Saving Grace

Howdy! This week’s update provides an important stability patch for people playing the game across multiple systems, IPs and what-have-you. Weirdnesses and data loss should be non-existent where they’ve reared their ugly heads before, and the denizens of player Kingdoms can breathe a collective sigh of relief knowing that they won’t sporadically vanish and stuff.

We’ve also nailed that pesky Codex bug related to god discovery and the “NEW!” tag hanging around for an absurdly long time. Man, that one bothered us for a while.

And for badge farmers, we have bad news: PISORF finally has a damage type for consideration. Looks like that’s one less cheeky little trick to take advantage of!

There’s a few other tweaks here and there to take a look at. If you haven’t already, you can have a gander at our first after-action report, then give us a bit of feedback or commentary on the QCF Design forums! Changelog follows: More…

Post-Release: Some Quick Thoughts

After the thrills, panics and elations of the Desktop Dungeons release on Steam, we’ve had a little time to sit down and think about all the stuff that’s happened. Here’s a few things that we’ve learned from the experience so far:

(1) If you have to release within a week of a major next-gen console, be prepared for a rough ride – and make sure reviewers get their play copies on time. If your game, like DD, is oriented around entirely engulfing a player’s mind, body and soul for several dozen hours before they even get past the first few dungeon tiers, you don’t want to be sliding the keys over to press just a few short days before the world expects them to spend weeks talking about PS4 Launch Title: The Launchening. Due to that humble little company called Sony somehow having more marketing clout than us, we lost a few important site reviews because they couldn’t possibly give us enough attention during the prime news window. More…

Safe and Sound

So, we’ve made it to the other side! The game is out and this is our first non-beta patch for the web player community.

Weekly updates aren’t strictly part of our brief anymore, but there’s still more for us to put into the online build and the Steam community has been very helpful in providing loads of early-game feedback (don’t forget to grab the game on Steam or redeem your key if you haven’t done so already).

What may interest most of you is the addition of streamed audio from the powerhouse duo of Danny Baranowsky and Grant Kirkhope, giving Desktop Dungeons a fully orchestral soundtrack to finish the experience with a little bit of aural magic.

The soundtrack is too big to load up all in one go (and we’re sensitive to people connecting wirelessly from the Antarctic or whatever), so we’re experimenting with loading up individual tracks on the fly — if there’s a delay in hearing any sound, it’ll be due to stuff caching in the background. Let us know if there’s any issues, and enjoy the music!

This week’s changelog is rather big, due to it being the culmination of several panicked, semi-panicked and almost-entirely-unpanicked build updates made over the course of the week. Have a look through: More…

Desktop Dungeons Full Release!

Go to the Steam page now!

Here at last! The culmination of three years of hard work, game design and goat-slaying has arrived – it’s the full release of Desktop Dungeons!

Now with a full soundtrack and several gazillion hours of gameplay, DD is set to blow you away on PC and Mac, available now via our website and Steam. This has been a long time coming, folks. Thanks for all the support, feedback and farm animal anecdotes over the years, it has truly been an unrivalled experience.

If you’ve bought the Beta version as a pre-order and want access to your complimentary Desktop Dungeons Steam key, get it over here. You’ll be able to link your Steam account to your existing game profile and continue right from where you left off.

Enjoy, folks. We hope this game will be one truly baaaaa-dass experience.

Regards,
The Desktop Dungeons Team

Final Beta Update

It’s been a long and emotional journey, folks.

This is the final Desktop Dungeons Beta Update. As we scramble to add the last few features and bugfixes for the impending Steam launch and our release of the official “full” version, we’d like to thank all of our beta supporters, pre-orderers and faithful problem-spotters for the enthusiasm, hard work and commitment to improvement that has not at all waned in all the time that we’ve been developing openly on this product.

That’s 128 beta updates, folks. A nice binary kind of number and a fitting version update to wrap things up with!

Our message is brief: there’s a heaaaaavy weekend ahead of us for a whole bunch of reasons and the excitement in the office is palpable (even if one of our number is currently over at MineCon)! If anything breaks in the next few days, we’ll be paying careful attention — so let us know. Gaze below for one last beta changelog and give yourselves a pat on the back for all the valuable feedback you’ve given us over the years: More…

Steam Release Announced!

Yep, we’re finally loosening our tongues about the long-awaited Desktop Dungeons Steam launch! Your favourite fix of homicidal goats, merciless dungeons and thinky roguelike puzzling will hit the service on 7 November for PC and Mac.

You have one last week to get in on the pre-order system for 10% off and immediate access to the almost-no-longer-beta version. No matter when you purchase your copy, you will be entitled to a free Steam key on full release, and we’ll be working on the iPhone / Android / Linux conversions shortly thereafter. So, tell your friends! Tell your family! Tell your more technologically-inclined pets!

Let everyone know that we’re here to change their coffee breaks forever. And tell them to buy the game. Their loyal Kingdom subjects will thank them for it.

PS. If you happen to be in or around America, make your way to MineCon in Orlando, Florida to check out Desktop Dungeons before it goes public! Yep, we’re totally gonna have a presence there — just look out for goats and a guy with an epically braided beard.

Dungeon Task Force

Now, this is a pretty little update!

We’ve added a chunk of new animations this week, vastly improving the appearance of a lotta common dungeon interactions such as exploration and enemy thwacking. Bosses have suitably ominous bone piles placed around them (the unfortunate remains of unfortunate adventurers, no doubt) and gold coins are about 50% more golden and coin-ish.

We’ve also added one last game system to fill out a hitherto barren panel on the Kingdom screen: the long-delayed Advisor Tasks panel, designed to direct, intrigue and reward players with micro-quests and common chores. Players stuck on dungeons will no longer find themselves completely bereft of achievements or income, and beginners should find the tasks pulling them in interesting new directions. Give the system a try and let us know what you think!

New sound effects are being added this week, too. The process has only begun in this update, but we’ll have another whole chunk of ’em by this time next week. They’re already sounding pretty crackly, magical and chilling on our end, so it’s just a matter of plugging ’em into the game itself!

What more have we added this week? How much extra content is possible? Which final gaps are being plugged at this late hour? The changelog reveals all: More…

Trailers and puzzles

As Desktop Dungeons nears release, we’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about trailers. Indie games tend to be hugely impacted by their trailers – that’s how a lot of potential players first interact with your game. For ages, we had no idea how to convey the ideas behind Desktop Dungeons in video: The game isn’t really packed with action, gameplay tends to be slower and less spectacular and players often sit and think instead of being bombarded with situations they have to deal with right-the-hell-now.

A few weeks ago we started working on our trailer problem in earnest and things are starting to get really interesting. We ended up reaching out to several professional trailer makers, hoping to get a few ideas that would work. In the end, it looks like we’re going to have multiple trailers – two by different people and a third one that we initially weren’t going to pursue, but ended up liking so much that we thought we might just try to film it and see how it turned out.

That happened last weekend. The early cut of that live-action trailer has made the people we’ve tested it on laugh quite a bit, so that’s good. The other trailers serve different purposes – one is designed to get people’s attention and the other is an attempt at showing off gameplay (yes, that’s hard to do, it doesn’t mean we didn’t have ideas that could work). Shooting for a trailer that’s just over a minute long took most of the day, we’re really glad that we have friends in the film and TV industries, otherwise we’d never have made anything this cool happen… Also, effects are pretty fun to make! The eggs above worked wonderfully, although you’ll just have to wait until the trailer is finished to see exactly what we did with them.

Kerbang Kaboom

Here’s another juice update for y’all. As we continue padding out the animations for dungeon interactions, we’ve started bringing our attention to small — but oft-forgotten — aspects of the dungeon experience, such as tile scouting, fog-o-war and an actual frikking graphic for the actual frikking backpack.

Bug fixes and minor interface adjustments abound. We’re also halfway through the Advisor Tasks system, one final mechanical tweak that’s due to be rolled out soon. Players needing additional victory metrics and a small gold boost should appreciate this little bit of content, which will be explained in more detail when it arrives next week.

How much could there possibly be left to do? Well, a rapidly diminishing amount, as it so happens. Adjustments sink further into details as we prepare for the final push! Changelog follows, loyal beta users: More…

Score!

This week sees a juicy visual update with the introduction of a brand-new score screen, iterating on the basic improvements shown in the last update. Now players can take after-dungeon screenshots to be truly proud of, showing off their adventuring prowess without the burden of an all-encompassing inky void, ugly stats and text in odd places. Hooray!

People waiting for the official full release of Desktop Dungeons will be excited to know that this is the last significant overhaul of a temporary graphics scene, meaning that visual adjustments from here will only concern themselves with smaller game elements (and maybe a tasty-looking splash screen for good measure). Minus the juice that we still want to add with animations and additional UI tweaks, this is pretty much starting to *look* like the product we’d originally envisioned. Additional background work should soon have it *sounding* like the product we’d envisioned, and significant advancements in haptics and Goat Cheese Over IP technology should also mean that we’ll get it *tasting* just like we imagined.

Or something.

We’re frantically working through an ever-dwindling checklist of “Stuff That Still Needs The Doing” and there’s an aura of excitement in the air strong enough to trigger a fainting goat reflex. Changelog follows: More…