Category Archives: Dungeons of Dredmor

Dredmor Skill Icons

January 28, 2011 by David Baumgart

I’ve just finished the latest round of revisions to the entire pile of spell icons. This is just one task which is part of the massive spell overhaul we’re doing for Dredmor’s beta 0.92 (when I’m not getting distracted drawing the disembodied heads of founding members of Gaslamp Games).

Man, there are a lot of these buggers, but they do get easier (and better) every time I redraw them. Telling you anything about them would ruin the fun*, so I’ve just thrown together a collection of some of my favorite spell and skill icons for your enjoyment:

Still have to draw animated effects for most of these. Urrgh.

* whereas “the fun” refers to how much fun I have as people try to guess what the hell some of these skills do.

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Gameplay as a Hierarchy of Cycles

January 23, 2011 by David Baumgart

I’m going to quote a post in whole that covered most of what I was meaning to write on this subject but far more succinctly than I imagined possible. Brenda Braithwaite’s post “Design Truth 1”:

Focus on second-to-second play first. Nail it. Move on to minute-to-minute, then session-to-session, then day-to-day, then month-to-month (and so on). If your second-to-second play doesn’t work, nothing else matters. Along these lines, if your day-to-day fails, no one will care about month-to-month, either.

This  seems like an excellent imperative to good game design – especially a mechanics-based game. In counterpoint, (though I could quibble about “good” vs “successful” design) whole games are built on hooking players with long-term investment, be it emotional, social, or time (read: sunk cost fallacy), rather than refined short-term, low-level gameplay (see: grindy MMOs, Zynga), or some kind of story that players get invested in despite the gameplay (see: Final Fantasy games). I think an argument can be made for classifying games according to higher-level design philosophy. But yes, Dredmor’s core is certainly in the mechanics. Well; the mechanics and the insanity, which might count as “story” content though ours is decidedly nonlinear. But I digress. I’ll be doing a lot of that.

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Making The Cut

January 13, 2011 by David Baumgart

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!

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Dredmor v0.90 Screenshots

January 10, 2011 by David Baumgart

For your viewing pleasure I’ve taken some new screenshots of Dredmor in fabulous HD-o-vision for you to pick over and tear apart, pixel by pixel.

Dungeons of Dredmor beta screenshot showing Octo interrupting cheese-plundering Dungeons of Dredmor beta screenshot skill tome, choosing skills

1. An Octo has rudely interrupted my cheese-plundering. And those skull bolts are amazing, except they’re doing the wrong damage type right now.

2. Deciding what skill to upgrade next; I settled on taking the next level of Dual Wield because it increased my ability to counterattack.

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100th Post! Dredmor Release Date! New Video!

January 9, 2011 by Derek Bonner

Happy Hundredth Post! In celebration of this fact, and our live Twitter debugging experiment, we present a special video:

It’s official: Dungeons of Dredmor is going to be headed out in April, 2011. Stay tuned for an exact release date; we’re just signing little pieces of paper.

Some additional website news:

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Happy New Year!

January 3, 2011 by Nicholas Vining

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.

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Indie Game Bingo

December 31, 2010 by David Baumgart

Let’s play Indie Game Bingo!

Yeah, so I’m a year or so behind on this one. Sue me. I saw this on an old thread on TIGsource here and a not terribly well populated blog here.

Here’s the blank sheet so you can follow along (or fill it out for your own games!):

Dungeons of Dredmor indie game bingo

Now, how does Dredmor fare?

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Commitment Anxiety in Skill Selection

December 20, 2010 by David Baumgart

In the current revision pass on Dungeons of Dredmor we’ve finally had to make some hard choices about what skills mean to a player’s character. Thus far, all skills have been more or less freely available to select from any point for testing purposes. But if every skill is always available then by the time a player earns a few levels they shall have had the chance to buy a completely new set of skills which would render the importance of their initial choices mostly meaningless. We want every playthrough of Dredmor to be about an experience which is meaningfully different from a playthrough with different starting selections — so far as we are able to make it so.

Dungeons of Dredmor hero choosing skills

Which will you choose?

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