28 Jun 13
Nandrew

Loose Arrows And Page-Turners

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Some of you will be very pleased to hear that we’ve finally enabled keyboard arrow support for Desktop Dungeons. Combined with other interface improvements that have taken place in recent weeks, you may now use the four directional to explore an eight-directional, step-by-step dungeon experience to your heart’s content. This mode not only allows faster and more effective early-game movement (for players otherwise forced to use the trackpad), but also lets you select and engage enemies in the same way that the right-click targeting system does.

Sally forth and clackity clack to your heart’s content!

We’ve also started cleaning up the in-game menu in preparation for the impending Codex – golly, we haven’t spoken about that in a while, have we? We’ve also revised existing interface thingies a whole bunch too, including some inventory-based issues which have come to prominence in recent weeks. It’s an interesting and slightly uncomfortable balancing act, but we’re making good headway.

If this week doesn’t offer an overwhelming number of new bugs for players to bang their heads against, then we’ll consider our chunky list of fixes to be a great success. Want to know more? Well, the changelog follows: More…

26 Jun 13
Nandrew

Keyboards and Roguelikes

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The original Rogue.

As work continues on interface and other polish elements, we’ve set aside a little time for extra keyboard controls to control things such as dungeon movement. To those who’ve been waiting for this addition since goodness knows when: now is your moment to rejoice! You’ll have it soon.

There’s always been a case for the addition of directional keyboard controls (countless bus trips spent coding and testing dungeon runs using a laptop and trackpad have demonstrated this admirably). It’s never been at the top of our priority list, though, since it just hasn’t been vital or practical enough to implement until recently – and I mean that in a broader context, oh beleaguered and anecdotal naysayers! And wow, there’s been a lot of debate in this area. More…

21 Jun 13
Nandrew

Such A Draaaaagggg

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This week’s update comes with yet another interface tweak for in-dungeon combat: left-clicking on an opponent and dragging the mouse cursor off its grid tile will produce a quick menu similar to the recent pop-up system we’ve been testing out.

Instead of a separate control mode, this integrates itself with the rest of the combat control options (standard clicking and custom selection panel), providing users with another avenue of flexible control while being as smooth and unintrusive as possible.

The pop-up / normal combat toggle option via the in-game menu has been changed to a button layout option for this scheme, and for the time being the option will be changed randomly on new runs so that players can get a feel for both formats. Let us know what you think!

This week’s update has fixed several crash problems that appear to have cropped up with recent changes. Thank goodness for session logging! By now, we probably know more about you than the NSA does … changelog follows: More…

20 Jun 13
Aequitas

Touching

Drag Interactions

As I’m sure you’ve seen, in recent weeks we’ve been working on alternate interface strategies. A lot of time has been sunk into making them, just so that we could test to see if they actually felt good to play with (since you can only theorycraft so far). We’re pretty happy with what we’ve come up with so far, as it enables some different play styles, but there is another motivation for these additions: Touch screens.

We’ve known from the start that we wanted to bring DD to touch devices. The time it takes to play a dungeon, and its ‘wait for user input’ nature make DD perfect for devices where you may need to ‘look up’ every now and again. The only problem we foresee is the interface. Touch devices have no real answer to mousing over something, which in DD, has been central to how you gather information (and boy do  you need that information). So all of our new interface code has been to try and allow multiple ‘taps’ to do things, instead of ‘mouseover, then tap’. The current right-click selection will be the default tap-on-an-enemy action on touch devices, showing you combat prediction, and enemy stats, without fear of you killing yourself.

This week, we’re also adding the ‘pop-up’ interface to the normal way of playing. We think that it could be useful for mouse players, and touch devices, as it gives you the options of the thing your mouse is over, right where your cursor is.

I can’t wait to play DD on a tablet.

14 Jun 13
Nandrew

Xylophones

2013-06-14blogImageThis week, we continue messing about with art and interface and specific subsystems instead of adding new features or changing game balance (the latter being the sort of thing we want to a lot less now).

But that doesn’t mean we haven’t been hard at work! The right-click selection interface has been refined further in this week’s update. The underlying architecture has been adjusted a bit to accommodate some nasty edge cases though, so we’d appreciate any further reports of mishaps while using the system (we also saw a few reports today that we couldn’t quite get around to in time).

The Kingdom and save/load dynamics have also received some love (thanks, as always, for the reports in places where we almost certainly wouldn’t have thought to look) and we’ve got some miscellaneous changes in game areas that we can’t quite identify under any category more specific than “stuff”.

Sadly, despite what this week’s blog post may suggest, we have no immediate plans for in-game xylophones. OR DO WE? Changelog follows: More…

13 Jun 13
dislekcia

Drink from the Fire Hose

Fire Hose Games has been experimenting with streaming recently, doing things like discussing the intricacies of game development techniques and playing other indie games they enjoy for their audience. Back in 2010 they said some very nice things about Desktop Dungeons, so when the opportunity came up for us to put the newest version of the game in front of them, we jumped at it. That ended up with Marc and I joining Sean in playing Desktop Dungeons in front of complete strangers for a while as Sean asked us all sorts of smart questions. Here’s the recording of the stream!

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Just as a programming-related aside: When you happen to be working on path-finding, make sure that it’s as self-contained as possible. I’m having a hard time right now trying to refactor some path-finding subsystems so that Marc can deal with a couple of tricky knockback-from-the-other-side-of-the-dungeon prediction problems. Some lazy coding I did months ago came back to bite me in the ass yesterday…

07 Jun 13
Nandrew

You Ain’t Nothin’ But A Pit Dog

2013-06-07blogImageSo, this week’s update has brought a visual update to a large chunk of the character class effects (that triad of perks which each hero comes loaded with), making the in-game portraits look a whole lot less grotty. Hooray for that! We had a great deal of fun making appropriate themes and visual styles for each set of icons, and we hope that they add a bit of extra visual “personality” to many of the classes.

The right-click enemy selection has been cleaned up drastically, so give it another chance this week if you were interested by the core idea but struggled with its glitchiness. We find it to be one massive goatload of help when it comes to regeneration-based combat, and should be a strong addition to the game’s default interface. Once that’s stable, we should be free to do more for the alternative control schemes.

The Kingdom has also been cleared up a bit to deal with some residual issues concern gold and quest updates. Additionally, we’ve implemented a mechanic that allows players to temporarily go over the gold limit when they bring in a single large haul from the dungeon, to reduce the depressing occurrence of bandit scalps and meat loafs being sold for next to nothing because gold was too close to cap after the previous run.

Thanks for the frequent and reliable bug reports: we think we’ve nailed most of the problems with the new enemy selection, and had a little time to work on some other issues as well. Check the changelog for full details! More…

06 Jun 13
Nandrew

Choking up

Back in the days of yore, the Desktop Dungeons alpha had a very simple generation system which more or less did its job – there was really only one kind of map, and enemies were distributed using a dumb-fire system of random placement.

This caused occasional frustration for players who ran into enemy layouts that veered wildly between extremely generous and literally impossible – most sorely felt when they arrived in a new dungeon only to be surrounded by level 9 creatures!

Fortunately, due to the low metagame investment and the earliness of the game build, this wasn’t a major problem and we smartened up the algorithm for DD’s beta. Lower-level enemies would generally spawn closer to the player’s starting position, and more challenging beasties would – on average – be created further away. Horrific map layouts were basically a thing of the past (with exceptions that we’d work on from time to time!).

As time passed, however, we realised that we needed to put some more fine-tuning into monster positions. New map generators emerged to switch up player expectations and provide variety: open terrain creators, mazes and swamplands all introduced their own sets of opportunities and challenges. More…


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