Welcome to the modern era of gaming! In a supreme flush of forward thinking and divinely-inspired game dev smarts, we’ve implemented an alternative UI for enemy engagement, giving players the option to select a foe and kill it with the help of a quick options menu instead of the classic DD fighting style. Great for mouse users and surprise-click death victims!

The old Kingdom continues to be erased in favour of newer, more accessible interface panels. Information now flows throughout the screen like a unique solid/liquid hybrid of manna and ambrosia. Word has it that next week we’ll be seeing the final round of art for Kingdom buildings, too. Hooray!

This week’s blog post is short and sweet, as we continue to focus on interface changes and improvements. We’ve struck at one or two bugs where possible (including that pesky Gaan-Telet dungeon generation error), so check the changelog for details:

Fixes:

• Added default backing panel with kingdom information.
• moved profile change and kingdom gold to default panel.
• Added optional active quest field to Adventuring Permit.
• Added dungeon/quest previews when mousing over buttons in Adventuring Permit.
• Boss information hidden for vicious dungeons, and Gaan-Telet.
• Added a strike pip to show when enemies get an attack in between player hits (e.g knockback).
• Migrated god panel to paper look and feel.
• Going to map screen when a dungeon is selected should now show it as selected.
• Contiguous terrain checker added to several dungeon generators
• Added option to select new combat UI from game menu
• Bug with very long Enemy effect lists being recalculated no longer leaves empty spaces

As is evident by our last few updates, we’re currently making a real push to polish off the interface in DD. I’m sure any coder can tell you that this is not ‘fun’, but it is necessary. You need your interface to convey all the important information players need to make decisions, but at the same time, looking at a page of numbers that resembles an excel spreadsheet is not compelling. So you do your best to group the information and present it in an elegant way, while your overworked artists finish off a different part of the game.

Soon enough we’ll turn the artists loose on the game’s information displays. They’ll do some mockups of how things could look, and there will be some back and forth as they try to make your horrible layout choices look great, while keeping all the relevant info visible and accessible. After that, it’s importing all the art assets into the game (trying to squeeze as many of them as possible into a single sprite sheet), and then integrating the art and the info so it looks as good as the mockups, but is still dynamic.

We’re going for a particular look with the DD Kingdom. We want you to feel like the administrator, leafing through papers about which buildings are in need of upgrades, which trophies are lacking, and filling out/approving permits for the latest adventurer who wants to try their luck out in a dungeon. Up until now, we’ve always made the ‘adventuring permit’ the default side panel for the Kingdom, and while this serves a fine purpose for letting players navigate choices of going on an adventure, it’s not really necessary while just administering the Kingdom.

This week you’ll get the first look at the admin backing panel. We’ll add more stuff to it in the future, and once the artists get a shot at it, I’m sure it’ll look a lot nicer. In the meantime though, it gives you a definite feeling of separation between administering your Kingdom, and preparing a brave adventurer for their impending death.

This week, we’ve been putting our work into the default Kingdom and map side panels, both of which have been in sore need of updating for quite a while. The obsolete information displays and quest listings have left the scene, replaced by stuff that’s easier to use and much friendlier on the eyes (our Kingdom Advisor panel will be making a return later in a different and much more impactful form).

We’ve also managed to properly implement regeneration trails in-dungeon, which is a huge relief for us. As it turns out, teaching people about the marriage of exploration and regeneration is a rather thorough exercise in pulling teeth. Visually reinforcing where one’s health comes from – and where it ends up – is one of our most vital weapons in the war of understanding. Perhaps we’ll write a post sometime about common gamer expectations versus departures from the norm, because this issue alone has given us more pain than third-degree burns at a salt convention.

The radial menus mentioned in this week’s dev blog aren’t in the game yet, because we want to polish them a bit more (not much use giving people an alternative interface yet if it’s not 100% convenient to use, right?).

Aside from one or two changes which could be considered bug fixes more than anything else, we don’t really have much in the way of balance adjustment for you this week. Graphical improvement, however, marches proudly on. Changelog follows:

Fixes:

• Major kingdom panel overhaul.
• Fixed crash with reclaiming locker items.
• Explorer Guild interface cleaned up
• Fixed issue where locker items wouldn’t show after building upgrade
• Jehora now responds properly to B2P enemy reveals
• New animations for health and mana regeneration
• More status effect graphics included

Long story short: the above mouthful of a title is just our fancy way of saying that DD’s gonna get some cute little radial menus soon. Booyah!

This has been a long-time goal of ours for two reasons. One: we’ve always been meaning to build menu systems that are slightly friendlier towards touch interfaces (because, you know, we haven’t forgotten about that huge mobile fanbase awaiting us on release). Two: among the crew at QCF, I’m pretty sure I’m the only one who still insists on using pure mouse controls when playing the game. Seriously, I’ve broken the hotkey system about two or three times without even realising it because I really just don’t give a crap about that part of the game (very sorry, keyboard fans — one of the other devs will probably step in and give you those highly sought-after arrow controls before full release, though).

That said, I’m really being quite silly because mouse-only has some pretty heavy drawbacks. For a start, I absolutely hate having to go back and forth between the inventory panel and the enemy that I’m fighting. Really wrecks my day.

Hence my personal drive for the new radial menu, under the guise of a totally legitimate QCF Design advancement for the sake of control and compatibility across multiple platforms. Under this system, whenever the player clicks on an enemy (or wall, or other interactive stuff), the game will perform a quick scan of the items in the inventory panel and provide useful shortcuts to any that are applicable in the current situation: glyphs, once-off attack items and perhaps even humble consumables such as potions (depending on whether or not they’ll clutter the environment too much).

Need to wear down the Tower of Goo with a clustertruck of BURNDAYRAZ? Wanna spam BYSEPPS at a resistance-stacking foe? Need to quickly and conveniently nom a few walls with ENDISWAL to build up protection? Not a problem! These formerly tedious chores are gonna be a breeze with the new radial menus, maybe to the extent you’ll stop caring about keyboard shortcuts altogether (though this is much easier if you never started in the first place).

We’re not 100% sure if we’re going to roll out the new system just yet, but we’ll probably add an option to experiment with it soon.

As those of you who read our blog post on the subject are already aware, we’re trying to get certain tasks and game areas done and dusted in a very definite manner. We’ve already abandoned most trivial balancing concerns (favouring user interface and player expectation problems) and we’d like to get the Kingdom locked down soon, too. Expect regular poking at that over the next few weeks.

Since the changelog generally does a good job of explaining what already IS changing, we’ll mention here that the coming weeks are also going to see more changes made to the in-dungeon interface, mostly related to combat interactions and supporting animations for “everyday” stat adjustments.

We’ve been receiving a lot of feedback from new players recently about their experiences with the early stages of DD. Our thanks to all of you – even the horribly confused ones. Especially the horribly confused ones.

Slowly but surely, our Kingdom is winning the war against its greatest and most long-standing nemesis: poor UI. The changelog that follows chronicles just one battle in this epic, years-long conflict:

Fixes:

• Added click protection after failed cast events, attacking only possible after moving the mouse.
• Changed building panels to be side panels.
• Fixed a bug where preps were being added to incorrect buildings.
• Fixed a bug where Thief Den preps could be over the change profile button.
• No longer possible to go to map, char, or prep select screen until the guild is upgraded to lvl1.
• Fixed a bug where mousing over some images could cause s subtle shift.
• Conversion bonus effect capped at 100%
• Some tutorial messages adjusted
• Northern Desert now spawns two bosses at once
• Vicious variant dungeons given their own names
• Agbaar’s Academy now unlocks at the correct time
• Freshly upgraded buildings open their panels correctly
• Expanded effects panel won’t open if no effects exist
• More generator tweaks to eliminate cases of cut-off dungeon areas
• Potion kit resets properly when cancelling / reselecting dungeon runs
• Second round of effect graphics updated.

This is doubly true of a project that’s got a budget and a limited runway in terms of when you can afford to still be working on this thing… So during a some recent time off during a public holiday, inbetween trampolining and exploring the mountains along our south coast, I had the chance to take a step back from the work-face and consider a few things.

The biggest question: Is the Kingdom worth it?

Specifically, is the graphical representation of the Kingdom in Desktop Dungeons worth it? It performs fine as a progression menu in the game, it gives players meaningful goals and manages quests, etc. That’s all great, but do we need it to look as detailed as we’ve been trying to make it?

The background on the Kingdom’s “new look” (which to us isn’t new at all) is that Lurk first drew a few Kingdom concepts back in the early days of us starting to work on ways to expand Desktop Dungeons into something better than the free alpha. His concepts were great and quickly got us thinking about a lush field, full of upgradable buildings and quirky little touches. The idea totally blew away the alpha’s ugly starting screen with its incomprehensible options, but the sad truth is that the actual Kingdom menu that had been in the beta for so long was the result of us crunching like mad to get the game playable before GDC 2011. It was, as many of you know, another ugly collection of (often incomprehensible) buttons…

We only recently managed to replace that menu with something resembling the Kingdom concepts of old, why did it take us so long? Well, it turns out that getting all that art to play nicely with progression is incredibly tricky. Finding an artist that could take on Lurk’s singularly detailed painted style was one thing (Hi Dorianne!), but we also had to do a lot of engineering to make it work the way we wanted it to.

I spent 4 months on a tool that would allow Dorianne to work on the Kingdom in a similar way to how she’d worked wonders with the tilesets. We had endless back and forth sessions on what individual buildings should look like and how they interacted with their neighbors from both a graphical and functional perspective as a sort of stealth menu. And it’s worth noting that this wasn’t an acrimonious process! We were all pretty happy with everything, it was just taking forever. It didn’t really matter that the buildings and their upgrades were all written up in the game’s design wiki years ago, things had to be concepted, painted, re-sampled to lower resolutions, touched up, polished, re-drawn, transferred to polys, integrated into display groups, logically tied to mouse actions and put into the overall progression before they were even viewable in the game. Yes, the LayerSet editor allowed us to do WYSIWYG edits, but that mostly resulted in tons of re-drawing and polishing, which took up tons of time.

Time which we’re starting to have problems affording.

So, the question burned away while I was trying to remember how to stop pulling to the right during backflips: If we don’t have the fully-featured Kingdom we see in our heads, what takes its place? Once I got back to the office, I lobbed the same question at Marc and we tried to be as ruthless as possible. We decided that we needed to have the Kingdom done and dusted by the end of this month. If that meant going with a simpler, less rich version of the Kingdom screen that was essentially a skin over simpler buttons, so be it. The deciding factor would be how efficient we could get with the production of the Kingdom we really wanted, so out came the big lists of stuff that needed doing and we crunched at that until we had a critical path.

We presented Dorianne with both options, the cut down Kingdom as a recovery plan if we didn’t get far enough on the full thing’s milestones this week and next. Dorianne told us how we could help it all happen faster too and a significant chunk of my time has moved from coding to managing art… How are we doing so far? Well, I’ll let you judge for yourselves:

This week is heavier on bugfixes again, but we’ve made a few interface and design tweaks according to recent player concerns (don’t get too excited about balance though, we’re keeping our interference super light on that from now on).

The new effects icons should start rolling out this week, and will continue doing so for a while (you may remember us teasing the concepts for those in previous blog images). We’ve also got more significant plans for Kingdom interface improvements which will hopefully be gracing your screens next week. We’re not just talking about artwork, here – extra user interface optimisations are lurking off the port bow, cap’n.

A few other ragtag changes of note: we’ve done teensy tiny tweaks to the Tinker and Transmuter challenges which should make them more readable and consistently doable (mostly by massaging the RNG, so let’s see how well a more subtle approach works). We’ve also done away with the initial buying of prep slots, at least for now, so hopefully that’ll make the play experience a bit smoother in this area.

That’s it for now! The rest is detailed in the changelog. Because it’s the changelog that you both deserve and need right now. It’s kinda like some sort of double hero, maybe? Or maybe just an obscenely stretched pop culture reference. Either way, it follows:

Fixes:

• Fixed a bug where prep selection outlines were showing up prematurely.
• Fixed a bug where early dungeon images would persist until another building was moused over.
• Added failsafe for ‘not earning gold’ bug. Gold should now be earned, and tracked.
• Added tracking for ‘only 2 potions in shop’ bug.
• Vicious token is now counted as above 100% for completion percentage.
• Added buttons to switch between class/badges view in dungeon info panel.
• Fixed bug with Berserker, Rogue, Paladin and Monk effect application order.
• Added more protection to item preview windows to try and prevent edge-case crashes.
• Status effect icon update round 1.
• Preparations on some buildings are now awarded for free.
• Minor adjustments to Transmuter Silver, Tinker Gold and Pactmaker set pieces
• Potential crash fixed in Tinker Gold
• Revenant movements now compatible with Fighter’s Monster Sense
• Island generators should no longer create inaccessible land masses.

When parts of QCF Design went to good ol’ San Fran for this year’s GDC, I opted to stay on my home continent due to a combination of local life admin and an extreme hatred of sleeping in airport lounges between flights.

I spent a lot of that time working in the office of another South African game dev studio known as Free Lives, the chaps responsible for the ever-excellent BROFORCE. They’re a great crew and I really like what they’re doing for South Africa’s presence in game development (Evan Greenwood – God King And Ex Chief Beard Cultivator of Free Lives – just recently presented a talk at A MAZE in Germany). But although this blog post was originally going to be about them, I realised after a draft or two that my time spent with these guys has inspired me to talk about the broader dev scene in our country and what I consider to be our primary challenges as a group of developers trying to build momentum in Africa.

In a nutshell, precious few game devs in South Africa have any idea what the rest are doing or how they’re doing it. It’s all delightfully (distressingly?) ad-hoc, and hopping between offices is an interesting and educational experience because everybody is trying something different according to their own mixture of global industry knowledge, local industry knowledge and gut feelings. QCF Design, despite the success it has enjoyed so far, is still struggling to figure out a lot of stuff. So is Free Lives. And the same goes for everyone else who tries to start a company here.

It makes for some rather weird game studio structures – at QCF, our freelancers and correspondents heavily outnumber the humble “in-office” crew of three programmers (all other talent being distributed across some rather radical geographic extremes). This means that the heart of our studio is surprisingly detached from the majority of our studio, which causes all of the communication and workflow hassles one would expect. Free Lives expanded from a lone developer to a crew of six (plus freelancers) in the space of a year, all working in half an office room (shared, interestingly enough, with former employer and fellow game studio Tasty Poison).

South Africa still has a little trouble supporting and legitimising its own game developers. The industry is small, poorly-recognised and rather heavily misunderstood by anyone in our country with the actual means and capital to financially back a big studio (“Wut are gaemz?” asks many a local venture capitalist). Practically everyone is indie – companies who try to build something bigger with the standard model of publisher support tend to struggle as much as any game developer would, with the added burden of working not only against the standard industry demands, but their own relative isolation.

Stuff that seems to work just fine overseas often turns out to be a really, really poor bet locally. In South African game development, practically everyone is still a newcomer, practically everything is untested, and our own government still classifies games as films due to a rather bizarre set of technicalities put in motion by bureaucracy years ago (you don’t want to know how much legal awkwardness this causes). We have to take these things into account when we make decisions about anything.

Want to be an engine coder? You’ll probably need to adjust your attitude or go overseas. Want to work on the AAA MMO of your dreams? We don’t have unlimited time, resources and support for something like that here. One needs to be prepared for workarounds, new ideas and plans of action that make sense uniquely for South African devs.

But perhaps the most fixable (and therefore frustrating) problem of our relatively young industry remains that fractured nature amidst devs. Our recent formation of a legally-recognised game development body in South Africa is promising, but does little to help the surprisingly isolationist policies of many local studios – every month, we discover new game development groups that have been labouring for years without contacting local organisations. Of those, many will pop their heads in briefly only to return to relative solitude and obscurity. Developers often have no idea what’s going on just half a country (or even half a city) away, and scores of South Africans still participate in global events with the belief that they’re alone in their passion.

It’s a puzzling culture – one that continues to bewilder us as formal South African game development gets bigger and bigger – and is most often summed up in the words of the isolated devs themselves when they unveil their grand plans:

“I want to show the world that South Africans can make games.”

The world kinda already knows that we can make games. Sure, people may not consciously realise that a product is South African, but we’ve definitely taken to the stage. It doesn’t actually matter if our audience pays much attention to our nationality, but it seems odd that local devs themselves have little to no understanding of this country’s international impact, or its growing, formalised community, even as they spend years toiling away on that One Great Project that will supposedly change the local scene forever!

It’s a funny country we live in. As successful as we’re collectively being on a global front, there’s surprisingly little internal communication among our professionals. I find myself wondering: is this a South African thing? Is it a developing industry thing? Or are we actually just getting our dose of a problem that has always affected everyone and will continue to do so until the end of time?

As is the norm recently, we’re pleased to announce a few interface improvements and an important development in the war against erroneous logging (hawww yeah!). The inventory and prep panels have been improved and we’ve also removed the questionable Gardening Shears from play.

Enjoy this week’s update, that’s the last of our bonus challenge series. The feedback in recent weeks has been fantastic, thank you! Changelog follows:

Fixes:

• Introduced 2 key verification to reduce ‘logged in from another computer’ from triggering falsely.
• Fixed crash bug when interacting with Apothecary shop items.
• Changed Stone Skin to display stacks instead of total resistance given.
• Fixed a bug where the kingdom could go back to the ‘building’ state long after loading ended.
• Tinker challenge adjusted.
• Fixed hitball arena bug.
• Transmuter storyline modified.
• Pactmaker subdungeons edited.
• Transmuter challenges added.
• Rock Heart replaces Garden Shears.
• Added item info panel when mousing over preps that have an item attached.
• Added prep costs under prep buttons.
• Added grouping borders for prep buildings.
• Effects now go multi-line when running out of space in verbose mode.
• Several optimizations in item creation/movement.

So what exactly did we do at GDC? Among other things, we went to the IGF/GDC award shows (look, Journey won Game of the Year!), and got to congratulate all our fellow devs on their wins/nominations. Watching Tim Schafer and Andy Schatz MC the two shows was a treat as always, and it’s the event where you’re most likely to meet some of the big names in AAA development. And yet, it’s not the highlight of GDC. Not for me at least.

So in San Francisco, there’s a hostel where practically all the Indie devs stay during GDC. This is fantastic. Meeting people at formal events is nice, and grabbing lunch with a random katamari of devs is great too, but heading down to the hostel common room at 2am (because time zones!) to do some browsing, and running into 20 devs in various states of panic/denial is amazing. The casual atmosphere lets you really get to know these awesome people, and learn that they’re all having the same struggle as you: Making a game. Making games is hard.

It was a whirlwind week of meeting people though. I’m just gonna list off some of the favorite moments from the conference now. Going to Supergiant Games to play Transistor. Hanging out with DannyB and Grant Kirkhope, chatting about DD’s music. Meeting Kert Gartner, and asking him to help us make a trailer for DD. Chatting to Lucas Pope about game design. Having dinner with the guys from Cipher Prime, and playing something new from them. Touring EA redwood shores with Paul Barnett. Going to the MoMA to see Robin Arnott exhibit SoundSelf. Meeting Steve Russell, and playing Spacewar! on an actual PDP-1. And about a million other things.

There really is no place quite like GDC