31 Oct 13
Nandrew

Steam Release Announced!

new-splashwip

Yep, we’re finally loosening our tongues about the long-awaited Desktop Dungeons Steam launch! Your favourite fix of homicidal goats, merciless dungeons and thinky roguelike puzzling will hit the service on 7 November for PC and Mac.

You have one last week to get in on the pre-order system for 10% off and immediate access to the almost-no-longer-beta version. No matter when you purchase your copy, you will be entitled to a free Steam key on full release, and we’ll be working on the iPhone / Android / Linux conversions shortly thereafter. So, tell your friends! Tell your family! Tell your more technologically-inclined pets!

Let everyone know that we’re here to change their coffee breaks forever. And tell them to buy the game. Their loyal Kingdom subjects will thank them for it.

PS. If you happen to be in or around America, make your way to MineCon in Orlando, Florida to check out Desktop Dungeons before it goes public! Yep, we’re totally gonna have a presence there — just look out for goats and a guy with an epically braided beard.

25 Oct 13
Nandrew

Dungeon Task Force

2013-10-25blogImageNow, this is a pretty little update!

We’ve added a chunk of new animations this week, vastly improving the appearance of a lotta common dungeon interactions such as exploration and enemy thwacking. Bosses have suitably ominous bone piles placed around them (the unfortunate remains of unfortunate adventurers, no doubt) and gold coins are about 50% more golden and coin-ish.

We’ve also added one last game system to fill out a hitherto barren panel on the Kingdom screen: the long-delayed Advisor Tasks panel, designed to direct, intrigue and reward players with micro-quests and common chores. Players stuck on dungeons will no longer find themselves completely bereft of achievements or income, and beginners should find the tasks pulling them in interesting new directions. Give the system a try and let us know what you think!

New sound effects are being added this week, too. The process has only begun in this update, but we’ll have another whole chunk of ’em by this time next week. They’re already sounding pretty crackly, magical and chilling on our end, so it’s just a matter of plugging ’em into the game itself!

What more have we added this week? How much extra content is possible? Which final gaps are being plugged at this late hour? The changelog reveals all: More…

24 Oct 13
dislekcia

Trailers and puzzles

As Desktop Dungeons nears release, we’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about trailers. Indie games tend to be hugely impacted by their trailers – that’s how a lot of potential players first interact with your game. For ages, we had no idea how to convey the ideas behind Desktop Dungeons in video: The game isn’t really packed with action, gameplay tends to be slower and less spectacular and players often sit and think instead of being bombarded with situations they have to deal with right-the-hell-now.

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A few weeks ago we started working on our trailer problem in earnest and things are starting to get really interesting. We ended up reaching out to several professional trailer makers, hoping to get a few ideas that would work. In the end, it looks like we’re going to have multiple trailers – two by different people and a third one that we initially weren’t going to pursue, but ended up liking so much that we thought we might just try to film it and see how it turned out.

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That happened last weekend. The early cut of that live-action trailer has made the people we’ve tested it on laugh quite a bit, so that’s good. The other trailers serve different purposes – one is designed to get people’s attention and the other is an attempt at showing off gameplay (yes, that’s hard to do, it doesn’t mean we didn’t have ideas that could work). Shooting for a trailer that’s just over a minute long took most of the day, we’re really glad that we have friends in the film and TV industries, otherwise we’d never have made anything this cool happen… Also, effects are pretty fun to make! The eggs above worked wonderfully, although you’ll just have to wait until the trailer is finished to see exactly what we did with them.

18 Oct 13
Nandrew

Kerbang Kaboom

2013-10-18blogImageHere’s another juice update for y’all. As we continue padding out the animations for dungeon interactions, we’ve started bringing our attention to small — but oft-forgotten — aspects of the dungeon experience, such as tile scouting, fog-o-war and an actual frikking graphic for the actual frikking backpack.

Bug fixes and minor interface adjustments abound. We’re also halfway through the Advisor Tasks system, one final mechanical tweak that’s due to be rolled out soon. Players needing additional victory metrics and a small gold boost should appreciate this little bit of content, which will be explained in more detail when it arrives next week.

How much could there possibly be left to do? Well, a rapidly diminishing amount, as it so happens. Adjustments sink further into details as we prepare for the final push! Changelog follows, loyal beta users: More…

11 Oct 13
Nandrew

Score!

ScoreScreenWIPThis week sees a juicy visual update with the introduction of a brand-new score screen, iterating on the basic improvements shown in the last update. Now players can take after-dungeon screenshots to be truly proud of, showing off their adventuring prowess without the burden of an all-encompassing inky void, ugly stats and text in odd places. Hooray!

People waiting for the official full release of Desktop Dungeons will be excited to know that this is the last significant overhaul of a temporary graphics scene, meaning that visual adjustments from here will only concern themselves with smaller game elements (and maybe a tasty-looking splash screen for good measure). Minus the juice that we still want to add with animations and additional UI tweaks, this is pretty much starting to *look* like the product we’d originally envisioned. Additional background work should soon have it *sounding* like the product we’d envisioned, and significant advancements in haptics and Goat Cheese Over IP technology should also mean that we’ll get it *tasting* just like we imagined.

Or something.

We’re frantically working through an ever-dwindling checklist of “Stuff That Still Needs The Doing” and there’s an aura of excitement in the air strong enough to trigger a fainting goat reflex. Changelog follows: More…

04 Oct 13
Nandrew

All Of Our Rage

2013-10-04blogImageWe’re pretty stoked about the presence of Desktop Dungeons and Make Games SA at this year’s rAge expo in Johannesburg. Our game is just one entry in an exciting list of local games forming the pretty respectable setup seen over here. This is probably MGSA’s most impressive showing at rAge so far and we’re actually kinda jealous that we can’t make it up there this time around.

If you feel like dropping by the expo itself, be sure to try out our unique build of DD featuring a never-before-heard selection of the orchestral music track from Danny Baranowsky and Grant Kirkhope. That’s some special incentive right there! Sadly, we’re not putting the audio into DD’s online version just yet (yeaaah, file sizes), but we have our regular weekly offering uploaded and ready for your consumption with some animation improvements, bugfixes, the beginnings of our revised score screen (you didn’t think that was going to be its final version, didya?).

This week has seen a smattering of improvements in various areas of the game. Surprise bonus: if your DD profile was created relatively recently, chances are that you’ve only just earned access to a quest or two that were unwittingly orphaned a little while back. Think of it as the game content equivalent of finding a few forgotten bank notes stashed in one of your pockets! Changelog follows:

Fixes:

  • Dragging a glyph/item, and then replacing it in the inventory should no longer trigger its use.
  • Added footprint trails.
  • Fixed a bug where using WONAFYT in the Yin/Yang subdungeon could summon and enemy into a wall.
  • Changed toast interaction to only happen when toast ribbon is near it’s final position.
  • Changed score screen kill list to activity list.
  • Changed score screen money description to sales/income list.
  • Vicious Halls of Steel quest only shows up after at least one victory in the regular dungeon
  • Clarified exit removal in Banker fight
  • Adjusted Crusader Bronze for clarity
  • Fixed Transmuter quest description and flags
  • Restored some orphaned quests on certain profiles
  • Selecting a preparation during step 1 of the advisor prep tutorial is now optional
  • Fixed building name tooltip overlap
  • Reworded IMAWAL description
  • Updated Codex numbers
  • Updated wall destruction animation.
  • Updated PISORF knockback animation.
  • Added cursor animations for ENDISWAL and PISORF.
  • Added slow effect animation.
  • Fixed bug with looping animation playback missing frames.

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