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.
Today we’re finally ready to launch the new Desktop Dungeons site. We’ve got a ton of announcements, so here goes:
Firstly: You can now pre-order the full version of Desktop Dungeons for PC and Mac! Every pre-order will gain access to the upcoming beta as soon as it goes live.
Secondly: To celebrate pre-orders going live, we’ve got new versions of the Desktop Dungeons freeware for everyone. Not too many changes, just some bug-fixes, general cleanup and some interface changes. Oh! And a new class! And a new dungeon! Enjoy. Yes, your existing saves will carry over just fine.
Thirdly: We’re also launching the QCF Forums today. There’s now a definitive place to trade DD strategies and ask for support if something’s wrong.
We’re really excited about the next few months, there’s a lot going on. Oh, be sure to come say hi if you’re going to be at E3!
Yeah, this situation doesn’t look suspicious at all.
I’ve always felt a little bit guilty about the latter portion of freeware DD’s game progression: in terms of raw challenge, it was good giving players a few extra dungeons to bang their heads against, but the core gameplay never changed quite enough for it to be pronounced “good design”. It was more like simple difficulty escalation: people completed X, they wanted more, so we gave them Y with an extra boss and they were only allowed to hurt monsters by chest-bumping them.
The freshly-established code base in the Unity version was built with far more flexibility in mind, and it’s a lot easier to add variety in dungeons. Now it’s not just a matter of creating more difficult dungeons with one or two extra enemies: we can change terrain layouts, spawn numbers and even starting gear. We can even code special scripted rules on a per-dungeon basis to shake things up, though this has to be done with care.
Read on for a more detailed description of our changes, along with a bunch of screenshots — just please excuse the repetitive graphics, we’ve only got one terrain tileset loaded up at the moment! More…
If you’ve been reading up on previous posts, you may have realised two things: one, we don’t update this blog nearly as often as we should (er, sorry about that). Two, we’ve been putting a lot of emphasis on changing the way that Desktop Dungeons manages the player’s items.
Potions are just some of the things affected by our changes. Because they now take up precious inventory slots (along with every other item in the game), we’ve introduced a new helper to make the player’s chemical loadout far more varied and powerful.
Meet the Witch:
This kitten was found on Google. Hopefully we’ll have real witch graphics soon.
Thanks to the fine folks at IndieCade, Desktop Dungeons is going to be making an appearance at E3 this year! The game will be at the IndieCade stand as part of their curated indie showcase (which just sounds totally posh). So if you’re heading to E3, come find Desktop Dungeons in the West hall: You might not meet us (we’re still trying to figure out how we could afford the trip) but we promise we’ll have something new for you to play!
Speaking of affording things and official announcements, it’s time we let you all know about something we’ve been working on for the past few months: We should be ready to start taking pre-orders for Desktop Dungeons on PC and Mac in the next couple of weeks. We could talk about the annoyances of accepting credit cards in Africa, but we figure you’d rather hear about the cool stuff:
I still can’t believe our game’s going to hit both the GDC and E3. That’s childhood dream territory…
Guess you should have signed up for that suspicious-looking insurance policy after all.
In addition to gold being used for Kingdom upgrades (as well as a more limited form of spending within dungeons themselves), smaller amounts of money can be spent on carefully controlled dungeon preparations.
The previously-discussed adventuring locker is one such preparation, allowing players to carry a saved item into fresh dungeon runs for a fixed fee. But there’s many more to be discovered as players upgrade their kingdoms and learn about new buildings. Like other aspects of the game, preparations are designed to range from beginner-friendly helpers to subtle (yet powerful) boosters that more advanced players will find useful. More…
Locker items: never go dungeoneering without an eating utensil again!
Imagine this: you’re just wandering around on a merry ol’ dungeon run somewhere when you happen to stumble upon a shop selling the Orb of Zot, the Amulet of Yendor or something similarly rare and powerful. Unfortunately, the dungeon you’re in isn’t particularly challenging, and you lament the fact that such an uncommon occurrence is completely wasted on killing a boring old goblin lord. If only there was some way you could buy the item now and take it into the golem factory for your Wizard run later!
Well, as it so happens, the commercial version of Desktop Dungeons is going to have you covered. As mentioned in our earlier post, the brand-new locker system will allow players to store a limited number of items at the Adventurers’ Guild between dungeon runs, while charging them some sort of bureaucratic nonsense fee based on their market value.
What does this mean for the game? Behold: More…