I have a math post under construction that explains some statistical stuff that we were doing, but when I went to write it I lost interest, then discovered that WordPress’s LaTeX system wasn’t working (Derek assures me it now is), and then wrote about half of it and then got distracted by, you know, trying to ship a video game. Mea culpa. I was going to finish writing that post today, but instead I was struck by the applicability of the following quote by filmmaker Jim Jarmusch (“Broken Flowers”, “Coffee and Cigarettes”, etc.) to the craft of game development. Jarmusch, of course, is talking about creative endeavours in general. He advises:

“Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existant. And don’t bother concealing your thievery – celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: ‘It’s not where you take things from — it’s where you take them to.'”

Nowhere is this more applicable than in game development. We steal on a regular basis. Every first person shooter references back to the roots of the genre – Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, Quake, Half-Life. Any role playing game released on a console today digs back through the collective unconsciousness until it eventually turns into either Ultima or Dragon Quest. In our case, Dungeons of Dredmor borrows liberally from Nethack, Linley’s Dungeon Crawl, and Dwarf Fortress. More recently, there has been an alarming infusion of Diablo; we also have some ideas that originated with a lesser-known Roguelike called Lost Labyrinth, which particularily influenced how we assign character skills. Our magical skill set – earth, fire, water, air, white and black magic – comes from, like, every computer game ever. Our musical score contains licks lifted cheerfully by Matthew that pay homage to everything from an episode of Doctor Who that I particularily liked to Pink Floyd’s “Money.” Our art… well, I’ll let David talk about our art.

Sometimes this is a fight in the office. As indie developers, surely we should be doing things that are original.  To heck with that – let’s be authentic!

So Crunch Week happened. It was reasonably successful; we wrote a lot of code and put in a lot of sustained development. In fact, we put in enough sustained development that there is now a clear path to beta and release. There wasn’t before, there is now. I think that’s a good thing. We are looking at trying to get a beta candidate done by May 15th, at which point we send it out to the Lucky, Lucky People. (Did I mention you can still get in on this beta action? There is a sign-up somewhere around here.) Pizza was eaten, coffee was consumed, other important tasks were ignored… yeah, it was a success. Not much bunkering actually happened, though; maybe we’ll work on that more later.

Okay, everybody read that? May 15th, 2010 beta. That’s the first time I put a date on the blog. Let’s see if we hit that.

In the end, as Citizen Daniel said, mostly what we did was tear stuff *out* of Dredmor. We removed all the old spell system and replaced it with a new one. We removed 10 floors of dungeon. We removed the scroll system, which kind of sucked anyway. We got rid of duplicate monsters. New content includes figuring out what the Evil Chests actually DO, and paring our giant mess of skills and spells into a somewhat coherent collection of one hundred and thirty five skills, implementation of which is ongoing (and each one of which requires somebody to manually enter data, from a text file, into yet another XML database… by somebody other than me. Ain’t I a stinker?) A lot of code cleanup was done. Some bugs were killed, including some long standing ones. For instance, you can now actually get things into your inventory with some degree of accuracy. And so on, and so forth. Generally, … let us just say that “business was taken care of” and we’ll leave it at that.

I also drank a lot of coffee. There was no coffee in my apartment when I woke up this morning, because I drank it all during crunch week. I’m currently drinking “coffee” brewed from ground-up espresso beans. It… well, it’s an interesting experience, and I alternate between feeling euphoric and like death.

So about this dungeon cutting thing. Daniel proposed it, and I agreed to it. It’s interesting looking at how we’ve gotten from where we started to where we ended up. In the end… well, it’s another step away from where I originally planned on being with Dredmor. Dredmor was originally supposed to be a very, very oldschool experience in terms of its length; you would descend through the dungeon to kill Dredmor, but reaching Dredmor originally required you to explore through branches containing various monsters. Each branch corresponds to one of our tilesets that we have today, and would be a 5 level mini dungeon with its own generators and content. (This idea was almost certainly influenced by Linley’s Dungeon Crawl – one of the better roguelikes since Nethack. Then, after you killed Dredmor, you had to escape back out of the dungeon while being chased by him and carrying his Magical Phylactery (lifted, again, from Nethack.) Now, you have ten levels to get through, and you have to kill Dredmor. The good news? You might actually get to beat the game in your life time. The possibly bad news? Traditional roguelike players (as Daniel likes to point out, all ten of them) may not be quite as satisfied with the experience. Personally, I think it’s reflective of a general trend in game development towards tighter, more focused experiences. I’m comfortable with that.

Next week: more on roguelikes that have influenced Dredmor, and how those influences were removed. The week after that: well, hopefully we’ll be into beta.