hope this didn't come off as ranty or judgemental - each person enjoys games in different ways... but low detail art has a way of really spurring the imagination on!

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojT99rDmq5M

My favorite thing about the engravings (and statues and similar art) is that not only is it based on real dwarves, gods, etc. from the current game world, but you can commission pieces about specific dwarves and the artisans will commemorate battles or other milestone events that involved them.

In one of the last times I played, some invader had broken through my defenses and killed a couple of highly respected dwarves (one of whom was a skilled fighter), but finally came face to face with a young girl dwarf who confronted him in one of the dining halls and, though she lost a leg, managed to kill him (eventually recovering to grow up to be a skilled craftsdwarf). I had a some statues made of her, and most of them came out depicting the heroic deed in different levels of detail (so of course the best one was put up in that dining hall).

There's also a sort-of-exploit related to this, where if there's a stranger in your fortress whom you suspect of having a nefarious background, you can commission artwork of them and sometimes it will reveal malicious traits about them if you examine it. The artists always seem to have perfect knowledge of their subjects.

This is the key for me - DF is like Sim City or other building games (including Minecraft) - you have to be able to create your own goals. Sure, you can keep trying more and more difficult embark locations, but after awhile you'll have DF down well enough that you can survive 'indefinitely' on underground farms behind impenetrable walls.

So you begin to do other things, mega projects are a common one.

This is also one of the reasons I enjoy playing older games. 2D RPGs such as Baldur's Gate to me aren't detailed enough to fully depict the game world, therefore my imagination fills in the gaps. This leads to a significant part of the game being played in my head which I think can create more immersion sometimes than more photorealistics games would, though I'm not saying this is a general rule.

I played Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead in ASCII long before I even looked at screenshots of the tiles. Worse than getting stuck with Ben Affleck in the movie of a book you loved. The Jabberwocky was in the screen shot I saw, the description gave such a spooky mental image, but now all I see in my head is the 8-bit swamp monster thingy, like something from the original Castlevania.

Clearly we need to feed DF generated descriptions to AI and generate tilesets for that /s

ASCII version will get the new UI Soon™

Personally I don't think the new look they're going with will be problem with imagination for me - the new look adds just enough detail that you can spot dwarf by their look alone but there is still plenty of space to imagine how exactly the described things look

I agree with the "encourages imagination" argument, and also that ASCII modes might be more practical. I have played Nethack in ASCII mode and tried a few graphical variants, and always returned to the ASCII version because it's easier to tell the enemies apart and easier to see what's going on.

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