Happy New Year!

January 3, 2011 by Nicholas Vining

Happy new year from all of us at Gaslamp Games. 2011 is gonna be huge. Some housekeeping:

– Did you know we have one of those damn-fangled Twitter-things? Why not give it a look? In particular, I’ll be Live-Tweeting my work session for a bit today, and maybe tomorrow as well. We’ll see how it goes.
– We’re also on Facebook. Just search for Gaslamp Games and you’ll see us. I don’t know what we’ll do for Special Facebook Content, but I’m sure I’ll think of something.
– Congratulations to fellow Roguelike makers QCF Design whose game, Desktop Dungeons, was nominated for the Seamus McNally Grand Prize at the 2011 IGF this year. This’ll be a lesson to us: we didn’t end up submitting a build of Dredmor to the IGF last year because a) it wasn’t in a particularly good state at the time, but also b) because we didn’t think a Roguelike had a good chance of placing anywhere. Shows what we know. There you have it, folks: 2011 is clearly the year of Roguelike Domination!

More importantly, perhaps: over the holidays the collective Gaslamp crew managed to recharge our batteries and get a lot of work done. The game, replete with a new combat system, a new skill system, multiple resolutions, and the blasphemous presence of Numbers all over the place feels like a game, and that’s a sign that we’re getting close to shipping. Now, if you’ll excuse me – these 52 bugs aren’t going to fix themselves, you know.

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

Indie Game Bingo

December 31, 2010 by David Baumgart

Let’s play Indie Game Bingo!

Yeah, so I’m a year or so behind on this one. Sue me. I saw this on an old thread on TIGsource here and a not terribly well populated blog here.

Here’s the blank sheet so you can follow along (or fill it out for your own games!):

Dungeons of Dredmor indie game bingo

Now, how does Dredmor fare?

{ read this article }

Posted in Dungeons of Dredmor | Tagged
1 Comment

Commitment Anxiety in Skill Selection

December 20, 2010 by David Baumgart

In the current revision pass on Dungeons of Dredmor we’ve finally had to make some hard choices about what skills mean to a player’s character. Thus far, all skills have been more or less freely available to select from any point for testing purposes. But if every skill is always available then by the time a player earns a few levels they shall have had the chance to buy a completely new set of skills which would render the importance of their initial choices mostly meaningless. We want every playthrough of Dredmor to be about an experience which is meaningfully different from a playthrough with different starting selections — so far as we are able to make it so.

Dungeons of Dredmor hero choosing skills

Which will you choose?

{ read this article }

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

Two New Screenshots

December 12, 2010 by Nicholas Vining

As promised in my previous post, here are two new Dredmor screenshots:

{ read this article }

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

State of the Dredmor

December 12, 2010 by Nicholas Vining

You know what? I didn’t get ANY Sewer Brew for my birthday. Not a drop. That means I’m now programming sober for the first time in ten years. Watch out, people.

A recent post from the SomethingAwful Forums states, “Well, I went to check up on Dungeons of Dredmor, but there’s been no new release information.” Well, something to that effect, anyhow, and the post wasn’t all that recent. I think it was in November. So here’s the state of the union. As a bonus, I’ve taken a few more WIP Screenshots showing off some of the new systems, which we will shove in a new post.

{ read this article }

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

A Very Dredmor Birthday

December 8, 2010 by David Baumgart

Dungeons of Dredmor happy birthday image feature the Dredmor hero and Lord Dredmor himself

– Just wishing Nicholas, our bold programming wizard, a very Dredmor birthday. Today we unshackle him from his hole in the Code Mines and allow him all the sewer-brew he can pour into his gullet. Cheers!

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged ,
1 Comment

From the Piles of Energy Drinks

December 5, 2010 by Derek Bonner

While our standard structure of posting weekly has fallen faster than a tree in a logging area I felt it important to update everyone about something that has slipped past me in these last few months. We use a great plugin called WPBook to feed posts that we make here on the blog directly to our Facebook page. Unbeknownst to me, there was a change in the way in which WPBook handles posts to our page’s wall in a recent update. While it still posted they were not in the correct format and many of you were redirect to the app’s back-end feed. I have remedied the problem and everything to be back to the way I originally designed it. For those of you who are our fan on Facebook our title links will not directly take you the blog. For those of you who are not our fans, why not?

Posted in Website | Tagged , , ,
Leave a comment

What is a Warrior to do?

December 1, 2010 by David Baumgart

Combat RPGs don’t traditionally offer much active choice to a warrior character: Do you attack? Do you not attack?

Maybe you get to quaff (but never “drink”) a potion every so often. A player’s agency comes more from the set-up to combat through having a much more equipment-driven character than, say, a wizard. It is compelling to collect and use equipment, but  a warrior really ought to have something to do in combat aside from clicking “attack”.

But this is a known problem, and it has been dealt before, and cleverly.

{ read this article }

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