First off, let me preface this with the following announcement: we have two middleware solutions targeting independent game developers coming down the pipeline. One of them is a user interface toolkit, similar to wxWidgets or Qt, but fully hardware accelerated and oriented towards video game UI and level editors. The other piece of middleware is a complete “game engine” on the level of, say, Unity or C4. It features all the stuff that you would want, including interactive level editing, terrain creation, and a full dynamic lighting and shadowing solution using deferred rendering. It also includes some stuff that you didn’t know you wanted, such as an easy-to-use level sketching tool, an asset store built into the level editor, and our new and improved version of so-called “Megatexturing” which lets you paint on every surface on the world, dynamically, and without compilation times or messy texture packing.

Neither one of these two pieces of technology is used by Dungeons of Dredmor; when Gaslamp Games was founded, we originally started working on a 3D isometric strategy game, but we soon decided that it was unrealistic to try to ship a fully 3D title for our first effort – especially without a dedicated 3D content creator on staff! – and so we decided to finish Dredmor instead as a way of bootstrapping the company. That said, we have been working on our next game’s technology base in parallel with Dredmor’s development, it is *very* indie-friendly, and it will be available to interested parties at a very reasonable rate in the near future. If you want to be notified about when we get set to release, send an e-mail to technology-announcements-subscribe@list.gaslampgames.com and we will shower you with love.

That said:

I woke up this morning to see that GarageGames (renamed recently to “InstantAction” as part of a buyout) has gone under. InstantAction is dead, and the Torque Game Engine is looking for a buyer. Deep in the heart of the Gaslamp command center, we’re still trying to figure out exactly what triggered the collapse of the company. I’ve worked for companies that have collapsed before – Loki Software, anyone? – and the root causes of the company’s destruction are not always visible to outsiders. What caused the collapse, and what does this mean for independent developers?

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