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[ScriptWolf]

Daniel quick Question

You mention multiplayer with co-op do we have to play nice with our friends or will we get Vs mode as well and try to finish eachover off ?

Also really nice blog post love it and I love the art style.

Also you can never have enough pipes! WE NEED MOR PIPES

How buildings are made is also very nice I like this alot

[Frumple]

Also you can never have enough pipes! WE NEED MOR PIPES

Indeed, we need more morpipes.

Morpipes are like morlocks: Strange, twisted pipes that grow underground for inexplicable reasons and occasionally devour the normal pipes you bury in the ground. Your standard morpipe is a five by three length that undulates softly and consumes passerbys with one of its seven gaping maws, but there's many variations of greater and lesser morpipes that have unique biologies (metallurgies?) and peculiar habits unique to their breed.

The naturalists have yet to find any particularly useful means of morpipe exploitation, but the local dockworkers immediately found it unutterably hilarious to toss the more flagrant criminals (and the occasional cultist) into a pit full of starving morpipes and watch the brass and copper fly. Morpipe fights are also a thriving underground betting venue, with the occasional highly successful contender breaking free of its constraints and eating a couple of blocks of the local city before someone manages to melt it into quietly writhing scrap.

[guale]

Also you can never have enough pipes! WE NEED MOR PIPES

Indeed, we need more morpipes.

Morpipes are like morlocks: Strange, twisted pipes that grow underground for inexplicable reasons and occasionally devour the normal pipes you bury in the ground. Your standard morpipe is a five by three length that undulates softly and consumes passerbys with one of its seven gaping maws, but there's many variations of greater and lesser morpipes that have unique biologies (metallurgies?) and peculiar habits unique to their breed.

The naturalists have yet to find any particularly useful means of morpipe exploitation, but the local dockworkers immediately found it unutterably hilarious to toss the more flagrant criminals (and the occasional cultist) into a pit full of starving morpipes and watch the brass and copper fly. Morpipe fights are also a thriving underground betting venue, with the occasional highly successful contender breaking free of its constraints and eating a couple of blocks of the local city before someone manages to melt it into quietly writhing scrap.

This has to be in the game now.

[Gaslamp-Daniel]

Haha awesome

Multiplayer right now is actually type-agnostic.  Everyone's on the same map together, and what you do with or to each other is your choice.  While this *may* change, it's unlikely, unless there's something that people really want to do that this doesn't support.  LP style hand-off games will also be supported.  Any other modes fall squarely into the "maybe, if we have time" category.

Thanks for the feedback guys!  The systems described in the posts are of course far from finished, but they're starting to get the faintest hint of polish to them, which is always hugely rewarding.

[Urist McSpike]

Indeed, we need more morpipes.

Morpipes are like morlocks: Strange, twisted pipes that grow underground for inexplicable reasons and occasionally devour the normal pipes you bury in the ground. Your standard morpipe is a five by three length that undulates softly and consumes passerbys with one of its seven gaping maws, but there's many variations of greater and lesser morpipes that have unique biologies (metallurgies?) and peculiar habits unique to their breed.

The naturalists have yet to find any particularly useful means of morpipe exploitation, but the local dockworkers immediately found it unutterably hilarious to toss the more flagrant criminals (and the occasional cultist) into a pit full of starving morpipes and watch the brass and copper fly. Morpipe fights are also a thriving underground betting venue, with the occasional highly successful contender breaking free of its constraints and eating a couple of blocks of the local city before someone manages to melt it into quietly writhing scrap.

Surprisingly, these morpipe-pit events have turned into a youth outing in parts of the empire.  Oddly attired youth have started gravitating to the noisy, so-called "music" of morpipes beating upon criminals and each other; these youth often twist and gyrate in strangely occult manners.  Food and drink vendors have been making steady profits from these events, although the more mature folk can't understand the attraction of all that clanging racket.  Many town elders in the affected areas simply refer to it as "the Devil's music".

[woose1]

All of this sounds exciting, and I hate to be a wet blanket, but alot of this stuff seems sort of sky-high aspirations with ungrounded ideas of how the devs plan to implement all this stuff. I think you guys need to really sit down and hammer out some solid gameplay ideas before you go on about soil moisture levels and humidity fluctuation and all that jazz. The roleplaying stuff that you guys did with the haunted coffin was great, I'd really like to see you guys do that sort of stuff again and eliminate things which you think will be impossible or take too much time to implement.

[ScriptWolf]

I forget one letter and it gets turned into a gameplay mechanic. This is why Bay12 is great.

[sebcool]

This is Bay 12 country, insanity is our main export!

[Gaslamp-Daniel]

A grounded approach is commendable. 

It's worth mentioning, just for posterity, that the vast majority of systems implementation for the project is based on a minimum viable product that involves no problems without known solutions, and that most of our development to date involves just going through the motions of implementing what people have done before.  Game development is, in this case, an iterative process, and we are lucky to be able to look back on successes and failures for decades now and build from those lessons.

The things that we've been discussing here, on our blog, and elsewhere, are some of the ideas which we are embellishing this baseline with.  As such you're right; they must be tried, iterated, and ultimately sometimes discarded in the name of a workable game.  So while it may seem that we are spinning speculative fiction and calling it game development, what you're seeing is the visible part of the iceberg, the entertaining parts.  What lies beneath is the majority: monotonous work of implementing marginally interesting code and drawing bricks.

[Darkmere]

All of this sounds exciting, and I hate to be a wet blanket, but alot of this stuff seems sort of sky-high aspirations with ungrounded ideas of how the devs plan to implement all this stuff. I think you guys need to really sit down and hammer out some solid gameplay ideas before you go on about soil moisture levels and humidity fluctuation and all that jazz. The roleplaying stuff that you guys did with the haunted coffin was great, I'd really like to see you guys do that sort of stuff again and eliminate things which you think will be impossible or take too much time to implement.

I don't think anyone REALLY wants to hear the fundamental underpinnings of game design and coding.

"I spent a couple hours figuring out how to make a topological map of local hill country that can be read and modified by the erosion simulator. It used a lot of For() loops."
vs.
"You call in X-files guys in plague doctor suits with flamethrowers! Yeah!"

That's the fundamental difference between gamers and game designers. Gamers "want", designers "want to know how and why." Daniel said it very well: the majority is iterating on past projects.

[woose1]

I don't think anyone REALLY wants to hear the fundamental underpinnings of game design and coding.

I actually do like hearing about that sort of stuff  , but you're right. If the devs really broke down into programmer speak when talking about their game it'd make the blog a whole lot more boring. The abstraction is nice when you don't want to wade through piles of code to get to the fun bits. I guess it does make more sense to tell people what you're doing differently from other games rather than going over the same material. (the exception being the comparisons to older games of the same genre)

The stuff that you guys mentioned about autonomous slaves citizens, that sounds really interesting. How independent are they going to be, exactly? From what I can gather from the blog and what you've said here, they're going to build their own houses and take care of basic necessities, while the player focuses on the industrialization of the colony. How much of a 'hands off' approach is the player going to have?

[Johuotar]

I love the world of Dredmor and Im definitely happy if I can get to see more of it.

[Pnx]

Pretty sure this is not the world of Dredmor. Dredmor was more about lots of silly stuff and making fun of fantasy/rpg's/roguelikes. This is more silly yet straight-faced steampunk victorian stuff with lovecraftian horror mixed in.

[ScriptWolf]

there was no clockwork update last Wednesday im not happy

[Darkmere]

Pretty sure this is not the world of Dredmor.

Last I heard, the only thing this world has in common with Dredmor is (possibly) diggles.

You can never, ever, have too many diggles.