Category Archives: Dungeons of Dredmor

Two New Screenshots

As promised in my previous post, here are two new Dredmor screenshots:

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State of the Dredmor

You know what? I didn’t get ANY Sewer Brew for my birthday. Not a drop. That means I’m now programming sober for the first time in ten years. Watch out, people.

A recent post from the SomethingAwful Forums states, “Well, I went to check up on Dungeons of Dredmor, but there’s been no new release information.” Well, something to that effect, anyhow, and the post wasn’t all that recent. I think it was in November. So here’s the state of the union. As a bonus, I’ve taken a few more WIP Screenshots showing off some of the new systems, which we will shove in a new post.

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What is a Warrior to do?

Combat RPGs don’t traditionally offer much active choice to a warrior character: Do you attack? Do you not attack?

Maybe you get to quaff (but never “drink”) a potion every so often. A player’s agency comes more from the set-up to combat through having a much more equipment-driven character than, say, a wizard. It is compelling to collect and use equipment, but  a warrior really ought to have something to do in combat aside from clicking “attack”.

But this is a known problem, and it has been dealt before, and cleverly.

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Dear Linux Community: We Need To Talk.

I glanced at Slashdot yesterday while bored and found an interesting article on the CDE packaging tool. An impressive piece of work, CDE automatically packages up all of your dependencies into a self-contained directory structure. If I wanted to package up Dungeons of Dredmor and to be able to guarantee that it would work on your computer, all I would have to do is to run CDE on my computer, where I know Dredmor works, and sha-zam! Instant package.

This is something I have been fretting about: how do we distribute Dredmor for Linux?

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Posted in Dungeons of Dredmor, Gaslamp, Other Games, Programming | 12 Comments

The Nefarious Devices of Dredmor’s Dungeon

Or: Mortality & Happenstance via Mechanical Means

Traps are a bit of a conundrum because it’s not generally good game design to aggravate the player by having them randomly die. Aye, The Grand Tradition of dungeon crawlers demands traps in some form, but they pose the problem of being hidden surprise! damage-dealers. If a player is walking along and gets offed by a Dwarven land mine, hilarious though it may be to randomly explode, their agency has been taken away and this is frustrating to a player.

What is one to do with traps? Read on!

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The Essential Attributes of a Dubious Hero

In which David rambles about why Caddishness is a character attribute in Dungeons of Dredmor

I was listening to some podcast on RPG design a while back, I forget the name of it (killer opening, eh?), and there was a line of thought brought up that went something like: “What is your RPG about?” “Hope.” “Why isn’t that a stat in the game?”

And this struck me: A game is about the mechanics of the game, regardless of what overt theme is overlaid in stilted cut-scenes. The optimal gameplay path is the message.

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Design Dialog

I’ve long since learned that it’s far better to present Nicholas with a fait accompli which he finds amusing to implement rather than a rational argument for a feature. Allow me to demonstrate.

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Why Do a Job Once When You Can Do It Eight Times in Only Eight Times the Time?

Quiet? Only outwardly. Our Dear Leader saw fit to allow ye players to select your own resolution rather than be limited to a proper and traditional 800×600 screen. Oh, we have such things in store. You will be able to descend far deeper into the Dungeons of Dredmor than ever imagined previously!

Now come with me and perform a cheap analogue of descending into the dungeon by scrolling down past this large image which is a crop of the title screen painting, showing how I’m expanding it to fit higher resolutions!

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