After being offered to stay another year and a $50,000 stipend, he agreed and eventually left to devote his full attention to developing Dwarf Fortress and other games, which was until then only a hobby. He decided to leave during the first year due to increasing stress and is said to have broken down in the department head's office. In 2006, Tarn started his post doctorate in Texas A&M, which was his goal since his undergraduate days. Other titles were Liberal Crime Squad and WWI Medic. They made side projects like Corin and Kobold Quest in a few days and Squiggles was made in three hours. In the next five months, they made around $300, which brought in only enough to cover their site's $20 hosting cost. Tarn put up a PayPal button after a request from a fan similarly, a subscriber system was added later. They worked on other small projects during graduation which were released on their website. With his skill in programming and Zach's background in ancient history and storytelling, together the brothers designed and developed various projects. Tarn's background in mathematics helped in the development of algorithms with three dimensional spatial considerations. Tarn assumed the alias "Toady One" and Zach "ThreeToe". The Adams brothers started a company called Bay 12 Games, where they developed and released freeware games, attracting a small following. This stressful situation drove him for a time into depression and he admitted to having had a brief stint with narcotics. He also cited a dilemma he was facing between studying mathematics and developing video games. During his first year at Stanford, he said he was under heavy pressure, that the professional environment and competitiveness affected him negatively. He began his doctoral studies at Stanford University, completing them in 2005 with a dissertation titled "Flat Chains in Banach Spaces", which was published in The Journal of Geometric Analysis. Tarn earned a degree in mathematics at the University of Washington. Tarn announced in 2004 on his forums that he was going to shift his main project from Armok to a side project called Dwarf Fortress. Tarn 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." The brothers posted it on their website in 2000, but by 2004 the project started to face increasing problems. The addition of a random story generator was inspired by both of them being avid story writers. "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. After working on the project for four years and rendering it in 3D graphics, they released it under the title Slaves to Armok: God of Blood. For this, they drew inspiration from the role-playing video game hit Ultima. Īfter dragslay, Tarn and Zach started working on another adventure game, focusing on procedural world generation. A few years later, Tarn rewrote it in the C programming language, and it featured minute details and kept track of populations of units in the generated world. It consisted of single battles leading to a final encounter with a dragon. In sixth grade, they developed their first fantasy game, called dragslay and written in BASIC. In high school Tarn and Zach created a spacecraft game that simulated sections of a rocket blowing off and released their first publicly available game on America Online. Explaining his reluctance to socialize, he said, "I was a get-home-from-school, get-on-the-computer kind of kid." Tarn stated that the main reason they started writing games was to play them themselves, and soon began introducing complicated and unpredictable behavior to achieve more replayability. In fifth grade, Tarn wrote his first animation game with Zach. The brothers grew up playing computer games, drawing their own renditions of the randomly generated creatures they encountered, and logging their journeys in detail. He taught his sons the rudiments of coding at an early age and this shared interest allowed the brothers Tarn and Zach to remain close to each other despite their family's constant shifting due to their father's work. His father, Dan, worked at a waste water treatment plant and used to work in data management. In 2006, he quit during his first year of a mathematics post doctorate at Texas A&M University to focus on game development. He learned programming in his childhood, and took up designing computer games as a hobby. He has been working on the game since 2002 together with his older brother Zach. Tarn Adams (born April 17, 1978) is an American computer game programmer, best known for his work on Dwarf Fortress.
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