Making The Cut

I just redid the character information panel again. I had to re-arrange all the info boxes then type out the size and position of every single textbox and tooltip hotspot. It was awful. Now Nicholas gets to update the code to my specifications, the poor bastard.

Dungeons of Dredmor, as some sort of RPG, and god-help-us, as a roguelikeish game, lends itself to a maddening excess of features, ideas, items, skills, spells, potions, special abilities, factions?, unique rooms, artifacts, vengeful gods, and and.. and … Well, one of the most important points of successful game development is knowing when to cut; no, being able to cut features so that the project can ever be completed.

We have done this. No, really! A bit, at least.

Dredmor Hero dodging a blade

At least you’ve survived with piles upon piles of unique items, silly skills, and an upcoming hellishly complex crafting system, dear hero!

Take a feature and consider the code it will take to implement, then the assets it will require to look any good. Then the UI design, assets, and iteration it will take for this feature to be comprehensible and intuitive to use. Then consider how it must be tested, how it must be roughly balanced with every other feature in the game, how it must be polished. The total work which results is rather more than the mere sum of these parts.

And yet here we go, right now discussing strategies for the implementation of a completely mad crafting system.

It is a masochistic, ecstatic, infectious creativity, a fey mood, which takes us. We do it not because it’s ever a good idea but because we must.

It is the Gaslamp Way.

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

4 Responses to “Making The Cut”

  1. Lekon says:

    The gaslamp way: Cut until the blood runs gold!

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  2. Chojiro says:

    Do you have any plans to update the game after release? That is, aside from the inevitable deluge of bugs that have the discourtesy to only show up after extensive playtesting.

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    • AdminDavid Baumgart says:

      We definitely plan to update the game after release.

      Small things like simple content (adding new items, unique rooms, dungeon objects, even skills) are quite easy to add and we’ll probably do that simply because it’s cool.

      Just how far we go with it depends to some degree on the success of Dredmor, of course. If it makes financial sense (and I hope it does), we would like to do actual expansion packs which add new skill mechanics, dungeon dynamics, mustaches, tilesets, monsters, and a number of even bigger ideas.

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  3. Kyzak says:

    New mustaches, you say? I will be severely disappointed if I can’t have a handlebar mustache at some point in Dredmor’s lineage- though I do have to ask, wouldn’t this make Dredmor more of a “facial hair game” rather than an “eyebrow game”?

    On a different note, I’d love to see a blog post about your work environs sometime- have you already obtained office space, or do you all rely on social networking for communication?

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