As any game coder will tell you, saving and loading are horrible things. They make your life miserable, and people only notice them if they fail spectacularly. So I’ve snuck onto the blog to get some appreciation for my toil, and also give you a little “behind the scenes” idea of what’s going on when DD saves/loads. More…
As the team working on Desktop Dungeons expands (more on that later, oh so much more) we’re starting to get up to speed on the content side of the game. But you don’t need to take my word for it, I submit as evidence the new ice cave tileset that we’re working on:
Yes, we’ve broken tradition with this, the ice isn’t in the north (as is so often the case) but actually to the east of the map. Perhaps there’s a reason for that?
Of course, this is all part of the lead up to the beta going online. We haven’t lost sight of that in the slightest, in fact there are tons of less visible changes happening in the game, but I’ll let Aeq talk about those later.
Doesn’t Binlor look just awesome?
If I was required to mention one aspect of Desktop Dungeons that has been changed the most over its lifespan, I’d probably point to the religion system. God appeasement in DD has evolved from one-shot microquesting and stackable blessings to a more complex system of boons, piety levels and behaviour conditions — for better AND worse.
While we like the general approach as it stands now, there’s been a few harmful behaviours that the system encourages, and we’re working to get rid of them. We’re also adding a few new religious behaviours which give advanced players something new to consider and — hopefully — take advantage of. Details below! More…
Although the reliable ol’ dungeon remains a good standard unit of adventuring throughout Desktop Dungeons, we’ve recently been putting some more work into other classifications such as puzzles, subdungeons and regions.
Puzzles have been discussed recently, and subdungeons have been mentioned here and there (one or two simple ones were included with the E3 demo), but I don’t think we’ve mentioned regions yet. So here’s a little bit about ‘em. More…
A fiendish mindtrap disguised as a simple situation.
So, Desktop Dungeons has puzzle rooms now.
I don’t quite remember when we first decided to add puzzles to DD, but I DO know that they became an absolute necessity after seeing how well they worked in Clash of Heroes. Kicking back and working through some creative challenges in a small, fixed environments is a real breath of fresh air, and they’re quite fun to design, too. More…
After struggling with a weird rendering problem at the bottom of buttons, I figured out that moving the entire camera 1/3rd of a pixel down fixed the issue. Not gonna complain … just gonna look at 3D engine and go “It’s ok … i know you aren’t built for 2D”.
Finally figured out why the ‘pixel perfect’ rendering was making some very weird lines appear in textures … they were being stretched/shrunk, and the point filter does not stretch/shrink well. This means once we redo some textures, we can give people a choice between ‘smooth’ filtered mode, and ‘pixely’ unfiltered mode.
Many people complained about hotkeys during the E3 demo, so I took the day to get them in and working. There are now hotkeys for your two favorite potions (H for health and M for mana), and any inventory item that is useable is hotkeyed to the particular inventory slot that it’s in (1-6 top to bottom). And if you’re unsure, the tooltip for the item will tell you it’s hotkey.
It’s been pointed out that we should probably be a little more verbose with our development updates, so in the spirit of regular content, here’s what I managed to get done today inbetween mindlessly refreshing our sales info, avoiding writing up my E3 trip and reading the forum:
The hideous monstrosity above is our in-house Tileset editor. It allows us to turn a single texture into the detailed map backgrounds to your dungeon runs and is probably needlessly complex. We’ve been wanting to add the ability for tilesets to contain custom graphics for specific in-game objects for a while now. The obvious win being that we could do cool stuff like have signposts with snow all over them in an ice tileset, or tailor the dungeon stairs in every dungeon so that they don’t stick out quite as much as they do now, etc.
So with only a few game-breaking changes, tilesets now support the ability to override almost any ingame object’s graphics, provided we’ve allowed for that in the script. I might want to extend that even further to allow for the equivalent of map-specific monsters, but that’s probably not going to be terribly efficient: It would just be a better idea to add those monsters to the standard monster spritesheets and be done with it.
We’ll keep this brief. You have 3 days to play as much Desktop Dungeons as you can. It’s our brand new E3 demo build, and you can get to it by hitting that big ‘Play!’ button in the top left of the Desktop Dungeons site. The demo runs directly in your browser, using the Unity web player. Enjoy!
Only part of the QCF team is able to make it to E3 this year, so we figure there’s a good chance that not all of the DD community will make it there either. This situation is vastly unfair … so we’ve gotta do something about it.
After throwing out some magnificently expensive and incredibly impractical ideas (a duplicate E3 show in every major city), we decided to simply let you all play the same demo that we’ll be showing at E3! It’ll only be available for the 3 days of the Expo, so make sure you get to try it while it’s up at the Desktop Dungeons site!
The demo will show a partially upgraded kingdom (without the final graphics) and offers no progression — it’s designed specifically for the quick E3 showfloor turnover, sorry! But if you know anyone who’d love to get some playtime with the new improved DD, or just wants a little piece of E3 at home, point them at us this week.