Even though it’s probably going to kill me. I’m also moving on the day of beta release. I’m going to probably die of stimulant overdose saturday night after collapsing into a pile of bbq pork ribs. The vividness of that image actually just really disturbed me. Ah, video game production. But anyway, I want to talk to you about brief status updates, and the moddability of Dredmor. (Is that a word?)

What’s new in the world of Gaslamp? We mentioned setting up website transactions for the beta, and that’s going along well. We’ve more-or-less solved our issues with the payment processors and Derek is hard at work on a simple and secure system for getting you our game, which isn’t as easy as it sounds (or as it should be?).

David mentioned the new art, and it goes along with a lot of great additions (and great subtractions) from the spells and skills of Dredmor; I hope you will be as excited to kill monsters with them as I am that you will be. I don’t need to tell you that we’ve been through a lot of iterations of this stuff, but I can honestly say that each iteration was (when not a lateral move) an improvement. But, obviously, we’ve got to let this bird fly, and now I think is a great time.

I can and want to talk just briefly about the modularization of Dredmor. You might notice that there’s a lot of talk about XML tables. Well, within the bounds of the machinery that we need to use to run Dredmor (which, believe me, is about as robust as Nicks and my brains can allow), the recombination options within this framework are far beyond infinite.

Spells and skills can be rewritten, new items can be added with new effects, new quests can be included, the tilesets can be changed… If you really, really wanted to, you could take Dredmor and remake the classic board game “Space Hulk”, or things that I could never even consider. I’m hoping you will, and we are looking forward to creating a space where you can submit your mods for your friends to try, add something of their own, and we’ll do what we can to help you if this is what you want to do with the game.

Anyway, I’m really excited about it, but I obviously also feel that you never need touch these things in order to have a really unique, and (as Nick mentioned) authentic gaming experience from a few odd people.