Dwarf-Fortress posts

How can you make money from a game that's supposed to be free to download. If you are the indie development team at Bay 12 Games, you ask for donations.In this case the donations are for the very popular free game Dwarf Fortress. The team released a major new update around the first of April and that was enough to generate a ton of new donations.

How much money was raised? According to Bay 12 Games' May newsletter, they generated a whopping $16104.49 in donations in the month of April. On April 1, they day the first major update to Dwarf Fortress was released after a long delay, the team got $3466.76 from over 80 different sources. Which just goes to show you that if you have a good game, people will gladly give you money to support it even if its free.

[Via Computer and Video Games]

One of the more popular Rogue-like fantasy RPG games out there is Dwarf Fortress from developer Bay 12 Games. This week the freeware title got a major new release, version 0.31.01, and you can download the PC, Mac and Linux version of the game at Bay 12's web site.

You can check out the rather massive change list of new features, improvements and bug fixes on this web page. Just a few of the new features include new additions to the combat model, a new weather model and much more. It looks like this new release is a tad buggy, according to Bay 12's April newsletter, but it also states, "I'll be populating the new bug tracker with them over the next days. Then I will be fixing them." There's also a note about the money that has been raised to support the freeware game via donations.

Welcome to Freeware Friday, a weekly column showcasing excellent games that you can play free of charge! It's our one year anniversary! Here's to many more years of talking about the best freeware games out there!

It's been one full year since Freeware Friday debuted on BigDownload. There has been many freeware games featured, and there are many that are waiting to be found. In memoriam of the past year, we'd like to present to you my personal favorites of all the games we took a look at over that past year. These are the games that were enjoyable and memorable above all else. The games that really define the independent and freeware communities as being truly classic and entertaining.

Independent Minds aims to take various aspects of indie gaming and present them to you each week. From game round-ups to design elements to interviews with prominent members of the scene, it's an exploration of what makes indie gaming great as well as what makes someone an indie.

Well, maybe not handicapped, but certainly accessible! Accessibility is an incredibly important aspect of gaming that nobody really pays attention to. Accessibility is really simple: how easy is it for a new player to come in and pick up your game. Most notably, you must pick up and hold your new player's attention, even if they don't completely understand the game right from the very start. In a way, this tied into both ambition and the principles of good design, but it goes a little farther beyond that into knowing your players. It's a guessing game, really.

Welcome to the Indie Showcase, a semi-regular column on Big Download that takes a look at games we haven't covered on the site that we really think you should play.

Wow. 2008 sure was a whirlwind year for independent games on PC and console alike. Games like World of Goo, Braid, and Everyday Shooter have defied our expectations and brought forth a sort of indie gaming renaissance. So let's take a look back at all those indie games released or significantly updated in 2008. There's a lot that can be learned from the independent and the auteur, after all. These games will be in no particular order, because I don't want to taint this list with trying to name a best, second best, and so on. They are all great games.

Click on the image above to continue reading about the best indie games of 2008

Nothing like good ol' Dwarf Fortress, the indie game you can count on to be developed full-time. Thanks in part to Tarn Adams' development log, we can keep up with all the new additions and bugfixes to this incredible games. And since 39f, there's been quite a few. 40c's big addition over 39f is embark stocking profiles, enabling you to build a profile that you can use with each expedition, saving you the hassle of redoing your items and skills every time to restart. There's also a plethora of bugfixes, from fixing display errors to mood lockups. You can check out the full list of changes between versions on Tarn Adams' devlog, and can download the game on Bay 12.

Once again, Tarn Adams dazzles with another update to Dwarf Fortress. This one, 39f, introduces a few new features as well as bugfixes. The biggest feature addition is that refugee groups now get their own spaces and movement instead of being relocated to a (possibly hostile) nearby civilization. Another added feature is a mention in the legends for scaling a mountain in Adventurer mode. There's also various bugfixes, ranging from making sure that erosion no longer causes mountains to raise up to making sure that bottomless pits don't have lava at the top. You can download the new version at the Bay 12 Games site. All saves from 32a onwards are compatible.

Tarn Adams must be made of some titanium alloy, because he is a machine. Only a day after releasing Dwarf Fortress version 39d, he releases another version that fixes some more bugs. Since the last version we talked about was 39c, here's some fixes and additions that are in both versions of this amazing strategy game:

• Questgivers no longer give quests to kill themselves
• Player can skip rejects when performing a custom world generation
• Abandoned stores are no longer still stocked
• The rest job no works properly
• Races are now accounted for in historical figures
• Added a basic site finder
• Added a minimum cave size parameter to the custom world generation
• Fixed several crashes
• Fixed several message spam errors

This is only a small portion of the fixes, so check out the development log for the full scoop on everything that has changed. As always, you can download the newest build from the Bay 12 Games website.

Tarn Adams is just blitzing along with making sure his latest version of the exquisite Dwarf Fortress is (mostly) bug free. The next bugfix version has been released, bringing the version number to 39c. It fixes such things as pathfinding causing dwarves to stop performing a certain job, RNG (that's random number generator) issues, fish and turtle options not being available to take with you on embarking, buildings becoming invisible, and countless other problems, from small tweaks to big changes. You can download the new version on the Bay 12 Games site and, as always, your saves are compatible with previous versions.