If you like Dwarf Fortress, you might like a game called: Factorio
Rimworld - http://rimworldgame.com/
It's a bit of a spiritual successor, and like DF it's developed without a supporting team (by Tynan Sylvester)
It is really interesting and I almost feel like I am writing code at some points, having the machines automate themselves.
I haven't even started playing with the circuits yet which allows you to do even more programming.
I have this theory that the game designer(s?) actually took some pages from a multithreaded programming book and turned them into a game. A kind of meta-game.
Items are messages, transport belts are buffers with blocking writes, factories are actors, scheduling is roundrobin with preemption. Flying robots are a metaphor for references. Everything is as a pull model, and you can see the backpressure progating up the chain.
I'd love to see the implementation. I bet there is no modeling, everything directly mapped to some core programming primitive.
Yes, I'm sure the game's flying robots are implemented as a simple pointer and nothing else, no additional data to model for a name or any animation or where it comes from or where it goes to or anything like that at all.
Try Bob's mods. Increases depth by about 2-3x. Quite fun.
It's a rougelike in a zombie apocalypse.