Author Archives: Nicholas

Dredmor; Odin

January 16, 2012 by Nicholas Vining

A quick status update: Dredmor should be getting a second patch – 1.0.10 – this Thursday, or – worst-case scenario next Tuesday. (I’m not releasing patches on Fridays any more. Once bitten, twice shy.) This will be going to Steam, Desura, and the HIB simultaneously, so everybody will finally be up to date. This fixes the bookshelf crash, the weird loading of saves related crashes on OS X and Linux machines, and adds a few cosmetic niceties (working magic reflection, remembering what mods are loaded, remembering if you have disabled click-to-move, random boss monsters occasionally having additional magic resistance, that kind of thing) that have been on people’s lists for awhile.

We have been uncommunicative lately, and this is our fault. Owing to external factors which we cannot announce yet, we have suddenly found ourselves catapulted into Project Odin, almost full-time, somewhat quicker than we anticipated. We’re not entirely sure how much we can talk about this yet, which is problematic, and everybody is probably wondering what’s going on. Ah, growing pains. (This has also been one of the reasons why we are looking for additional gameplay programmers; at least one person will be working on Dredmor with me, on a full-time basis, for the next few months.)

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Posted in Dungeons of Dredmor, Other Games, Programming | Tagged ,
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Jobs, Jobs, Jobs

January 10, 2012 by Nicholas Vining

In what is clearly a sign of the apocalypse, we are hiring. If you think you’ve got what it takes to work for Gaslamp Games? Then we’re interested in talking to you.

Specifically, we are looking to fill four positions at this time. These are contract positions, mainly due to the fact that we are independent and therefore hideously unstable. We are looking to start with about two months worth of contract work, and should that be successful continuing onwards for up to a year (and beyond, if our next project is a success.) If you think you have what it takes, send your resume/CV and a cover letter containing a link to your work portfolio to jobs@gaslampgames.com.

Preference will be given to candidates who are local to the Vancouver or Greater Victoria regions of British Columbia. (EDIT: We are open to remote work. But, we prefer locals.) Gaslamp Games is an equal opportunity and LGBTQ-friendly employer. Only those candidates we are interested in will receive a reply.

We are looking for:

– one gameplay programmer
– one generalist programmer
– one character artist (3D)
– one environment artist (3D)

Job descriptions under the cut. Thanks for applying!

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Posted in Gaslamp, Other Games, Programming | 29 Comments

Happy New Year!

January 7, 2012 by Nicholas Vining

Well, folks, we made it to 2012. Barely, but we made it. For those of you worried about the Mayan Doom Prophecy – fear not! Like all good Canadians, we scoff at your doom prophecies, and know that there are in fact 100 years until the arrival of the Priests of the Temples of Syrinx.

Our contact e-mail is completely jammed up, and we’re trying to work through everything, but here’s some news and status updates on things.

First off: the hotfixes that we put out earlier for various save issues over Christmas are now live on Steam and Desura. We’ll be putting another one up later this week to clean up an additional three crash issues that have reared their ugly heads. If you installed a hotfix from our webpage, we recommend uninstalling local content and making sure you grab a fresh install from Steam. If it does *not* say something like “1.0.9 REVISION B” on the title screen, something’s gone wrong.

There have been a few reports of older save games still being broke on OS X; we’re on it. That said, we have also heard reports of older save games working just fine on OS X, so… it’s a bit puzzling, really.

Second off: Desura and HIB users who want to purchase the Realm of the Diggle Gods, we are working on this but have no ETAs yet. As soon as we know how we’re going to do this and have it set up, we’ll let you know. Watch this space.

Third off: with Dredmor and the expansion pack behind us, our plan at this point is to finish stabilizing any last issues caused by the 1.0.7->1.0.8->1.0.9 patch cycle, and then to keep proceeding with smaller, more incremental patches. Hopefully we should be as stable at the end of this week as we were when we released 1.0.6 (voted “Most Stable Patch of 2011” by our user base.) Balancing and fixes are a continual process, and we’re taking our inspiration from Team Fortress 2 in terms of how we’d like Dredmor to continue evolving. (This does not include a) a hat store, b) becoming free-to-play, c) “Meet the Diggle.”) We’re also looking at the mod support that we put in with release 1.0.7; people have made some *very* cool things, and we are going to continue to provide support for this developing part of the community. Additionally, we will be starting a “mod spotlight” feature on the blog, featuring a mod selected once… every so often… by our community moderator, Mathieu “Daynab” Dugon. We should have the first one up sometime next week.

Finally: not content to rest on our laurels, this week has officially marked the start of work on Project Odin. I am up to my neck in network code and the innards of Google V8, David has been drawing concept art and running art tests, and Daniel is doing The Dark Paperwork. What are we up to? Well… watch this space for hints.

Posted in Dungeons of Dredmor, Gaslamp, Programming | Tagged , , ,
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Post-Holiday Update

December 28, 2011 by Nicholas Vining

EDIT 3:This is now on Desura. Once it looks like nothing else has gone hideously wrong, we’ll move it to Steam and the HIB.

EDIT 2:Alright Mac users, we’ve heard you. You think you’ve got what it takes to apply HOTFIXES. Well, here you go. Grab it, try it, let us know what you think; you’ll need to put it in your Dungeons of Dredmor.app in Contents/MacOS – it should replace an existing file called Dredmor.

All this chicanery will be on Steam and Desura some time tomorrow, provided that just throwing the patches out there doesn’t show us any new problems. 🙂

EDIT: We have a patch being tested that fixes the other three major issues with 1.0.9: mysterious portal issues, the crashing after level 1, and quest hordes not spawning. Windows users, if you want to test the patch at home: grab it here and throw that EXE into your Steam/steamapps/common/dungeons of dredmor folder. Mac users, we can’t give you a test patch quite as easily, but rest assured, we’re working on it. Again, this is an unofficial test patch, and is offered without guarantees, but we would like to know if it works or not. (It should, theoretically, fix your old crashing saves, too.)

Having survived the ancient ritual known as “Christmas with the Families”, we are back in the office today. For what it’s worth, I’m not sure that we actually remember how to relax any more.

That said: we’re back, we’re fixing things. Expect some kind of a status update on a) the OS X nonsense, b) the missing quest monsters, c) getting all of this pushed to Steam – in a bit.

Now has anybody seen my fire extinguisher…?

Posted in Dungeons of Dredmor, Gaslamp | Tagged , , , ,
113 Comments

Bride of the Scorpion Diggle

December 22, 2011 by Nicholas Vining

EDIT: Hotfix below! See below the cut.
EDIT 2: OS X users, we are working on getting you something as fast as we can, but it will likely be after boxing day. (This is mainly due to the fact that I am on the road, and have no access to a Mac.) That said, we are aware of the situation and you guys are my first priority.

First off, my apologies for both letting the teleportation glitch – and our resulting slow response time – happen. In the case of the glitch happening: patch 1.0.9 got rushed in order to try and get it out before the holidays; this turned out to be a bad move. It was my judgement call, and in hindsight we should have given it more QA time (although, interestingly, we did test old saves) and just released it after Boxing Day. In the case of the response time… this is a little more entertaining. Daniel gave me the word, via cellphone, that something was wrong; unfortunately, at the time I was stuck on a Grayhound headed for the middle of nowhere, visiting relatives – having previously been lulled into a false sense of security by the quiet patch reception caused by… well, by the patch not actually being released yet.

Oops.

Mad panic ensued – which is not easy to do on a bus – but I managed. Having now recovered the laptop, and having now found wireless Internet thanks to the good people at Starbucks, we have some answers.

First off: yes, we can fix your save games. I will be putting up a hotfix tonight; I’m not sure how fast we will be able to get things onto Steam and Desura. Humble Bundle users – since this only actually affects 1.0.8 savegames, you *should* be okay.

Second off: this only affects save games made with Dredmor 1.0.8. Dredmor 1.0.9 saves should be fine.

Again, I apologize for this mess and will be coming up with some additional QA improvements in the future.  I will personally find some way to make it up to you in January with something awesome.

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Posted in Dungeons of Dredmor | Tagged , , , , ,
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Dredmor Patch 1.0.9; The Lord Dredmor Diggle-mas Special

December 22, 2011 by Nicholas Vining

(David is still away, so we have to re-use banner art. Let’s put the Giant Pink Scorpion Diggle up again, in the hopes that that doesn’t happen to us…)

Dredmor Patch 1.0.9 has now been sent off to Steam, Desura, *and* the Humble Bundle! Finally. These fine groups of people will get it up in their own sweet time, but we’ve sent it and our part is (hopefully) done. We are desperately praying that nothing new blows up, because if it does… well, Christmas is cancelled forever.

Changelog below the cut. Patch 1.0.9 doesn’t fix everything; some things, such as fixing Blackjack and some of the stickier issues are going to have to wait until January, but it ended up being more comprehensive than I originally planned. As is traditional, we’ll put a little note on this post once Steam puts the patch up and it doesn’t go Blooie. We are still hoping to get the DLC into the hands of our loyal Desura and Humble-Bundlers some time in the New Year; dealing with the actual Diggle Gods release, as well as the massive influx of new users as a result of our Steam Sale has been… a bit overwhelming.

With this last responsibility complete, I am now going to try and get all my Christmas shopping done in 48 hours. The office will be sort-of-closed-ish until some time after Boxing Day.

On behalf of David, Daniel, and myself, as well as the rest of the Dredmor crew: Happy Holidays, and thanks for making 2011 so awesome. It has been nothing short of an amazing year for Gaslamp. The day before Dredmor launched on Steam, we sat around wondering what would happen, and Daniel noted, quite famously, “Well, hopefully we sell enough copies of Dredmor that we can buy a nice bottle of Scotch or something.” We have exceeded that beyond our wildest dreams – I, for one, am still vastly confused about what exactly happened – and we are grateful and humbled by the support that the PC gaming community, our user base, the gaming media, and our friends, have given us over the course of the year. Through ups and downs, highs and lows, Steam Sales and Scorpion Diggles, you’ve been awesome. It’s been a pleasure to make games for your enjoyment.

We’re really looking forward to 2012. (You have been warned.)

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Posted in Dungeons of Dredmor, Gaslamp | Tagged , , , ,
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Steam Winter Sale! Buy All The Things!

December 19, 2011 by Nicholas Vining

EDIT: Well, that happened.

Wow.

We’re still on sale for 50% off until January the 2nd, or something.

But still…

Wow.

EDIT: Today, only, we’re not just fifty percent off – we are SEVENTY. FIVE. PERCENT. OFF. You can now go buy Dredmor, today only, with the small pile of loose change in your couch.

WHAT HAVE WE DONE…

It’s bargain time again at Steam, where the good folks at Valve are running a Winter Sale event! Dungeons of Dredmor is 50% off until January 2nd; Realm of the Diggle Gods, our brand-spanking-new expansion, is for sale at 50% off as well!

But wait, there’s more! The Super Indie Bundle Pack is for sale until January 2nd only! For only $19.99, you can get Dungeons of Dredmor AND nine other great games, including Cave Story+, Revenge of the Titans, and more! Buy it here.

…

There may be a small task for you to perform later.

Posted in Dungeons of Dredmor, Front Page | Tagged ,
19 Comments

Winter Wrap-Up

December 17, 2011 by Nicholas Vining

First off: we are amazingly honored to find ourselves on some “best of 2011” lists. In particular, IndieGames has declared Dungeons of Dredmor to be their sixth best independent game of 2011, against some very stiff competition (and, amazingly, beating out Bastion, a game we really enjoyed.) Even more mindboggling is the fact that we’ve been nominated as one of the five best RPGs for the PC for 2011 over at the IGN Network – next to Bastion, the Witcher 2, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, and a little game called Skyrim that nobody’s ever heard of. This is basically like being nominated for an Oscar – you may not win, because you’re up against a ringer – but hey, you’re still Oscar-nominated!

We’re also in IndieDB’s “Top 100 Indie Games of 2011” – vote for us here – and we’re still neck in neck with ToME 4 over at the ASCII Dreams Roguelike blog, where the battle between a commercial roguelike and one of the best new free traditional roguelikes of this year has caused no end of controversy. (I say this not having played ToME, but I’m making it my business to do so over the holidays.) Feel free to vote for us at these things if you think we deserve your voting love.

In non horn-tooting news:

Monday, we released patch 1.0.8, shortly followed by patch 1.0.8b, and patch 1.0.8c (fixing the invasion of the Giant Pink Scorpion Diggles on OS X.) Thursday, after some hiccups, we got the Realm of the Diggle Gods up on Steam, and we’re delighted that the feedback has been universally positive. Everybody is having fun, and everybody seems to think it’s worth $2.99. Friday, just to put the icing on the cake, I successfully defended my Master’s Thesis in Computer Science, which I have been quietly writing in the background while all of this development has been going on. Finishing that project, however, has meant that I am a little behind on Support Things this week; under normal circumstances, we would probably have been a little better organized.

Accordingly, here is a run-down of where we currently are on All of The Things.

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Posted in Dungeons of Dredmor, Gaslamp | Tagged , , , , ,
62 Comments