Gaslamp Games

Many years ago, two men’s fantasy became reality with the establishment of a giant cooking arena… no, that’s not right. Well, it’s a giant arena of some sort where men face men in tabletop tournamenting and handheld chicanery. That’s right, it’s PAX.

Daniel, Derek and myself are at Penny Arcade Expo this weekend. Our goals: carousing, debauchery, video gaming, some mild networking, and harassing the Wolfire guys for secretly being closeted furries. (Really, we love you guys and you know it.) While we’re not here officially, if any blog readers are here (or members of the gaming press, or whoever) and want to check out Dungeons of Dredmor, a private showing can be arranged in our hotel rooms.

Yeah, that doesn’t sound dubious at all.

Also, we’re *really* having to work hard right now to beat Duke Nukem Forever to publishing. Darnit!

We’ve been promising you a trailer for a long time now, so here it is.

All footage is taken from beta 0.8 of Dungeons of Dredmor. Amongst other things you can see our attempt at minimizing the UI cruft (which is still not done!), and the Vile Liqueur of Yog-Sothoth. Enjoy!

We are fairly well-convinced that this is the way to go: the game is actually a lot more engaging now, the only problem is our current director thinks that rooms *literally* full of traps are a good idea without so much as a “hey, this might be a trap room” sign, so we’re working out kinks.

Also, I would currently analogize our relationship to our bug tracker with a guy with a shotgun and a horde of shambling zombies.  Thankfully there’s lots of ammo and it’s a big shotgun, and he’s smoking a cigar.

Nethack players, really experienced Nethack players, know that nothing is more cruel and unusual than the Random Number Generator. It is capricious and can either grant you great powers and wisdom (I remember being astonished at finding Grayswandir on level 4 of the Dungeons) , or can instantly kill you (“An endless stream of snakes flows from the fountain! The water moccasin hits… you die…”)

As part of our ongoing work with beta testing, we discovered that users never really felt compelled or pushed forward to keep moving, or to find some sort of pace. We looked at this, and decided that our best approach would be to implement something similar to the Director system that Valve uses for Left 4 Dead. For those of you who haven’t seen this, L4D measures player “experience intensity”, and then spawns mobs or allows for cooldowns based on this information. It’s crude, but it works. We therefore decided to try lifting it, with reasonable success. If your gameplay experience is not intense enough – i.e. you’re not Having Fun, the game will ratchet up the monster spawns in your area. If you’re having too much Fun, the game will give you a breather. We also track reward in the same manner; we will spawn more rewards if you haven’t been rewarded frequently enough, or we wlil spawn a really big reward. Similarily, if you’ve been getting too many items the item supply may dry up a little.

So, yes. We really *do* have a random number generator that cares. Is this entirely in line with the Roguelike philosophy? Maybe, maybe not. At the heart of the game the spawns are still random. We simply generate the contents of a room only when it first becomes visible and bias how many items/how many monsters are in a given room, as well as the spawning of other things (new monsters spawned post level creation, quests, et cetera.) So far it’s working out well and it will be interesting to see how we proceed from here.