Here’s a transcription of what Nick posted on the forums earlier today (just to get people to maybe check out our shiny new toy), we’ll endeavor to keep the blog the de-facto “news” source.
I’ve been directed to post some interesting stuff on the forums about what we’re doing next, in order to get as many new people using them as we can. So that said, here’s the plan going forwards, courtesy of today’s company meeting. (Which did, in fact, involve swords.)
– 1.0.6: Linux support and a handful of the more interesting things that need to be fixed. I’d like to get this to the beta testers by Monday. I’d like to do it earlier, but the first part of the week is consumed by rubbish Real Life Stuff. So we’ll see what happens.
– 1.0.7: More fixes, and the introduction of a Super Secret Thing that we’ve… well, I may have talked about it before, and I wanted it to get in for the original game, but I didn’t. So I think we’ll put it in for 1.0.7. Again, I’d like a turnaround of about a week, a week and a half.
– 1.0.8: If necessary, more fixes. This patch may not exist, depending on where we set our cutoffs for 1.0.6 and 1.0.7. Hopefully, we get the female character in by this point.
– 1.1.0: Mod support, including bumping all the strings out of the EXE and into an XML file for the usage of various translation teams. (We have a *really* cool translation announcement coming up later this week, by the way.)
and then various support patches for 1.1.0 moving forward.
There is also the little matter of an expansion pack. Gaslamp as a company – and myself, personally – are universally opposed to charging you for things that should be in the core game. We’re committed to fixing every single one of the one hundred and forty-nine issues in the bugtracker for Dredmor, and we will keep adding more Stuff to the core game every time we send out a patch, so that you always get a little something extra.
We don’t want to try to sell you 99 cent horse armour, either. That’s just… lame.
That said, people have actually *asked* us for an expansion pack, so we have to make one. We think we have a concept for an expansion pack that does justify being spun off to a paid expansion, as opposed to being Horse Armour or Eyebrow Wigs or whatever, and we will be moving on this front as soon as we are happy with the state of the core game. (That is to say, Not Yet. Not For A Long Time Yet.) In typical Gaslamp fashion, said expansion pack will probably be about the price of a package of potato chips. Crawl players will like it. It also won’t be anything you couldn’t put in yourself with the mod support, so in effect we will be putting up an Officially Sanctioned Mod and inviting you to buy it from us. I think this is a reasonable policy. I have no idea when this will be done, either. If I had to pull an estimate out of my posterior, I would guess six months or so. It’ll mainly be frontloading on the art side and less on the code side, and will be something that the company will collectively move on after 1.1.0.
There should also be an announcement about Merch in a few weeks. Buy Merch. BUY MERCH.
So that’s the roadmap going forwards. Questions? Comments? Let us know! That’s what we’re here for.
What’s New In Programmertown?
The best part of game development, for me at least, is when everything suddenly starts working. Quite often, there is a critical mass of code that you end up writing for a game, and then – in the span of a week, or even days – you go from “everything is hideously broken and we’re going to die” to “Oh, this might be fun.” We’re right on the cusp of that right now; programming has seen some setbacks this week, mainly due to an outbreak of flu that has consumed the office. Nonetheless, we’ve been hard at work here in Programmertown, trying to get all the excellent artwork and ridiculous designs that people have come up with integrated into the game as quickly and efficiently as possible. Once again, let us take a tour through my folder of wonderful work-in-progress screenshots.
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