We’ve mentioned the Kingdom before, but we haven’t actually spoken about what it is. Essentially it’s Desktop Dungeons’ new menu. Some of the changes to the full version required a bit of a reboot to how players initiated a dungeon run, plus we wanted to have the meta-game be more visible and instantly rewarding. Here’s how Lurk interpreted our scribblings in the design doc from initial concept to his usual jaw-dropping final polish after the cut, I’m sure nobody’s going to miss the old menu.
The first draft. How much do you love that goat?
Discretely clickable areas worked quite nicely, but we realised that because players had a strict set of filters that they would use while interacting with the Kingdom: Choosing a race, a class and then individual preparations (more on this later). We moved things around in response: More…
We can safely reveal that the artist responsible for the character portraits that got some of you salivating even more than usual is none other than: Lurk! Recommended some months ago by DerekYu (possibly to stop us saying thank you for the tileset), Lurk answered our “Would you be interested in working on Desktop Dungeons?” email with this image:
We took that as a yes.
I’ve been spending a lot of time redesigning DD’s interface. Again… (You can see Lurk’s mockup is based on an even older version of the game) Thankfully the event-based design now means that the UI can sit on top of the game logic like a spider, registering to get events that it cares about (like the player taking damage, or mousing over a glyph) without having to be integrated into the logic at all. Essentially the interface is the most self-contained one I’ve ever worked on.
That may not sound like much, but UI coding is almost universally reviled in game dev circles – sitting somewhere just above game tester in the hierarchy of traditional studio progression, below pond scum. Anything you can do to get you amped about an interface is a good idea. Interfaces often end up being polished late in a project, right after the point when everyone throws code etiquette out the window during crunch – they’re historically messy, bug-riddled and done way too fast. Also, I like spiders, they’re cool.
We’ve been working with an incredible artist for the past couple of months, getting the full version out of our heads and into shape. I think it’s time we started showing off some of that process (because everyone loves art)… First up, character portrait concepts:
I literally can’t pick a favorite.
Current activity, now that we’re well and truly done with IGF entry stuff:
Aequitas is beavering away at the quest and tutorial systems, getting everything ready for content and doing a ton of behind-the-scenes stuff like writing saving/loading subsystems. Nandrew’s been re-designing the tutorial so that it’s better than the old one at one or two things, as well as getting people into the new systems in the full version. He’s also re-balancing the spell glyphs based on all the data we’ve got from the freeware version, tweaking the ones nobody enjoyed using and possibly even adding a couple of new ones we’ve had ideas for. I’m back to poking at the interface after spending last week working on the Kingdom and its progression.
So, after thinking long and hard about whether it was a good idea or not, we decided to enter Desktop Dungeons in the IGF. We entered the freeware version, as the Unity build is just not good enough for human consumption right now.
One of the prerequisites for IGF entry is a video showcasing the game, in case it’s too hard and the judges have trouble getting very far … so naturally we made our video a survival guide!
Just a quick graphics and obscure OMG-what-the-crap-happened-there bug focused update in time for the IGF. Unfortunately the Unity version simply isn’t complete enough yet (read: It plays well, but looks like crap and the progression stuff isn’t done yet) so we’re entering the freeware version, hence the update to the thing we said we wouldn’t be updating anymore… Hopefully we’ll be able to update our entry as the full game starts collecting polish tokens.
DD v0.15 contains a lot less red line of death and a bajillion percent more footprints. It’s also got snazzy new class-specific sprites designed to fit into Derek Yu’s already awesome tileset, courtesy of the extremely kind Brian Bugh, which you can see above (the sprites, not Brian himself). To top it off, we’ve added our favorite tilesets so far from the TIGsource tileset thread and Twitter.
As usual, all you have to do to carry your progress over from v0.145 is to simply copy the contents of your chardata directory across to the new version… Here’s a direct link to the new version, enjoy! Now I need to go figure out how our IGF entry video is going to work.
Something that Desktop Dungeons prides itself on is the careful use of space and structures to provide those awesome, randomly-generated dungeon romps. Of course, while each new session creates a unique layout for players to enjoy, the core algorithm that has governed it so far has been … well, pretty much the same all the way through. Heck, the terrain generation system that you’ve seen from the freeware is actually just a merry programming screw-up that accidentally turned out well. That’s about to change. More…
While Desktop Dungeons didn’t make it into the PAX 10, it did get a mention in one of the panels during the show. Specifically a panel of various indie luminaries telling people which indie games they felt weren’t being played enough.
DD squeaks a mention by Dylan Fitterer (of Audiosurf fame) who then goes on to talk about how he’s played it for at least 15 hours now and it still makes him feel smart when he figures out something new. I’m totally calling that a win vs MW2. Thanks to IndieGames.com we’ve now got video of this happening:
Parts 1 and 2 – in which many awesome games are mentioned that we didn’t make – are here and here, respectively. Unfortunately part 4 is missing, which means I’m dying to know what so troubled the nearly somnolent Mr Fitterer and what he discovered… Did he mis-click and die horribly? (I’m sorry Dylan! The numpad works, don’t put up with that trackpad!) Was he playing a Crusader and the final strike perk took down the boss? Did the Fighter’s pit fighter ability save him? Did he manage to open the door to the secret dungeon thing that we don’t talk about? What happened? I must know!
I had a bit of time earlier this week to stop working on the Unity version of DD and go back to the freeware version for some quick changes (get!). Aside from a few god balancing thingies that immediately came to mind, I also added a new Gauntlet mode that’s hopefully going to scale well for veterans and super-veterans alike (yep, “super-veterans” is now a term). There’s also some tweaks in other game areas which may or may not help with balancing here and there.
From an artistic point of view, I’ve also added the ability for people to craft individual sprites for every character class. The basic sprite additions that I’ve personally thrown in are still cheap colour-blending hackjobs at the moment, but at least it’ll give the artists out there a chance to throw in something that they’ve been nagging me about for some time. 😉
The new version won’t break old tileset contributions, but if you check the “default” folder you’ll notice a few new HeroXXXX.png files which can be replaced with something cool-looking in your own tilesets (the cheap-ass colour blended chars here are just for placeholding purposes, honest!). Have fun designing the new classes — unfortunately, we can’t spend too much time on the GM version at the moment with our commercial work looming and all, but we’re still taking feedback into account when designing the new system, so comments and e-mails are appreciated.
Hope y’all have fun with the changes made, however slight they are. We’ll do our best to make the final Unity product worth the wait!
(Oh, and don’t forget to regularly check in at this TIGSource forum thread for more tilesets as artists create them. The stuff over there is pretty durn rad).
Edit: We’ve silently updated the game to squash a couple of bugs that snuck their way in during testing. The Warlord now spawns with the correct glyph and the Gorgon class once again petrifies instead of killing normally.
So basically, the upcoming Unity version of Desktop Dungeons is running on a homebrewed, event-based system of awesome programmy proportions. This system offers several distinct advantages over what I (clumsily) implemented for the freeware.
All your edge cases are belong to us. How did I ever get my programming degree?
VALUABLE POINT ONE: Since every meaningful game event that we play through has a set of values which can be stored in association with that event, we can save “playthroughs” of individual game sessions and replay activities at our leisure. Read: player input, easy debugging!
VALUABLE POINT TWO: Instead of writing special case code for every unique combination of scenarios that get tacked on to the system during dev (think of about half a dozen conditional statements for most common occurrences), we can allow a potentially limitless number of handlers to listen out for any events that we want. For example, when the character gets poisoned, we get a health bar handler to listen out and change the input to green, while a player poison handler usurps the role of the regular regeneration handler whenever dungeon tiles are revealed. Then, without much trouble, we can add extra effects to the poison later by simply adding new handlers that listen out for it.
Those of you who have ever studied computer science formally have probably heard of event-based systems like this before, so some of this should already be ringing some bells. For people like me who kept falling asleep in class, the process has been rather challenging to get to grips with, but the net result for players is undeniable: a bigger, better and more flexible game system that’s easy to extend at any time!
Okay, so we shopped in the tear. Doesn’t mean the goat isn’t still crying on the inside.
Deciding that we were cocky enough to want a piece of the PAX 2010 pie, we sent the recent freeware draft of Desktop Dungeons to their board of shadowy judgement figures. Turns out we didn’t get too far (they cited, among other reasons, a dislike for the colour purple and an all-consuming hatred of farm animals), but we’re pretty damn sure that we’ll have a little more luck when we shove our commercial reboot down the IGF’s throat a little later.
In the meantime, we’ve been looking at the list of games that did make the bar and most of ’em seem pretty gosh-darn cool. Familiar faces such as Super Meat Boy are present alongside stranger-looking titles like Shibuya, and the competition has pretty good representation across most major platforms.
Few of the games listed have actually been released yet, but I guess that’s just further incentive to hit the PAX floor and get a sneak preview. Or some autographs. Whatever floats people’s boats, really.
