Contextual Influences

Dwarf fortress, initally released in 2006 and in a constant state of development, is a game for PC created by two brothers, Tarn and Zach Adams. Describing the gameplays systems would be too complicated and since it's really irrelevant to the contextual influences on it's art I shall leave the reader to learn more about the game itself.

The beautiful ASCII in action

The game world is three dimensional but is displayed to the player in a 2d topdown veiw. For the graphics, the game use a slightly modified code page 437 characters in 16 different colors. This is often referred to as "ASCII" art, since it uses characters rather than images to convey information. This style of visual representation traces back many years back to games which ran on computers that couldn't display images. All of these games are influences to some extent but perhaps the one that could be considered most influential is Rogue.

Rogue, the original Roguelike

In fact, in the "Adventure Mode" portion of the game (which could be described as an open world roguelike) the character is represented by an "@" symbol; just like the aforementioned Rogue. Also, as seen in the screenshots above, both games use full stops to denote the ground, although Dwarf Fortress as taken this and, in an attempt to create a more visually pleasing aesthetic, has used a mix of full stops and commas, an example of a tiny but noticeable evolution in this graphic style.