This Dwarf Fortress documentary details the development of the indie management simulation video game Dwarf Fortress and goes behind the scenes of its creation. Discover more about its two creators Tarn and Zach Adams. From a very young age, Tarn and Zach’s dad taught them the basics of coding and this led to the brothers creating about 400 games in the BASIC programming language. They were inspired by tabletop RPGs such as Dungeons & Dragons and Cyberpunk 2020, as well as many roguelike games from the eighties such as Hack, Rogue, Larn and Ragnarok. When Tarn and Zach were 12 and 14 respectively, they started developing their very first fantasy game that would eventually evolve into Dwarf Fortress.
The documentary also explores all the design decisions that Bay 12 Games made and shows why the project went from 3D graphics to using simple ASCII text-based graphics. It also takes a close look at all the hurdles the brothers had to go through. From struggling to become full-time indie developers, and Tarn’s bank account skimming zero multiple times, to completely overhauling the game’s world generation system during the process of adding a z-axis to Dwarf Fortress. Additionally, after Zach got skin cancer, the two developers started thinking more about their health insurance and how expensive it is. Therefore, they decided to partner with publisher Kitfox Games and develop a commercial version of Dwarf Fortress that was released on Steam and Itch.io in 2022. Lastly, the documentary takes a look at what’s next for the brothers, who are now millionaires, and their growing team and what we can expect of Dwarf Fortress in the future.