All posts tagged with "development"

Happy New Year!

Happy new year from all of us at Gaslamp Games. 2011 is gonna be huge. Some housekeeping:

– Did you know we have one of those damn-fangled Twitter-things? Why not give it a look? In particular, I’ll be Live-Tweeting my work session for a bit today, and maybe tomorrow as well. We’ll see how it goes.
– We’re also on Facebook. Just search for Gaslamp Games and you’ll see us. I don’t know what we’ll do for Special Facebook Content, but I’m sure I’ll think of something.
– Congratulations to fellow Roguelike makers QCF Design whose game, Desktop Dungeons, was nominated for the Seamus McNally Grand Prize at the 2011 IGF this year. This’ll be a lesson to us: we didn’t end up submitting a build of Dredmor to the IGF last year because a) it wasn’t in a particularly good state at the time, but also b) because we didn’t think a Roguelike had a good chance of placing anywhere. Shows what we know. There you have it, folks: 2011 is clearly the year of Roguelike Domination!

More importantly, perhaps: over the holidays the collective Gaslamp crew managed to recharge our batteries and get a lot of work done. The game, replete with a new combat system, a new skill system, multiple resolutions, and the blasphemous presence of Numbers all over the place feels like a game, and that’s a sign that we’re getting close to shipping. Now, if you’ll excuse me – these 52 bugs aren’t going to fix themselves, you know.

Posted in Dungeons of Dredmor, Gaslamp | Tagged , ,
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Commitment Anxiety in Skill Selection

In the current revision pass on Dungeons of Dredmor we’ve finally had to make some hard choices about what skills mean to a player’s character. Thus far, all skills have been more or less freely available to select from any point for testing purposes. But if every skill is always available then by the time a player earns a few levels they shall have had the chance to buy a completely new set of skills which would render the importance of their initial choices mostly meaningless. We want every playthrough of Dredmor to be about an experience which is meaningfully different from a playthrough with different starting selections — so far as we are able to make it so.

Dungeons of Dredmor hero choosing skills

Which will you choose?

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Posted in Dungeons of Dredmor, Game Design | Tagged , , , ,
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State of the Dredmor

You know what? I didn’t get ANY Sewer Brew for my birthday. Not a drop. That means I’m now programming sober for the first time in ten years. Watch out, people.

A recent post from the SomethingAwful Forums states, “Well, I went to check up on Dungeons of Dredmor, but there’s been no new release information.” Well, something to that effect, anyhow, and the post wasn’t all that recent. I think it was in November. So here’s the state of the union. As a bonus, I’ve taken a few more WIP Screenshots showing off some of the new systems, which we will shove in a new post.

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Posted in Dungeons of Dredmor, Game Design | Tagged , ,
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Game Design Dialectic: Dwarf Fortress and Goblin Camp

This is only the beginning of a story, but it could prove to be a very interesting story if it bears out. I think it already contains instructive lessons for game development and design.

On the left, Dwarf Fortress. On the right, Goblin Camp.

I hope you know about Dwarf Fortress, the very complex roguelike-lookinglike fantasy world sim / citybuilder. From a development perspective, DF is a very long-running obsessive project coded by one guy, Tarn Adams, who makes more money than I do (not difficult) entirely by donations from his fans. I admire Tarn’s goals and his creative freedom which lets him indulge his whims – I wish I could do that. I even had fun playing some Dwarf Fortress until I explored most of what there was to explore. It was sweet while it lasted, but I grew tired with the tedium of a very rough user interface and tedious gameplay.

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Posted in Game Design | Tagged , , ,
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The Joys of OS X Development, Part II

The scene: 1996. Apple has just purchased NeXT, and programmers huddle together, cursing the devil-spawned end user. “Alas,” says one, “our mighty empire has fallen. Know now that our legacy shall live on, as a curse passed to all mankind.”

“What curse shall this be?” asks his brethren. “What artifact of our dark majesty shall we use to smite our enemies and leave them fearing our almighty glories?”

“Why,” replies the first programmer, “it shall be known as… the OS X frameworks mechanism!” All tremble.

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