SOPA and PIPA

January 18, 2012 by Daniel Jacobsen

First I should say that Gaslamp Games is a company.  We sell products, and our motivations as individuals are swayed by the fact that our personal successes are tied to the successes of our company.  We have a vested interest in allowing Gaslamp to be successful.  That said, Gaslamp Games would cease to exist as the entity that you know and love if SOPA and PIPA are passed.

If SOPA passes, it requires that we censor each and every post or message within our blog posts and our forums to ensure that no piracy or hints at piracy are posted.  If we aren’t successful, we could become blacklisted and unreachable without so much as a chance to defend ourselves.  What’s more, the bills together give internet service providers the ability to make these decisions on their own, only requiring “credible evidence” of piracy-oriented content.  We simply can’t afford to police our community to a degree where we could be somewhat assured to be operating within the parameters set out by these bills.  What’s more, we don’t want to police our users.  Our community, like every other healthy community, depends upon some degree of freedom of expression.

Gaslamp’s vested interest aside, there are some very serious freedom of speech issues.  I am no expert here but I have read a lot about SOPA and PIPA over the last week or so and I strongly urge you to look into them on your own, and of course, to try to hear both sides of the story.  While it is our opinion that SOPA and PIPA are too heavy-handed in their attempt to lessen a problem which is a serious concern, it is most important that you know what is going on and have the opportunity to share an informed opinion with your government representatives.

Posted in Uncategorized | 15 Comments

Dredmor; Odin

January 16, 2012 by Nicholas Vining

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.)

{ read this article }

Posted in Dungeons of Dredmor, Other Games, Programming | Tagged ,
45 Comments

Community Spotlight #1

January 11, 2012 by Daynab

Hi everyone! I am Daynab, resident community/tester/DoD enthusiast guy. I’m gonna be doing weekly posts about mods and other things going on over at the forums and elsewhere.

The past few weeks have shown an amazing growth in interest and we’re now up to around 30 functional mods. It may not seem like much, but keep in mind they’re pretty major, such as completely new skill lines. Since I can’t describe every one in a single post, here are two among my personal favorites.

(Please read this guide if you don’t know how to install mods.)

Clockwork Knights

This skill is an interesting combination between combat and crafting. It boosts your survival by giving you a trap scanner and some movement spells, and it ups your general crafting skills while giving access to a bunch of special new recipes for (mostly) melee characters.

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Posted in Dungeons of Dredmor | Tagged , , ,
4 Comments

Jobs, Jobs, Jobs

January 10, 2012 by Nicholas Vining

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!

{ read this article }

Posted in Gaslamp, Other Games, Programming | 28 Comments

Happy New Year!

January 7, 2012 by Nicholas Vining

Well, folks, we made it to 2012. Barely, but we made it. For those of you worried about the Mayan Doom Prophecy – fear not! Like all good Canadians, we scoff at your doom prophecies, and know that there are in fact 100 years until the arrival of the Priests of the Temples of Syrinx.

Our contact e-mail is completely jammed up, and we’re trying to work through everything, but here’s some news and status updates on things.

First off: the hotfixes that we put out earlier for various save issues over Christmas are now live on Steam and Desura. We’ll be putting another one up later this week to clean up an additional three crash issues that have reared their ugly heads. If you installed a hotfix from our webpage, we recommend uninstalling local content and making sure you grab a fresh install from Steam. If it does *not* say something like “1.0.9 REVISION B” on the title screen, something’s gone wrong.

There have been a few reports of older save games still being broke on OS X; we’re on it. That said, we have also heard reports of older save games working just fine on OS X, so… it’s a bit puzzling, really.

Second off: Desura and HIB users who want to purchase the Realm of the Diggle Gods, we are working on this but have no ETAs yet. As soon as we know how we’re going to do this and have it set up, we’ll let you know. Watch this space.

Third off: with Dredmor and the expansion pack behind us, our plan at this point is to finish stabilizing any last issues caused by the 1.0.7->1.0.8->1.0.9 patch cycle, and then to keep proceeding with smaller, more incremental patches. Hopefully we should be as stable at the end of this week as we were when we released 1.0.6 (voted “Most Stable Patch of 2011″ by our user base.) Balancing and fixes are a continual process, and we’re taking our inspiration from Team Fortress 2 in terms of how we’d like Dredmor to continue evolving. (This does not include a) a hat store, b) becoming free-to-play, c) “Meet the Diggle.”) We’re also looking at the mod support that we put in with release 1.0.7; people have made some *very* cool things, and we are going to continue to provide support for this developing part of the community. Additionally, we will be starting a “mod spotlight” feature on the blog, featuring a mod selected once… every so often… by our community moderator, Mathieu “Daynab” Dugon. We should have the first one up sometime next week.

Finally: not content to rest on our laurels, this week has officially marked the start of work on Project Odin. I am up to my neck in network code and the innards of Google V8, David has been drawing concept art and running art tests, and Daniel is doing The Dark Paperwork. What are we up to? Well… watch this space for hints.

Posted in Dungeons of Dredmor, Gaslamp, Programming | Tagged , , ,
35 Comments