Hi-Res Screenshots Ahoy!

September 12, 2010 by Nicholas Vining

Alright, Derek fixed the uploader for the weblog, so we can now put up some new, hi-res screenshots of Dungeons of Dredmor. These are running at my native monitor resolution of 1680×1050. This is still very much an alpha version of the code; liquids are still broken, item sizes are all over the map, spell sizes are hoopled, and I haven’t even begun messing with font sizes yet. More damningly, the scaling algorithm we are using chokes up on some of David’s pixel art, which does not adhere to Pixel Art Formalism and hence contains lots of colors with small delta values instead of a fixed, 8 or 16 color palette. (The art for the characters, on the other hand, was drawn by Pixel Art Formalists and is therefore Perfectly Safe.) There is an interesting trade-off to be made here: we can either fix it before or after we ship (it will be fixed – we’re all perfectionists!), but I don’t know if we will do it before Dredmor ships or as a patch afterwards. My inclination at this point is to get Dredmor out to you lovely people as soon as we have gameplay in an acceptable state, and we can fix the few visual glitches (as you can see, it still looks perfectly acceptable) post-ship. On the other hand, it really would be nice not to have to upload a massive art patch. It may also be possible that there is a code solution.

The characters look great, though, and as there is a *lot* of animation that we simply cannot redo at this stage in the game, it’s fortunate indeed that we are able to get results that look this good. I mean, look at that giant-feet-with-an-eyeball monster. Anyhow, get some fresh screenshots under the cut…

{ read this article }

Posted in Dungeons of Dredmor, Uncategorized | Tagged
1 Comment

One More Thing

September 10, 2010 by Nicholas Vining

Okay, I should save some posts for later, but this is too cool not too blog about.

I’ve recently been sweating over one of my bad legacy decisions on Dredmor: namely, the fact that the game is resolution locked at 800×600. If you run in a window, the game runs at 800×600. If you run fullscreen, the game runs at 800×600 on your fullscreen monitor. Well, I decided that this was unprofessional, and started looking at what I could do to fix it… but I kept resisting, because I didn’t *really* want to break everything. Dredmor has… a lot of hard-coded positions. It’s very bad. Very, VERY bad; in fact, one of the things I really regret not doing for Dredmor is Long story short: the main menu screens still don’t work in any resolution, but the rest of the game… pretty much does. I think there are a few bugs still to be kicked out, but I’ve been playing the game very happily at 1680 x 1050 in glorious fullscreen and it’s… a much, much better experience. Clearly, the right decision. A brief word on the technical scaling elements follows below:

{ read this article }

Posted in Dungeons of Dredmor, Programming | 1 Comment

We’re Back!

September 9, 2010 by Nicholas Vining

We have now all safely returned from Penny Arcade Expo. I’m going to write up a brief description of my adventures, but in general I think we all had a good time. I’m not sure if it was particularly good as a networking event, but I did more networking than Daniel said would happen, and I also got to just spend some quality time with people who I haven’t seen in a long time, including my friends from Vancouver. What may be more valuable about PAX is that it reaffirmed my belief that Dredmor is something that people will understand, and will appreciate; furthermore, it reaffirms my belief that independent game developers like Gaslamp Games do actually matter, and that people do actually care about what we produce and what we create. Sixty thousand nerds like gaming enough, in all of its forms, to show up in Seattle for an entire weekend; what other conclusion can we draw but that video games matter to people, and somehow manage to touch their lives?

{ read this article }

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

Gaslamp Games at Penny Arcade Expo

September 3, 2010 by Nicholas Vining

Many years ago, two men’s fantasy became reality with the establishment of a giant cooking arena… no, that’s not right. Well, it’s a giant arena of some sort where men face men in tabletop tournamenting and handheld chicanery. That’s right, it’s PAX.

Daniel, Derek and myself are at Penny Arcade Expo this weekend. Our goals: carousing, debauchery, video gaming, some mild networking, and harassing the Wolfire guys for secretly being closeted furries. (Really, we love you guys and you know it.) While we’re not here officially, if any blog readers are here (or members of the gaming press, or whoever) and want to check out Dungeons of Dredmor, a private showing can be arranged in our hotel rooms.

Yeah, that doesn’t sound dubious at all.

Also, we’re *really* having to work hard right now to beat Duke Nukem Forever to publishing. Darnit!

Posted in Gaslamp | 1 Comment

Follow the White Rabbit

August 21, 2010 by Nicholas Vining

One of the things that constantly, and consistently, breaks in Dredmor is our save game system. I’m looking into new ways of fixing this for future projects while I keep the old one up and running. If I get a winner, well, I may retrofit Dredmor with it. If I don’t, well, who knows.

As part of this research, I stumbled across a C++ feature recently — I use the term “feature” loosely, as with all C++ features — that seems like it might be useful. At the very least, it’s not something that I knew you could do in C++ before, and after working with C++ for the better part of 15 years, very little about the language surprises me. So, follow the white rabbit:

{ read this article }

Posted in Programming | 2 Comments

Dungeons of Dredmor Trailer #3 Up

August 20, 2010 by Nicholas Vining

We’ve been promising you a trailer for a long time now, so here it is.

All footage is taken from beta 0.8 of Dungeons of Dredmor. Amongst other things you can see our attempt at minimizing the UI cruft (which is still not done!), and the Vile Liqueur of Yog-Sothoth. Enjoy!

Posted in Dungeons of Dredmor | Tagged
1 Comment

Auditions for the role of Director

August 17, 2010 by Daniel Jacobsen

We are fairly well-convinced that this is the way to go: the game is actually a lot more engaging now, the only problem is our current director thinks that rooms *literally* full of traps are a good idea without so much as a “hey, this might be a trap room” sign, so we’re working out kinks.

Also, I would currently analogize our relationship to our bug tracker with a guy with a shotgun and a horde of shambling zombies.  Thankfully there’s lots of ammo and it’s a big shotgun, and he’s smoking a cigar.

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

How to make a malicious random number generator

August 14, 2010 by Nicholas Vining

Nethack players, really experienced Nethack players, know that nothing is more cruel and unusual than the Random Number Generator. It is capricious and can either grant you great powers and wisdom (I remember being astonished at finding Grayswandir on level 4 of the Dungeons) , or can instantly kill you (“An endless stream of snakes flows from the fountain! The water moccasin hits… you die…”)

As part of our ongoing work with beta testing, we discovered that users never really felt compelled or pushed forward to keep moving, or to find some sort of pace. We looked at this, and decided that our best approach would be to implement something similar to the Director system that Valve uses for Left 4 Dead. For those of you who haven’t seen this, L4D measures player “experience intensity”, and then spawns mobs or allows for cooldowns based on this information. It’s crude, but it works. We therefore decided to try lifting it, with reasonable success. If your gameplay experience is not intense enough – i.e. you’re not Having Fun, the game will ratchet up the monster spawns in your area. If you’re having too much Fun, the game will give you a breather. We also track reward in the same manner; we will spawn more rewards if you haven’t been rewarded frequently enough, or we wlil spawn a really big reward. Similarily, if you’ve been getting too many items the item supply may dry up a little.

So, yes. We really *do* have a random number generator that cares. Is this entirely in line with the Roguelike philosophy? Maybe, maybe not. At the heart of the game the spawns are still random. We simply generate the contents of a room only when it first becomes visible and bias how many items/how many monsters are in a given room, as well as the spawning of other things (new monsters spawned post level creation, quests, et cetera.) So far it’s working out well and it will be interesting to see how we proceed from here.

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment