All posts tagged with "can we borrow UI concepts from Diablo again? that worked well last time"

Strange Moods At Gaslamp Games

“Periodically, individual dwarves are struck with an idea for a legendary artifact and enter a strange mood. Dwarves which enter a strange mood will stop whatever they are doing and pursue the construction of this artifact to the exclusion of all else. They will not stop to eat, drink, sleep, or even run away from dangerous creatures. If they do not manage to begin construction of the artifact within a handful of months, they will go insane and die soon afterward.” – Dwarf Fortress Wiki

Strange moods abound in the office. It must be Autumn.

David screams "I must have steps!"

The programmer screams “I must have steps!”

I was seized with the strange mood recently after I got annoyed when implementing a new feature – more office code, I believe. Writing and testing my code required me to make a change to the Lua scripts, open the game, build an office, test the feature, see my stupid mistake, shut down the game, change the Lua script, open the game again, and continue ad infinitum. Uggh. Inspired by Casey Muratori’s Handmade Hero approach to hotloading – even though our approaches are totally, conceptually dissimilar – I decided to add the ability to reload Lua scripts on the fly to the game. The UI code is crude and nasty, but it looks something like this:

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The Marathoner’s Wall

It’s that time of the lunar calendar again! We’re going to be putting out a major monthly patch in a few days, more info to come toward the end of the week.

As for game development news, this blog post was really tough to write because I haven’t actually been working directly on the game code in probably a couple of months now, barring my brief work enabling a new biome.

#1 Management Tip? Condition.

#1 Management Tip? Condition.

Most of the work that I’ve been doing has been the rather inglorious work of preparing revenue reports for our financial partner (Canada), preparing for taxes, product management, and other typical things that business owners need to do. Nothing glamorous or interesting as game development blog material.

Between “Early Access” and “Shipped”

One of the things I have been doing for the last few weeks, though, is quantifying the details that separate our game as it exists now from the level of polish people expect from finished games. There’s a gulf between a nearly completed game and a completed game that comes down to all the tiny details that aren’t absolutely necessary for the game to function, but these are the details that remove the necessity for the player to do detective work to play the game. In a truly great game, among a host of other things, the game will gently encourage players to do the things they wanted to do anyway in all the right ways without them having to puzzle out how. This is what we need to do to get from the bare skeleton of a game to that properly fleshed out experience. Getting there is a little weird.

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December Technical Status Update: Santa Quag’garoth is Coming To Town

At a certain point, game development just comes down to iteration. You build a big pile of things, and then you iterate on them.  Then, you iterate on them some more… and then some more. Eventually, after enough iterations, you get a game, or the Standard Template Library (whichever comes first.)

One of the major driving forces behind said iteration is the fact that the game is now in the hands of Real People, in limited quantities. We have done five internal test releases so far – a bit slower than I am happy with; the first four test builds mainly focused on performance and getting things working somewhat better on people’s terrible hardware (see blog post from a couple of weeks ago); the fifth test build put combat, barbers, and phrenologists back in the game, as well as turning on More Useful Features (like mining.) So what we have right now is a game buried under a shameful selection of UI failures, which we are now trying to extricate ourselves from for Revision 6. This has mainly led to David learning how to use the Doctor Nicholas Vining Patent XML UI Syntax Guaranteed to Vivify The Spirit and Improve Marriage, which has led to this:

Secretly, I think we’re all just wishing for the good old days when he would send me large Excel spreadsheets of coordinates for Dredmor…

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Hundreds of Tiny Icons

Everything is better smaller and removed from any context.

You make a 32×32 image of fame, rasterize glory, and even make an icon of death.

Someone has to do it. Someone must take up this mantle; Someone has to come up with a blog post about something or other because Nicholas & Daniel are too tired from crunching out a bunch of (quite fascinating actually) systems which, however, lack visual polish and therefore aren’t much good to show off. Yes yes, we’re going to fix that giant white cube that says “POWER SAW” on the side.

So why not icons?

You may recall something of this most diminutive Art from such games as, oh, Dungeons of Dredmor which had altogether over 500 skill, spell, and status icons. There’s no reason to think that Clockwork Empires will be any different. (Except less with the magical spells, perhaps; That’s cultist stuff and we Don’t Approve.)

An apparently loyal subject of The Empire could be a secret Revolutionist.

An apparently loyal subject of The Empire could be a secret Revolutionist.

So, as mentioned in a previous blog post, we have thought icons to express what characters are thinking, feeling, and talking about. Being in effect an avatar of bureaucratic panopticon, somehow, cough, you get to see all of this. Your little people will say things which influence how others feel about them while, perhaps, feeling other things entirely. At this point the valid topics of conversation are entirely about the hatwear of social classes. A lower class labourer will speak of their fine flat cap, though this might not go over well with the middle class overseer who prefers a business-like bowler. Among the aristocrats there are even poetically-inclined types who deign to “slum it” and associate with their lessers while wearing the hat-wear of lessers. On the other hand there are ambitious folk who prefer to discuss hat-wear which is above their station such as the regal top hat, though due to their birth they’ll surely never gain acceptance from their Betters. It’s all very awkward and British.

Everything you could need in 64x64 pixels!

Everything you could need in 64×64 pixels!

There are also, as players of Dredmor will recall, very good reasons why I won’t be making any icons in a mere 16×16 pixels — we’ve got more UI space to play with for our target specs. Would you believe that our original plan for Dredmor was the ship as an 800×600 fixed resolution game? Terrible idea. And this time around our UI workflow doesn’t consist of me writing giant passive-aggressive documents and giving them to Nicholas for hard-coding. In C++.

I won’t get into the specifics of UI layout here because I really can’t — our entire plan, based in part on experience from Dredmor and in part from some common bloody sense, is to have a highly modifiable UI system which allows easy iteration. For instance just last week Nicholas fired up some Prison Architect (Hi Introversion! We think you’re pretty swell) and thought some of what they were doing with UI was clever so he had to try it out. He edited some XML and had an approximation working in CE before the end of the day. A few ideas we are sticking with for now, a few are still proposals based on old Bullfrog games and our company-wide Company of Heroes brawls the past few Fridays. Iteration is cheap, which allows us to experiment and rapidly react to feedback. And if you really don’t like the UI, why, you can just mod your own.

All that said, I bet we can beat that 500 icon count for Clockwork Empires. I mean heck, we’ve got like 30 different kinds of hats already, and that’s just hats. Yeah! Art is pain! (Please send wacom nibs.)

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