We have now all safely returned from Penny Arcade Expo. I’m going to write up a brief description of my adventures, but in general I think we all had a good time. I’m not sure if it was particularly good as a networking event, but I did more networking than Daniel said would happen, and I also got to just spend some quality time with people who I haven’t seen in a long time, including my friends from Vancouver. What may be more valuable about PAX is that it reaffirmed my belief that Dredmor is something that people will understand, and will appreciate; furthermore, it reaffirms my belief that independent game developers like Gaslamp Games do actually matter, and that people do actually care about what we produce and what we create. Sixty thousand nerds like gaming enough, in all of its forms, to show up in Seattle for an entire weekend; what other conclusion can we draw but that video games matter to people, and somehow manage to touch their lives?

In the mean time, it’s back to work. A mea culpa: we were hoping to get a finished version of the game out by the end of the summer, but our experience with the 0.8 beta taught us that we need to deal with the last of our UI issues before this can happen. We also have decided that we need to perform some additional work before we ship to ensure that the player is consistently motivated to keep exploring as he goes through the dungeon, and that he gets to experience the fun bits of Dredmor sooner, rather than later. (We have a lot of the “fun” spells wadded up in the tail end of the skill tree, for instance; this kind of sucks.) We all watched the recent Elemental: War of Magic shipping fiasco — I will probably write more about this later — but it should remind all of us that it is important to take the time to make sure that your game is done right.

So when will the game come out? Well, Duke Nukem Forever showed up on the show floor, and I refuse to ship after Duke Nukem Forever. So hopefully this fall sometime. Our next immediate milestone is getting a build of Dredmor done for the Independent Games Festival; the IGF has a deadline of October 18th, and I am hoping that we can get our next beta build – beta 0.9 – out by then. We have already redone the bottom UI bar – again! – and hopefully this will be the last iteration through. (Short version: the unified item/skills bars are now gone, but the matrix based display for the skills remains; also, ranged attacks are now treated as skills as opposed to something that just sometimes happens when you don’t expect it to do so.) We are also planning on adding a few other niceties to 0.9 that will hopefully fix some of the major outstanding UI issues that 0.8 uncovered, as well as just adding more of the strange, entertaining fun that you are all so eagerly craving. A *lot* of work has gone into Dredmor since the version that we submitted to the PAX 10 competition this year; the version that we submitted was version 0.2, and we are now halfway through the road to 0.9. In that time period, we have resolved approximately four hundred and forty six bugs.

Two notable new design features:

Anyhow, I have bugs to fix. See y’all later!