Author Archives: Nicholas

Lean Startups, Part II: Some Games That Suck (And Why That’s Not a Bad Thing)

January 26, 2011 by Nicholas Vining

(Eric Ries has now started re-tweeting this series, so I will take that as tacit approval from the master. He’s in British Columbia in two months, giving a series of talks on Lean Startupsin Vancouver and somewhere in Kelowna, so there is a slim possibility that this is just a ruse to lull me into security while he takes time out of his busy schedule to hunt me down and shoot me with a blowgun.)

When last we left our hero, he had just discovered that it was possible to make a lot of money by shipping software that sucked. This, of course, was nothing new to our hero; now, however, he was confronted with the fact that this might not be a bad thing after all.

So here’s the skinny.

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Lean Startup, Part I: “Why does your IM Client Suck?”

January 25, 2011 by Nicholas Vining

I promised that I would write a post about my thoughts on Lean Startups at some point. This is evolving into… well, it’ll be a series. Gaslamp is not a lean startup, at least in the puritanical, traditional sense; that said, there is a certain amount of talk around the old campfire about doing our next game in a Lean fashion. Lean Games have been done before – arguably the best example is Mount and Blade, but I think Overgrowth and Natural Selection 2 both count – but nobody has put a label on the idea yet.

So let’s do this, and while we’re at it let’s talk about Lean Startups. What is a Lean Startup? Well, it’s a complicated subject. I also get to tell an Eric Reis story, which he probably doesn’t even remember, and if he reads this either I’ll get flamed and the company will be sued, or he’ll put it up on his excellent weblog. It’s a win either way, so here goes.

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Game Development Snake Oil

January 19, 2011 by Nicholas Vining

I am actually sick with lung flu, which means I have some time to write angry rants, inspired by things on my Twitter feed, and then post them to the company blog.
(Actually, this is just shameless bait for sites like Y Combinator, who love to hear Angry Young People railing about the world at large. I… I should give up now.)

That said, we have been falling short on technical commentary here, and I did get linked to two Twitter posts this morning that are worth discussing in some detail. So let’s have at ’em.

The first item is from id Software’s John Carmack, who does things like writing an entire photon mapper in a day and then tells people that he did it – and, it’s not a big deal, you know? His contribution to the discussion:

“Floating point trick: If ( a != a ) a is a NaN”

I took a few minutes to puzzle out how this could possibly work. It turns out that in C++ – and in fact, according to IEEE floating point standards – NaNs (or not-a-numbers) will cause ANY expression to return true if they are used in an inequality comparison. Clever!

The second item that caught my attention was an advertisement for a course with a “Certified ScrumMaster for Agile Game Development”, to be held two days before GDC. This course promises that we will, with the ScrumMaster’s help and guidance, learn such things as:

“The essentials of getting a project off on the right foot”,
“How to successfully scale Scrum methods to hundreds of participants”,
“How to help both new, and experienced teams, be more successful,”

and so on and so forth. In just two days, you too can sip at the mystical elixir of Scrum, which is guaranteed to make your game ship on time, your Metacritic scores improve, and as an added bonus it’ll make all your hair grow back and your girlfriend will stop complaining about all the overtime you put in at the office. The cost of this affair? $1500 for a two day seminar, although you get $250 off if you register early. As a bonus, after you take this course (and fill in some kind of online quiz), you too can call yourself a Certified Scrum Master!

…

*sigh*

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Posted in Games, Programming | Tagged , , , , , ,
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Happy New Year!

January 3, 2011 by Nicholas Vining

Happy new year from all of us at Gaslamp Games. 2011 is gonna be huge. Some housekeeping:

– Did you know we have one of those damn-fangled Twitter-things? Why not give it a look? In particular, I’ll be Live-Tweeting my work session for a bit today, and maybe tomorrow as well. We’ll see how it goes.
– We’re also on Facebook. Just search for Gaslamp Games and you’ll see us. I don’t know what we’ll do for Special Facebook Content, but I’m sure I’ll think of something.
– Congratulations to fellow Roguelike makers QCF Design whose game, Desktop Dungeons, was nominated for the Seamus McNally Grand Prize at the 2011 IGF this year. This’ll be a lesson to us: we didn’t end up submitting a build of Dredmor to the IGF last year because a) it wasn’t in a particularly good state at the time, but also b) because we didn’t think a Roguelike had a good chance of placing anywhere. Shows what we know. There you have it, folks: 2011 is clearly the year of Roguelike Domination!

More importantly, perhaps: over the holidays the collective Gaslamp crew managed to recharge our batteries and get a lot of work done. The game, replete with a new combat system, a new skill system, multiple resolutions, and the blasphemous presence of Numbers all over the place feels like a game, and that’s a sign that we’re getting close to shipping. Now, if you’ll excuse me – these 52 bugs aren’t going to fix themselves, you know.

Posted in Dungeons of Dredmor, Gaslamp | Tagged , ,
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Two New Screenshots

December 12, 2010 by Nicholas Vining

As promised in my previous post, here are two new Dredmor screenshots:

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Posted in Dungeons of Dredmor, Game Design | Tagged
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State of the Dredmor

December 12, 2010 by Nicholas Vining

You know what? I didn’t get ANY Sewer Brew for my birthday. Not a drop. That means I’m now programming sober for the first time in ten years. Watch out, people.

A recent post from the SomethingAwful Forums states, “Well, I went to check up on Dungeons of Dredmor, but there’s been no new release information.” Well, something to that effect, anyhow, and the post wasn’t all that recent. I think it was in November. So here’s the state of the union. As a bonus, I’ve taken a few more WIP Screenshots showing off some of the new systems, which we will shove in a new post.

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Posted in Dungeons of Dredmor, Game Design | Tagged , ,
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Dear Linux Community: We Need To Talk.

November 13, 2010 by Nicholas Vining

I glanced at Slashdot yesterday while bored and found an interesting article on the CDE packaging tool. An impressive piece of work, CDE automatically packages up all of your dependencies into a self-contained directory structure. If I wanted to package up Dungeons of Dredmor and to be able to guarantee that it would work on your computer, all I would have to do is to run CDE on my computer, where I know Dredmor works, and sha-zam! Instant package.

This is something I have been fretting about: how do we distribute Dredmor for Linux?

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Posted in Dungeons of Dredmor, Gaslamp, Other Games, Programming | 12 Comments

On Engine Licensing and the Fall of GarageGames

November 12, 2010 by Nicholas Vining

First off, let me preface this with the following announcement: we have two middleware solutions targeting independent game developers coming down the pipeline. One of them is a user interface toolkit, similar to wxWidgets or Qt, but fully hardware accelerated and oriented towards video game UI and level editors. The other piece of middleware is a complete “game engine” on the level of, say, Unity or C4. It features all the stuff that you would want, including interactive level editing, terrain creation, and a full dynamic lighting and shadowing solution using deferred rendering. It also includes some stuff that you didn’t know you wanted, such as an easy-to-use level sketching tool, an asset store built into the level editor, and our new and improved version of so-called “Megatexturing” which lets you paint on every surface on the world, dynamically, and without compilation times or messy texture packing.

Neither one of these two pieces of technology is used by Dungeons of Dredmor; when Gaslamp Games was founded, we originally started working on a 3D isometric strategy game, but we soon decided that it was unrealistic to try to ship a fully 3D title for our first effort – especially without a dedicated 3D content creator on staff! – and so we decided to finish Dredmor instead as a way of bootstrapping the company. That said, we have been working on our next game’s technology base in parallel with Dredmor’s development, it is *very* indie-friendly, and it will be available to interested parties at a very reasonable rate in the near future. If you want to be notified about when we get set to release, send an e-mail to technology-announcements-subscribe@list.gaslampgames.com and we will shower you with love.

That said:

I woke up this morning to see that GarageGames (renamed recently to “InstantAction” as part of a buyout) has gone under. InstantAction is dead, and the Torque Game Engine is looking for a buyer. Deep in the heart of the Gaslamp command center, we’re still trying to figure out exactly what triggered the collapse of the company. I’ve worked for companies that have collapsed before – Loki Software, anyone? – and the root causes of the company’s destruction are not always visible to outsiders. What caused the collapse, and what does this mean for independent developers?

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