Some quickies:

– Dredmor 0.8: I have three bugs remaining to get to 0.8, and 17 in total. This is the first time I’ve been *near* the single digits camp in over a month. Exciting.

– We got a lot of web traffic recently due to David’s Goblin Camp article. It looks like it got picked up by Something Awful, a Russian website of some sort, and also the Temple of the Roguelike, who were kind enough to give us a plug on Twitter. They describe Dredmor as follows: “Dungeons of Dredmor is an upcoming graphical Roguelike with impressive style/video trailers. One to watch for!” Thanks for the praise, guys. We’ll send you some exclusive screenshots or something. This reminds me, I need to make another video trailer.

I’m particularily pleased, actually, that some of the SA folks thought we were worth checking out. I can’t say quite how much of Dredmor has been inspired by Boatmurdered, but I think that we can directly blame Boatmurdered for the fact that you can find rooms with names like “The Theatre of Cake”, as well as the ridiculous randomly generated artifact system. At one point we had runic names for artifacts too, but that… seemed to fall by the wayside a little. I’m not sure what happened to that. I might re-enable it. More interestingly, I remember the original Jeff K. nonsense from back in 2000 when I was working for Loki Software. So, yeah. Looking forward to the first Dredmor Let’s Play.

Really, the interesting thing to me is that it shows, in a very scientific perspective, that the blogging exercise works. You write about stuff, it may get picked up if it’s worth anything, and it circulates. You can even track the circulation of traffic via Google Analytics. So, yeah. More blogging, more often, and fear the almighty power of referrals.

– Here’s one thing that offends me: video game companies that plug the existence of “free snacks and soda”, or other related elements, on their web page. What set this off was Gearbox’s hiring page, as linked today from Voodoo Extreme. Don’t get me wrong, Gearbox does stuff right: full medical and dental from day 1, no premiums, is a good thing. So is a 401k. It indicates that they are thinking about the health and well-being of their employees. But there is something that irritates me about seeing “soda” mentioned as a perk. First off, I prefer coffee as a working beverage. (Gaslamp culture is replete with references to the Demon Brew.) This is mainly because I drink enough of it that if I drank my equivalent weight in soda, I’d be shaped like a potato. Black coffee, brewed from grounds, has about two calories per cup. Regardless, even from day one our old offices have had soda and coffee. People who are thirsty don’t work as well as people who aren’t thirsty.

To my mind, the indication of free soda as a “perk” on your jobs page indicates that you’re thinking about all the wrong things. If you’re not going to take care of simple, obvious stuff without calling it a “perk”, that means that you’re not going to take care of the important, non-obvious stuff. For instance, chairs. Do I get a decent chair? If I’m sitting in a chair for eight hours a day, or more, I want it to be the best chair I can get and a good desk with enough room that I can have all my stuff on it (books, papers, note pads, keyboards, etc.) I want a set of decent monitors. I want the things that I know will directly increase my productivity and programming ability, and if you think that putting beverages in the company office is a big enough deal that it deserves to be mentioned on your jobs page, then what this tells me is that I’m not going to get the things that are really important without a big fight. I don’t want to work for that company. I want to work for Joel Spolsky.

Gaslamp, as an entity, has no damn money. But I am proud of the fact that, on day one, we went out and bought good chairs. And I continue to believe that as the company evolves, we’ll get the important stuff taken care of.