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.

{ read this article }

Posted in Programming | Tagged , , , ,
3 Comments

Gameplay as a Hierarchy of Cycles

January 23, 2011 by David Baumgart

I’m going to quote a post in whole that covered most of what I was meaning to write on this subject but far more succinctly than I imagined possible. Brenda Braithwaite’s post “Design Truth 1”:

Focus on second-to-second play first. Nail it. Move on to minute-to-minute, then session-to-session, then day-to-day, then month-to-month (and so on). If your second-to-second play doesn’t work, nothing else matters. Along these lines, if your day-to-day fails, no one will care about month-to-month, either.

This  seems like an excellent imperative to good game design – especially a mechanics-based game. In counterpoint, (though I could quibble about “good” vs “successful” design) whole games are built on hooking players with long-term investment, be it emotional, social, or time (read: sunk cost fallacy), rather than refined short-term, low-level gameplay (see: grindy MMOs, Zynga), or some kind of story that players get invested in despite the gameplay (see: Final Fantasy games). I think an argument can be made for classifying games according to higher-level design philosophy. But yes, Dredmor’s core is certainly in the mechanics. Well; the mechanics and the insanity, which might count as “story” content though ours is decidedly nonlinear. But I digress. I’ll be doing a lot of that.

{ read this article }

Posted in Dungeons of Dredmor, Game Design | Tagged , , , ,
13 Comments

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*

{ read this article }

Posted in Games, Programming | Tagged , , , , , ,
8 Comments

A Rather Dredly Birthday

January 17, 2011 by David Baumgart

Dungeons of Dredmor, a thrusty bursting from a cake at our shocked hero

A barrel of sewer brew and well-preserved, fishy birthday wishes to our oft-abused web djinn, Derek. Cheers!

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged ,
4 Comments

David’s Gaslamp Workspace

January 15, 2011 by David Baumgart

In a comment one Kyzak requested a post on work environs – who am I to deny such a request?

So come, dear reader; let me give you an exclusive tour of my workspaces.

{ read this article }

Posted in Gaslamp | Tagged , , , , , , ,
5 Comments

Making The Cut

January 13, 2011 by David Baumgart

I just redid the character information panel again. I had to re-arrange all the info boxes then type out the size and position of every single textbox and tooltip hotspot. It was awful. Now Nicholas gets to update the code to my specifications, the poor bastard.

Dungeons of Dredmor, as some sort of RPG, and god-help-us, as a roguelikeish game, lends itself to a maddening excess of features, ideas, items, skills, spells, potions, special abilities, factions?, unique rooms, artifacts, vengeful gods, and and.. and … Well, one of the most important points of successful game development is knowing when to cut; no, being able to cut features so that the project can ever be completed.

We have done this. No, really! A bit, at least.

Dredmor Hero dodging a blade

At least you’ve survived with piles upon piles of unique items, silly skills, and an upcoming hellishly complex crafting system, dear hero!

{ read this article }

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

Dredmor v0.90 Screenshots

January 10, 2011 by David Baumgart

For your viewing pleasure I’ve taken some new screenshots of Dredmor in fabulous HD-o-vision for you to pick over and tear apart, pixel by pixel.

Dungeons of Dredmor beta screenshot showing Octo interrupting cheese-plundering Dungeons of Dredmor beta screenshot skill tome, choosing skills

1. An Octo has rudely interrupted my cheese-plundering. And those skull bolts are amazing, except they’re doing the wrong damage type right now.

2. Deciding what skill to upgrade next; I settled on taking the next level of Dual Wield because it increased my ability to counterattack.

{ read this article }

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

100th Post! Dredmor Release Date! New Video!

January 9, 2011 by Derek Bonner

Happy Hundredth Post! In celebration of this fact, and our live Twitter debugging experiment, we present a special video:

It’s official: Dungeons of Dredmor is going to be headed out in April, 2011. Stay tuned for an exact release date; we’re just signing little pieces of paper.

Some additional website news:

{ read this article }

Posted in Dungeons of Dredmor | Tagged , ,
7 Comments