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Another day, another late blog post. I probably owe other Gaslampers some kind of savory pastry or something. Maybe a delicious soy-based iced confection? I don’t know.

Most of my day was spent putting together the finishing touches on the accompanying source code for my Game Developer Magazine article. (Yes, I’m pimping the article again. If you like it, tell the good folks at Game Developer to keep the hits rolling.) I spent five hours fixing a race condition, which is ironic because the article is about how to *avoid* race conditions. I still managed to create one in the code for the message-passing architecture mentioned in the article, and it’s taken me a good long time to figure out what the heck was causing it.  Hopefully my learning experience will save somebody else – maybe one of you! – some trouble down the road.

{ read this article }

I had an original post here, which I made, and it was late, and then everybody decided that it was too incendiary. Therefore, it has been relegated to the bin of Posts That We Will Save For When We Require Webtraffic. I should mention, incidentally, that we have a blogging schedule:

Sunday – Nicholas
Monday – David
Tuesday – Derek
Friday – Daniel

I think that’s correct, anyhow. I’m just running late because of Easter, but I have returned from the grave in order to provide you with inspiration for how to better live your life. It seemed…. appropriate, somehow.

Instead, let me congratulate the Dwarf Fortress crew on their recent release on April Fools’ Day. Dwarf Fortress continues to be a source of supreme inspiration, mainly because it takes normal expectations about how to make a good video game and turns them upside down on their arse. I will readily admit that we stole a few ideas from Dwarf Fortress: in particular, I will readily confess that Dwarf Fortress was what originally inspired us to put random names on everything. It started with a simple conversation between myself and somebody else, where one of us said “Hey, let’s put random decorations on artifacts.” Next thing you know, we had maces decorated with tawdry post-it-notes and clapped-out llama fur. At this point, Dredmor spiralled off into the realms of chaos as we asked ourselves, “What else can we do with this text database?” Artifact names were the next logical conclusion, as were monster names. At some point afterwards, I wanted to make it so that certain rooms would be given names, and then decided that one of the most entertaining things in Dredmor was exploring the dungeon and discovering that you had entered the Diseased Maze of Pickles.

There have been a few other sources of indie inspiration in how we run things at Gaslamp Games. We completely stole our PR model from the Wolfire guys, who first showed the indie community how important blogging actually is when you need to produce PR. In-house content is cheap, and if you can continually send eyeballs to your website, then so much the better. When we developed our new web site, I kept sending people over to the Wolfire blog so that they could get an idea of what I ultimately think has been the most successful model for indie self-promotion to date; ultimately, this is why we ended up using WordPress for our blogging system. Well done, Derek, for getting that set up. I think that the next game will further reflect other lessons that we’ve learned from other independent developers, both in terms of how to – and how not to – make a game that sells well, and lets us stay in business.