Category Archives: Uncategorized

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.

• The Stop Online Piracy Act
• The Protect Intellectual Property Act
• The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s latest article on SOPA and PIPA

Ladies and gentlemen, we are doing this. See you on the top floor of the convention center – floor 6 – between the Unicorn and Serpent theaters, today, at 7 PM.

We have cardboard signs.

As you all know, it is a tradition amongst the Gaslampers that when somebody has a birthday and we can be bothered to remember it, David draws them a birthday comic.

Sadly, today is David’s birthday. He mentioned this to me this morning, prefaced with a mournful “… I hope somebody draws me a birthday comic.”

“Ah,” I said. “It could be arranged…”

Consequently, I took graphics tablet in hand and set out to draw something suitable. After an hour or two, I had this:

… let us never speak of this ever again.

BONUS picture from the Twitter-feed:

Version 0.93 of Dungeons of Dredmor just hit our stream of beta testers. We are exhausted, but happy, having resolved one hundred and eighty six bugs and minor TODOs since the start of the new year. Will we hit our April deadline? No idea, but I think we’ll go gold some time in April and it will take a little while to get the distributors sorted out. Famous last words.

This week, the plan is to deal with 0.93.1 (bugfixes for 0.93 – including, finally, the mysterious thrown weaponry crash that has been plaguing David’s father! – and anything that comes up in the immediate feedback for 0.93), hopefully by Friday, and then onwards to 0.94 (“higher level gameplay”, which as far as I am concerned means adding in a batch of new sound effects, making a number of improvements to monster AI, and trying to deal with our unpleasantly large memory footprint. I don’t know why it’s gotten so large recently – probably, it just means that we’ve been adding stuff – and now I get the unpleasant task of trying to retrofit the game with a garbage collector for sprite memory. Lessons learned…)

I’m very happy with this latest release; I find myself using things that I didn’t previously use, relying on skills and magic to save the day instead of simply trying to collect six artifacts and beating the tar out of monsters with a fistful of fireball-shooting amulets. A new smattering of interesting, entertaining traps – most of which shoot lightning – makes the dungeon more dangerous. Buying and selling gives you somewhere to dump your stuff, and there’s lots of random stuff to have fun with. Players are actually enjoying themselves, without us needing to pump them full of drugs.

The newest problem? The game is *too easy*.