I dreamt that Bay 12 games had cancelled Dwarf Fortress. At first it was just a rumor I heard, and I couldn’t confirm it, first I couldn’t get a good internet connection, then I got interrupted by people and had to do other things (like taking a warped train/metro back and forth), and conversing with people from back in middle school. Some of these people would ask/talk about Dwarf Fortress, since they would have heard about it being cancelled. I also woke up a couple of times during all this, due to my alarm being set on snooze, but after each time I fell asleep again an the theme of ”Dwarf Fortress has been cancelled” remained, so I became convinced I had woken up and this was really the truth.
The forums/Bay 12 website were also strange, at some point overloaded so I couldn’t open them, but when I did manage to with the layter it was like an infinite landscape, stretching away in a long strip like when you pass in with a train. There were some textboxes too, but they were seen in like planes in perspective, stretched away towards a vanishing point at the horizon. So I couldn’t read them. I felt the website was this weird because DF had been cancelled, and there was no point having it left. The forums were also weird, they looked even older (somehow) and were constantly a little too zoomed in. They had also been downsized, with only a few subforums (or threads!) all in all. Somehow I knew this smaller uglier forum was it having reversed to how ”it originally was”.
After many ifs and buts, I found something like a livestream with Tarn in it. In the game, Tarn’s character would move around, at first in a grid-based system, then in some kind of pixelly isomorphism. First he walked around in an overworld, with some goblins/orcs and having to flee from them (actually, this overworld/grid-based part might have been even earlier, and lead to non-related parts, with the DF theme later resurfacing). At this point I thought it might be DF, though the graphics were different, the concepts of following/fleeing from ’*’ glyphs on the world map still existed. In a later part, he walked in a pixel-art dungeon. It had elements that are not in DF, like televisions (of the non-flatscreen kind) that were ”psychic and caused by aliens” or ”caused by psychic aliens”. In this section, which looked like some kind of dump zone, Tarn’s character (who was increasingly ”me”) had to fight or flee from some kind of boss or special character, but I don’t remember what it was. I don’t think it was an alien, but something more mundane (for DF) like a goblin warlord. In any case this section ended with stepping into a helicopter, and getting out of there. I understood it as some kind of fast travel, since the parts between this section of the game and the next part were unfinished.
With the helicopter, tvs and non-grid based movement, I was now sure this was a new game. It was kind of unclear why, if Dwarf Fortress had transformed into this game after a change in development requiring it, or someting in DF development going wrong causing DF to be cancelled and this was a side project that was picked up instead. I flipped to the first page of the forum thread I was on, and concluded the new game was called ”BlauBlau”, though as the live stream was not finished people were not sure what it was about. I went back to the stream, and now it was 3D isometric, in a sort of blocky style. Tarn explained (or I concluded) that what was prieviously was a kind of ”loot round” and now that loot was used to upgrade/maintain our base. As Tarn’s character exited the base the perpective turned into first-person and the character fully into ”me”.
The base turned out to be a small outhouse, as I wandered around I found it was part of a Hotel Resort in the woods. The resort was a long white wooden building with a slight curve to it, lots of windows and maybe one or two floors. I wondered at first why the base was only the outhouse and not the rest of the resort, but the resort was dark with no one there, and I realized that was the goal, to be able to light up and use the whole resort. For now there were ”zombies” there. Then I saw the first zombie. The size of a small child, it was black and white (like marzipan dipped in chocolate). Its proportions were not really human, rather like a clay figurine, and it might have been hovering. Somehow it was oozing black goo. I slashed or punched it, and started to hurry towards the outhouse. There was another adult-sized zombie on the way, I slashed once, and then another more similar to a human. I fled into a corridor leading towards my goal, but they were onto me. There was a door, but to shut it I had to close a clasp, and the zombies were reaching in. I had to cut off an arm or something like that to do it.
The more humanlike zombie was smarter. It talked somehow, though it might not have been with words, and it might not have been more sophisticated than ”I’ll get you”. These zombies were not the kind that became weaker when damaged. Instead, their mutilated bodies would warp and stretch. They also knew this. Somehow the zombies had made a hole in the wall. They could not get through it, but the smart zombie put its face against the hole and its tongue stretched out and into the room. I cut it off. Then the smart zombie did something to the other, like cutting its head off. That way something new could warp and stretch from its neck, a warped skull thing, through the hole. This also happened to the cut off arm, flesh emerged from it, lumpy and red. At the end it also looked like it had a face (and not a hand). These two reached through the hole in whe wall, and expanded, spiraling out to fill the room and engulf me. The sound, and the horror, and the stretchy warpiness felt like they explained the name ”BlauBlau” (onamatopoetic rather than german). It was how it felt when that happened.
Then I woke up, and hurried to find up parts were not true, that DF had not been cancelled. Got a little stressed when someone (a spammer) had posted something in the announcement forums. But everything was well, and I started writing this down.
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Topic: The Dream Thread (Read 504832 times)