First!

Heyooo, it’s a new year and a new DD update! Our changes prior to the holiday break were pretty radical compared to the usual fare, and it’s been great to see all the enthusiasm and feedback on the new systems we have in place.

A quick apology, though, to players who suffered crash bugs from use of the WONAFYT glyph over the vacation — we returned to work this week to find a rather scary number of reports about that on our logging system. The problem has been resolved now, and you shouldn’t have any further grief with spellcasting. Summon away.

Poison in its new incarnation is something we have faith in, and this week we tweaked some of those values to make it “click” properly. Everything we messed with in this area has been carefully labelled in the changelog below. And nope, wizard definitely can’t infini-create potions using the new class buff. Sorry!

We also included a few interface and player convenience tweaks in this first update of the year, while migrating more of the news and dev updates here instead of just the game site (hopefully, this one is a resolution we’ll manage to keep).

Concept art this week comes from our new pixellator, Shamie. He’s been throwing together a bunch of, uh, charming pics for items and whatnot. They’re pretty beadass. Okay, these jokes are awful. Welcome, Shamie. Changelog: More…

Loresome

Games with solid, narrative-driven progress are always a treat, but sometimes story elements need to take a back seat and be a little more subtle — educating the player with hints and whispers instead of hitting them over the head with a thick cardboard sign reading “EXPOSITION”.

Spoonfeeding an entire game history to your audience is the narrative equivalent of forcing them to play in permanent Tutorial Mode. It’s safe, tepid and unengaging. And if the core of any good gaming experience is the way it challenges you — dextrously, mentally, perhaps even emotionally — then does it not follow that a full plot exposition should challenge players in a similar way? Forcing them to think and theorise and fill in the blanks and come to their own conclusions? Implicit storytelling like this is already used well in games like Dark Souls, The Binding of Isaac and even seemingly story-void titles like Dungeon Crawl.

The way that Desktop Dungeons is narratively structured right now encourages two streams of storytelling. One is the explicit, shallow version: outlining stuff like the main plot, which bad guys need to be killed and what you’ll have to do next to keep your fledgling Kingdom from falling into doom and iniquity. Text pop-ups about important events will be visible to players throughout the game, hopefully without being too obtrusive (DD is, after all, supposed to be a romp first and foremost).

But we’ve been working on the “deeper” storytelling layer from time to time, as well. A lot of information exists in special dialogue, semi-rare subdungeons and unconventional item descriptions to help shape and unify the seemingly disparate events, locations and civilisations found in Desktop Dungeons. Ideally, none of this gets in the way of the gamers who just want to go and kick warlocks in the face. The players who are inclined to investigate, however, can go on entirely new emotional journeys as they get closer to the truth of how our crazy, monster-chopping world really works.

Or something like that. In theory. Storytelling is a skill, after all, and narrative prowess isn’t really what made DD popular in the first place. But there’s no harm in trying!

The image above is a random dev shot of the upcoming Codex — a place to store all of your accumulated knowledge about the Desktop Dungeons world, whether practical or flavorful. The system is really not safe for general consumption yet (as you may have guessed), but after cleaning out the rest of the stray LOREM IPSUM paragraphs and finalising the layout for each type of panel, it should be a pretty sweet addition to the game.

Thinking about the End-game

If you’d seen us working the last two days, you’d never have guessed that this tired, drained and somewhat irritable trio had just been on holiday for nearly two weeks. The break was good, great even, but when the time came to get back to work on Desktop Dungeons, we jumped straight into the deep end:

“How do players win the game?” ended up taking over our first design session for the new year and turning it into something we needed to sleep on and come back to the next day.

It’s a tricky thing to think about: We already had some things that we planned to offer to players that had finished the game (somehow) and wanted more, but where do you draw the line in terms of what’s finishing the game and what isn’t? The Desktop Dungeons alpha doesn’t even really finish at all – either you run out of things to try that are difficult, or you get discouraged by the difficulty at some point and stop playing.

In the end we agreed that finishing the game was actually all about player perception. We wanted people that weren’t necessarily super-hardcore DD players to have something to aim for that would give them a reason to improve as well, our goals became:

• Players of all skill levels should have a target they can aim for that’s been signposted from the beginning of the game – This is hard to accomplish when a game is actively played by both casual and hardcore users, you don’t want to exclude either one from the game by forcing only one progression path.
• The challenge shouldn’t be the hardest in the game, but it should be something that requires skill, not resources – Essentially, this means that finishing the game needs to be something that happens mostly in the meta-game around the Kingdom, not in the random dungeons themselves. This is why the alpha didn’t have a finishing condition, it didn’t have the setting for it.
• The game’s narrative and setting should push players towards a logical conclusion point that makes sense to them – Don’t force players to adopt or learn a new mechanic that’s introduced only to cause narrative tension. Plus we really don’t want to code new features at this point…
• Players that have finished the game should still be able to enjoy playing Desktop Dungeons afterward – We don’t want to chase players away, we want to reward players in what has been the mid-game of the beta progression. All the vicious dungeons and mean quests should still be around.

We’ve settled on an idea that we think solves these problems quite nicely,  whilst staying true to the ethos that makes Desktop Dungeons feel the way it does: You’ll trigger a game-wide event (aimed mostly at the Kingdom economy and the player’s coffers) by collecting all the different types of monster trophies. This will actually be possible quite early in the game: Some players will reach that milestone quickly, others will take a long time to get there. Once you’ve overcome the event’s dungeon, the game will continue to open up with more challenges and slightly changed meta-game rules.

Like the cruel Leonidas, we’re going to ask that you stand – merely kneeling will not be enough. But once you’ve proved you can, the game will challenge you to keep doing so.

Item Design

So with a recent patch to the Desktop Dungeons beta, we toned down many of the items that people delighted in using. Most of the delight was caused by these items being “no brainers”: they were so out of balance with the rest of the item pool that there was never a reason to pick anything else. Any item being a “no brainer” in  DD is probably a bad thing, since the game is designed around a core concept of give the player meaningful decisions. Here we created a meaningless decision, because there’s no reason to not take that item. This had to be remedied. More…

rAge, IndieCade and not being dead

I repeat, not dead, merely heavily jetlagged (Except for Rodain, who was indeed briefly dead, but got better). That’s what 3 weeks of consecutive expos, festivals and travel will do to you (again, not the dead thing, we have no idea how that happened – we weren’t here).

The three of us were up in Johannesburg for rAge, South Africa’s annual games and tech expo:

At rAge, we helped put together a game development conference of sorts, kindly sponsored by Microsoft South Africa and the awesome folks at NAG magazine and brilliantly masterminded by local hyperactive dev-legend Sven. Our talks have been digitized and uploaded to the global intramind: Thrill to Rodain talking about the motivations and difficulties of making games and shudder as Marc and I get all business-y on the topics of revenue, funding and getting cloned.

Then it was off to the airport and plane-jamming our way to Los Angeles for the week-long IndieCade festival (just in case we weren’t already exhausted enough), which to be honest, was far too awesome for me to cover all of it. How do you successfully write about a week that started with John Romero and Brenda Gorno (previously Brathwaite) buying us ice-cream (actually a sub-variant called gelato) and was filled to the brim with people walking in off the street to play Desktop Dungeons at us, hanging around (and partying with) devs, both indie and mainstream that we’ve looked up to for ages. It felt like suddenly being surrounded by friends that we simply hadn’t met just yet.

Highlights include: Hearing Simon Ferrari deconstruct Desktop Dungeons in his Well Played session (pictured above) and fielding questions from Eric Zimmerman afterward; Playing Johann Sebastian Joust and witnessing the epic shoe of death; Seeing the birth of T-Rex Ninja; Telling Andy Schatz our theories about hats and privilege; Playing Way and [redacted - spoilers]; Existential conversations with the Ordnungswissenschaft guys over salad; Following Mark Essen to other people’s houses; Being amazed by Daniel Benmergui’s new game; Bringing home way too many magic cards and generally just constantly meeting/talking to people that loved doing what they’re doing as much as we love what we’re up to.

In short, IndieCade was brilliant, challenging and a serious chance to learn way too much in the short time we were there. We’re back and raring to get moving on Desktop Dungeons again – huge thanks go out to Akira Thompson for smoothing the way to IndieCade, every awesome person we met overseas and everyone that pre-ordered the game to let us carry on doing this thing we’re so happy about. You’re all amazing.

Team Video and rAge

As IndieCade finalists (which we might have mentioned previously), we were asked to make a team video that went some way towards explaining either something about us, our game or why we made games in general. We weren’t really sure what to do at all and thus ended up with this:

This week also marks the start of our epic travels as we’ve arrived in Johannesburg (no longer in the pointiest bit of Africa anymore, alas) to prep for rAge – our local games expo. Among all the general awesome that permeates the coming weekend, we’ll also be talking about what we’ve learned this past year as part of a game development community event. It’s going to be amazing. And then we hop on another plane to LA when that’s done… Synergy, I tell you.

Desktop Dungeons is an IndieCade 2011 Finalist

The IndieCade 2011 Finalists have been announced and we’re proud to say that Desktop Dungeons is one of them! We’ve known for about 2 weeks now (and keeping hush was proving pretty difficult). We’ve been making plans to get to Culver City for the festival and Marc and I will be there, being odd and trying to see more of LA than I managed during E3.

How amazing is this tileset?

Brand new tileset from Dorianne. Those lava glows, OMW… She’s starting to have way too much fun with the editor, nobody tell the authorities.

Do I want to pick this up?

We’ve all been there. You see something shiny on the dungeon floor, you trot on over, and then you have to decide whether it’s worth taking up your oh-so-limited inventory space. Up until now, that’s been a slow process of: switching to your inventory, hovering over the tiny little ‘i’, and then switching back to the pick up panel … all very tedious. NO MORE!

So much juicy information!

More…

Gods, Part 2: The new Pactmaker

Finally, altars that can be identified at a glance!

The Pactmaker has always been a point of interest among the gods. His/her (its?) boons are extremely powerful, universally applicable and pretty much game-deciding in just about any dungeon. Most veterans in the Desktop Dungeons alpha will go Pactmaker or go bust, leaving other gods as situational carriers or consolation prizes.

As with any overpowered game element, the Pactmaker is acknowledged as being a little too potent but is nonetheless quite well loved, so we knew that simply weakening him/her/it would leave a sour taste in many people’s mouths (and maybe some sternly-worded condemnations on our forums!).

Instead, we changed the god completely, giving it a playstyle that is boldly unique within the DD pantheon. Here’s how we did it: More…