Another Game of Dwarves Preview

A Games of Dwarves has progressed well since I played it in April. Giving you the space dig huge multi-level caverns for your dwarf host, the game offers plenty of freedom with an emphasis on exploring the 75x75x50 block maps.

Back then, I found exploration in this 3D dungeon builder to be rather daunting. You’d be digging one block at a time through a massive, featureless, underground world with no guidance, just hoping to stumble onto some resources.

Now Zeal Game Studio have added indicators for impatient people like me. If there is a secret cave within 10 blocks of your hall, it’ll be shown on the map as a set of question marks. Of course, the room may not be empty. With the procedurally-generated maps, you just as likely to stumble across a nest of orcs as find a seam of rare materials. Purists can always turn the indicator off if they don’t like pretending the dwarves have some kind of invisible sonar detection.

During the campaign mode, you lead a group of dwarves on a quest to reclaim their ancestral lands from en evil wizard.

“The campaign levels are goal-oriented, so you know what you’re supposed to do – you don’t always know how to do it,” said designer Sebastian Thorwaldsson. “It can be as easy “Get through these barriers” and then you have to explore the area around them to see if there’s some kind of item you’re missing, something you might find.

“Or it might be something very very direct – kill that guy. But the way you kill him could be either build strong military guys or you could lure him into a room of traps. It’s open-ended.”

Originally, the team were looking at giving aesthetic preferences to individual dwarves. You can spend your time building stone pavements for your dining room floors or wooden wall decorations for that luxury bedroom feel. Of, of course, you can dispense with aesthetics entirely and just shove a bunch of high-scoring items in hideous colours around the room.

“It made the game more complicated than it needed to be,” said Thorwaldsson. “Since a lot of the expression in the game comes from having the player build the way he wants to build, we don’t want to force-feed the player into ‘This is the right way to build. This is what looks pretty.'”

It’s a fair point and there’s still an overall happiness measurement for the mine. Build your people a beautiful home decorated with rare materials and you’ll be rewarded with experience and work rate bonuses.

As you progress, you’ll unlock a tech tree to improve the skills of your worker dwarves, allowing your military to specialise or giving workers the ability to build traps.

Thorwaldsson told me that the influence you gain will also impact the behaviour of your clan’s prince. “He’ll go from this rather useless character who only sleeps and eats and become a fighter, or a researcher or a production manager.” Side quests will allow you to equip him with new armour and weapons.

The feedback interface has been improved as well. I’d often find myself getting lost while scrolling around in the black landscape trying to plan out my mines. The game now features buttons to take you directly back to your dwarven king, or show you a starving dwarf that you’ve left down a mineshaft without a ladder. It’s these kind of user-focused improvements that make me feel like A Game of Dwarves will be a worth a shot when it comes out on PC later this year.

Here’s the latest trailer: