Wondering when you can begin exploring the forgotten dimensions of lost wizards? Then gather ’round, because Gaslamp Games is pleased to announce that the Conquest of the Wizardlands expansion for Dungeons of Dredmor will be launched on August 1st.
Let’s do that one more time with art.
Got it? Got it.
Lightning! Brax! The Bomb! Wizardly Empties! Diggles again! Conquest of the Wizardlands has it all!
Now let us hint ominously at Things To Come.
A quick status update: Dredmor should be getting a second patch – 1.0.10 – this Thursday, or – worst-case scenario next Tuesday. (I’m not releasing patches on Fridays any more. Once bitten, twice shy.) This will be going to Steam, Desura, and the HIB simultaneously, so everybody will finally be up to date. This fixes the bookshelf crash, the weird loading of saves related crashes on OS X and Linux machines, and adds a few cosmetic niceties (working magic reflection, remembering what mods are loaded, remembering if you have disabled click-to-move, random boss monsters occasionally having additional magic resistance, that kind of thing) that have been on people’s lists for awhile.
We have been uncommunicative lately, and this is our fault. Owing to external factors which we cannot announce yet, we have suddenly found ourselves catapulted into Project Odin, almost full-time, somewhat quicker than we anticipated. We’re not entirely sure how much we can talk about this yet, which is problematic, and everybody is probably wondering what’s going on. Ah, growing pains. (This has also been one of the reasons why we are looking for additional gameplay programmers; at least one person will be working on Dredmor with me, on a full-time basis, for the next few months.)
In what is clearly a sign of the apocalypse, we are hiring. If you think you’ve got what it takes to work for Gaslamp Games? Then we’re interested in talking to you.
Specifically, we are looking to fill four positions at this time. These are contract positions, mainly due to the fact that we are independent and therefore hideously unstable. We are looking to start with about two months worth of contract work, and should that be successful continuing onwards for up to a year (and beyond, if our next project is a success.) If you think you have what it takes, send your resume/CV and a cover letter containing a link to your work portfolio to jobs@gaslampgames.com.
Preference will be given to candidates who are local to the Vancouver or Greater Victoria regions of British Columbia. (EDIT: We are open to remote work. But, we prefer locals.) Gaslamp Games is an equal opportunity and LGBTQ-friendly employer. Only those candidates we are interested in will receive a reply.
We are looking for:
– one gameplay programmer
– one generalist programmer
– one character artist (3D)
– one environment artist (3D)
Job descriptions under the cut. Thanks for applying!
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?)
Official Friend-of-Gaslamp Alex Mosolov just released the first alpha of his indie space-combat/rpg/sandbox game “Starfarer”, now available to customers who pre-order the game (at half price!).
Congratulations to Alex for shipping this release!
There is some Gaslamp involvement with Starfarer, I should add: All graphics were done by myself (David) and SF’s sound was made by our own Mr. Matthew Steele (who made all the sound and music for Dredmor).
I want to thank Alex for having me work on his game – it’s incredibly fun to draw spaceships and planets and it’s been a project I’ve wanted to do since I was 10 years old. It should be said also that in part Alex has made Gaslamp Games and Dredmor possible by hiring me to work on his game.
We also owe a lot of thanks to Alex for helping us test many painfully early in-development versions of Dungeons of Dredmor.
So best of luck to him on sales and the future of Starfarer and Fractal Softworks!
You can pre-order Starfarer from the Fractal Softworks page here. It runs on Windows, Mac OS, and Linux.
You can read more about the game’s features and planned development in the features section and the faq as well as follow development on the Fractal Softworks blog (which I occasionally post to as well). Additional screenshots and videos can be found in the media section.
(David recently did a State of the Dungeon post, and I guess this is my State of the Dungeon.)
For the most part it is rewarding for us, as developers, to hear that people are excited about the work that we’re doing and how badly they want to pre-order our title. (See, we’re listening!) I think that this is true of any creative endeavor: the artist thrives on the energy of his or her public. At the same time, it is also worth noting that it is very easy for a developer to get unexcited about a project when people keep telling you that you’re doing a lousy job. Most developers will tell you that the secret to this is not to listen to people on the Internet – after all, what do they know? That said, most successful developers – Valve springs instantly to mind, under the capable direction of Gabe Newell – will tell you that the success or failure of a game, and of a game company, is dependant upon your fans and your customers. Listen to people, get them excited, and you will prosper. Alienate your fans and you will alienate your customers, and your customers are the people who pay you money (or who will pay you money once we get the pre-orders going.) So that’s why we listen: we secretly want to be Valve. (Who doesn’t? Ben McGraw, our executive producer, recently pointed out that Valve is one of the few game companies in the so-called “Industry” that he would work for. Like indies, Valve brings joy to people. Other companies, he says, just make games.)
So what are our users saying? In a recent poll on our Twitterfeed – which you should all be following, because it really is the best way to keep tabs on us – one user wanted to know more about our development process, and the day-to-day decisions behind game development. We hope that this will oblige you, but today’s blogpost is *really* inspired by something from The Internets.
In a recent online discussion about Dungeons of Dredmor, somebody said – and I paraphrase: “Commercial roguelikes will never be as good as free roguelikes because the multi-year, evolutionary development process that results in amazing games like Crawl will never be commercially viable.” Here we have somebody who likes roguelikes, and who should like Dredmor. Hopefully, he will support us – here is a man, after all, who could be a customer, and any failing to attain him as a customer is a failing on our part as a business – but his concern is legitimate. Can a commercial roguelike be as good as Crawl, or Nethack? Well, I think we can… but let’s talk about this.
David and I are being interviewed next Wednesday for the “Immortal Machines” podcast over at Colony of Gamers. If you have questions about Dungeons of Dredmor, Gaslamp Games, or anything else that you want to know about, head on over to their forums and get askin’.
The best part? Ask a question – if it gets answered, you’ll be entered to win a free copy of Dungeons of Dredmor!
Go now! Heed the call of the Wizard-Kings!
I glanced at Slashdot yesterday while bored and found an interesting article on the CDE packaging tool. An impressive piece of work, CDE automatically packages up all of your dependencies into a self-contained directory structure. If I wanted to package up Dungeons of Dredmor and to be able to guarantee that it would work on your computer, all I would have to do is to run CDE on my computer, where I know Dredmor works, and sha-zam! Instant package.
This is something I have been fretting about: how do we distribute Dredmor for Linux?
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