Communication is starting to get tough.  We want to tell you guys about the brand new patch that has a bunch of awesome things in it, but it’s not quite ready.  I can tell you about one thing that we haven’t told you yet though, regarding mods.  I also want to talk about our lack of communication regarding the state of Odin.

First, Mods.  We want to give the mod community a chance to get these fantastic creations in the hands of more people, get more feedback happening, more collaboration, and more generally awesome stuff coming out for people to play with.  To do this, we are piloting a project with Valve and the Steam Workshop platform.  Users will be able to search for mods, comment on them, rate and share them.  The forum will still be here and we will do everything we can to make sure that the mods are available for non-steam users as well, but they have built this fantastic tool, it would be a shame not to use it to let people share content more easily.  Details on how you guys can access the tools for this below.

We also want to tell you all about our new project: the real name of Project Odin, some screen shots that we have been working on, and answer any questions you might have about how it’s not a tower defence game.  The reason we haven’t done this quite yet is that we need to make sure we’re doing things right: registering trademarks, copyrighting what we can, and all that other stuff that keeps games from being duplicated before they’re finished.  It’s lame, I know.  It’s also a big enough problem that it deserves a bit of our time.  We didn’t do a lot of this stuff before Dredmor’s release, and we were lucky that it wasn’t a problem.  I’d rather that we didn’t have to be lucky again.  We are all really excited about this project, and it’s killing us to have to wait to tell you.  Trust me, game development is way easier when you get to talk about it.

So you want to get your mod on the Steam Workshop?  Easy.  Well… it is if we did everything right. This feature is still in the pilot stage; we’re sure there will be some issues, but we’ve tested it as thoroughly as we can.  Patch version RC5 has some issues, RC6 looks good so far.

First, you need to make yourself a shortcut to the game, and change the target to

C:\pathToDredmor\Dungeons of Dredmor.exe -publisher

This should also work through the command line if you have issues.  You also need the Steam Client running.  From there you should be presented with mods that you have subscribed to through your steam account – which, for now, should be none.  To add your mod to the workshop, click “Publish New Mod”, select the .zip file for your mod, then select an image to use as the preview image for the Steam Workshop (you can use our art for this if you like, but unique stuff will set you apart).

At this point the mod is still hidden to anyone but you, and correspondingly if you click the “View in Workshop” button, it’ll show up as a dead link unless you log in to steam’s web portal.  From here you can change the description, image, change its visibility, delete it, all that stuff.

Lastly, it’s worth saying that until this feature jumps from our beta to the release version of Dredmor (and we have a little time to test it), the workshop won’t be accessible from our Steam store page, or from the Workshop main page.  When we’re ready, we’ll open it up to the public with a dot matrix banner and some cookie plates.  Until then, if you render your mod public, other people should be able to use the link the publisher gives you, but that will be the only way to access it.