Desktop Dungeons

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: Read the rest of this entry »

We’re pretty stoked about the presence of Desktop Dungeons and Make Games SA at this year’s rAge expo in Johannesburg. Our game is just one entry in an exciting list of local games forming the pretty respectable setup seen over here. This is probably MGSA’s most impressive showing at rAge so far and we’re actually kinda jealous that we can’t make it up there this time around.

If you feel like dropping by the expo itself, be sure to try out our unique build of DD featuring a never-before-heard selection of the orchestral music track from Danny Baranowsky and Grant Kirkhope. That’s some special incentive right there! Sadly, we’re not putting the audio into DD’s online version just yet (yeaaah, file sizes), but we have our regular weekly offering uploaded and ready for your consumption with some animation improvements, bugfixes, the beginnings of our revised score screen (you didn’t think that was going to be its final version, didya?).

This week has seen a smattering of improvements in various areas of the game. Surprise bonus: if your DD profile was created relatively recently, chances are that you’ve only just earned access to a quest or two that were unwittingly orphaned a little while back. Think of it as the game content equivalent of finding a few forgotten bank notes stashed in one of your pockets! Changelog follows: Read the rest of this entry »

There’s nothing that says “still in active development” quite like a healthy colony of interface, progression and mechanical errors popping up every week. We have mixed feelings about the number of these little guys that are still cropping up, but at the very least it means that we have a regular bunch of sharp-eyed forum users who have nothing but our best interests at heart (at least until we finally discover what secret agenda has kept them playing the beta for all this time).

So, this week’s changelog is a nice chunky example of what happens when we panic and realise that a three-update-buildup of game issues is busy glaring at us more furiously than a level 10 Meat Man’s death prediction glow.

We’ve been inserting more graphics and animation tweaks this week while gaining steam on more behind-the-scenes stuff (hint: a certain Danny “Lithuanian and proud” Baranowsky and Grant Kirkhope are really excited about the version of DD they’ll be seeing this weekend).

Prepare to read the word “fixed” a lot if you dare gaze any further! Here’s this week’s changelog: Read the rest of this entry »

Okay, technically the map has been in for a really long time already. But now it actually looks the way we want it to.

That’s right, the realms of Desktop Dungeons are no longer a barren waste of parchment-coloured desert and dirty brown dungeon buttons. The same treatment that our Kingdom screen recently enjoyed now extends to the full game world, revealing a magical adventurescape of vibrant colour and custom-drawn hazards. Hooray for that!

Woot! Short blogpost this week because the fancy new mapscreen has been the crux of our playerside output. We’ve also worked up the first iteration of a somewhat more spiffing login screen, and done more of that recent behind-the-scenes stuff. For additional details on some of the mild bugfixes and design tweaks we made on the side, changelog follows: Read the rest of this entry »

Our new Kingdom map is nearly ready for in-game awesomeness! We just need to finish up the different states required for all of the dungeon graphics (yep, they have different appearances based on completion criteria), then it’s off to plugging them in and watching them go.

In the meantime, open up the in-dungeon menu when you have a moment and check out the cool new badge graphics we’ve got for you! Finally, your unique and hard-earned dungeon achievements have been honoured with equally unique and hard-drawn dungeon badges from our unique and hard-pressed dungeon artists!

This has been another week of text fixing, with a bit of narrative improvement and some flesh-out-ness when it comes to lore and Exclusive Edition content (several EE characters so far being dispensers of this additional lore, so keep an eye out for them). From a UI perspective, we should have dealt with that pesky bottom cut-off problem that’s been plaguing the Kingdom’s dialog boxes for a few weeks. Please send us a report via e-mail or our gigantic thread o’ bugs if you still encounter graphical glitches. Screenshots are always helpful in these cases.

Aside from that, there’s been a few minor in-dungeon tweaks including a BLUDTUPOWA / Goatperson nerf. Not our idea, honest. This one’s on you guys.

A rather incremental week, though it has been filled with content and adjustments that we’re not allowed to talk about. Is that a valid carrot to dangle or not? Either way, changelog follows with the stuff we DO get to divulge: Read the rest of this entry »

Good news! We’ve made some sweeping, game-wide tweaks this week and players of all levels and Kingdom progressions should see some improvement in today’s update.

The new animation system is gaining momentum and we’ve been focusing on making everyday dungeon interactions like fighting, killing and piety gain that much more visceral and satisfying. It takes time, but the effort has been well worth it so far.

The general dialogue went through a considerable overhaul. Most of it is subtle reorganisation and condensation. Portraits, icons and character sprites have been corrected and updated. A few more advanced tutorials have been put into place. Lore and codex adjustments have been made. Et cetera et cetera. These past few days have really been an eye-opener regarding just how much text exists throughout the game.

(Oh, and female characters finally have their own name lists populated!)

We’ve also done our best to improve information flow, particularly with player gold. Two important changes in this regard are the new once-off advisor tutorial replacing the annoying gold cap popup in the Kingdom, and the ability to preview monster trophy values in-dungeon.

Finally, for those of you plugging through the Special Edition campaign: yep, slightly easier again. Particularly the third one. Maybe. Though we don’t know whether or not we went overboard in throwing an entire Kingdom’s worth of heroes at those final dungeons to help you along …

The changes this week are subtle. Profound. Powerful. Occasionally generous. Now would be a pretty decent time to fire up a new profile and test out Kingdom progression if you want to look at how much better it’s doing nowadays. Just saying. Otherwise, changelog follows: Read the rest of this entry »

And that’s another pass on the early game progress done.

In our neverending quest to streamline the learning experience for new players (and cram as many lessons into as small a space as possible without sacrificing everyone to the vengeful god Waloftext), we’ve added more icons, helpful pointers, concept explanations and aesthetic improvements to make stuff “pop”. The map isn’t in just yet, but that’ll be in as soon as our artists come out the other end of the UI spam that they’re being forced to endure.

From a bug (and performance) perspective, we’ve made a few important optimisations which should improve the game radically on systems that previously suffered! Even our less oppressed players should notice fewer halts and hiccups in their overall game experience.

Be on the lookout for weird hiccups in the progress if you decide to play through this week. We discovered and squashed a surprising number of long-standing gremlins towards the end of this cycle, but we tend to fall into a horrible habit of playing the game absolutely perfectly every time we go through it and that doesn’t really do much for exploit catching. So annoying.

For those concerned about balance, some of the Goat Glade quests are subtly easier this week – though for the most part they remain resolute in their difficulty. Sorry. But look at this lovely changelog! Isn’t it just lovely? Yeeeess. Yes it is. Precious. Things below: Read the rest of this entry »

In our everlasting Quest for Pretty, we’ve continued improving the flow and animation of early game progression. Sit back and marvel as the Kingdom animates and builds upon itself using the architecturally-patented Smoke And Nonsense Effect.

The image you see accompanying this blog post is sadly not in the game yet. But it is the game your game could look like.

One day.

Soon.

Yep, that’s right, our crosshairs are set on the map screen up next, and we want it to be bee-yoo-ti-ful by the end of the whole process (click on the image for a larger size of the current draft). We’re also sprucing up seemingly unimportant stuff like the profile switching panels, the typeface and size on toast announcements, and a bunch of other little things which do their bit to improve the player’s suspension of disbelief. Soon, there won’t be any loose ends left at all.

Aside from cosmetic and interface issues, we’ve also tackled one or two bugs (those have finally been getting rarer). Then there’s smoothing out the questline in the Goat Glade (the first one is much easier and more stable than it was a few weeks ago). You should check the changelog for other bits ‘n bobs, you know? Read the rest of this entry »

This week has been a big win for interface design and new players – along with some more flashy new animations in the general Kingdom area, we’ve rebuilt large sections of the early game progression to be less overwhelming for new players, helped along by a brand spanking new advisor tutorial system that guides players along in a nice hand-holdy (or hand-pointy) way.

This is paired with a bunch of Codex refinements and content re-additions (yeah, we couldn’t leave the lorehounds hanging) and several improvements to our recent animation system. There’s also a frightful amount of new art in the pipeline that we just couldn’t cram in — trust us when we say it’s absolutely mind-pop-sploding. Yep, that word.

Giant disembodied pointy hands of justice! We couldn’t get absolutely everything we wanted in this week, but the core systems seem a-ok and that’ll be refined by the next update. Please report any problems! Changelog follows: Read the rest of this entry »

Players of our Special Edition may rejoice – we’ve fully populated the quest content for the Goat Glade, rewards and all! The trio of multi-dungeon campaigns on offer are fiendish, varied and fiendish (while also being a little fiendish) guaranteeing hours ‘n hours of entertainment for even the most hardened veterans.

We’ll be listening to feedback carefully over the next few weeks, so if you have interesting / depressing / ferocious experiences within the Goat Glade challenges, please let us know about them!

The game continues to be prettied up in several areas — you’ll notice the shiny nature of the new Codex tabs, and there’s a bunch of cool little animations to help stat comprehension and juice up everyday dungeon experiences more.

And while on the matter of the Codex – we’ve already taken some of the minor tweaks and adjustments into consideration, and will be adding more content (especially in boss and lore areas) in the coming weeks. Should be great!

Bugs are, of course, still being squashed on a day-to-day basis. They’re frisky little rabbits, no?

Well, this week’s update comes a day early. Why? Public holiday in South Africa, y’all! Despite our 4-day work week, we like to think we’ve crammed in a good dose of gameplay to get you going for your (read: our) long weekend! You may now enjoy the changelog: Read the rest of this entry »