More General Bits of News

February 3, 2012 by Nicholas Vining

Simba!

Some more quick news fluff from the front:

  • Congratulations to Gaslamp Programmer-Affiliate Ryan C. Gordon (better known as “icculus”, the great and knowledgeable), who is now the proud father of a lovely daughter. (This has slightly delayed our incoming patch yet more; just before dashing to the hospital, Ryan immediately said “Here! Have an entirely new SDL library and audio driver!” This fixes a lot of the stuttering issues, as well as various performance issues and crashes under OS X, but I’m currently quietly poking his changelist with a stick, somewhat afraid that it will bite me.) We have celebrated by having Chris Triolo produce this small homage to the Lion King.
  • We are pleased to announce that Sean Hamilton has joined the Gaslamp Games team. Sean will be working with us on Project Odin; since his arrival on the project, he has already produced three crates, a selection of small shanty houses, two logs, one ingot, and a mineshaft. Auspicious.
  • We are still looking for a character modeler and a gameplay programmer to do some contract work on Dredmor with us. I think we’ve got everything else taken care of  at this point. Exciting. If you think you’d be a good fit for either of these things, please drop us a line at jobs@gaslampgames.com ; I think, at this point, that we are restricting ourselves to locals after all for the most part.
  • There is vague talk of doing another Dredmor DLC pack, either as an additional paid expansion (of a form to be determined) or a free DLC package of some sort to be determined. Other than our continued commitment to patching and general subterfuge, is there anything else specific that you’d like to see from us? Let us know in the comments.
  • Finally, here’s another Odin teaser.
Posted in Dungeons of Dredmor, Games, Gaslamp | Tagged , , ,
58 Comments

The Indie Things.

January 27, 2012 by Daniel Jacobsen

Brief status update on the goings on at Gaslamp Central:

  • We are still interviewing people for the programming positions we posted here, so you are not too late to submit.  At this point though, we reserve the right to charge you a late fee of beer or donuts.
  • I will be dropping by the Global Game Jam at the University of Victoria this evening at around 5pm to say hi, see what the whole thing is about, maybe pitch some ideas and participate, who knows.  The whole thing sounds really interesting: you can find more info about it here.  If you are interested in seeing what it’s all about but don’t want to do any development, evidently you can sit there and heckle us while you play Minecraft!
  • We are super excited that we may be moving into some office space that is sufficiently insulated that yesterday’s coffee doesn’t freeze in the night.  Woo!  Also, it reminds me of the offices of the Ghostbusters, which is potentially even more important.
  • Lastly, we received word this morning that we are in PC Gamer’s March issue listed as number 58 of the top 100 video games of all time, which, frankly, floored each of us. Seriously.  We are staggered and supremely honored.  The issue hasn’t made it into our cold Canadian mittens yet, but I am certain that we stand with some very illustrious company.  We know that we owe all of our success to you guys, and we hope to continue to make you happy for years to come.
Posted in Gaslamp, Interviews | 13 Comments

Community Spotlight #3

January 27, 2012 by Daynab

Hey everyone! It’s modding time again. I wanted to touch up on some older mods this week and will be doing so as well in the next weeks, but Ruigi surprised us with a new masterwork that deserved immediate mention. And that is…


Runecaster

“You’re very scholarly, you also make runes.”

Runecaster is a wizard skill that combines crafting with spell casting. You create runes out of mana, which you then combine with the n-Dimensional lathe to create runewords. These runewords are throwing weapons that cast a spell when hitting enemies/the ground.

{ read this article }

Posted in Dungeons of Dredmor, Modding | Tagged , , ,
2 Comments

Teensy Patch Hold-up

January 26, 2012 by Nicholas Vining

There’s been a little, unforeseen patch hiccup. Interestingly, this isn’t as a result of Dredmor, but as part of a Dredmor-related secret project that we have been working on, quietly and mysteriously. We’re not saying what it is yet, save that it is something that a lot of people have expressed interest in.

As a result of this work, we’ve had to remove two libraries from Dredmor, in order to replace them with… well, equivalents that are suitable. We have only just finished rewriting all of Dredmor’s audio code to use OpenAL; because this is a fairly major rewrite, we actually have to sit down and run a Real Beta now instead of just testing the bugfixes, vaguely making sure we didn’t break anything major, and calling it a day.

Some test binaries will probably show up in the IRC channel either late today or early tomorrow, and based on how well that turns out we will let you know what a better ETA for the patch looks like. This is mainly us being ultra-cautious and trying to make sure that we don’t shower you all with broken pixels and static in our quest for increased portability.

That said, the new audio is a heck of a lot better, and also fixes all the little lag issues when changing music or wandering in and out of stores. We’ve also managed to cut down on our memory use a bit as a result of this secret project, although we still have further work to do on this front. Levels now use about 20 megabytes less memory on average. It’s not quite enough for our svelte new lifestyle, but it’s a start.

{ read this article }

Posted in Dungeons of Dredmor, Games, Gaslamp | Tagged , , , ,
19 Comments

Community Spotlight #2

January 19, 2012 by Daynab

Hi everybody, it’s modding time again! Last week I talked about a few melee/crafting mods, so it’s fair to delve in sorcery this time around. These are two skills I enjoyed playing with because they add variety and support to existing magic options.


Wind Magic

“You are the master of all winds in the sealed off underground dungeon with no access to the sky.”

{ read this article }

Posted in Dungeons of Dredmor, Modding | Tagged , , , ,
9 Comments

SOPA and PIPA

January 18, 2012 by Daniel Jacobsen

First I should say that Gaslamp Games is a company.  We sell products, and our motivations as individuals are swayed by the fact that our personal successes are tied to the successes of our company.  We have a vested interest in allowing Gaslamp to be successful.  That said, Gaslamp Games would cease to exist as the entity that you know and love if SOPA and PIPA are passed.

If SOPA passes, it requires that we censor each and every post or message within our blog posts and our forums to ensure that no piracy or hints at piracy are posted.  If we aren’t successful, we could become blacklisted and unreachable without so much as a chance to defend ourselves.  What’s more, the bills together give internet service providers the ability to make these decisions on their own, only requiring “credible evidence” of piracy-oriented content.  We simply can’t afford to police our community to a degree where we could be somewhat assured to be operating within the parameters set out by these bills.  What’s more, we don’t want to police our users.  Our community, like every other healthy community, depends upon some degree of freedom of expression.

Gaslamp’s vested interest aside, there are some very serious freedom of speech issues.  I am no expert here but I have read a lot about SOPA and PIPA over the last week or so and I strongly urge you to look into them on your own, and of course, to try to hear both sides of the story.  While it is our opinion that SOPA and PIPA are too heavy-handed in their attempt to lessen a problem which is a serious concern, it is most important that you know what is going on and have the opportunity to share an informed opinion with your government representatives.

Posted in Gaslamp | 15 Comments

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.)

{ read this article }

Posted in Dungeons of Dredmor, Other Games, Programming | Tagged ,
45 Comments

Community Spotlight #1

January 11, 2012 by Daynab

Hi everyone! I am Daynab, resident community/tester/DoD enthusiast guy. I’m gonna be doing weekly posts about mods and other things going on over at the forums and elsewhere.

The past few weeks have shown an amazing growth in interest and we’re now up to around 30 functional mods. It may not seem like much, but keep in mind they’re pretty major, such as completely new skill lines. Since I can’t describe every one in a single post, here are two among my personal favorites.

(Please read this guide if you don’t know how to install mods.)

Clockwork Knights

This skill is an interesting combination between combat and crafting. It boosts your survival by giving you a trap scanner and some movement spells, and it ups your general crafting skills while giving access to a bunch of special new recipes for (mostly) melee characters.

{ read this article }

Posted in Dungeons of Dredmor | Tagged , , ,
4 Comments