Category Archives: Game Design

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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Two New Screenshots

December 12, 2010 by Nicholas Vining

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

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State of the Dredmor

December 12, 2010 by Nicholas Vining

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?

December 1, 2010 by David Baumgart

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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The Nefarious Devices of Dredmor’s Dungeon

November 9, 2010 by David Baumgart

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

November 5, 2010 by David Baumgart

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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Video Games Podcasts I Listen To

July 23, 2010 by David Baumgart

Or: Why I listen to people talk about playing games instead of actually playing games.

Mostly.

I’m an artist, right? Right. I draw using my computer pretty much all the time. It’s what I do. Drawing (or ‘digital painting’ or ‘pixeling’ or whatever it is) doesn’t particularly engage the part of my brain that involves language unless I’m actually doing higher-level design. A lot of it is just painting away at something or pushing a lot of pixels. Oftentimes it’s not supremely engaging stuff like drawing lots and lots of bricks or painting lots and lots of clouds – all good and necessary things, yes, but the mind tends to wander. So I listen to stuff. Music works oftentimes, and the emotional content of the music often finds its way in to my art. Other times I want to listen to something I can think about, something relevant to what I’d like to be doing: game design.

I listen to internet audio shows about games. For some reason Apple has convinced us that these audio shows are to be called podcasts, and just as I eventually gave in to using the word “blog”, so too shall I adopt use of the word “podcast”.

These are the podcasts to which I continue to listen, with some of my thoughts.

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Game Design Dialectic: Dwarf Fortress and Goblin Camp

July 16, 2010 by David Baumgart

This is only the beginning of a story, but it could prove to be a very interesting story if it bears out. I think it already contains instructive lessons for game development and design.

On the left, Dwarf Fortress. On the right, Goblin Camp.

I hope you know about Dwarf Fortress, the very complex roguelike-lookinglike fantasy world sim / citybuilder. From a development perspective, DF is a very long-running obsessive project coded by one guy, Tarn Adams, who makes more money than I do (not difficult) entirely by donations from his fans. I admire Tarn’s goals and his creative freedom which lets him indulge his whims – I wish I could do that. I even had fun playing some Dwarf Fortress until I explored most of what there was to explore. It was sweet while it lasted, but I grew tired with the tedium of a very rough user interface and tedious gameplay.

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