How do I economy? Wat is gold?

… and that’s why you should always explore subdungeons.

The freeware version of Desktop Dungeons has always been hampered by a slightly bothersome gold carryover system. People have complained of its grindalicious nature, and it is indeed a rather weak design element — after all, one of our key desires was to avoid letting players bore themselves by mining for resources in a time-consuming way that wasn’t particularly difficult or rewarding.

In the fresh new version of DD that we’re working on, the economy has already undergone significant improvements, keeping much more in line with our original goals while hopefully avoiding some of the pitfalls: More…

What we learned at the GDC: Indies

It’s probably not possible to really convey the impact of coming to something like the GDC from the rather sparse game development environment of South Africa. We all had our eyes opened, our cherries popped, our minds blown and further variations on that theme. There was also a lot of handshaking. Then there was nerd-flu…

Here’s something we learned at the GDC:

1. Indie devs are awesome.

You have no idea how awesome. Seriously. Every single indie dev we met over the course of the week was literally amazing. Being surrounded by people like us is something that we’re just not used to, but are definitely feeling the lack of right now. More…

IGF: Desktop Dungeons wins Excellence in Design

We did it! At this year’s Independent Games Festival awards (against all odds, expectations and core laws of existence) we managed to snag an award for Excellence in Design.

From left to right: Beardy McViking, Hatty “Fedora” Hat and Scary Drunkard. Also pictured: an award

Yeah, this all happened on Wednesday, but we’ve really really only just been able to spend enough quality time with our laptops to make this post right now (touring and pressing and marketing and celebrating takes its toll, yo). More…

Wha?

OMG, we’re at the GDC! Besides having the time of our lives meeting hordes of our internet heroes, challenging people at Metagame and freaking out over how much random things cost in Dollars, we’ve managed to sneak in a few solid days of development. Behold the build that people will be able to play in the IGF pavilion at the GDC expo tomorrow:

Wondering what the crap’s going on there? You’ll have to wait till someone plays the new hard levels and moans about plants.

Enemy sprites and interviews

Last week I lobbed a couple of pics of the hastily-thrown-together tileset editor at twitter. This week I’ve been getting the new graphics into the game, witness a test dungeon:

The new tilesets give the player slightly more information about the dungeon.

Lurk’s been doing an amazing job with the monster and character sprites, if the interface didn’t still look like a coder’s breakfast, you’d see how much the Rogue sprite looks like his portrait… Yes, we’re still using some of the old sprites as placeholders for now. I would have finished changing those by now if we hadn’t been busy being interviewed so much:

• Gamasutra’s Road To The IGF: The Quick-Burst Roguelike Fun Of Desktop Dungeons – In which we talk roguelike difficulty curves and accessibility, which IGF finalists we’ve been playing and how much sleep we’re getting.
• Rock Paper Shotgun asks Where Next For Desktop Dungeons and gets philosophical about game cloning, has comment wars comparing imaginary comparisons to apartheid to Hitler and lots of features we haven’t talked about yet.
• Not quite as recently, local site Lazygamer talked to us about all sorts of crap and we mostly made really bad jokes and were exposed as Vin Diesel admirers.

P.S. I can’t believe we forgot to blag about The Last Fleet being selected as a Gamesauce Challenge winner! Marc and Rodain were thence invited to Casual Connect Europe (which is just about to end) but we’re running a little low on Out of Africa money, so one of the runners-up got to go instead.

Desktop Dungeons hits Mac (tentatively)

Yup, after battling with GM for OSX on and off, we’ve managed to reach a reasonably stable point. It’s basically the same version of the alpha that’s available for PC, but now you can play it on your Mac doohickeys! (No, that doesn’t mean DD on iPhone – you’ll have to wait for the full version for that).

Grab Desktop Dungeons v0.15 for Mac here, at this very link. Note that some testers have complained about slowness and that one or two tilesets may look a little off. We’ll post fixes as soon as we find them (or all you Mac-people whip up new tilesets!)

P.S. If you download the game and suddenly it’s tomorrow, you may want to take a look at the IGF Audience Awards and do that thing we spoke about.

P.P.S @Brandonnn Points out that you can use the CTRL+scrollwheel macro to zoom in and prevent eye-strain.

Greetz from Cape Town, GGJ 2011!

Click for enlarged version!

I wrote a post yesterday about this year’s Global Game Jam, and some pictures just swung in from Kyle Findlay, a friend of ours who was judging at the event. Here’s a group shot for y’all: we’d like to say “howzit” on behalf of all the Cape Town jammers this year!

A few more thingies after the jump …

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The Almost Mandatory Global Game Jam Write-up

What do strawberries, traffic and games have in common?

That’s right, they’re all varieties of jam.

I’m quite sure that this joke very nearly worked on some people.

This past weekend, the boys at QCF Design took part in the Global Game Jam, an IGDA-organised event which has been running since 2009. All over the world, people gathered to create games centred around a particular theme, armed with nothing more than a humble 48 hours to consider, conceive and complete their creations.

Many of you have probably heard about the GGJ at some point, or even participated. If you’re pretty familiar with the Jam itself, I’ll waste no further time in showing off our submissions: The Last Fleet (Game Jam Page) and Lextinction. More details on these projects and the Jam follow after the jump.

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Easy dungeons for the veteran

It feels a bit odd writing a post about tutorial progression and the easier dungeons, mainly because most of this blog’s readership consists of dedicated fans who already know a thing or two about clicking around single-screen dungeons. Still, it’s a game aspect which we find absolutely vital — keeping both beginners AND veterans in mind.

The freeware version of DD didn’t sport much more than a rather basic tutorial, quickly introducing core concepts and murdering the player a few times with some goats before tossing them into the deep end of a “normal” dungeon. Even when they’re provided with a quiet 20% monster strength reduction (at least until the first victory), some beginners still feel rather overwhelmed by the whole experience. So obviously we have to make things a little easier in the commercial version.

But how do we do this without boring experienced players too much? It’s a tricky situation which we think we have a solution for. More…

A writey-thing about the gods

Programmers often ask me if I know any Python. Proof that I do.

Oh man, this one’s a doozy. Gods were added relatively late in Desktop Dungeons’ design cycle (after a couple of freeware releases, they still appeared in only a very rudimentary form) and they have always been something that we wanted to swell and make comparable to the excellently-designed religion system in Crawl.

Unfortunately, we’ve enjoyed only limited success before now: the gods are packed with a fair amount of detail in comparison to some of the other core game elements, and trying to balance these divine buggers while maintaining their distinct personalities and (hopefully) interesting play styles has been quite a mission.

Bearing this in mind, the glyph system isn’t going to be the only game balance overhaul we perform in Unity DD. We’ve got a few ideas on where our beloved deities need improvement — here’s some of the tweaks we’ve catered for so far:

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