Category Archives: Gaslamp

An update on updates, Workshops and workshops.

Communication is starting to get tough.  We want to tell you guys about the brand new patch that has a bunch of awesome things in it, but it’s not quite ready.  I can tell you about one thing that we haven’t told you yet though, regarding mods.  I also want to talk about our lack of communication regarding the state of Odin.

First, Mods.  We want to give the mod community a chance to get these fantastic creations in the hands of more people, get more feedback happening, more collaboration, and more generally awesome stuff coming out for people to play with.  To do this, we are piloting a project with Valve and the Steam Workshop platform.  Users will be able to search for mods, comment on them, rate and share them.  The forum will still be here and we will do everything we can to make sure that the mods are available for non-steam users as well, but they have built this fantastic tool, it would be a shame not to use it to let people share content more easily.  Details on how you guys can access the tools for this below.

We also want to tell you all about our new project: the real name of Project Odin, some screen shots that we have been working on, and answer any questions you might have about how it’s not a tower defence game.  The reason we haven’t done this quite yet is that we need to make sure we’re doing things right: registering trademarks, copyrighting what we can, and all that other stuff that keeps games from being duplicated before they’re finished.  It’s lame, I know.  It’s also a big enough problem that it deserves a bit of our time.  We didn’t do a lot of this stuff before Dredmor’s release, and we were lucky that it wasn’t a problem.  I’d rather that we didn’t have to be lucky again.  We are all really excited about this project, and it’s killing us to have to wait to tell you.  Trust me, game development is way easier when you get to talk about it.

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Posted in Dungeons of Dredmor, Gaslamp | Tagged , , , , , ,
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The new Gaslamp Games office

As insinuated and/or implied via the Twittersphere and elsewise, we’ve finally got some pictures of the new office to show.

Left: Our neighbours' lovely building gives inspiration to texture artists everywhere. Right: Practicing the traditional Scottish art of the minifridge-toss. Joseph is wary; Nicholas don't care.

The move itself was moderately grueling. Nicholas and I agreed that the ability to live-tweet our adventures through darkest Richmond to find IKEA form the most compelling reason for either of us to finally get a smartphone. While heading in a direction that turned out to be about 270 degrees off my intended course, I sighted a Tofu Soup House and had to be restrained, then some point we crossed the Fraser river, broke an axle, someone got dysentery, and Nicholas and I finally found the Swedish Death Star and set ourselves up for some Sherlock-style jokes, somehow.

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Patch beta, Project Odin, and another Secret Project

Wow, it’s been a long time since we’ve posted anything on the blog.  Sorry about that guys.

The big patch beta has started, those of you who are interested in trying it out can take a look here.  There are still a few bugs in it, but we can use all the help we can get in testing it out.  Windows only for now, OSX and Linux on the way.

The team for Project Odin is almost complete: Joseph Nejat is joining our sodden ranks as 3D Character Artist. We are really looking forward to having him on the team largely due to his awesome English accent. And it’s becoming evident that we probably need to update our group portrait sometime soon =)

We are busy organizing our notes in preparation for finally releasing the details of Project Odin; right now we’re stuck on the name, but we should be coming to some consensus soon. (See: THE PIT.)

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Posted in Dungeons of Dredmor, Gaslamp | Tagged , , , , , , , , ,
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Patch 1.0.10 Changelog

EDIT: We totally forgot to mention that we’re PC Gamer’s Indie Game of the Year for 2011. Yeah. Oops. In celebration, we drew a wallpaper which they’re putting up at some point in the near future; we’ll host it over here as soon as they give us the go-ahead.

Gaslamp News

We have outgrown our offices, and are moving again! As previously briefly mentioned, the new offices have a spiral staircase and remind Daniel of the Ghostbusters (no pole though… yet). I interviewed for a job in this building eleven years ago, back when Black Box Games was still an independent studio and before they were purchased by EA. The thought of now renting an office, for Gaslamp, in the same building … is a little mindblowing.

I also have a giant mechanical clicking keyboard of doom now. It’s extremely noisy, and everybody else in the office hates it. I love it.

Dredmor News

Now that things are a little more organized on the Odin front, and now that our days are no longer a giant sink-hole of meetings and job interviews, we’ve found some time to finish pushing that patch out the door. A beta should be floating through the IRC channel any day now; at that point, we’ll have a week of testing, and then we will push everything to Steam, Desura, and the Humble Bundle. The current changelog is below the cut, as well as a handful of Odin teasers.

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Posted in Dungeons of Dredmor, Gaslamp, Modding | Tagged , , , , , ,
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More General Bits of News

Simba!

Some more quick news fluff from the front:

  • Congratulations to Gaslamp Programmer-Affiliate Ryan C. Gordon (better known as “icculus”, the great and knowledgeable), who is now the proud father of a lovely daughter. (This has slightly delayed our incoming patch yet more; just before dashing to the hospital, Ryan immediately said “Here! Have an entirely new SDL library and audio driver!” This fixes a lot of the stuttering issues, as well as various performance issues and crashes under OS X, but I’m currently quietly poking his changelist with a stick, somewhat afraid that it will bite me.) We have celebrated by having Chris Triolo produce this small homage to the Lion King.
  • We are pleased to announce that Sean Hamilton has joined the Gaslamp Games team. Sean will be working with us on Project Odin; since his arrival on the project, he has already produced three crates, a selection of small shanty houses, two logs, one ingot, and a mineshaft. Auspicious.
  • We are still looking for a character modeler and a gameplay programmer to do some contract work on Dredmor with us. I think we’ve got everything else taken care of  at this point. Exciting. If you think you’d be a good fit for either of these things, please drop us a line at jobs@gaslampgames.com ; I think, at this point, that we are restricting ourselves to locals after all for the most part.
  • There is vague talk of doing another Dredmor DLC pack, either as an additional paid expansion (of a form to be determined) or a free DLC package of some sort to be determined. Other than our continued commitment to patching and general subterfuge, is there anything else specific that you’d like to see from us? Let us know in the comments.
  • Finally, here’s another Odin teaser.
Posted in Dungeons of Dredmor, Games, Gaslamp | Tagged , , ,
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The Indie Things.

Brief status update on the goings on at Gaslamp Central:

  • We are still interviewing people for the programming positions we posted here, so you are not too late to submit.  At this point though, we reserve the right to charge you a late fee of beer or donuts.
  • I will be dropping by the Global Game Jam at the University of Victoria this evening at around 5pm to say hi, see what the whole thing is about, maybe pitch some ideas and participate, who knows.  The whole thing sounds really interesting: you can find more info about it here.  If you are interested in seeing what it’s all about but don’t want to do any development, evidently you can sit there and heckle us while you play Minecraft!
  • We are super excited that we may be moving into some office space that is sufficiently insulated that yesterday’s coffee doesn’t freeze in the night.  Woo!  Also, it reminds me of the offices of the Ghostbusters, which is potentially even more important.
  • Lastly, we received word this morning that we are in PC Gamer’s March issue listed as number 58 of the top 100 video games of all time, which, frankly, floored each of us. Seriously.  We are staggered and supremely honored.  The issue hasn’t made it into our cold Canadian mittens yet, but I am certain that we stand with some very illustrious company.  We know that we owe all of our success to you guys, and we hope to continue to make you happy for years to come.
Posted in Gaslamp, Interviews | 13 Comments

Teensy Patch Hold-up

There’s been a little, unforeseen patch hiccup. Interestingly, this isn’t as a result of Dredmor, but as part of a Dredmor-related secret project that we have been working on, quietly and mysteriously. We’re not saying what it is yet, save that it is something that a lot of people have expressed interest in.

As a result of this work, we’ve had to remove two libraries from Dredmor, in order to replace them with… well, equivalents that are suitable. We have only just finished rewriting all of Dredmor’s audio code to use OpenAL; because this is a fairly major rewrite, we actually have to sit down and run a Real Beta now instead of just testing the bugfixes, vaguely making sure we didn’t break anything major, and calling it a day.

Some test binaries will probably show up in the IRC channel either late today or early tomorrow, and based on how well that turns out we will let you know what a better ETA for the patch looks like. This is mainly us being ultra-cautious and trying to make sure that we don’t shower you all with broken pixels and static in our quest for increased portability.

That said, the new audio is a heck of a lot better, and also fixes all the little lag issues when changing music or wandering in and out of stores. We’ve also managed to cut down on our memory use a bit as a result of this secret project, although we still have further work to do on this front. Levels now use about 20 megabytes less memory on average. It’s not quite enough for our svelte new lifestyle, but it’s a start.

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Posted in Dungeons of Dredmor, Games, Gaslamp | Tagged , , , ,
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SOPA and PIPA

First I should say that Gaslamp Games is a company.  We sell products, and our motivations as individuals are swayed by the fact that our personal successes are tied to the successes of our company.  We have a vested interest in allowing Gaslamp to be successful.  That said, Gaslamp Games would cease to exist as the entity that you know and love if SOPA and PIPA are passed.

If SOPA passes, it requires that we censor each and every post or message within our blog posts and our forums to ensure that no piracy or hints at piracy are posted.  If we aren’t successful, we could become blacklisted and unreachable without so much as a chance to defend ourselves.  What’s more, the bills together give internet service providers the ability to make these decisions on their own, only requiring “credible evidence” of piracy-oriented content.  We simply can’t afford to police our community to a degree where we could be somewhat assured to be operating within the parameters set out by these bills.  What’s more, we don’t want to police our users.  Our community, like every other healthy community, depends upon some degree of freedom of expression.

Gaslamp’s vested interest aside, there are some very serious freedom of speech issues.  I am no expert here but I have read a lot about SOPA and PIPA over the last week or so and I strongly urge you to look into them on your own, and of course, to try to hear both sides of the story.  While it is our opinion that SOPA and PIPA are too heavy-handed in their attempt to lessen a problem which is a serious concern, it is most important that you know what is going on and have the opportunity to share an informed opinion with your government representatives.

Posted in Gaslamp | 15 Comments