Turns out when you’re writing a renderer for a game, and the renderer isn’t finished, it’s hard to come up with really awesome stuff to show people about the game you’re making. This is essentially what we’re waiting on before we blow the lid off of everything on Project Odin. We want to be in a position where we can show you what we’re working on, get your feedback, ask you about things you’d like to see in the game, and answer any questions you might have.
Mr. Triolo is currently contemplating how one might animate a chicken
There is a lot of concept art floating around on our repos that we’re trying to use to give you guys an idea of the fact that a lot of work is being done right now, not just in art but in the code as well. We’re having to do a lot of “architecture” programming before we can start putting the game together on top of it; the main reason for this is that Odin is multiplayer, and multiplayer games just work differently. We are taking the opportunity to do some optimization to ensure that the game takes advantage of all these newfangled “cores” we hear about in the computer stores these days as well. Again, if you have your toes in the programming world, you know that this can be tricky. (If you don’t but you are curious, check out this educational wikipedia article on race conditions! If you don’t like circuit theory, feel free to skip that.)
We are also taking some time to actually get organized. The game is going to take more than a year to get done (not six like the last one! maybe two though) and one of the biggest issues with making a thing that takes as long as games do is that it’s difficult to keep all the important stuff in your head when you haven’t thought about it in a while. We were guilty of a lot of this on our first (failed) project, and we were guilty of more of it on Dredmor. I’m sure it will happen for Odin as well, but my job over the last two weeks has been getting us set up with a way of managing our project stuff so that we can be as organized as possible with as little effort as possible. (For those of you who are interested, we’re using Atlassian, and it seems pretty awesome so far.) I’m also starting to understand why so many indies make all their games, start to finish, in a month.
Coming soon: some Dredmor news pertaining to toys, the Steam Workshop, and some new content!
A potential terrain style that we have since scrapped for technical reasons (orange didn't test well)
Oooh. Odin will be multiplayer. It makes me wonder how chickens and multiplayer might be linked O-o hehe.
Wait…Dreadmor toys?!…..
Toys as in physical, real world toys?
I would be throwing my money at the screen but I don’t have any. 🙁
Yeah! Real physical toys!
Take all of my nonexistent money! All of it!
Dredmor toys?! Awesome! The dungeons are overflowing wit h interesting insertables, both Eldritch and Non.
…
I saw what you did there and I’m not sure how I feel.
The first couple times are always a bit uncomfy. Totally worth it.
Mycon kink?
NO! it does not say! Your *sticky business* makes me *frumple*.
I’m looking forward to a future post about the importance of chickens and variety in chicken animations in Project Odin.
Uh oh… multiplayer?
Is it going to be possible to play single player as well?
Please say yes! 😉
I also want the answer to be yes!
Multiplayer is fine, but not what I do with most of my gaming time.
Um, oh yes.
Odin is not an MMO or online-activation online-only etc or anything like that. You won’t have to put up with adolescents speculating about your sexuality or your mother’s personal proclivities unless you really, really want to.
Yay thanks!
I am stoked to hear more about odin and I love the idea of a multiplayer game. I realize you guys are welcoming of feedback, but don’t let all the ‘good ideas’ overwhelm you and stall the game. I realize it is a far cry from the point where you are generating content when you are still working on the renderer, but it happens to good developers, especially indie ones. I believe notch himself said that the amount of time spent on wolves was probably a bit excessive and could have been spent on more globablly useful things in minecraft.
I think I figured it out. Project Odin is a multiplayer game where you write a multithreaded renderer which is (hard coded?) to display textured, animating chickens.
I actually expected the sequel to Dredmor to be along those exact lines. I’m glad I was right.
Jira, eh? The company I work for switched from Mantis to Jira about a year and a half ago. It’s hard to say how good the base product is because ours is modded heavily (Gotta love a company that has to remake everything it uses…), but it’s a generally solid, if extremely complex, system. it does have very good issue searching compared to most enterprise ticketing systems.
Yep! Jira and confluence. We’re basically using them vanilla with some very basic redecorating. AND we also just switched over from mantis! Still not sure about implementations yet. We are using their hosted “ondemand” stuff right now, but our code repo is in git and we want to use fisheye… wow, I just realized how boring this comment got.
Can I volunteer to test a Diggle plushie, please? Pwetty please? I’ll give it lots of love and cuddles and stuff <3