Game Design Dialectic: Dwarf Fortress and Goblin Camp

July 16, 2010 by David Baumgart

This is only the beginning of a story, but it could prove to be a very interesting story if it bears out. I think it already contains instructive lessons for game development and design.

On the left, Dwarf Fortress. On the right, Goblin Camp.

I hope you know about Dwarf Fortress, the very complex roguelike-lookinglike fantasy world sim / citybuilder. From a development perspective, DF is a very long-running obsessive project coded by one guy, Tarn Adams, who makes more money than I do (not difficult) entirely by donations from his fans. I admire Tarn’s goals and his creative freedom which lets him indulge his whims – I wish I could do that. I even had fun playing some Dwarf Fortress until I explored most of what there was to explore. It was sweet while it lasted, but I grew tired with the tedium of a very rough user interface and tedious gameplay.

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Against Pixel Art Formalism

July 15, 2010 by David Baumgart

[Begin faux-manifesto.]

Pixel art is for the pixels!

I don’t care for being formalistic about pixel art, of adhering to a limited palette or carefully anti-aliasing my lines by hand, of using all-or-nothing transparency (actually, I do the latter two more often than I’d like to admit). What matters is what I wish to do with the aesthetic of pixels – and what specifications I must meet for the graphics to work at all in the given platform. It is ridiculous to throw away perfectly good tools like brush effects, gradient tools, and overall image adjustments. Tedium is not artistically uplifting.

If the art is about pixels, it’s pixel art. It doesn’t matter how I make it.

I actually followed all the “rules” of pixel art to draw these. Oops. Then I used the adjust levels tool in Photoshop. Ha! I have overthrown the tyranny of aesthetic canon!

There! It’s not a manifesto unless you try to sound controversial in the first paragraph.

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Holy Redesign Batman

July 9, 2010 by Derek Bonner

Gaslamp Games just a bit better looking. Hold on there young guns… she’s not quite legal yet. We are experimenting with a new layout method that does have some benefits as far a loads times but it comes with the price of mis-rendering at lower width resolutions. Fear not, this mistakes shall soon be fixed and the beauty of a liquid design paired with lightning fast load times shall be had again. In the meantime why don’t you check out our Forums. As an added benefit of registration is that you will share the same logins between both the forum and the blog so you can leave comments easier.

Enjoy!

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Three Small Pieces of Verbal Diarrhea

July 9, 2010 by Nicholas Vining

Three quickies:

– We are pleased as punch to announce that Chris Dykstra has joined Gaslamp Games as our Director of Business Development (although that said, since we let you make up your own job titles here at Gaslamp, he could be ANYTHING.) Chris is handling our distribution and publisher liasoning needs, general community building, and media contacts. At some point we may even get him a real Gaslamp e-mail address.

– We just sent a build of Dredmor off to some publisher-distributor type people who wanted a look at it. This is very exciting. Hopefully, more on this later. Let’s not jinx it.

– Have you tried our forums yet? Forums are cool.

There’s some other stuff coming down the pipeline really, really soon now. I’m excited.

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Dungeon Creation and Beautification

July 8, 2010 by David Baumgart

With most of the foundational art assets completed I’m shifted my focus on Dredmor toward producing content for the game. In particular I’m polishing the dungeon tilesets and creating new dungeon objects (as the game items have actually been finished for a long, long time).

Tilesets

Let me take a moment to explain how Dredmor tilesets work (and used to work, and how they will work). Here’s a cut from the first dungeon’s tileset:

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Gaslamp Portrait Sketches

July 1, 2010 by David Baumgart

For the Great Gaslamp Webpage Revival I’ve started drawing steampunk portraits of the crew of the good ship Gaslamp Games.

(click to view full size)

From left to right: Nicholas, deranged technologist/bootlegger; David (myself), foppish art-lord; Derek, internet-tube engineer; and Daniel, merchant of ludology and man of science.

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Gaslamp as a movie: me as that insane cigar smoking flouridation dude.

June 24, 2010 by Daniel Jacobsen

If Gaslamp were Dr. Strangelove:

David –

David

Nicholas –

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The Part Of Making Games That Isn’t Making Games

June 24, 2010 by David Baumgart
  1. Make game
  2. ???
  3. Profit!

Something is missing here, see, and what’s missing is what really does the trick for the commercial indie game development thing. It is those developers that can fill in point number 2 that are successful, I think, regardless of any sort of brilliance in point number 1 (and sometimes making up for a lack of it).

We’re all doing something to carry some of the weight of step two, Derek handling hosting and coding online things, Daniel spearheaded incorporation and is our business guy probably because everyone else hates the idea of doing it more, and Nicholas has shadowy “industry connections”.

As for me? I do art. And it turns out there’s more to a game than the graphics.

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