Dredmor Beta 0.8

August 10, 2010 by Nicholas Vining

Dredmor beta 0.8 just hit the internet. Those of you with updaters, should feel free to download it. We’ll probably be releasing the next round of beta invites after 0.9 – or at least this is the current plan. The OS X build is up; the Win32 build will follow later this evening, once I get home from the office.

There are ninety-one issues between 0.8 and 0.9 as a result of our beta testing sessions. Most of these things are trivial, but a few of them are going to be nasty. The sheer number alone is pretty intimidating; however, those of you who want to witness true beta testing horror should go find Peter Molyneux’s talk from Develop 2010: at one point, Fable II hit over 60,000 bugs. If we only have 91, we’re sitting pretty.

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Dredmor Comics: The Curse, page 1

August 9, 2010 by David Baumgart

Okay, done. With page one of five. (This is going to take longer than I expected.)

This is a comic I’m drawing to promote Dungeons of Dredmor which has been written by the talented Mr. Vining, our lead programmer, and illustrated by myself. I’m going to do these as a series so, uh, stay tuned for more in the next … some period of time.

Click the image below to view the full first page.

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Study shows beta testers hate game less, company starts thinking about shipping dates

August 3, 2010 by Daniel Jacobsen

It’s true, we’ve begun a new round of beta testing, meticulously recording aggravated murmurings and strange glee-filled squeals in an attempt to distill a shipping date.  The theory is that when the one outweighs the other, we’ll be able to ask for money for this thing without feeling like highwaymen

Version 0.8 will be rolling out here today, an indication that we are rampantly crushing bugs underfoot.  Our biggest problems at this point seem to be at least partially to do with our constant desire to improve our user interface…

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Pixelcraft: The Colors of Frogatto

July 29, 2010 by David Baumgart

For quite some time I’ve been intending to write about pixel art technique. Today I stumbled on a pixel-art platformer game called Frogatto & Friends which has inspired me to get on this because I was struck by the game’s lovely art. (I haven’t actually played the game yet, though it is available for free on PC/Mac/Linux, and the code, but not the assets, is open source.)

So let’s see if I can explain what’s going on with the pixels of Guido Bos and Richard Kettering (who it seems also lead the art for Battle For Wesnoth; neat).

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Braindumps

July 26, 2010 by Nicholas Vining

Some quickies:

– Dredmor 0.8: I have three bugs remaining to get to 0.8, and 17 in total. This is the first time I’ve been *near* the single digits camp in over a month. Exciting.

– We got a lot of web traffic recently due to David’s Goblin Camp article. It looks like it got picked up by Something Awful, a Russian website of some sort, and also the Temple of the Roguelike, who were kind enough to give us a plug on Twitter. They describe Dredmor as follows: “Dungeons of Dredmor is an upcoming graphical Roguelike with impressive style/video trailers. One to watch for!” Thanks for the praise, guys. We’ll send you some exclusive screenshots or something. This reminds me, I need to make another video trailer.

I’m particularily pleased, actually, that some of the SA folks thought we were worth checking out. I can’t say quite how much of Dredmor has been inspired by Boatmurdered, but I think that we can directly blame Boatmurdered for the fact that you can find rooms with names like “The Theatre of Cake”, as well as the ridiculous randomly generated artifact system. At one point we had runic names for artifacts too, but that… seemed to fall by the wayside a little. I’m not sure what happened to that. I might re-enable it. More interestingly, I remember the original Jeff K. nonsense from back in 2000 when I was working for Loki Software. So, yeah. Looking forward to the first Dredmor Let’s Play.

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A Draconian approach is necessary here.

July 26, 2010 by Daniel Jacobsen

We here at Gaslamp command have been hard at work on a number of things:

  • trying to figure out how to get our game into the hands of the public without refurbishing a CD burner and a lemonade stand
  • trying to figure out how to effectively receive your input and turn it into the game that you want us to give you
  • trying to figure out how to train the stalag-men into a useful work force without upsetting their labor union or delving too deep

I also realize that my ongoing task to inform you guys about what is actually going on around here totally fell off of my to-do list.  I have no idea how it happened, please feel free to email me with your grievances and I will attempt to send each one of you a doughnut, if the internet will accommodate such things.

Feelings for the day: Time management is utterly crucial to being able to do more than simply what your day job requires, and Aerobiz Supersonic is a great SNES game.

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Video Games Podcasts I Listen To

July 23, 2010 by David Baumgart

Or: Why I listen to people talk about playing games instead of actually playing games.

Mostly.

I’m an artist, right? Right. I draw using my computer pretty much all the time. It’s what I do. Drawing (or ‘digital painting’ or ‘pixeling’ or whatever it is) doesn’t particularly engage the part of my brain that involves language unless I’m actually doing higher-level design. A lot of it is just painting away at something or pushing a lot of pixels. Oftentimes it’s not supremely engaging stuff like drawing lots and lots of bricks or painting lots and lots of clouds – all good and necessary things, yes, but the mind tends to wander. So I listen to stuff. Music works oftentimes, and the emotional content of the music often finds its way in to my art. Other times I want to listen to something I can think about, something relevant to what I’d like to be doing: game design.

I listen to internet audio shows about games. For some reason Apple has convinced us that these audio shows are to be called podcasts, and just as I eventually gave in to using the word “blog”, so too shall I adopt use of the word “podcast”.

These are the podcasts to which I continue to listen, with some of my thoughts.

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More WordPress Hacking, Now with Tastier Facebook Posts

July 18, 2010 by Derek Bonner

It has been quite awhile since my last post and that can only mean one thing, tons of boring server side work that no one but myself cares or understands. Thankfully I have something to share with the masses!

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