Dear Steve Jobs:
It’s nice when a topic for a blog rant presents itself, and you don’t have to go finding it.
Dear Steve Jobs:
It’s nice when a topic for a blog rant presents itself, and you don’t have to go finding it.
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:
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.
Since nobody has commented on various matters: yes, we are still working towards a beta, yes it will be soon, but right now I’m sticking with the “When It’s Done” line. When we have a beta, we have a beta. Also, for the record: the Dwarven Panini Press did make it into Dungeons of Dredmor. Right now, it’s a throwing weapon. I’m not sure *where* I’m going with that. Anyhow, the coffee is on, Miles Davis is playing on the speakers, and it’s a long night of work ahead to get my TODO list whittled back to the state where it needs to be.
I keep saying that I’m going to make a post on this blog about some of the more interesting code that we’ve written for Dredmor, but – again – a lot of the Dredmor code isn’t that interesting. Instead, I think you get rambly thoughts on software engineering for the next little while. I was inspired by reading a post over at the IMVU engineering blog on how they expanded their business model. (Well, actually, it was a set of presentation slides.) I know many of the IMVU folks – a few of them were involved in the original seed work that turned into Dungeons of Dredmor, and they do a lot of very interesting work with continual deployment and Agile that is interesting if you’re interested in continuous deployment and Agile. Their CEO person, Eric Reis, also writes a lot about Agile Startups and how to bootstrap yourself via continually listening to what your customer has to say and then integrating that, continually, into your software deployment process. This is very similar to a Valve-style design-by-playtesting model, and I think that the game development community can either a) learn a lot from this, or b) has been doing it all along, and the rest of the world is just now playing catch-up. Eric’s blog is fascinating, and you should all go read it.
Many moons ago I was invited to interview for IMVU. I flew into Palo Alto, via a red-eye flight, and was treated to a fascinating hiring process. In fact, it was the most fascinating hiring process that I’ve ever been involved with. The sleep deprivation was cool, too, although I’m pretty sure it was accidental. Anyhow, I highly recommend applying for a job there simply so that you can check out how they hire people. Seriously. Go do it.
At the end of the day, I was offered a job. I declined to take that job, for a number of reasons, some of which are between me and IMVU and some of which are between me and myself. One of the more interesting reasons was that the company was struggling under the volume of significant technical debt in the area that I was interested in working on (the character rendering system and various other parts of the rendering pipeline), as well as all over. To actually read what they’ve been doing to try and deal with the technical debt, go hit up their weblog. I don’t know how well their approach to dealing with technical debt has panned out; that’s for them to talk about. But I can talk about technical debt with respect to how it affects myself, and I think that this will make interesting reading material this week.
We are still working on our Dredmor beta aspirations. My lungs are now full of coffee, and David hasn’t seen the light of day now for… okay, five years, but who’s counting?
While we wait for the last of the skills to be implemented, and for the eighty-seventh window closing button to get its new, fresh coat of gold paint, here’s another Dredmor gameplay trailer for your enjoyment. Music by Mr. Ludwig van Beethoven, lovingly arranged by Mr. Matthew Steele.
An approximate list of things that have been done in the past week:
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.
We’re finally putting some video footage of Dungeons of Dredmor on the web for you to take a look at.
There isn’t much gameplay here – mainly we’re attacking monsters – so we’ll put up another trailer in the next couple of weeks or so with more magic and lutefisk action.