Curate of Curiosities

Like I did with Tobias Cornwall's games, I aim to play through each one of Bay12's games, so as to gain a feel for his approach to game design. This of course includes his earliest published games, made at the turn of the millenium, just a few years before Cornwall's.

This may turn out to be easier than playing through Cornwall's early games. Although they are more than 20 years old, they never depended on a browser-based platform for whom its developers could withdraw support at any time.

But that doesn't mean that the games ran without hiccups.

The earliest game by the Adams brothers that I could find was WWI Medic. The objective of the game, as indicated by the title screen, is to rescue as many wounded soldiers as possible, both on your and the enemy's side.

Having trouble making out what's in this screenshot? Imagine what it would be like to actually play this game. The character that you play as looks practically identical to the allied soldiers that you're supposed to be helping, so it's usually not clear where you are at any given time. What's more, while in most games when you let go of the arrow key, your character stops moving, here, your character keeps moving in the direction they were going, and you have to press the 5 button on the numpad to make them stop.

Every now and again, either your side or the enemies will charge out onto the battlefield. You'd think that this would provide the perfect opportunity to go out there and be a hero. But there's still an awfully narrow window of time between a soldier getting wounded and that same soldier bleeding out, and it's not like the controls are making reaching them in time any easier. And there's still the chance that you could either get shot by enemy or allied troops, or blown up by a passing bomber plane.

But hey, no one said that being a battlefield medic would be easy, Moving on.

Next up is the somewhat awkwardly titled Slaves to Armok: God of Blood. It is perhaps most notable for being the direct predecessor to Dwarf Fortress. Indeed the latter game bears the supertitle Slaves To Armok, God of Blood - Chapter 2.

Notice the version number? If you know your decimals, it's clear that it's not even at version 0.1. Does it look like it's even remotely ready for public release? Let's find out.

And this is where the game spat me out after I created my character. Like in Dwarf Fortress, this game procedurally generates an entire world for your character to explore,

First thing to notice: the game's in 3D. The only Bay 12 game to be in 3D, in fact. And after having played this, I can understand why he decided to make Dwarf Fortress in ASCII graphics.

Look at the menu on the right side of the screen. Without elaborating any further, the leftmost icons are the most important, as they allow you to switch between the different control modes. From top to bottom: rotate mode, combat mode (which would be useful if I encountered anything worth fighting), look mode, and target mod, and conversation. And for some reason, I rolled a mage on character creation, so I have a bunch of spells as well.

All of these menu options and nothing to do with them. With nothing to do, I decide to go for the time-honored method of picking a direction and walking until I find something.

After a few minutes, the only difference in scenery that I noticed was the featureless gray mountains that I spawned in turned to mostly featureless brown mountains. Out of mounting frustration, I decided to test out the combat mode on the nearest tree that I found. Strange game is it, when all of the trees have proper names.

Eventually, I noticed a black X on the minimap, different from the green ones that seemed to represent trees that, at this point, seemed to be my only friends. I found...something that I needed to zoom the camera in to notice, and even then I had no idea what it was. A roast chicken?

Yes, this indistinguishable pile of polygons turned out to be a rabbit. And I'm not sure why you are given the option to grab yourself or the empty space right next to you--don't answer that, actually.

There is also a map function, but it's of suprisingly little use. This is the whole world, apparently, an unending expanse of barren land.

I did once see a video on YouTube of someone fighting a goblin in this game. It was about as awkward as anything else, and I wondered how long it took for that player to even encounter one to start with.

While it's certainly impressive that an indie dev could make a fully 3D game with so many different features back in 2004, it doesn't mean much when there's no actual use for most of them. That aside, the vision of creating a highly detailed 3D world is there, something that Dwarf Fortress would more fully realize, mainly through abandoning the 3D part.

So, from these two games, we have a feel for Adams' taste for the unconventional in either design or concept: a war game where you heal people, and a fantasy RPG-like thing with no health or mana bars, where seemingly inanimate trees have names and you can try to talk with rabbits.

This design philosophy will, of course, persist in their later games, particularly the next game I'll feature, which revolves around a topic that you'll either find very timely or very tactless.