“There’s always some worry, but we were hopeful the fans would stick with us, and for the overwhelming
part they have” Tarn Adams, Dwarf Fortress developer
WHEN ADDING GRAPHICS TO A GAME LIKE DWARF FORTRESS, WHAT MATTERS MOST, APPROACHABILITY OR ATTRACTIVENESS? Carolyn Jong: It’s a mixture of both. Readability is also important, since players need to know what they’re looking at, and ideally be able to tell it apart from other objects in the game. With so much going on, and so many different kinds of items, creatures, plants, and so on, that can be a real challenge, but it’s also part of the fun of working on something like DF. After all, how many games out there have four different kinds of yams, both blueberries AND bilberries, or an infinite variety of procedurally-generated instruments?
DID YOU TAKE INSPIRATION FROM ANY OTHER GAME WHEN DEVELOPING THE ART/UI? CJ: By the time I joined the project the art style was already pretty well defined, so I wasn’t necessarily taking inspiration from any one particular game, although I do follow a lot of pixel artists who I’m sure have influenced me to some extent. Owlboy, Eastward, and Songs of Conquest all stand out for having particularly beautiful pixel art and have definitely inspired past work I’ve done.
WAS THE ART HANDLED IN-HOUSE OR EXTERNALLY - HOW DID YOU HAVE TO ADAPT PROCESSES TO COMPLETE THE WORK? TA: We brought in artists mainly from the existing community (I believe four of five artists had prior experience with the game either as players or modders.) We’d never
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done graphics of any kind before, so we had to create processes rather than adapt them, ha ha. There was a lot of discussion with the first few artists we hired just to sort out the basic way we were going to proceed, and artists that came later also brought work processes of their own.
WAS IT JUST A CASE OF SWITCHING ASCII CHARACTERS FOR SPRITES? TA: There was some of that, but the main issue is that there are only ~250 ASCII characters total, and they don’t convey a lot of information. So where a ramp in Classic Dwarf Fortress might be an up arrow, ramps in the graphical version had to be drawn from a large sheet of options which respected the positions of walls. A dwarf in Classic is a
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