Author Archives: David

The Interaction Problem

June 3, 2010 by David Baumgart

Oh playtesting, how you tear down my illusions, besiege the fortress of my ego then poison its well and set fire to its stores of grain.

Fig. 1: The good part of Dredmor’s interactivity.

It is shocking just how surely a player will ignore tutorial text. The help button is effectively invisible, ignored, the text left sad and unread. Whatever it is, the “go away” button is clicked via Skinnerian response to years of training at ignoring inane popups. Yes, Nicholas passed me a link (or possibly a newer one) to Jeff Atwood writing on the subject when this issue of the tutorials being completely ignored came up, and it got me thinking.

Fig 2. The bad. Don’t ask why it says “Axe” on that lightbulb.

We’ve got issues.

{ read this article }

Posted in Dungeons of Dredmor | Tagged ,
Leave a comment

Beta: From making a game to making a game good

June 1, 2010 by David Baumgart

Yes, this is how we do things at Gaslamp.

The other day I was banging on the latest release candidate for Dredmor’s Beta v0.2 for Nicholas and I noticed that rather than things simply not working or, worse, crashing the game I was coming up with more issues that had to do with balancing and tweaking the game. It’s a fine point that we’re reaching; This is turning into an exercise not of making a game anymore, but of trying to make a game good.

It’s a good place to be. Soon, I keep telling myself, it’ll happen.

Posted in Dungeons of Dredmor | Tagged
Leave a comment

Not a job posting.

May 26, 2010 by David Baumgart

Click for Full Size

Posted in Gaslamp | Tagged
Leave a comment

“Why is the Dwarven Panini Press a rejected weapon idea?”

May 21, 2010 by David Baumgart

A spur of the moment call to a few rushed, jammed-together Gaslamp meeting-type things saw me with a lot of time to blow on the ferry from Vancouver to Victoria, so please enjoy the fruit of my sketch pad:

Top: Sword skill icons. Bottom: “Mystic Mines” tileset revision & dungeon objects.

Not pictured: List of weapons rejected from Dredmor. All credit to Nicholas for the Dwarven Panini Press. The downside is that I might have to actually draw an icon for it now.

Posted in Dungeons of Dredmor | Tagged
Leave a comment

Painter’s Progress: The Dredmor Title Screen

May 17, 2010 by David Baumgart

It’s been a fairly brutal crunch of art-making for the Dredmor beta, so pardon me if I part with the greatest part of my usual verbosity [edit: Who am I kidding, I’m going to ramble on and on for the fun of it].

I knew it was serious when I started being able to walk into the Tim Horton’s down the block and they knew my order — extra large coffee, black — without me having to say anything.

Part of the polish I’ve been wrapping up to make Dredmor presentable is the Very Important title screen art. First impressions are important; the opening screen has to be /totally cool/ and show off the spirit of the game.

I present to you the evolution of the title screen painting and, in turn, my growth as an artist over the last year and a half.

{ read this article }

Posted in Dungeons of Dredmor | Tagged
Leave a comment

Old Magic, New Magic – And the crunch.

May 10, 2010 by David Baumgart

Begin ye, my week of Dredmor crunching!

I shall drink the black liqueor of Yog-sothoth; yea, that odious brew which gives unlife to that-which-lived-not shall give me life that I may make all the art for which Dredmor thirsts in this week.

(We’re off to a good start, aren’t we? Imagine how crazy I’ll feel by the end of it.)

Anyway, I’ve been drawing some icons for our recently revised and renewed spell list. The art direction has changed: All spells will be drawn, like skills, at a larger size because bigger pictures are more fun to look at (though they still size down to 32×32 for use in the old spell slots). Some spells are new, some spells are old. Some are all new graphics, some are old graphics redrawn. See here:

My, I’ve got an awful lot of work to do. Sixty spells, thirty-one rogue skills,  twenty-five warrior skills. And that’s not including the menu art, new and revised UI elements (hey, we have an experience bar now!), new and revised tilesets (including animated liquids), and uh, some more items, a few status icons, spell effects, random things …  stuff … and things …

I’ve even got a great idea for a comic for the beta release written down somewhere; hope I can find time to draw it out.

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

Nitpicking Lockpicking

May 3, 2010 by David Baumgart

As part of the Dredmor beta crunchening process we’ve been making executive decisions about various pieces of game content. Among these are the various abilities granted by the seven starting skills a player selects when beginning a game of Dredmor. These skills are roughly classified by the three traditional RPG archetypes: Warrior, Rogue, and Wizard.

Let us then enter the shadowy world of the Rogue.

The Rogue is a strange one in Dredmor and possibly my favorite for being a bit of an underdog. It’s ended up as the class that’s received all the skills that were not explicitly spell-casting (Wizard) or direct-combat related (Warrior) and therefore range from the obvious (“Stealth”) to utility (“Alchemy”) to the rather random (“Archaeology”). A player who chooses pure Rogue skills will be in for a session of Dredmor that shall often revolve around manipulating the more periphery systems at work in the game.

{ read this article }

Posted in Dungeons of Dredmor | Tagged , ,
1 Comment

So Ridiculous That It’s Awesome

April 26, 2010 by David Baumgart

For Dungeons of Dredmor I’m currently revising the main title screen, credits, and high score background paintings, and I’ve effectively finished the introduction paintings in the last couple months. I even wrote the text for the intro; Truly, a renaissance man stands before you.

{ read this article }

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