Category Archives: Website

The Part Of Making Games That Isn’t Making Games

  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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Posted in Dungeons of Dredmor, Gaslamp, Website | Tagged ,
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News From the Console

It’s been over a year since Gaslamp Games moved from the seedy underbelly if shared hosting into the semi-professional world of a virtual private server.
How did I celebrate this great day you may ask? I broke the server…twice.

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Ignore the Man Behind the Console

Another short post from me this week. Beta, beta, beta! Why does beta always get all the attention when my hair, er… problems are just as pretty exciting. While we burn away at finding all those pesky last minute bugs my face has been owned by a console. What does this mean for you? Fuck-all. I’m improving, securing, and updating so much stuff you’d need at least three sticks to have enough shaking power.

Edit: Maybe its the huge amounts of caffeine or that face that I just conquered a problem that has been bugging me the past two days but you need to see this. The Oatmeal has done it again, it sure does suck to be a male angler fish. http://theoatmeal.com/comics/angler

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Services Everywhere!

Well it has been a busy week for all of us.  The programmers and artists are busy putting the finishing touches on our exciting beta and I spent the large portion of  last week redoing the CSS for the entire site to streamline your browsing experience.  When I go back a look at all of the little services and tweaks that I have done I figure I should give credit to my many resources.

First of all I’ve been using the Debian style of package management off and on since the early 2000’s when I used a distribution called Libranet.  This was a great distribution for a time when running Linux on the desktop was a challenge to say the least.  One thing that rang true with me was the east installation of packages AND all their dependencies with a very simple command..

apt-get install <package>

No crappy .rpm’s no having to install from source just easy to use and even easier to customize.

Enter Ubuntu which has gone to great strides bringing  Linux to the masses.  Not only does Canonical have a well thought out and designed product, there is a great community behind it.  For a self taught computer user I found it immensely helpful.  One of my favorite little bits of information is the server guide that is made for ever release.  This guide provides a quick setup for many of the common services that are run in a server (read: command line) interface.  You can find the latest version for 10.04 here.

For all those self taught users out there like myself you will learn more from following this guide then you’d like to admit.  I challenge anyone to setup a mail server for multiple domains in less than six hours without at least referencing a guide once or twice.

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Hark! A new Dredmor trailer appears!

We are still working on our Dredmor beta aspirations. My lungs are now full of coffee, and David hasn’t seen the light of day now for… okay, five years, but who’s counting?

While we wait for the last of the skills to be implemented, and for the eighty-seventh window closing button to get its new, fresh coat of gold paint, here’s another Dredmor gameplay trailer for your enjoyment. Music by Mr. Ludwig van Beethoven, lovingly arranged by Mr. Matthew Steele.

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Housekeeping… May I Fluff Your Pillow?

Short post from me this week.  With the impending release of our first beta of Dungeons of Dredmor slated for May 15th everyone has kicked things into high gear and I am no exception.  While Dan is knee deep in game databases, David doing that creative art stuff, and Nicholas doing… well I don’t know but I’m going to assume its more of the same it is up to me to tidy up the website and push out the slew of changes to the website.

What will this mean for you as the user?  Well the graphics should be a little less narrow and use a bit more of your screen as well as some graphics tweaks that probably only bother me.  In the back-end of things I’m preparing our pre-order tool as well as setting up some scripts to hopefully handle an increased load from our adoring public.  In addition to my usual duties of checking security I’m exited for the prospect of providing you our customers with a streamlined process and overall easy browsing experience.

If you ever get a message that you don’t think belongs please feel free to contact me at webmaster (at) gaslampgames.com

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The Problem with Products, or How Being Canadian is Difficult Sometimes

If you have been paying attention to gaming news recently, and, well.. you’re reading our blog so you probably have been, you may have seen ads for the Humble Indie Bundle.

First of all, let me say awesome job to the Wolfire guys et al.  The indie gaming community constantly impresses me with its community-oriented and generous mentality; I haven’t been a member long but I’ll work hard to live up to it.

That said, if you’ve checked out the bundle, you would have noticed 3 payment buttons at the bottom: one for Amazon, one for Google, and one for Paypal.  Well… we’ve been working on setting that up for ourselves, due to the oncoming beta release and being keen on offering some pre-order related deals, and being Canadian doesn’t really help things very much…

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Posted in Games, Gaslamp, Website | 1 Comment

Git Web Development with gitosis

Looks like I am the one with the late article this week. Hopefully it is worth the wait for some of you.

As mentioned in my article last week I’m going to go through how to setup a similar workflow to what I use here at Gaslamp Games.  Before I get ahead of myself I should probably start at the beginning for those who might stumble on this post with very little previous experience with git.  This article assumes you know your way around a Linux command line and can install packages on your system with no problem.

So what is git?

Git is a “free & open source, distributed version control system” and while that may be a quick blurb about what git is, it is exactly what it says.  Every time you clone a git repository (more on that later) you not only get the entire repository but you get every commit, a full history, and my favorite part; once cloned there is no need to have a central server or even network access.  This allows me to pull the latest changes, pack  up my laptop and head somewhere excluded when I need to really get some work done. There is quite a bit to know about exactly how git works but that is well beyond the scope of this article.  If you are curious how exactly how it all works I would suggest you get a cup of coffee and see the excellent video over at gitcasts I referenced last week.

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