Author Archives: Nicholas

The Canadian Indie Bundle Is Here!

October 23, 2012 by Nicholas Vining

Edit: Looks like that’s it folks!  Thanks for spreading the word and helping us promote our awesome country of maple syrup, igloos, and great indie games!

 

We’re in a bundle on Steam right now with a number of other *great* Canadian titles! For only $14.99, you can get Dungeons of Dredmor, and a number of other fabulous indie games featuring everything from Sworcery (whatever that is?) to a bandana-wearing, knife-wielding lunatic, to … some kind of game about quantum waveforms. Quantum physics has never been so exciting!

(look at banner, Michael!)

You get:

  • Dungeons of Dredmor (obviously)
  • Capsized!
  • Shank!
  • Shank 2!
  • Waveform!
  • Superbrothers: Swords and Sworcery EP
  • Space Pirates and Zombies
  • HOARD

Honestly, though, these games are fantastic – as are the wonderful indie devs who made them.  Buy the Canadian bundle today! And Blame Canada!

Posted in Dungeons of Dredmor | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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The Inner Secrets of Clockwork Empires

October 16, 2012 by Nicholas Vining

World Building is a finicky business. You need to build a universe for a game, and you need the universe to be believable and cogent. When we set out to start writing for Clockwork Empires, we knew that it had to be different than Dredmor; Dredmor was very self-indulgent, and full of sly nods, parody, tropes, and generally rampaging through every single fantasy property, bad B-movie, and obscure metal band known to man, woman, and Diggle.

CE is a bit different. We have some scope to be indulgent, but we need to get away from anything that is referential and anything that is going to break the illusion that this is a large, functioning Empire with its own intelligent citizenry and history. We can’t make references to, say, Buckaroo Banzai (sorry, Daniel!) and get away with it. We actually have to go into the trenches and start writing about the world, and about the things in the world. This process is known as worldbuilding.

{ read this article }

Posted in Clockwork Empires | Tagged , , , , , , , , , ,
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Our Terrifying October

October 2, 2012 by Nicholas Vining

We dared to explore the terrifying realms of toy manufacturing. The madness continues.

(Get your Diggling Horrors here, etc. OUR HORRIFYING OPERATORS ARE STANDING BY.)

Posted in Dungeons of Dredmor | Tagged , , , , , , , , ,
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Meanwhile…

September 20, 2012 by Nicholas Vining

Over at ShouldBee, we understand that problems are getting steadily worse:

(Diggle Plush link is here! Limited edition Diggles w/David Artwork are still available! etc.)

EDIT: Now with fixed link that won’t trigger security key errors.

Posted in Dungeons of Dredmor | Tagged , , , , , , , , ,
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Evolution of a 3D Engine

September 19, 2012 by Nicholas Vining

One of the major reasons behind announcing Clockwork Empires – as I think I mentioned before – is that we want to talk about what we’re doing. We want to keep you in the loop, and we want you to feel happy, informed, and involved. Accordingly, we’ll be posting lots of work in progress stuff. Again, this is a work in progress and will not (and does not, even!) represent what we’ll be shipping in a year and a half; this is a catalogue of the journey, but not the destination. However, it’s a pretty interesting journey.

Yesterday’s moment of excitement was discovering that all our characters were too small, and occupied one sixth of a “game tile” rather than one quarter of a tile. Queue massive re-export. Ah, well. These things happen in game development, and we deal with them and we move on; the key thing is to try to make sure that it doesn’t happen again.

So, let’s not talk about that. Let’s look at some screenshots. Because we’re vicious and evil, we’re not going to show you up-to-date screenshots; instead, we’re going to show you things from the cutting room floor. Way back when we started Clockwork Empires, we put a screenshot button in the game so that we could easily take pictures of our work for analysis, sharing with friends, putting up on the blog, whatever. Because we did this so early, we have an interesting collection of archival footage. So here’s some stuff for anybody interested in seeing how you pull an engine together.

To get you in the mood, here is a construction animation:

{ read this article }

Posted in Clockwork Empires, Programming | Tagged , , , ,
17 Comments

Diggle Plushie Announcements!

September 12, 2012 by Nicholas Vining

We have some Diggle Plushie announcements today, including shipping news and clarification of our exciting limited-time sketch offer. First, however, here is a link to the product page. Second, here is a video:

ShouldBee is pleased to inform you that shipping of Plush Diggles to the US, Canada and the UK is now available right now! Those of you in Canada and the United Kingdom who have eagerly been awaiting Diggles can now go ahead and order. Again, a reminder – if you are one of the first 100 people to order a Diggle plush, we will throw in a small, hastily done sketch by David Baumgart and signed by the Gaslamp Games crew. There are still sketches available as of the time of writing.

Again! Diggles can be yours. Just click this link.

It just gets worse from here.

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

PAX Prime 2012 Photos

September 7, 2012 by Nicholas Vining

It is customary, at this time, to tell the audience what they missed. So here are some photos of our PAX 2012 booth, our PAX 2012 staff dinner, and a small yet modest cocktail party we threw for Visiting Dignitaries.

{ read this article }

Posted in Gaslamp | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , ,
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Clockwork Empires: Alright, Now What?

September 6, 2012 by Nicholas Vining

We’re back from Penny Arcade Expo! This was our first year as an exhibitor; while previous years have been reasonably epic (most notably for me, at least, was 2010, which was the year I crashed a panel with Steve Jackson), this year blew them all away. We got to meet a bunch of you, we got to hand out 100 Stuffed Diggle Menaces,  and we got to see the Hat of Bergstrom. We also had a few good times with some members of the remote team who don’t normally work at the Vancouver office, most notably Chris Triolo and Ryan C. Gordon, who just happened to be in town that day. I got a Valve tour! Daniel was on a panel! We went to Notch’s party! The list goes on and on…

Now we’re back, the question becomes: now what do we do?

The main thing that PAX impressed upon me was just how much work we have to do between now and next year on Clockwork Empires. Next year, we want to be showing this game, and we want it to be in a presentable state. That’s fine. We have a long, rather hard road ahead of us, and we’ll get there, but the question is… what do we do until then?

So here’s the plan. We’re an independent studio that is really not beholden to anybody but ourselves. We want you to know what’s going on and how we’re progressing; we want you to get excited for Clockwork Empires, and we want you to let us know how you think we’re doing. We’re going to open things up as much as we can, and we’re going to write while we do so. We hope you’ll like it. We’ll try to be honest, and we’ll try to let you know the good news as well as the bad news. You’ll be getting posts from me on the programming stuff, David on the art side of things, Daniel on AI (and maybe ranting about “business stuff”), and all of us on game design.

Let the great Developing begin, er continue! To that end, here is random art. What do you folks want to hear about?

Clockwork Empires serves the needs of all, from the clothing needs of growing alternative religions to the logistical infrastructure required to maintain a respectable zeppelin fleet in these challenging times.

Posted in Clockwork Empires, Game Design, Gaslamp, Programming | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , ,
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