Category Archives: Games

Patch Status

July 28, 2011 by Nicholas Vining

Hi, folks!

We’re still grinding away on the next patch; this is slightly complicated by the fact that I am moving on Sunday, so my apartment furniture consists of nothing but my desk, chair, and a never-ending sea of boxes. There are two practical sides to this, however. The first is that I will be in the same city as David, which can only increase The Madness. Gaslamp will have shared offices again! David may yet drink decent coffee, if I have anything to do with it! And so forth. The second consequence is that I was originally slated to begin a Ph.D in Computer Science as of September; this has now been pushed back to January 2012 so we can wrestle the madness a little bit more, and ensure that Gaslamp is well set up to work on the next thing. (Who knows if I make it there in January, either. At the rate things are going, all bets are off. Dredmor may have spelled the end of my academic career… or not. Who knows. It worked for Jeff Vogel…)

That said: our planned next revision hums along at a good pace. My working notes on the things that have actually been fixed are below: subtract these from the most recent list we put up to get an approximate idea of the amount of work is remaining. I’m considering splitting this into smaller patches, so we can get this out sooner rather than later; at the same time, I want to make sure that we … well, for a lack of a better term, that we get everybody’s pet issues. 🙂 If you want to participate in our Exciting Dredmor Blooper Beta Bonus Round, send us an e-mail to ilovetocrash@gaslampgames.com (really) and tell us why you want to be one of our Exciting Patch Testers. Preference will be given to those who participated in the beta, to those who have been active in the community with assembling bug reports and tracking things, and to those with existing QA experience.

Okay. List of things we’ve done so far… is below.

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Posted in Dungeons of Dredmor, Game Design, Games, Gaslamp, Programming | Tagged , , ,
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So. Uh. Hi there.

July 13, 2011 by Nicholas Vining

EDIT: Today’s patch, while fixing the random crashes for some people, has added a new one for other people. We’re on it. Please keep sending us your broken save files too, especially if they were entirely produced *after* yesterday’s patch. — Gaslamp Games McManagement

Hi, everybody. We’re… a little overwhelmed, and also going about with large grins on our faces. Being #1 on Steam – even if we have been cruelly deposed (for now!) by the Curse of Cthulhu Saving the World – is quite the rush. We should ship games more often. Thank you all for your support and patronage; we’re looking forward to kicking it up to the next level.

We have fixed a few bugs that came out of the woodwork. The random crash bug is fixed, a save corruption bug is fixed (there may be more), the Infinite XP glitch is fixed, and the infinite-money-in-shop glitch has been resolved as well. We will be sending a patch off to Steam as soon as we have finished testing it a little more.

….

So how is everybody enjoying the game?

Posted in Dungeons of Dredmor, Game Design, Games, Gaslamp, Programming | Tagged , ,
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DREDMOR WEEK (Day One): Soundtrack Up!

July 11, 2011 by Nicholas Vining

Ladies and gentleman, we’re selling a game. In order to sell it, we’ve put together a little something we like to call…. DREDMOR WEEK.

Not relaly a Night at the Opera, is it?

That’s right, folks. Every day a blog post, a new piece of revelry, and by the way, we’re releasing the game ON WEDNESDAY. You heard us. WEDNESDAY. At long last, your pain and suffering will be over…. or just beginning. Ahem.

Let’s kick things off with a fanfare. Several fanfares, actually.

Matthew Steele, our brilliant musician, has put together a Dungeons of Dredmor soundtrack release on Bandcamp. You can preview the entire game’s soundtrack, and you can even buy it from him if you feel so inclined. How much will this cost you? Well, it’s pay as you want, but the minimum price is set at $2.99. (Any money Matthew makes on this, we told him he could keep. We’re awesome like this.)

Check it out here. Cover art by David.

The Schedule for DREDMOR WEEK:

Monday: Soundtrack Release
Tuesday: Why is Dredmor priced at $4.99? We promised you an explanation. On Tuesday, you’ll get it. Added bonus: the Dredmor Community Art Mutilation Pack.
Wednesday: We Release The Game. Wailing and gnashing of teeth.
Thursday: David draws a comic. (Or, maybe, posts Part I of the Modding Guide. He hasn’t decided yet.)
Friday: The Making of Dredmor: a behind-the-scenes PDF spectacular containing never-before seen art, screenshots, and Fun from the Vaults.

Posted in Dungeons of Dredmor, Game Design, Games, Gaslamp | 9 Comments

Some Minor News

July 9, 2011 by Nicholas Vining

Dungeons of Dredmor is coming in between four or five days, depending on your time zone. If you want to see some Video Footage of people Playing Dredmor, you are encouraged to check out the fabulous M and B Games Dredmor video-tutorial-ography: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5. Also, let’s not forget the ferocious videography of Paul Soares here.

So what have we fixed between our Gold Master Candidate and now? Well, honestly not all that much. Most of our work has been on prepping for launch, and we also took a modest, slightly less than Notch-sized vacation. Now that we’re back on the game, we’re looking forward to adding exciting post-release content and making this thing better than ever. We have started the mod work, but it doesn’t look like it will be done in time for our release; we will roll this into the game as soon as possible. Mod support, it turns out, is one of those difficult things to get working perfectly; in particular, it’s causing a great deal of trouble with the save games.

We did, however, add some fun stuff. First off, permadeath now works. If you die, we actually delete your save game! Mwa hah hah. By contrast, non-permadeath now works very well as well. You can save your game wherever and whenever you want, and it’s always there for you to carry on if you get slaughtered. Just remember to save as often as you feel that you can.

Second off, we have added a few achievements. Seven, to be exact. Right now, you get achievements for a) killing Dredmor, b) being killed by Diggles. This is more of a proof-of-concept thing; we’ll be adding more in the first patch, but David has to wrap up some contract work for a bit. I have a draft list, and it has over one hundred things to acquire in it. So good luck with that one. If you have achievement suggestions, incidentally, we’d love to hear from you.

If you’re on The Steams, you will also find that Dredmor has some leaderboards going on. You too will be able to compete with your friends and enemies to see who can descend furthest into the depths of the Dungeon.

Finally, we fixed a few crash bugs. No biggie. 🙂

Anyhow, the time is nearly upon us. As prophecied, the Dark Lord Dredmor shall rise, and thousands upon millions of hours of productivity shall be destroyed by his evil machinations. Also, somebody got him on the Twitter, and you’re encouraged to follow him in addition to our own fine Twitterfeed. We’re looking forward to having you all as players.

Posted in Dungeons of Dredmor, Games, Gaslamp, Programming | 7 Comments

The Sweet Taste of Gold

June 17, 2011 by Nicholas Vining

There are now zero outstanding issues on our “must fix before ship” list. We’re going to play Dredmor internally for about 24 to 48 hours, and if we don’t find anything we desperately need to fix, we now have a Dungeons of Dredmor gold master build.

Nearly there, folks – we’ll have this in your hot little hands as soon as we can. Speaking for myself: having been working on Dredmor since 2005, it is *very* odd being done.

Posted in Dungeons of Dredmor, Games, Gaslamp | Tagged , ,
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Retro and Pixel Fumes

June 10, 2011 by Nicholas Vining

We’re still working on Dredmor, and that price post and distributor announcement is coming, I swear.

While you wait, though, why not take Inaria out for a spin? It costs the same amount as Dredmor will – $4.99 – and while it’s not a roguelike, I find myself instantly remembering what it was like to be… six, seven? … and playing Ultima: Quest of the Avatar on the original Nintendo Entertainment System, desperately wanting to make RPGs, and not just any RPGs but the RPGs I saw in my head. I suddenly remembered working with the DC Games RPG Toolkit – a very early, shareware toolkit for making Ultima-style games, sort of what RPG Maker might have been like if it was written in 1987 by a bunch of Europeans who had never even heard of Final Fantasy – and trying to shoehorn whatever I wanted to achieve – whatever that was! – into a program that was clearly not designed to accommodate my grand, nebulous vision.

The dark secret of retro gaming is that when you revisit these old, early giants of your youth, they’re never as good as you remember them being. They’re slow, sludgy, grindy, full of filler and stodge, and ultimately an exercise in patience and frustration that we all played because it was perfectly okay to play a game where you had to make maps with graph paper. This is where Inaria comes in: it’s the game we all remember playing, and not the game that we actually played with all of its faults and limitations.

For five dollars, you owe it to yourself to remember what it was like to be five. Me? I find myself remembering why I started doing this, which is a very easy thing to lose sight of when you’re working on a game and it feels like it will never end.

You can find Inaria at http://www.viridiangames.com/ and I hope you will give it a whirl. (Did I mention there’s chiptunes and dancing?)

Posted in Games, Other Games | 2 Comments

On Mod Support

June 8, 2011 by Nicholas Vining

Very briefly, because people keep asking: “Can you make mods for Dungeons of Dredmor? What is the plan for modding for Dredmor?” Emphatically: a) yes, b) what is contained below.

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Posted in Dungeons of Dredmor, Games, Gaslamp, Programming | Tagged , , , ,
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On Shipping

June 7, 2011 by Nicholas Vining

Time for more coffee; while that brews, let’s do a blog post. Let’s talk about polish, a topic that is near and dear to my heart. (EDIT: Now with addendum.)

First off, an enormous thank you to all our beta testers. Dredmor is so much better now than it was two weeks ago, and this is thanks to your input, crash bugs, feedback suggestions, gameplay complaints, and balance issues. Hang in there guys, I know you’re burnt out. For everybody not in the beta: hang in there, we’re so close to the end it’s amazing. There have been times when I thought this day would never come.

So what *are* we working on? Polish, mainly.

There was a thread on the Positech Games blog that gave me a few ideas about what to write about while I wait for coffee. Cliff… well, I don’t actually know why I read his blog; he mainly spends his time writing about a) how awful it is to be an indie, b) why everybody should be paying $29.99 for Gratuitous Space Battles, and c) how horrible it is to have to deal with municipal planning authorities in the United Kingdom. (The last complaint is fairly universal.) Meanwhile, Alex Mosolov, whose game Starfarer you should all be playing, just gets on with making a game, and is letting you pre-order for $10 and suffer along with him as he works on the alpha. Guess whose attitude I like more? And guess who just posted, excitedly, that he decided to quit his job to work on his company full-time? (Also, unlike Gratuitous Space Battles, Starfarer actually lets you pilot a spaceship. I think that’s a selling point.)[1]

That said, I usually get ideas for blog posts from reading the Positech blog, so there you go. Today’s post at Cliff’s blog was the usual “Argh Indie Pricing” thread. We still haven’t made a pricing announcement for Dredmor other than the < $10 thing, but we do have one in mind. It’s a shame that the final price for Dredmor isn’t higher, but there is a recession on and I will be the first to admit that there is a lot of competition out there for your gaming dollar. Nothing new there. The next game we make, we are committed to having production values that clearly justify a $19.99 price, both to ourselves and everyone else. That’s all there is to it. What is interesting in that thread, though, is the following comment from a poster – a comment that has massive, incredible value:

If there’s something I want to say it’s this:
Indie games need more polish to be able to sell for more.
Most devs don’t have the money for that amount of polish, but they do have the time, even if it means taking a part time job to survive. If a game looks unpolished, with bad graphics, bad sound quality, music, uninteresting characters etc, then no matter if it’s indie or not, it will fail, and people won’t want to buy it, not at the full price.

Yes, exactly what he said.

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Posted in Dungeons of Dredmor, Games, Gaslamp | Tagged , , , ,
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