Dredmor 0.94 done!

April 6, 2011 by Nicholas Vining

We’ve finished Dredmor 0.94, and are busy trying to figure out what we need to fix for Dredmor 0.94.1 (a handful of minor bugs that weren’t worth stopping the build today for) and 0.95 (???) Based on where we are right now – the start of the game is looking good and polished, but the end game and middle game is still in need of work. We’re looking at how to address that with 0.95, but here’s where it gets encouraging: most of what is left in the TODO for the game – the entire game! – is scripting and content creation. Not much code appears to be needed from me, which leaves me relegated to bug fixes, little pieces of polish, and of course tackling some of the last few little design issues. I’m sure that my bugtracker will fill up again, but it’s very nice having only seven code issues sitting between me and shipping.

Be advised: we may start mining the beta list shortly for more testers. You lucky, lucky people.

 

100% natural fiberglass compounds.

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Gaslamp Games Press Release: Dungeons of Dredmor is Not an April Fools’ Prank

April 1, 2011 by Nicholas Vining

April 1st, 2011 – Gaslamp Games, an independent game development company based out of British Columbia, Canada, has regrettably announced that its upcoming Roguelike Dungeon Crawler, “Dungeons of Dredmor”, is not an April Fools’ Day Prank. In fact, the game exists, is being actively worked on, and is still on track for a release on major digital gaming distribution services some time in April 2011. Members of the gaming press, understandably incredulous that anybody is actually trying to make a roguelike that makes money, have recently been claiming that Dredmor is an elaborate practical joke on the PC gaming community; Gaslamp’s cofounders have therefore been forced out of their bunkers and parents’ basements to inform the public that this is not the case.

“Yes,” said Nicholas Vining, Gaslamp’s technical director, “we at Gaslamp genuinely believe that you will actually want a game with 8-bit graphics, stored in antiquated file formats, where you run around a dungeon and eat Lutefisk while trying to kill an evil sorcerer. We deeply regret the error of our ways.” David Baumgart, Gaslamp’s technical art director, was heard to gnash his teeth and wail in dulcet tones at this pronouncement, before running out of the office to seal his claim to fame as the independent game community’s version of Toulouse-Lautrec. Daniel Jacobsen, Gaslamp’s technical business director, was technically unavailable for comment, being technically asleep at the time, lulled into peaceful slumber by the soothing songs of the Space Whale.

“We understand that this is a painful time,” Vining added, “and that Dungeons of Dredmor is probably the cruelest non-April Fools’ Day Joke not committed in the history of not-jokes. We apologize to our audience for not tricking them, and for actually making this thing, but we actually believed that you wanted to play a game with eighty-seven bazillion cheeses in it. I have erred grievously in mixing my business projects with my personal hobbies, and my fascination for the bovine product has doomed the company and sullened its reputation by casting it as nothing more than a band of merry pranksters. I feel that this announcement, clarifying that we have actually built this game in deathly, earnest seriousness, will go a long way towards improving our company’s reputation as being perfectly serious as well as my reputation as, technically, Gaslamp’s technical technical director.”

“Woe is the life of the starving technical art director artist,” Baumgart commented miserably and technically. “I told you we should have ripped off Minecraft.” The Dungeons of Dredmor codebase was unavailable for comment, having impaled itself on a version control system some hours earlier and remaining in critical condition.

Dungeons of Dredmor will be available for purchase in case anybody wants to buy it. The game is rated “T” for technical.

Posted in Dungeons of Dredmor, Game Design, Gaslamp | 4 Comments

Late Night Dwarven Infomercials? Say It Ain’t So!

March 30, 2011 by Nicholas Vining

In celebration of Dwarven Craftsmanship Month, we at Gaslamp Games are pleased to present our new line of Late Night Dwarven Infomercials. Each video is lovingly seared with Potent Runes of Advertising and guaranteed to help you make the finest, most informed decisions about where to spend your entertainment dollar.

This video features the new Spring 2011 Trap line up, suitable for any discerning dungeon builder. Many have not heard that Dwarven Craftsmanship is finally available at rock-bottom prices, so please feel free to spread the love.

We will have some information about where to actually buy Dredmor, and how much it will cost, VERY shortly. Stay tuned!

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Dredmor Beta v0.93.2 : Crafting & Traps

March 28, 2011 by David Baumgart

0.93.2 is now out. The big piles of Fun here are crafting and traps. Shall I? Yes I shall: Let’s start with a screenshot.

Click to view full size.

I’ve got just about the full array of crafting skills here and am in the process of making some gold ingots to sell to Brax, whose potion shop I am standing in. The distilling widget has an outline of an apple in the ingredients box because I’ve selected the “Hard Cider” recipe.

You can also drag the inventory bag around to keep it in less-annoying spots on the screen. Yes, Dredmor is on the bleeding edge of  UI design!

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The Sound of Progress

March 24, 2011 by Nicholas Vining

Version 0.93 of Dungeons of Dredmor just hit our stream of beta testers. We are exhausted, but happy, having resolved one hundred and eighty six bugs and minor TODOs since the start of the new year. Will we hit our April deadline? No idea, but I think we’ll go gold some time in April and it will take a little while to get the distributors sorted out. Famous last words.

This week, the plan is to deal with 0.93.1 (bugfixes for 0.93 – including, finally, the mysterious thrown weaponry crash that has been plaguing David’s father! – and anything that comes up in the immediate feedback for 0.93), hopefully by Friday, and then onwards to 0.94 (“higher level gameplay”, which as far as I am concerned means adding in a batch of new sound effects, making a number of improvements to monster AI, and trying to deal with our unpleasantly large memory footprint. I don’t know why it’s gotten so large recently – probably, it just means that we’ve been adding stuff – and now I get the unpleasant task of trying to retrofit the game with a garbage collector for sprite memory. Lessons learned…)

I’m very happy with this latest release; I find myself using things that I didn’t previously use, relying on skills and magic to save the day instead of simply trying to collect six artifacts and beating the tar out of monsters with a fistful of fireball-shooting amulets. A new smattering of interesting, entertaining traps – most of which shoot lightning – makes the dungeon more dangerous. Buying and selling gives you somewhere to dump your stuff, and there’s lots of random stuff to have fun with. Players are actually enjoying themselves, without us needing to pump them full of drugs.

The newest problem? The game is *too easy*.

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Almost wrapped up Dredmor 0.93

March 22, 2011 by David Baumgart

About ready to ship the latest beta out to testers. We’ve been working ourselves very hard on this run up to the end of March; have had little time and energy to write (and man, my hand hurts from drawing sprites).

So to keep this cheap, here’s a little teaser of something we’ve been putting the icing on tonight:

Nicholas and I are both fans of Dwarf Fortress. If you are too, you may know something of what this implies about what we’re doing here.

On to 0.94 and victory!

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New User Registration Temporarily Disabled

March 12, 2011 by Derek Bonner

New user registration will be temporarily disabled until Sunday March 13th at 5pm while our forums are upgraded and database cleanup is run.

Thank you for your patience while we get things ready for Dungeons of Dredmor’s arrival in the coming month.

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A Different Kind Of Magic

March 8, 2011 by David Baumgart

I think we’ve got a Gaslamp Admission to make: Sometimes we make decisions not because they are right from business perspective but because they would make things more funny.

At one point not too long ago I had just wrapped up outlining and drawing icons for every spell in the game — six schools of magic (the traditional Air, Earth, Fire, Water, Black, White) with eight spells each, so 64 48* total — when I spoke with Nicholas about a thought I had.

D: Right, so our spell school categories are basically [very] boring. I am not seriously suggesting we do anything about this, but they could be … much more interesting.
N: What did you have in mind?

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