Author Archives: Nicholas

Patch Status Update; Penny Arcade Expo

August 21, 2011 by Nicholas Vining

A user on Twitter has pointed out that it’s been three weeks since we put up a patch status update. What’s going on, Gaslamp? So here’s the approximate status and time line.

The patch, as it stands, is done. I’m waiting for one piece of art from David, and he assures me that he can paint it tomorrow, but I’m ready to drop it in when he says he’s done it. We’ve spent the weekend testing it internally, and are going to pack it up and send it out for external beta testing on Tuesday. As soon as the external beta testers give it the all-clear, we will fire it your way. There may be a second call for external beta testers next week; I need to get everything sorted out. I would like the beta to take about a week, so that I can put it up next Monday. There will be a content patch thereafter.

Thanks for sticking with us while we get this sorted out. The entire mess has been complicated by my moving, badly, and thus not having a real office until last Wednesday. Nonetheless, David and I are in the same building again, and we have plans to entertain you. I still don’t have internet at the new apartment yet, mainly due to working on this patch, so no doubt I will be in the office a lot until I manage to get that sorted out. 🙂 I need my fix.

In other news, various Gaslampers will be trickling down to Seattle this weekend for the grand and glorious Nerdstravaganza called Penny Arcade Expo. I will be there Saturday and some of Sunday, as I expect to be sorting out patch stuff all next week. Daniel will be wandering around, having a good time, and terrorizing Seattle in his [and Nicholas’s -Ed.] RV, “The Diggle Express.” If anybody would be interested in a Dredmor meet-up, or if anybody would be interested in having a beer with us, feel free to comment on this post and we’ll try to sort out something for Saturday. (As part of our deconstructionist approach to Achievements on Steam, there will be a special Dredmor achievement exposed to those of you who have been drinking with Gaslamp.)

There’s been a lot of other stuff happening in our three weeks of radio silence. There should be new distribution deals announced, including the long-awaited Linux port, in the next few weeks, and we will also be unleashing some sort of Merchandising Effort from the Dwarven Mountainhomes. Watch this space…

Posted in Dungeons of Dredmor, Game Design, Games, Gaslamp | Tagged , ,
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Patch Status

July 28, 2011 by Nicholas Vining

Hi, folks!

We’re still grinding away on the next patch; this is slightly complicated by the fact that I am moving on Sunday, so my apartment furniture consists of nothing but my desk, chair, and a never-ending sea of boxes. There are two practical sides to this, however. The first is that I will be in the same city as David, which can only increase The Madness. Gaslamp will have shared offices again! David may yet drink decent coffee, if I have anything to do with it! And so forth. The second consequence is that I was originally slated to begin a Ph.D in Computer Science as of September; this has now been pushed back to January 2012 so we can wrestle the madness a little bit more, and ensure that Gaslamp is well set up to work on the next thing. (Who knows if I make it there in January, either. At the rate things are going, all bets are off. Dredmor may have spelled the end of my academic career… or not. Who knows. It worked for Jeff Vogel…)

That said: our planned next revision hums along at a good pace. My working notes on the things that have actually been fixed are below: subtract these from the most recent list we put up to get an approximate idea of the amount of work is remaining. I’m considering splitting this into smaller patches, so we can get this out sooner rather than later; at the same time, I want to make sure that we … well, for a lack of a better term, that we get everybody’s pet issues. 🙂 If you want to participate in our Exciting Dredmor Blooper Beta Bonus Round, send us an e-mail to ilovetocrash@gaslampgames.com (really) and tell us why you want to be one of our Exciting Patch Testers. Preference will be given to those who participated in the beta, to those who have been active in the community with assembling bug reports and tracking things, and to those with existing QA experience.

Okay. List of things we’ve done so far… is below.

{ read this article }

Posted in Dungeons of Dredmor, Game Design, Games, Gaslamp, Programming | Tagged , , ,
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Obligatory Press Post

July 22, 2011 by Nicholas Vining

As game developers, we have to put up links to our Press Clippings on the company weblog so we have some place to send our parents (who still don’t believe we have real jobs.) So now, it’s time for the Gloat Walk:

Rock Paper Shotgun: “I survived the nameless horrors summoned by the Shrine of Eyeballs. I fought cybernetic aliens, hulking Djinn, moustache golems. I even survived the Monster Zoo, the dreaded room packed wall-to-wall with bloodthirsty enemies – twice. I didn’t survive the blade trap…”

Press X or Die: “It’s a good sign when you’d rather play the game you’re supposed to review than actually review it. I am afraid to run Dungeons of Dredmor again because I’ll spend another hour on it (at best). Sadly, I had to get screenshots for the article, so I lost another 2 hours summoning moustache golems and killing diggles.”

Game Informer: “Dungeons of Dredmor isn’t Diablo III. It’s not even Dungeon Siege III, but it makes no pretensions about it. The game barely takes itself seriously enough to have proper swords, much less tell an epic story or rewrite the rules of a genre. Gaslamp Games’ mission was to make a fun, accessible, lighthearted dungeon crawl with enough interesting mechanics to make exploring the game’s systems as intriguing as diving through its dungeon. Dungeons of Dredmor is a solid success in those terms, and easily exceeds expectations for its five-dollar price tag.”

Game Pro: “I’m quite taken with this roguelike; it feels like a game that came out of nowhere and hits all of the dungeon-crawl buttons — steep challenge, lots of loots, and a ton of monsters. Throw in its humor and soundtrack and you’ve got a roguelike that should appeal to anyone who likes a good dungeon-crawl.”

and Wired, of all people, featured us in their list of “7 Fantastical Indie RPGs worth playing” (alongside such distinguished company as Recettear and Cthulhu Saves The World.)

Have you written about Dredmor? We’d love to hear from you. Would you like to write about Dredmor? Send us e-mail to our increasingly-buried contact list, and we’ll see if we can help you out. Want to talk Dredmor? Same deal.

Posted in Dungeons of Dredmor, Gaslamp | Tagged ,
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Laundry Day

July 21, 2011 by Nicholas Vining

“When you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is to stop digging.” — Ancient Diggle Proverb

Today, I caught up on my sleep and did all my laundry. Small things, but necessary, especially if you have ever seen what three weeks of laundry looks like. I also started taking stock of the bug pile. So since you’re all wondering, here are some Mild Announcements.

– We have hired Chris Triolo to do some art for us; in particular, he will be providing us with a female hero for Dredmor (Something that I have always wanted) and a handful of new monsters. Chris has promised to “rein in his salty language”, whatever that means. Welcome aboard, Chris – and just remember: when the new hideous demons start killing people, it’s Your Fault. Chris will be working on these as soon as he gets some of his other contract work wrapped up, and we look forward to letting you all play Dredmor as a woman with massive eyebrows.

– We have gotten Valve to set us up with an opt-in beta program; particularily active community users, and general masochists, will be invited to participate in our Advance Patch Testing Program. More on this as soon as we get it set up.

– I now have a working Mac development environment of my very own, which means Mac users will be getting the same level of love as their Windows brethren from now on. (Linux users, we love you too. I hope to have some good things to say about this soon enough.)

– I now have a version of Dredmor that can test three hundred save games for compatibility in five minutes. (Seriously? This is the best thing ever.)

I have also gone through the bug and balance pile and have started working out what is going to get into the next patch. The following is a draft list of what we are planning to address, collectively, for 1.0.4. If your favourite bug or balance issue isn’t here, don’t worry – we are thinking about it, and we will address That Lame Skill You Really Want To Love eventually. I don’t have an ETA for when we will get through this list, but I will let you know. Real life – plus Company Drinking and Cigars on Saturday – will delay the start of work on this, so realistically I will start working on the next patch on Monday. The biggest issue towards getting this done in a timely manner is that, as previously mentioned, I am moving on the first of August. This, traditionally, means chaos, but it also means David and I will be sharing an office space again… and this can only mean more madness that will please the Elder Gods.

Ye olde Patch 1.0.4 issue list is below:

{ read this article }

Posted in Dungeons of Dredmor, Gaslamp | Tagged ,
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Hotfix and Mac Update; The Future

July 21, 2011 by Nicholas Vining

Update: both these patches are now live. — N.

Hi, folks!

The Dredmor Save Fiasco Hotfix and a new OS X build have been sent to Steam, and they will go up some time tomorrow. (Steam is pretty good about these things.) As always, if you have any problems or questions, feel free to get in touch with us at contact@gaslampgames.com; we will try to get you sorted out as best we can. When updating the game, those of you using the hotfix may want to make sure you validate your Steam cache before, after, or during the install process to make sure you have the freshest, newest Dredmors that Steam can provide. (Or just uninstall and reinstall the entire thing, if bandwidth is cheap for you.)

At this point, the game seems to be running pretty stably for most people. We’re aware of a few slowdowns (generally bad performance on OS X; also blood, in particular in Monster Zoos), and a few odd things that happen using the Unsupported Features (the hidden speed-up key and the OpenGL renderer.) So this is good.

That said, we certainly have a bunch of issues to continue sorting out. My bugtracker currently has one hundred and eleven issues in it. In the words of Strong Bad, “That is not a small number! That is a big number!” There’s a very good chance that if there is an issue that’s bothering you (warrior health broken! Mages still need nerfing! Balance issues! Infinite Diggle Health bars! Pet stupidity! Monsters attacking you just as you kill them! Pets being stupid! WASD not working! This Translation is all Wrong… Is All Wrong! etc.), we probably have it on our list. This is in addition to the requested features list, which still includes 2X UI and has expanded to include a bunch of other things that everybody wants – and will eventually get – to make their life better. (Minimap icons springs instantly to mind, although there’s other stuff.) This is also in addition to new content. Plus, we need to finish the Linux port, and at some point we need to start assembling the next game! It’s a busy time to be a Gaslamper.

We are going to work through this as fast we can, and as best we can, but we’re going to have to stop for a bit and get our bearings so that we can figure out the best way to attack things. We are currently leaning towards alternating bugfix and content patches, and we can only do this if we start building some testing infrastructure, so we’re going to do that. (This is slightly complicated by the fact that I, personally, am supposed to be moving at the start of August. Oh well.)

We’ll let you know as soon as we determine what the next part of the plan is, and how soon in August I can actually get the Internet Access people to reconnect me with the rest of the world. In the mean time, we’re so thrilled you’re having a good time with Dredmor, and we hope that you continue to do so. I, for one, have spent several hours reading forum posts, laughing my head off, and being amazed at the incredibly long playtimes that people are putting in. It is very delightful to know that everything we threw in Dredmor over the course of several years has suddenly gone off with a very loud bang, all at once, all over the Internet. It’s like setting fire to an explosives factory.

Posted in Dungeons of Dredmor, Gaslamp, Programming | Tagged , ,
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Save Files and Apologies

July 19, 2011 by Nicholas Vining

First off, the good news. We have managed to fix the save file issue, and we will have a patch in your hands tomorrow. So hold onto them. Mac Users, we are still waiting on some information from Valve about the correct way to build Mac Patches. Again, thanks for hanging in there. Your patch is coming.

A few apologies are owed as well. Obviously, breaking save files is a bad thing. This is our mess, we made it, and now we get to live with it. I am not happy with the fact that we have been having teething troubles after launch. This is, bluntly, not how I want Gaslamp Games to be run. I want us to be the company that is so freakin’ awesome you tell your friends how awesome we are. The programming side of things is my fault, and I apologize for that as well.

The simple fact of the matter is that we were not expecting sales in the volume that we got, and we were not expecting the response that we got. I honestly thought we would make… maybe a thousand sales during the entire lifetime of the product. We are… doing somewhat better than that, and as a result we are doing our best to try to deal with the fact that we now have to support a massive user base, with no money, no staff, and no time. Consequently, we have been scrabbling around trying to get everything sorted out, and when we were testing the reasonably large patch that was about to come out, this slipped through the cracks at the last minute. We didn’t go back and re-test the savegames after we put together a last minute fix for a shopkeeper issue, and ka-blam, there’s nothing left to do but to pick up the bodies. It’s a mess, and our forums are probably on fire as well… I haven’t had the heart to look.

So, yep. There’s mud on all of our faces. Mainly mine, because whenever there are bugs it tends to be a programming issue.

At the same time, patch 1.0.3 seems to have dealt with the major crashes in 1.0.2. So that’s good news. Obviously, there are things that we will have to straighten out – vampirism, balance tweaks, whatever the heck is going on with dual wielding, mod support, social stuff, and I am sure that there is at least one more crash bug waiting to strike! – but it almost feels like I can sit down, stop running, and take a breather.

The only reason we put an achievement in for crashing was because we figured that the game was stable enough that this would no longer be an issue. Hence it might be coveted, instead of something that everybody now gets. Bleh. I was, also, admittedly surprised that this is an issue with a permadeath game. I didn’t actually think that enough people would care that much about their characters and their runs in the worst case scenario that we broke the save game format.  Frankly, this is also me being stupid. As users, you guys get to play the game how you want to play it, and who are we to make assumptions otherwise? I am, in fact, amazed and humbled that people are putting in monstrous amounts of time on Dungeons of Dredmor, and the stories of eighteen hour runs gone in an instant are absolutely heartbreaking.

As soon as things calm down and I get this hotfix out properly, I will be building some serious regression testing for save games so that this Does Not. Happen. Again. It was on the TODO list, and we didn’t get to it for this patch, because we wanted to deal with the Stairs bug and other issues. (Interestingly, the Stairs Bug has been in the codebase for five years; nobody’s managed to trigger it in all that time until the game has been released. Go team.) As soon as we actually get royalties, we will be investing in some hardware to run automated testing and hardware compatibility checking, and we will be building this into the next game from day one so that, again, this does not happen again.

I am also going to take a few days off to try and catch up on my sleep, so I feel less stressed out about having an Indie Hit on my hands that… well, to be frank, I’m not always totally sure how to deal with it. 🙂

Anyhow, as always, we are here to listen to your concerns. When I started Gaslamp in 2008 and dragged these other guys into it, I decided from day one that I wanted Gaslamp to be the kind of company that is awesome, listens to its user base, and puts out a good product. If we are not doing that, we need to know so that we can fix it… and we will fix it. So thank you, as always, for holding our irons to the fire.

Nicholas Vining

PS. Incidentally, we are interested in how things are going with 1.0.3 *other* than with the save game issues. A bunch of stuff did get fixed, and while I think we will be patching Dredmor a little more slowly from now on, we still need to start thinking at some point about what to tackle next.

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

Patch 1.0.3 Update

July 19, 2011 by Nicholas Vining

EDIT2: Your old save games from Dredmor 1.02 almost certainly do not work with Dredmor 1.03. We apologize for the inconvenience. I’m pretty sure you’ll get an achievement for your pain, at least. — David

EDIT: Windows users, your patch is now live, but may have trouble on older saves.  OS X users, we’re testing your patch now, and it might be up a little later, but certainly no later than tomorrow morning. The Changelog below has been updated to reflect the final last, few things that snuck in. — Nicholas / Daniel

First a quick reminder: today is the last day you can get Dungeons of Dredmor at 10% off – save all of fifty glorious cents. That said, onto the meat:

Some folks have been asking what the deal is with the promised 1.0.3 patch, so here’s the deal. The patch is done; I’m not adding any more code to it. However, we still have to give it a quick playthrough tomorrow before we can let it loose upon the world. This is to make sure that we haven’t added any more crash bugs, corrupted save games, or all the rest of it; hopefully this turns out to be a good strategy.  I would test it myself, but it’s now 3:30 AM in Victoria, and doctors keep telling me that I need at least four hours of sleep, preferably more. Foolish men of medicine, what do they know?

The 2X UI scaler has been moved to patch 1.0.4 (the next patch), as has in-client leaderboards. Doing the 2X UI properly – making it all pretty and stuff – is going to take at least another couple of days. I think, however, we have now taken care of most of the other major complaints. Here is the current, completed, changelog:

{ read this article }

Posted in Dungeons of Dredmor, Gaslamp, Programming | 108 Comments

It’s a Girl!

July 18, 2011 by Nicholas Vining

Congratulations to our Director of Business Development, Chris Dykstra, on the birth of his new baby girl!

Posted in Gaslamp | Tagged , ,
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