Tarn Adams
| Tarn Adams | |
|---|---|
Adams at PAX 2013
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| Born |
April 17, 1978 Silverdale, Washington, U.S. |
| Alma mater |
University of Washington (BSc) Stanford University (PhD) |
| Occupation | Computer game programmer |
| Years active | 1996–present |
Tarn Adams (born April 17, 1978) is an American computer game programmer, best known for his work on Dwarf Fortress. He has been working on it since 2002 with his older brother Zach. He learned programming in his childhood, and has been designing computer games as a hobby. He quit his first year of a mathematics post doctorate at Texas A&M to focus on game development in 2006.
Adams was born in Silverdale, Washington, US, in 1978. His father, Dan, worked at a waste water treatment plant and used to manage data. Adams credited his father for teaching him to code and his closeness to his brother, Zach, to their family's constant shifting due to their father's work. Adams and Zach grew up playing computer games and, with notebooks in hand, drawing their own renditions of the randomly generated creatures they encountered and logging their journeys in detail. In fifth grade, he wrote his first animation game with Zach. Explaining his reluctance to socialize, he said, "I was a get-home-from-school, get-on-the-computer kind of kid." Adams stated that the main reason they started writing games was to be able to play them themselves, and complicated and unpredictable behavior guaranteed replayability.
In high school they created a spacecraft game that simulated sections of a rocket blowing off and released their first publicly available game on America Online. In sixth grade, they started their first fantasy game called dragslay written in BASIC. It consisted of single battles leading to a final one with a dragon. A few years later, he rewrote it in C language, and it featured minute details and kept track of populations of units in the world generated.
After dragslay, they started working on another adventure game, focusing on world generation. The role-playing video game Ultima inspired him regarding world development. For four years, after working on the adventure tile and rendering it in 3D graphics, they completed Slaves to Armok: God of Blood. "Armok" was the name of the game's deity from the variable "arm_ok", which was used in dragslay to indicate how many arms were left on a particular unit. The random story generator was originated by both of them writing stories. Adams said, "you could zoom in on your character, and it’d tell you how curly his leg hairs were, and the melting and flash points of various materials, It was insane." They posted it on their website in 2000 and by 2004 but the project started to face increasing problems. Adams announced in 2004 on his forums that he was going to shift his main project from Armok to a side project called Dwarf Fortress.
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