All posts tagged with "twits"

Patch 1.0.6 Update; Dredmor Twitter Fiction Contest Results

Patch 1.0.6 has now been sent to the beta testers. As soon as we get the all clear, we’ll fire it your way. Thanks for being so patient. (Beta testers: if you’re on WINE, you can try the Linux build too! Dump everything out of your Steam install with WINE, and you should be able to just run “./Dredmor”, a little shell script which autoselects the correct build, x86 or amd64. You may have to chmod +x some files, I’m not sure.) The Changelog is still as posted, with the exception of the addition of some additional support for the WASD controls (which now break more things, open more things, flip more things, and are generally more useful than ever before) and correct proc assignment to crossbows (if you have a crossbow with Thaumites, only your crossbow will shoot Thaumites.)

In other news, we ran a 140-character Twitter fanfiction contest last week on our Twitter feed (which you can read here if you are so inclined.) A selection of the entries, and the eventual winner, has been rounded up for your pleasure…

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Posted in Dungeons of Dredmor, Gaslamp, Modding, Programming | Tagged , , , , , ,
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Preview Roundup & Beta Thoughts

These are exciting days at Gaslamp Games. Publicity is kicking up momentum and the game is nearing completion. A handful of sites have been writing previews for Dungeons of Dredmor (hey, if you’re a writer, drop us a line to the contact email in the sidebar). Our beta testers have been furiously breaking things as well and I’ve got a few thoughts on that to share.

And here’s a diggle.

But let’s have a look at those previews first eh?

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Posted in Dungeons of Dredmor | Tagged , , , , , ,
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Working hard on Dredmor beta 0.92

Let the Black Blood of the Earth flow, for Gaslamp is in crunch mode! (And I really ought to be polishing up the spells and some tilesets right now.)

This beta release is all about the spells. For example, from the school of “Mathemagic”:

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Posted in Dungeons of Dredmor | Tagged , , , , , , , ,
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Game Development Snake Oil

I am actually sick with lung flu, which means I have some time to write angry rants, inspired by things on my Twitter feed, and then post them to the company blog.
(Actually, this is just shameless bait for sites like Y Combinator, who love to hear Angry Young People railing about the world at large. I… I should give up now.)

That said, we have been falling short on technical commentary here, and I did get linked to two Twitter posts this morning that are worth discussing in some detail. So let’s have at ’em.

The first item is from id Software’s John Carmack, who does things like writing an entire photon mapper in a day and then tells people that he did it – and, it’s not a big deal, you know? His contribution to the discussion:

“Floating point trick: If ( a != a ) a is a NaN”

I took a few minutes to puzzle out how this could possibly work. It turns out that in C++ – and in fact, according to IEEE floating point standards – NaNs (or not-a-numbers) will cause ANY expression to return true if they are used in an inequality comparison. Clever!

The second item that caught my attention was an advertisement for a course with a “Certified ScrumMaster for Agile Game Development”, to be held two days before GDC. This course promises that we will, with the ScrumMaster’s help and guidance, learn such things as:

“The essentials of getting a project off on the right foot”,
“How to successfully scale Scrum methods to hundreds of participants”,
“How to help both new, and experienced teams, be more successful,”

and so on and so forth. In just two days, you too can sip at the mystical elixir of Scrum, which is guaranteed to make your game ship on time, your Metacritic scores improve, and as an added bonus it’ll make all your hair grow back and your girlfriend will stop complaining about all the overtime you put in at the office. The cost of this affair? $1500 for a two day seminar, although you get $250 off if you register early. As a bonus, after you take this course (and fill in some kind of online quiz), you too can call yourself a Certified Scrum Master!

*sigh*

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Posted in Games, Programming | Tagged , , , , , ,
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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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