For the past week I’ve been playing a game called Dwarf Fortress. It is a game where you play the role of a group of dwarves sent to a cliff face to survive and make something of yourself, whatever that may be.

The amazing thing about the game is how deep it is, on the surface it looks like a simple text based game, then you get into it and you are wondering what all the symbols mean and how to make your dwarves do things you need them to do. 2days of reading the wiki later and you are finally ready to spend the next hour losing your first fort to stupid mistakes. You can do almost anything in this game and it’s viable in some way. The graphics may be simple but behind them is a game more complex than The Sims or Sim City or almost anything I have played. You don’t so much control your dwarves as just assign jobs to them and hope they go about the business swiftly. Of course there are ways you can ensure that this happens, but without much direct control. I would suggest anyone who enjoys playing deep and interesting games to give this one a try.

Now the main reason why I’m talking about this game in particular is that I would like to take the idea furthur. What if you were a human outpost in rugged territory surrounded by enemies, could you survive? What about elves in their vastly forested landscape, could you protect yourselves from the orcs nearby without losing too many trees to their devestation or your own industry? Just the number of environments and challenges would be boggling, all with the complexity that runs Dwarf Fortress. This is a topic I intend to explore as time goes by, what kind of gameplay complexity enriches the experience, past fun and into pure amazement.

With the processing power of computers increasing, game complexity has been decreasing, while graphics have been improving. I’m going to try the opposite and see how complex a game I can make, lets see what happens.

As many of you already know, I tend to talk louder than I act when it comes to making computer games. Half finished game projects litter my computer like some kind of graveyard and while some playable demos see the light of day, for each one that does there are ten or more that don’t. Worst of all, I had a problem with this. That is up until last week.

I was working on Project: Wizards, making progress, and getting to a playable though not fully functional stage. Then I got busy, it got put by the wayside and I haven’t yet picked it up. I will, but I haven’t. What has happened though is that I had yet another idea for a game or series of games based on a concept, and while this concept is new and exciting I don’t feel like working on anything else. What I would normally do however is not work on it because I think I should be working on one of my more finished games, such as Project: Wizards. Not this time.

This time I make whatever game I feel like when I feel like it. New and interesting things to test my designing and programming abilities. Even if it’s a new idea for a tetris game, or just something small and useless, I’ll make it if I want to. I’ve spent many, many years doing nothing because I felt I should be working on this game or that. Instead, now, I’m just going to devote time to programming, whatever that may look like, and have come out of it what it will.

I guess I’m just taking the long way to say that I might never finish a game, but I’ll never stop programming.

The Intent for Parthon Software was to create games that are fun, interesting and different. I’ll still being doing this, but I’ll also be talking about independent game design, gameplay creation and of course other games, as long as it’s fun, interesting and different.

The Plan: to just mess around and have fun, build the site slowly with the various projects and games I plan to make and review, and eventually turn Parthon Software into a “job”.

I think it’s going to be an interesting few years.