Dredmor Beta v0.93.2 : Crafting & Traps

0.93.2 is now out. The big piles of Fun here are crafting and traps. Shall I? Yes I shall: Let’s start with a screenshot.

Click to view full size.

I’ve got just about the full array of crafting skills here and am in the process of making some gold ingots to sell to Brax, whose potion shop I am standing in. The distilling widget has an outline of an apple in the ingredients box because I’ve selected the “Hard Cider” recipe.

You can also drag the inventory bag around to keep it in less-annoying spots on the screen. Yes, Dredmor is on the bleeding edge ofย  UI design!

So what’s in? Well:

Crafting

  • Alchemizing potions in colors from Turquoise to Azure. Drink ’em to find out what they do! Also, for example, a historically semi-accurate system for the creation of Aqua Regia from five base ingredients processed through four stages. Use this to throw at enemies or produce devious traps.
  • Smithing of arms and armour (and I appreciate now why so few games have unique icons for material types and quality levels. This didn’t stop me from a bit of excess, of course).
  • Tinkering of various devices, particularly traps, ranging from the Shoddy Dwarven IED to the Brimstone Cloudburster Mine!
  • Also fungus. It’s kinda weird!

Traps

  • Yep, lots of traps. They’re random! … And Nicholas was good enough to implement two more stats to the game to handle trap visibility and trap disarming.
  • With proper skill, you can disarm traps, gaining both experience and the ability to re-lay the trap in a place of your choosing.
  • Gargoyles on the dungeon walls will spit bolts of iron, acid, and possibly ice at you — or whoever is in the way. (Have fun stepping on and off a pressure plate while that Octo gets pounded by javelins.)
  • Also: Cannons? They don’t crash the game anymore!

Right, more screenshots:

You can see here a gargoyle which would shoot at me if I stepped on that plate there. Also a fun firespout mine.

This Djinn followed me over a toxic gas sprayer mine which I was lucky enough to avoid triggering. The cloud effect is a great way to show off our Highly Advanced sprite particle system. New tileset for this level, too.

What shall I make today? Too bad I neglected to smelt any useful metals, all I’ve got is a pile of 10 gold ingots. Clearly I’ll have to implement useless (but shiny, also expensive) crafted gold armour and weapons before full release.

Have fun, testers!

And for me? Back to toiling in the pixelmines — we’ve got a few higher-level gameplay items to do in 0.94 before we’re more or less feature-complete, at which point we proceed with a few tough courses of testing, polishing, and balancing before shipping this thing.

(It’s so close I can taste it. It tastes like victory.)

Posted in Dungeons of Dredmor | Tagged , , , , , ,
5 Comments

5 Responses to “Dredmor Beta v0.93.2 : Crafting & Traps”

  1. Kyzak says:

    Can you taste the lingering tinge of monetary profit as well?

    { reply }
    • AdminDavid Baumgart says:

      Haha, ohhh boy.

      Short answer is ‘no’ – I mostly just feel really poor. We’ve been bootstrappin’ this thing for /years/, my friend. So I tell you: when I see any profit, I will be shocked and elated … and it will be wonderful.

      { reply }
  2. GhostLyrics says:

    I seriously hope there are better or other possibilities to navigate through the offered crafting options than just the two arrows at the right of the list, since that means that in higher skill levels you will be constantly scrolling down to select whatever you want to produce.
    One way to work around this issue would be to implement material icons at on the left to choose which things you want to use while crafting and filter down the list of possible options (or item icon to filter by item class you want to produce).

    { reply }
    • AdminDavid Baumgart says:

      You raise a very good point. We’ll put in some alternate recipe navigation options.

      At the very least, I think we’ll do a ‘grid view’ of outputs to fit 25 items per page.

      Sorting by input would probably be a bit difficult considering the sheer number of inputs, so the sorting by output type sounds rather more likely. Nicholas is going to complain, but it IS a good idea (and it’ll encourage him to make some very nice UI building tools for the next game).

      Thanks for this observation/prodding, I appreciate the outside perspective.

      { reply }
      • GhostLyrics says:

        I just happen to have a few lectures on usability right now at university. ๐Ÿ˜€
        Besides I’ve just already seen too many games suffering precisely the same issue (e.g. Mass Effect 1’s Inventory on the console versions).

        Glad that I was able to help. Subscribed to the blog some time ago. ๐Ÿ™‚

        { reply }

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