Author Archives: Daniel

Steam Workshop Mod Support Now Available

June 5, 2012 by Daniel Jacobsen

The time to create and use all new horrifying traps, dazzling spells, and weapons of diabolical ferocity is upon us: the Dungeons of Dredmor Steam Workshop is now open for business.

Check out the Steam Workshop Here!

Create and share all new monsters, items, skills, spells and dungeon rooms!  Ever wanted an acid fireball?  How about a skill that summons Diggle mages?  A staff that explodes when you throw it and turns everyone who it kills into zombies?  Easy.  A trap that can only be disarmed by feeding it 10 gallons of Slivovitz plum brandy?  A magical pear that summons a magical orange that summons a magical apple that summons the original magical pear?  That’s more like it.

The Steam Workshop is a place designed to make it easy to find, play, and share quality custom content created by other fans.  Simply head over to the Steam Workshop page, find a mod that you would like to play, and hit “Subscribe”.  The mod will be downloaded to just the right spot, and upon loading Dredmor you simply hit the “Mod” button on the launcher and pick which ones you want to load.

Or, if you want to try your hand at your own creations, head over to Dredmod.com and take a look at some tutorials on how to craft your own!  We’ve included information on how to make and upload a mod, as well as some of the code that you can use to create completely unique content.

And while you’re at it, check out the brand new DLC we launched today – it’s totally free, and full of some of our all-time favorite fan-made content!  Also, just because we’re so excited about the Workshop, Dredmor is on sale!

Posted in Dungeons of Dredmor | Tagged , , , , , , , ,
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Dungeons of Dredmor Free Expansion Available Now!

June 5, 2012 by Daniel Jacobsen

At long last the time has come.  You know what must be done.

You Have To Name The Expansion Pack :  now on Steam

What’s new? Here’s what:

  • Rebalancing of many original skills (now you can smith more flesh into zombys with Fleshsmithing, find more loot with Perception, fire more cannons at the same time with Piracy, and much more)
  • 29 new skills in 4 skill lines from the minds of mad Dredmor modders
  • 100+ new rooms filled with Tesla coils, lots of breakable stuff, and fine dining furniture (which is also breakable).
  • 20 new monster variations (including one new monster type)
  • 30 new crafting recipes
  • 47 new items from the Clockwork Grappling Bolt to the Rusty Caltrop Eruptor Trap
You want to know the details? Well it’s a good thing we have all kinds of details:
  • Battle Geology, a wizard-like warrior skill that involves killing people with rocks and a solid appreciation for tectonics – by Null
  • Clockwork Knight and Rogue Scientist, crafty steampunk skill lines that grow more powerful as your craft skills increase – by Ruigi
  • Warlockery, the wizard skill for wizards who would rather be warriors and want to blow stuff up with brute force application of mana as well as a massive overhaul of a large number of core skills and abilities -by Essence
  • Scads of twisty little rooms, all different, and decorated as befits the lich’s dungeon – by Bergstrom
  • And a horde of new monster variations from Poorly Cloned Heros to Diggle Rocketeers – by FaxCelestis
Go now. The expansion pack is not going to Name itself. 

(And anyway, it’s free. I did mention that, right?) 

Posted in Dungeons of Dredmor | Tagged , , , , , ,
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#BecauseWeMay Sale!

May 24, 2012 by Daniel Jacobsen

To celebrate the awesomeness of being able to do what we want with our game prices on Steam, we’re participating in a shindig put together by Ron Carmel of 2D Boy (World of Goo) and some other fantastic Indies where we’re putting our game on sale just for fun!

From now until June 1st Dungeons of Dredmor, Realm of the Diggle Gods, and the Complete pack are all on sale for 50% off on Steam!

Posted in Dungeons of Dredmor | Tagged ,
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The April Madness

April 25, 2012 by Daniel Jacobsen

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)

Posted in Games, Gaslamp, Programming | Tagged , , , , , , , , ,
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We have Top Men working on it!

April 11, 2012 by Daniel Jacobsen

Two quick things, because… well, we’ve been working hard lately, and we want you to know that!

First: the Indie Megabooth at PAX East was, by all accounts, an epically awesome thing.  So obviously the only reasonable thing for me to do was talk to the great guys over at Fire Hose Games about getting in on the party for PAX Prime!  It’s still super early to tell what exactly is going down, but chances are very good that we’ll be there, showing off one or two of a few of our super secret projects.  I’ll fill you in when I know a bit more about what’s going on.  Also, they probably won’t be super secret for that much longer, we just have an over-abundance of scheming to catch up on.

Secondly, it’s official, we now have Top Men working on secret Dredmor toys.  The first prototypes of the plush diggle are currently being developed by our people on the inside at ShouldBee.com, but as soon as we have some pictures for you guys we’ll let you know.

Here's a picture of the cause of most of David's spelling errors.

Posted in Front Page, Game Design | Tagged , , , ,
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An update on updates, Workshops and workshops.

March 16, 2012 by Daniel Jacobsen

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.

{ read this article }

Posted in Dungeons of Dredmor, Gaslamp | Tagged , , , , , ,
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Patch beta, Project Odin, and another Secret Project

February 29, 2012 by Daniel Jacobsen

Wow, it’s been a long time since we’ve posted anything on the blog.  Sorry about that guys.

The big patch beta has started, those of you who are interested in trying it out can take a look here.  There are still a few bugs in it, but we can use all the help we can get in testing it out.  Windows only for now, OSX and Linux on the way.

The team for Project Odin is almost complete: Joseph Nejat is joining our sodden ranks as 3D Character Artist. We are really looking forward to having him on the team largely due to his awesome English accent. And it’s becoming evident that we probably need to update our group portrait sometime soon =)

We are busy organizing our notes in preparation for finally releasing the details of Project Odin; right now we’re stuck on the name, but we should be coming to some consensus soon. (See: THE PIT.)

{ read this article }

Posted in Dungeons of Dredmor, Gaslamp | Tagged , , , , , , , , ,
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The Indie Things.

January 27, 2012 by Daniel Jacobsen

Brief status update on the goings on at Gaslamp Central:

  • We are still interviewing people for the programming positions we posted here, so you are not too late to submit.  At this point though, we reserve the right to charge you a late fee of beer or donuts.
  • I will be dropping by the Global Game Jam at the University of Victoria this evening at around 5pm to say hi, see what the whole thing is about, maybe pitch some ideas and participate, who knows.  The whole thing sounds really interesting: you can find more info about it here.  If you are interested in seeing what it’s all about but don’t want to do any development, evidently you can sit there and heckle us while you play Minecraft!
  • We are super excited that we may be moving into some office space that is sufficiently insulated that yesterday’s coffee doesn’t freeze in the night.  Woo!  Also, it reminds me of the offices of the Ghostbusters, which is potentially even more important.
  • Lastly, we received word this morning that we are in PC Gamer’s March issue listed as number 58 of the top 100 video games of all time, which, frankly, floored each of us. Seriously.  We are staggered and supremely honored.  The issue hasn’t made it into our cold Canadian mittens yet, but I am certain that we stand with some very illustrious company.  We know that we owe all of our success to you guys, and we hope to continue to make you happy for years to come.
Posted in Gaslamp, Interviews | 13 Comments