Author Archives: Nicholas

Dear Steve Jobs:

It’s nice when a topic for a blog rant presents itself, and you don’t have to go finding it.

{ read this article }

We have a beta release candidate for Dungeons of Dredmor.

I’ll be packaging it tomorrow – a task that requires me to swear at our software updating tool on not one, not two, but three platforms, and which will probably also require some wrestling with the Nullsoft installer and the peculiar chain of evil that is required to ship binaries on OS X. Hmm. The actual code, though, is done and tagged in Subversion.

Despite what the previous cartoon says, we are accepting *limited* applications for beta testers. We don’t want to overwhelm ourselves with bugs and data, and we want to make sure that people who are playing the game get to have their stuff taken care of as efficiently as possible. For the next week, at least, we will probably have about five beta testers, and we’ll see where we go from there. If you want in on the beta testing action, please drop us an e-mail at dredmorbeta@gaslampgames.com and tell us that you want in on the action. In no particular order, preference will be given towards:

• people we know, and are experienced QA Doodz
• people we know, and who are not experienced QA Doodz
• people who are members of the Indie game development press
• people who are members of the real game development press
• anybody who makes funny cartoons about video games
• people who buy pre-orders for Dungeons of Dredmor (this will hopefully be launched really, really soon.)
• everybody else

Be warned: the game is going to be rough for a little while. We still have to fill in missing particle systems, missing text descriptions, and to deal with any of the myriad of random bugs that occasionally show up in games where 90% of your content is randomly generated. There are issues of balance to be sorted. There is the always humbling experience of watching real players try to figure out how to play your game. The next month will be Fun.

We’ll be doing various press releases, interviews, and figuring out media relations and singing and dancing all next week. E-mail addresses for the press will be provided soon, but in the mean time the beta e-mail probably works as well as anything.

“A delayed game is eventually good, a bad game is bad forever.” — Shigeru Miyamoto.

An approximate list of things that have been done in the past week:

• The bolt dispenser is in, and works. Previously, you’d just get free bolts. Now you have to pay for them. Buy Bolts, or the Bolt Council will put a Bolt in your Head.
• The tutorial has been rewritten in order to a) cover all the new features, b) be obnoxious. “You probably shouldn’t go near that glowing anvil over there. It looks like it might explode at any moment, and it almost certainly wouldn’t help you on your quest.” Interestingly enough, it wasn’t clear during playtesting that the tutorial was a tutorial;  instead, everybody just thought that it was an enormous, glowing icon.
• Massive dumps of new art from David, who is still continuing, desperately, to try and finish all of the skill art.
• A new title screen (from David).
• Some fixes to the achievement screen.
• New title music from Matthew.
• You can now enter doorframes, or other hard to access locations, by holding down SHIFT and clicking. (This doesn’t work on David’s keyboard, and I have to track that one down yet.)
• Automatic crash bug dumping! Why didn’t I do this years ago? For everything? I don’t know. Anyhow, if the game crashes you can now send us a dump file and we can actually parse it. Microsoft does something good for once.
• Various new spell effects, including the support code for Midas’s Touch, the Blazing Nova, and various melee-flavoured skills.
• Levelling up works again. Skill selection works.
• Every single skill tree now has some sort of entry in the skill database, most of which have some kind of art and many of which do various things. This is thanks to the heroic XML-slaying effort of Daniel, who spent today moving houses so that he could get away from us. It won’t work, though. We sent Death Bees after him.
• An entirely new, all redesigned skill book. This is the third all new, entirely redesigned skill book, and we have now iterated its design to Valve-like levels of brilliance.
• Derek assures me you will be able to buy the game shortly. He showed me a web page with various links that went to Amazon, Google Checkout, and Paypal respectively.
• You can now combine skills due to the new Skill Combining System. Simply drag “Fireball” into one skill slot, “Root” into the other, and suddenly you can cover the entire dungeon with flaming plant life. It’s pretty funky. It also crashes occasionally, which is why you can’t combine just *any* skill…
• An experience bar now tells you how much experience you gained.
• Speaking of flaming plant life, monsters can now catch on fire.
• “Trap shhtung.” I don’t even know what this is, but apparently I did it.
• And more stuff that I haven’t been paying attention to.

We have gone from SVN revision 2,444 (David, Monday May 10th, “exp bar highlight versions and tileset polish”) to revision 2,544 (Nicholas, Sunday May 16th, “Tutorial Fies”) in the space of a week. The game is looking much, MUCH healthier than I have seen it looking in a very long time. You can play, things happen, they are good things and they are fun. I am pleased.

That said, we’re still not quite at our beta release date target (the 15th.) This is mainly the fault of the massive amount of work that still needs to be poured into the skills system.  Our Mantis bugtracking system claims that I have four tasks to do before beta, David has three, and Citizen Daniel has fifteen. I’m probably going to start chipping away at some of CD’s tasks soon enough, as some of them are things I put on his plate when I was overloaded with stuff to do. Now the tables have turned on me. With that in mind, I’m going to go back to work. I have coffee, Coca-cola (which I only ever drink in crunch mode these days), and a girlfriend in the back of the apartment playing Rune Factory Frontier (work that yogurt maker, honey! work it good!) and asking me every fifteen minutes if I want soup or not.

Now where’s that @#$@ing Rhapsody CD gone?

I have a math post under construction that explains some statistical stuff that we were doing, but when I went to write it I lost interest, then discovered that WordPress’s LaTeX system wasn’t working (Derek assures me it now is), and then wrote about half of it and then got distracted by, you know, trying to ship a video game. Mea culpa. I was going to finish writing that post today, but instead I was struck by the applicability of the following quote by filmmaker Jim Jarmusch (“Broken Flowers”, “Coffee and Cigarettes”, etc.) to the craft of game development. Jarmusch, of course, is talking about creative endeavours in general. He advises:

“Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existant. And don’t bother concealing your thievery – celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: ‘It’s not where you take things from — it’s where you take them to.'”

Nowhere is this more applicable than in game development. We steal on a regular basis. Every first person shooter references back to the roots of the genre – Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, Quake, Half-Life. Any role playing game released on a console today digs back through the collective unconsciousness until it eventually turns into either Ultima or Dragon Quest. In our case, Dungeons of Dredmor borrows liberally from Nethack, Linley’s Dungeon Crawl, and Dwarf Fortress. More recently, there has been an alarming infusion of Diablo; we also have some ideas that originated with a lesser-known Roguelike called Lost Labyrinth, which particularily influenced how we assign character skills. Our magical skill set – earth, fire, water, air, white and black magic – comes from, like, every computer game ever. Our musical score contains licks lifted cheerfully by Matthew that pay homage to everything from an episode of Doctor Who that I particularily liked to Pink Floyd’s “Money.” Our art… well, I’ll let David talk about our art.

Sometimes this is a fight in the office. As indie developers, surely we should be doing things that are original.  To heck with that – let’s be authentic!

So Crunch Week happened. It was reasonably successful; we wrote a lot of code and put in a lot of sustained development. In fact, we put in enough sustained development that there is now a clear path to beta and release. There wasn’t before, there is now. I think that’s a good thing. We are looking at trying to get a beta candidate done by May 15th, at which point we send it out to the Lucky, Lucky People. (Did I mention you can still get in on this beta action? There is a sign-up somewhere around here.) Pizza was eaten, coffee was consumed, other important tasks were ignored… yeah, it was a success. Not much bunkering actually happened, though; maybe we’ll work on that more later.

Okay, everybody read that? May 15th, 2010 beta. That’s the first time I put a date on the blog. Let’s see if we hit that.

In the end, as Citizen Daniel said, mostly what we did was tear stuff *out* of Dredmor. We removed all the old spell system and replaced it with a new one. We removed 10 floors of dungeon. We removed the scroll system, which kind of sucked anyway. We got rid of duplicate monsters. New content includes figuring out what the Evil Chests actually DO, and paring our giant mess of skills and spells into a somewhat coherent collection of one hundred and thirty five skills, implementation of which is ongoing (and each one of which requires somebody to manually enter data, from a text file, into yet another XML database… by somebody other than me. Ain’t I a stinker?) A lot of code cleanup was done. Some bugs were killed, including some long standing ones. For instance, you can now actually get things into your inventory with some degree of accuracy. And so on, and so forth. Generally, … let us just say that “business was taken care of” and we’ll leave it at that.

I also drank a lot of coffee. There was no coffee in my apartment when I woke up this morning, because I drank it all during crunch week. I’m currently drinking “coffee” brewed from ground-up espresso beans. It… well, it’s an interesting experience, and I alternate between feeling euphoric and like death.

So about this dungeon cutting thing. Daniel proposed it, and I agreed to it. It’s interesting looking at how we’ve gotten from where we started to where we ended up. In the end… well, it’s another step away from where I originally planned on being with Dredmor. Dredmor was originally supposed to be a very, very oldschool experience in terms of its length; you would descend through the dungeon to kill Dredmor, but reaching Dredmor originally required you to explore through branches containing various monsters. Each branch corresponds to one of our tilesets that we have today, and would be a 5 level mini dungeon with its own generators and content. (This idea was almost certainly influenced by Linley’s Dungeon Crawl – one of the better roguelikes since Nethack. Then, after you killed Dredmor, you had to escape back out of the dungeon while being chased by him and carrying his Magical Phylactery (lifted, again, from Nethack.) Now, you have ten levels to get through, and you have to kill Dredmor. The good news? You might actually get to beat the game in your life time. The possibly bad news? Traditional roguelike players (as Daniel likes to point out, all ten of them) may not be quite as satisfied with the experience. Personally, I think it’s reflective of a general trend in game development towards tighter, more focused experiences. I’m comfortable with that.

Next week: more on roguelikes that have influenced Dredmor, and how those influences were removed. The week after that: well, hopefully we’ll be into beta.