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.
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.
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!
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…
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.