Author Archives: David

Dredmor Beta v0.94.1

April 11, 2011 by David Baumgart

We’ve just declared Dungeons of Dredmor beta 0.94.1.

It’s a beautiful thing how much this has come together. I can see it looking back just a week — and two weeks, a month, the changes are huge! We have a real game here which is almost ready.

What’s new in this version? Oh, all sorts of things: new stairs that aren’t awkward, custom scripted rooms (which means we can do Very Silly Things), lots of UI polish, lots of new dungeon content, many more varieties of monsters — and spellcasting monsters.  Tons of bug-fixes. Lots of new sounds. Players actually getting to level 4 or 5 of the dungeon. Lots of new things.

We’re confident enough to start sending copies out to a couple press outfits and we’ll be mining the beta list for testers as soon as we figure out a protocol for all of this.

Yeah, it’s all a bit of a blur right now. My mind is still decompressing from this last crunch cycle. (And shall be back at it soon enough, I assure you.)

So here, have some pictures.

We have all kinds of tooltips loafing around our UI just waiting to fill your head with baseless hearsay and conjecture.

{ read this article }

Posted in Dungeons of Dredmor | Tagged , , , ,
28 Comments

Dredmor Beta v0.93.2 : Crafting & Traps

March 28, 2011 by David Baumgart

0.93.2 is now out. The big piles of Fun here are crafting and traps. Shall I? Yes I shall: Let’s start with a screenshot.

Click to view full size.

I’ve got just about the full array of crafting skills here and am in the process of making some gold ingots to sell to Brax, whose potion shop I am standing in. The distilling widget has an outline of an apple in the ingredients box because I’ve selected the “Hard Cider” recipe.

You can also drag the inventory bag around to keep it in less-annoying spots on the screen. Yes, Dredmor is on the bleeding edge of  UI design!

{ read this article }

Posted in Dungeons of Dredmor | Tagged , , , , , ,
5 Comments

Almost wrapped up Dredmor 0.93

March 22, 2011 by David Baumgart

About ready to ship the latest beta out to testers. We’ve been working ourselves very hard on this run up to the end of March; have had little time and energy to write (and man, my hand hurts from drawing sprites).

So to keep this cheap, here’s a little teaser of something we’ve been putting the icing on tonight:

Nicholas and I are both fans of Dwarf Fortress. If you are too, you may know something of what this implies about what we’re doing here.

On to 0.94 and victory!

Posted in Dungeons of Dredmor | Tagged , , , ,
Leave a comment

A Different Kind Of Magic

March 8, 2011 by David Baumgart

I think we’ve got a Gaslamp Admission to make: Sometimes we make decisions not because they are right from business perspective but because they would make things more funny.

At one point not too long ago I had just wrapped up outlining and drawing icons for every spell in the game — six schools of magic (the traditional Air, Earth, Fire, Water, Black, White) with eight spells each, so 64 48* total — when I spoke with Nicholas about a thought I had.

D: Right, so our spell school categories are basically [very] boring. I am not seriously suggesting we do anything about this, but they could be … much more interesting.
N: What did you have in mind?

{ read this article }

Posted in Dungeons of Dredmor | Tagged , , , , , ,
10 Comments

Working hard on Dredmor beta 0.92

March 6, 2011 by David Baumgart

Let the Black Blood of the Earth flow, for Gaslamp is in crunch mode! (And I really ought to be polishing up the spells and some tilesets right now.)

This beta release is all about the spells. For example, from the school of “Mathemagic”:

{ read this article }

Posted in Dungeons of Dredmor | Tagged , , , , , , , ,
Leave a comment

Gaslamp Games Quote File #1

February 19, 2011 by David Baumgart

I assure you, these words were uttered in perfectly reasonable game development discussions. For entertainment purposes, I have stripped them all of context. (Hmm, maybe this would more appropriately be called the “zany game-development with Nicholas quotes file”.)

Let us begin:

1.
Nicholas: Oh, it’s used to indicate the presence of an oiled character
Nicholas: monster, rather.
Nicholas: although I suppose if the player gets oiled, that is a possibility as well.

{ read this article }

Posted in Gaslamp | Tagged , , ,
1 Comment

Immortal Machines podcast interview

February 17, 2011 by David Baumgart

Nicholas and I were interviewed on the Immortal Machines podcast (an affiliate of Colony of Gamers) last week by the good bunch of guys there who were far too patient with certain Gaslampy … excesses. Now you can listen in to learn dark secrets about the Dungeons of Dredmor — about the unnatural habits of Thrusties, why Nicholas should not drink a pot of coffee on an empty stomach, and how much Dredmor isn’t going to cost. Here’s the link:

Immortal Machines episode 47: Gaslamp Games and Dungeons of Dredmor (or try the CoG post of the same, if you like)

Much thanks to the Immortal Machines guys for letting us on and to Colony of Gamers and their wonderful community for all their support!

The real question now is if they will ever make the mistake of letting us back on.

Posted in Dungeons of Dredmor, Gaslamp, Interviews | Tagged , , , , ,
2 Comments

Dredmor the Roguelike

February 10, 2011 by David Baumgart

I’ve been trying to figure this out for myself for a while — is Dredmor a roguelike?

And confronted with the obvious (in the midst of recording the Immortal Machines podcast, even; good fun by the way, will post a link when it’s released), I’ll have to concede entirely on this point. To lay it out:

Why Dredmor is a roguelike

  • Dredmor’s gameplay is turn-based with the implicit movement/action-as-a-turn mechanic
  • Dredmor is definitely a dungeon crawler; you explore a dungeon, fight things, loot things, etc.
  • Dredmor uses random, emergent structures for gameplay instead of a linear narrative structures

{ read this article }

Posted in Dungeons of Dredmor | Tagged , , , , , ,
6 Comments