If you’ve never heard of Dwarf Fortress, it’s this ridiculously-deep fantasy/strategy game involving a procedurally-generated world, where players command a dwarven outpost. It boasts “centuries of detailed history" in its game world, with crafting, strategy, trading, mining, surgery, and loads of other adventuring to do. It’s an ambitious game, albeit boasting ASCII graphics. It has been in active development since 2002, and available for free since 2006, with the developer subsisting on donations from the community. It was indie before indie was cool. It was available in early access before “early access" and soft launches were an idea. It’s so big that a 1.0 release isn’t planned for another couple decades. Right now, it’s only on PCs, but one third-party developer wants to make it playable remotely on iOS.
“mifki" on the Bay 12 Games forums has posted a video of their remote client for Dwarf Fortress. It’s not the game running native on iOS – which is certainly not impossible, though unlikely as the developers just distribute the game directly on their site – but “it’s an iOS app communicating with a dfhack plugin" which essentially renders the game running on a remote server to the iOS app. It’s allegedly playable via cellular networks as well. It’s far from finished, but we can hope someday to see this become a reality.
