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Gaslamp's blog notes the Linux release of Dredmor is now available through the Steam Linux beta:

First for Windows and Mac, and now, the fabled Linux client.  While the Linux client for Steam is still in a closed beta test, those who have access to it should now be able to purchase Dredmor for Linux (as well as a slew of other great games).  Also, of course, if you are in the beta and already own Dredmor on Steam, you should just be able to download it and give those Diggles what-for.

Gaslamp released the v1.1.2 update for Dredmor last week - head over to their blog for the lengthy patch notes.

Gaslamp has posted extensive patch notes for the "coming soon" v1.1.2 patch for Dredmor - they're too long to post, so head over to the blog for a look.

Gaslamp has provided an update on Conquest of the Wizardlands, which has launched very successfully:

The feedback from CotW has been overwhelmingly positive, and in some cases stark raving bonkers. We also didn’t expect to break the Steam Top 10 yesterday; we ended up at #8, failing to defeat our hated nemesis, Skyrim. Not bad for DLC for a 1 year old indie game that’s about Drunken Wizards. We are thrilled that everybody is enjoying it, and we encourage you to keep enjoying it. (Enjoy responsibly, lest you end up like the Wizardkings themselves.)

Head over for details on some of the bugs and issues they are working on as well as updates for other stores, such as Desura and HIB.

Conquest of the Wizardlands for Dredmor is now available on Steam for $2.99. The feature list:

Harness the expanded storage space of your very own Pocket Dimension where interdimensional gnomes probably won’t steal all your crafting-junk.

Explore the Wizardlands by trading Wizarding Graffiti with your friends and enemies alike to gain access to the fractured extra-dimensional domains of the Wizards.

Encrust your Equipment with our powerful new Encrusting System! Upgrade weapons and armour with powerful crusts, offering special abilities and horrifying instability effects as crust is encrusted upon crust!

Tackle new foes from the terrifyingly fun Baron Samedi to the small and annoying Cloud Gremlins who shoot small and annoying lightning bolts at you! Beware the Monstrous Rutabaga, scourge of the Vikings, who will run you down at unexpected speed with their monstrous dash ability.

New Monstrous Menagerie and Trophy Room menu screens to compel you further toward obsessive collectivism!

Diggle Hell. It’s a real place and you will go there if you are naughty. Beware the dark power of Vlad Digula!

A Whack of new skills: Communist, Bankster, Egyptian Magic, Magical Law, Paranormal Investigator, and Tourist! 

The next Dredmor expansion - Conquest of the Wizardlands - is about to go live and there's a v1.1.1 patch to accompany:

As is the Gaslamp Games tradition honoured by our ancestors, with the release of an expansion (maybe you’ve heard of it? Wizardlands?) we are also adding and fixing a bunch of stuff in the core Dungeons of Dredmor game.

The patch will go live alongside Conquest of the Wizardlands, which will be launching very very very soon.

Edit: As for 10:55am on August 1st, The Patch is Live!

Some choice highlights:

• Two new skills and weapon types have appeared: Daggers and Polearms!
• Larger UI controls are now on a per-element basis, rather than a global setting.
• Minibosses has been added!
• Nerfed Promethean Magic again!  We can’t send eagles to attack your abdomen so this is the best we can do.
• Oh, and we added a Raven.  I guess we could have used that, but it get its own bullet point.
• Added a Pocket Dimension for all your storage needs!  Requires finding a suitable set of Wizard’s keys.
• Total rewrite of savegame system.  Saved games are now stored in directories, and mods are now embedded in those saved games.  Now, when your Steam Workshop mods update, it won’t update in the game you have been playing (which was a bad idea).
• Mods published to the Steam Workshop are now automatically tagged to describe their content (new rooms, skills, monsters, et cetera).

Gaslamp announces the Dredmor expansion Conquest of the Wizardlands will be launched August 1st. There's also some art hints from their in-development Project Odin but they're completely opaque to me.

Wondering when you can begin exploring the forgotten dimensions of lost wizards? Then gather ’round, because Gaslamp Games is pleased to announce that the Conquest of the Wizardlands expansion for Dungeons of Dredmor will be launched on August 1st.

Gaslamp has posted a lengthy blog entry on their upcoming Dungeons of Dredmor expansion, Conquest of the Wizardlands. As they say in the opening, rather than present a typical feature list, they've delved into the some of the design decisions as well:

Pocket Dimensions & You: A Room Without a View

How’s it work? Simple: find some keys to the pocket dimension that a sodden wizard left in the dungeon (the game will make sure you keep finding keys until you pick the stupid things up). Once acquired, a new UI element appears which allows you to jump into the pocket dimension as if you were using a skill.

Like a skill, this dimensional key has a cooldown. When you return from the Pocket Dimension back to the dungeon, you will appear in the same space. Note that time and magic work differently and handwave handwave cough something or other so you can’t heal or digest food and booze in the pocket dimension or otherwise exploit it to get out of trouble.

Unless you go from the Pocket Dimension to The Wizardlands. But that has risks of its own.

But let’s back up a bit from all that and talk about limited inventory space.

Inventory has been a problem in Dredmor forever. This is of course a game based around finding piles upon piles of silly objects in the grand tradition of looting that made games like Diablo strangely compelling. We need the multitude of items for the sake of the act of looting as well as to be a vehicle for delivering so much of the humor and backstory – such as it is – of the Dredmor universe. In short, Dredmor wouldn’t be Dredmor without all the useless crap lying around. [...]

Gaslamp announces another Dungeons of Dredmor expansion, titled Conquest of the Wizardlands. The game will be available "pretty darn quick" for $2.99:

For the past four months, a secret strike team of game development commandos has been secretly crafting arcane components into something for you… something about wizards. Something about their lands. Yes, this summon you must join the Conquest Of The Wizardlands.

New Features:

• Explore the Wizardlands! Trade Wizarding Graffiti with your friends and enemies alike to gain access to the fractured extra-dimensional domains of the Wizards using an innovative retro-inspired magic password system.
• Harness the expanded storage space of your very own Pocket Dimension where interdimensional gnomes probably won’t steal all your crafting-junk.
• Encrust your Equipment with our powerful new Encrusting System! Upgrade weapons and armour with powerful crusts, offering special abilities and horrifying instability effects as crust is encrusted upon crust!
• Tackle new foes from the terrifyingly fun Baron Samedi to the small and annoying Cloud Gremlins who shoot small and annoying lightning bolts at you! Beware the Monstrous Rutabaga, scourge of the Vikings, who will run you down at unexpected speed with the monstrous dash ability.
• Drunkenness!
• New trophy screens, including a rewrite of the achievement system for off-line play (and people not using Steam)
• Two new weapon types: Daggers and Polearms! (No really, they’re not Swords and Staves anymore!)
• A whole WHACK of new Skills: Daggers, Polearms, Bankster, Communist, Paranormal Investigator, Magical Law, and more!
• Minibosses!
• A small, pleasant handful of usability fixes! (Which everyone with the core game will get for free, naturally.)
• Enhanced sneakiness, monster sight cones, and alertness levels for more roguish gameplay! The only thing missing is a box you can carry around to hide in — unless you count an extra-dimensional box (see the first item in this list).
• Diggle Hell. It’s a real place.

Gaslamp has been busy, announcing Steam Workshop support is live for Dungeons of Dredmor:

Create and share all new monsters, items, skills, spells and dungeon rooms!  Ever wanted an acid fireball?  How about a skill that summons Diggle mages?  A staff that explodes when you throw it and turns everyone who it kills into zombies?  Easy.  A trap that can only be disarmed by feeding it 10 gallons of Slivovitz plum brandy?  A magical pear that summons a magical orange that summons a magical apple that summons the original magical pear?  That’s more like it.

The Steam Workshop is a place designed to make it easy to find, play, and share quality custom content created by other fans.  Simply head over to the Steam Workshop page, find a mod that you would like to play, and hit “Subscribe”.  The mod will be downloaded to just the right spot, and upon loading Dredmor you simply hit the “Mod” button on the launcher and pick which ones you want to load.

Or, if you want to try your hand at your own creations, head over to Dredmod.com and take a look at some tutorials on how to craft your own!  We’ve included information on how to make and upload a mod, as well as some of the code that you can use to create completely unique content.

There's also a v1.0.11 patch and a Steam sale with 70% off.

Gaslamp will launch a free expansion and Steam Workshop mod support for Dungeons of Dredmor on June 5th, according to their blog.

The Gaslamp blog announces a free expansion for Dredmor will be released "very soon", offering Steam Workshop integration and new game features. The expansion comes via collaboration with modders but doesn't have a proper name yet:

team Workshop; mod integration with Steam! We’re turning it on! It’s Steamy!

Battle Geology, a wizard-like warrior skill with earth-shattering consequences by the terribly mysterious Null (how mysterious? terribly.)

Clockwork Knight and Rogue Scientist, a pair of crafty steampunk skill lines by the too-clever-by-half Ruigi

Warlockery, the wizard skill for wizards who would rather by warriors, by the utterly mad Essence — he wrote over 500 lines of xml for one spell.

A mess of twisty little rooms, all different, created by the deranged architect our mortal speech renders “Bergstrom“; The geometry is all wrong.

And to inhabit the renovated Dungeons of Dredmor we’ve summoned a pack of new monster variations dug up by one FaxCelestis, from the existentially troubling Poorly Cloned Hero to the lofty Diggle Rocketeer.

Naturally there are some new items and other such nonsense happening which you’ll have to discover on your own.

Dredmor has been updated to v1.0.10 - check out the last line in this excerpt where they say they have three "announcements" for encores coming:

Dungeons of Dredmor has now been updated across all distributions and all platforms: Steam, the Humble Download Page, Desura, and GameFly (our bonus new distributor!) So far, the only problem we are aware of is that the skills for Realm of the Diggle Gods are not installing correctly in the GameFly build only; we are looking into this with Gamefly, and hope to have it resolved as soon as possible. There have also been reports of some people being able to wear cheese as armour, but that’s neither here nor there.

The full change log for the patch is reproduced under the cut. If you have any feedback on the new patch – balance changes and complaints, bug reports, praise, suggestions, or simply wish to enjoy the complementary Lutefisk samples, please don’t hesitate to let us know on our forums.

So what do we do for an encore? Stand by for … three announcements.

Gaslamp has teased an iPad release of Dredmor on their blog...

A v1.0.10 update for Dredmor is being prepped and the Gaslamp blog has the patch notes - the release is sue at the end of the week. There's also another Project Odin tease with a piece of concept art.

The latest Community Update for Dungeons of Dredmor looks at two mods titled Practical Geology and Dire Gourmand.

Gaslamp has kicked up a blog post on the next Dredmor patch and a little bit more on Project Odin. Head over for another piece of concept art (pipes...a little Steampunk-y?):

Wow, it’s been a long time since we’ve posted anything on the blog.  Sorry about that guys.

The big patch beta has started, those of you who are interested in trying it out can take a look here.  There are still a few bugs in it, but we can use all the help we can get in testing it out.  Windows only for now, OSX and Linux on the way.

The team for Project Odin is almost complete: Joseph Nejat is joining our sodden ranks as 3D Character Artist. We are really looking forward to having him on the team largely due to his awesome English accent. And it’s becoming evident that we probably need to update our group portrait sometime soon =)

We are busy organizing our notes in preparation for finally releasing the details of Project Odin; right now we’re stuck on the name, but we should be coming to some consensus soon. (See: THE PIT.)

They're also looking at partnering on some toys...let them know if you're in the market for a Diggle plushie.

Gaming on Linux has an interview with Nicholas Vining and Daniel Jacobsen from Gaslamp Games about Dredmor and developing for Linux:

So, hypothetically speaking, will your future titles all be available for Windows, Mac and Linux now and indefinitely?
NV: Never make promises that you can’t keep. If we start building titles that use OpenGL features and extensions that are not supported on the OS X or Linux driver stacks, that might be an issue in the future. Since the closed-source Linux drivers mirror their Windows counterparts pretty closely, I don’t see it being a big issue for Linux. We also now - thankfully! - have OpenGL 3.2 support on OS X, but it means that our next game will require Lion to run.

That said, the plan going forward is to put the next title out for all platforms and see where we go.

In other news, PC Gamer featured a new wallpaper in naming Dredmor "Indie Game of 2011" and artist David Baumgart shows the creation of the art through several stages.

Gaming on Linux has an interview with Nicholas Vining Daniel Jacobsen from Gaslamp Games. The questions deal mostly with gaming on the Linux platform. Here's a quote on how to make the Linux succeed in terms of money:

It boils down to money. If you want Linux on the desktop to succeed, the Linux community has to accept that commercial, closed-source software, of the sort usually sold for money, is a necessary part of that ecosystem. One of the reasons why Linux in the server market has been so successful is because it’s possible to make a great deal of money off of Linux servers and open source software in the server market. That money then gets injected into the open source development sphere, and everybody wins. If you want a better Linux desktop experience, and a better open-source Linux desktop experience, make it easier for us to make money off of it. If we’re making money, we’re willing to help get things fixed and make life better, and we can use open source software to do so. Everybody wins.

Patch 1.0.10 has been released - the changelog is here. A quote:

•FIXED: Invisibility now works as it says on the tin.

•FIXED: Blackjack works again.

•FIXED: Added a flag to targetHitEffects that lets them apply before, or after, the target combat calculation.

•FIXED: “Playing for Both Teams” achievement now works.

•FIXED: bookshelf crashing bug w/bony wand recipes

•FIXED: Some timing exploits.

•FIXED: A number of load/save corruption issues.

•FIXED: Uberchests not opening after you load and save.

•FIXED: You can now load more than one mod on OS X.

•FIXED: The Mace of Windu now uses the correct art.

•FIXED: Item spawning on levels 11-15 now works correctly. Additionally, mods can now create items up to Level 20.

•FIXED: Installing all the skill mods will no longer overflow the main mod loader screen.

Be sure to check out the Project Teasers at the end of the changelog.

Gaslamp has kicked up their latest Dredmor Community Update, which looks at two mods that each add six skills to the game.

They also have some General Bits of News that covers news related to the team, discussion of the possibility of a DLC of some sort and more art from their next project, Odin.

In this spotlight from Gaslamp Games we hear about three new mods,  including the Interior Dreadmorating mod:

Pretty much a small expansion by itself, this mod adds (from the description,)

•45 new rooms. You should find something new on nearly every floor of the typical play-through. Some of the rooms have scripts, levers, and/or new custom blockers you haven’t seen before.

•25 variant rooms. These are either a tweaked version of a room from the main game, or a tweaked version of one of my new rooms, adjusted to better fit specific floors.

•20+ new items, including armor, weapons, special booze, and even a gorgon’s head.•Lots and lots of flavor-text. Several dozen new words for the monster, artifact, and room name generators. Some of the new room names generate new statues or paintings, as well. New phonemes, and new qualities and materials, too!

•New insults for monsters to hurl, and new ichors for them to collapse into when you squish them in retaliation for insulting you.

I recommend it mostly for the diversity it brings to the dungeon layout and I think most people will enjoy it.

This mod also requires Realm of the Diggle Gods.

The Gaslamp Blog has been updated.  This time around they're  talking about two mods, Wind Magic and Cooliomancy. Here's what the former does:

You are the master of all winds in the sealed off underground dungeon with no access to the sky.” Clearly, the description was enough to intrigue me. This skill is based both on utility and damage. The first ability is a frontal AoE with knockback, which would also be useful to non-mages. The second lets you fly gracefully is a teleport with an added dodge and sneakiness bonus. The next three let you silence monsters, stun them, and move around the battlefield all while doing damage.

At the end David borrows some space and talks about some art he sent to a fan for his birthday. Very nice.

Gaslamp has an update saying v1.0.1.0 for Dredmor should be coming this Thursday or so:

A quick status update: Dredmor should be getting a second patch – 1.0.10 – this Thursday, or – worst-case scenario next Tuesday. (I’m not releasing patches on Fridays any more. Once bitten, twice shy.) This will be going to Steam, Desura, and the HIB simultaneously, so everybody will finally be up to date. This fixes the bookshelf crash, the weird loading of saves related crashes on OS X and Linux machines, and adds a few cosmetic niceties (working magic reflection, remembering what mods are loaded, remembering if you have disabled click-to-move, random boss monsters occasionally having additional magic resistance, that kind of thing) that have been on people’s lists for awhile.

They also talk about the shift to their next project ("Odin") coming faster than expected, with hints they may have some external funding:

We have been uncommunicative lately, and this is our fault. Owing to external factors which we cannot announce yet, we have suddenly found ourselves catapulted into Project Odin, almost full-time, somewhat quicker than we anticipated. We’re not entirely sure how much we can talk about this yet, which is problematic, and everybody is probably wondering what’s going on. Ah, growing pains. (This has also been one of the reasons why we are looking for additional gameplay programmers; at least one person will be working on Dredmor with me, on a full-time basis, for the next few months.)

While we can’t give away what Odin is *just* yet – although there have been some pretty good guesses made – we can start talking a little bit about things we have been working on. We have acquired a real budget, oddly; dealing with this, and getting this organized, has been our major time-occupying phenomenon.

The Gaslamp blog has introduced a new feature - a community spotlight, which wil cover "mods and other things going on over at the forums and elsewhere". This first edition covers two mods - Clockwork Knights and Megacrafts Mod. 

Here's an update on the direction of Dungeons of Dredmor from the Gaslamp site:

Third off: with Dredmor and the expansion pack behind us, our plan at this point is to finish stabilizing any last issues caused by the 1.0.7->1.0.8->1.0.9 patch cycle, and then to keep proceeding with smaller, more incremental patches. Hopefully we should be as stable at the end of this week as we were when we released 1.0.6 (voted “Most Stable Patch of 2011″ by our user base.) Balancing and fixes are a continual process, and we’re taking our inspiration from Team Fortress 2 in terms of how we’d like Dredmor to continue evolving. (This does not include a) a hat store, b) becoming free-to-play, c) “Meet the Diggle.”) We’re also looking at the mod support that we put in with release 1.0.7; people have made some *very* cool things, and we are going to continue to provide support for this developing part of the community. Additionally, we will be starting a “mod spotlight” feature on the blog, featuring a mod selected once… every so often… by our community moderator, Mathieu “Daynab” Dugon. We should have the first one up sometime next week.

Gaslamp Games has released a new patch v.1.09B R2 for this game. You can get it at Steam or at Desura. The changelog:

- FIXED: Save game compatibility with 1.0.8 save games.
- FIXED: Save game issues on levels > level 2.
- FIXED: crash looking at bookshelves containing a wand recipe
- FIXED: hordes spawning off screen causing crash in script code. (This was the Moustache Fighting League. Again. Not even kidding.)
- FIXED: primary and secondary stat buffs not loading in mods.
- Redrew minimap icons so that they are beautiful.
- Additional wandcrafting recipes.

An update on Dredmor from the Gaslamp blog:

It appears a bug that affects v1.08 save games opened in v1.09 of Dredmor has crept in, causing mayhem. A manual hotfix has been released but has been flagged "experimental" (understandably, having been written in a hurry on the road):

Mad panic ensued – which is not easy to do on a bus – but I managed. Having now recovered the laptop, and having now found wireless Internet thanks to the good people at Starbucks, we have some answers.

First off: yes, we can fix your save games. I will be putting up a hotfix tonight; I’m not sure how fast we will be able to get things onto Steam and Desura. Humble Bundle users – since this only actually affects 1.0.8 savegames, you *should* be okay.

Second off: this only affects save games made with Dredmor 1.0.8. Dredmor 1.0.9 saves should be fine.

Again, I apologize for this mess and will be coming up with some additional QA improvements in the future.  I will personally find some way to make it up to you in January with something awesome.

So! We have a patch for this. And because you have clicked below the read buffer, this means you want to try it.

Head over for the file and instructions.

A v1.09 patch has been released for Dredmor - here is a snip from the blurb and head over for the patch notes:

Dredmor Patch 1.0.9 has now been sent off to Steam, Desura, *and* the Humble Bundle! Finally. These fine groups of people will get it up in their own sweet time, but we’ve sent it and our part is (hopefully) done. We are desperately praying that nothing new blows up, because if it does… well, Christmas is cancelled forever.

Changelog below the cut. Patch 1.0.9 doesn’t fix everything; some things, such as fixing Blackjack and some of the stickier issues are going to have to wait until January, but it ended up being more comprehensive than I originally planned. As is traditional, we’ll put a little note on this post once Steam puts the patch up and it doesn’t go Blooie. We are still hoping to get the DLC into the hands of our loyal Desura and Humble-Bundlers some time in the New Year; dealing with the actual Diggle Gods release, as well as the massive influx of new users as a result of our Steam Sale has been… a bit overwhelming.

Realm of the Diggle Gods is now available on Steam (and Desura soon, apparently) for $2.99:

• Six new skill trees: Veganism, Big Game Hunting, Werediggling, Emomancy, Piracy, and Demonology.
• One Hundred New Items! .. ish.
• Five new dungeon levels, in a variety of flavours!
• New mysterious portals that lead to places that will kill you!
• New scriptable rooms, providing joyful puzzles and traps!
• A dozen new monster types to fight!
• Polymorphing!
• And More!

Looks like a few Gremlins crept into the Dredmor 1.08 update and a hotfix has been issued:

A hotfix for 1.0.8 has now been sent to Steam, which fixes the vending machine crashes, the skill selection crashes, the crafting toolkit crashes, (hopefully!) everybody’s old 1.0.6 save games, and a few other things. It’s not up yet, but when it’s up we will let you know. We’re in the process of building new packages for Desura, and for HiB users.

EDIT: This includes a fix for the OS X version. Steve Jobs’s ghost has been laid to rest with the ritual offering of a black turtleneck sweater.

EDIT, EDIT: Up now.

EDIT, EDIT, EDIT: OS X users no longer crash. However, and I swear I can’t make this up, any OS X user grabbing the newest patch will be attacked by giant pink scorpion Diggles. We’ve sent a second fix to Valve, and it should be up in a bit.

The 1.08 update for Dredmor has been released, adding a female hero among other improvements and fixes - head to the official blog for the full patch notes.

Word from the same post is that the expansion pack is ready but they are waiting for a release date from Valve, so stay tuned. Apparently some websites have confused the 1.08 patch with the expansion but they are, of course, different things.

A short sample from the current patch:

- A female hero has been added to the game.
- Added Modding Support! (Use at your own risk.)
- Added No Time To Grind mode: shorter dungeon levels, more monster XP.
- All skill trees now have a minimum of 5 skills.
- Added support for polymorphing. (More of this in the DLC.)
- Wand tree has been completely revised. Wands now use traditional charges, and the wand lore tree now contains Wandcrafting instead.
- Added n-dimensional lathe to craft wands.
- Added new crafting interface; we stole the old one from Minecraft, we stole the new one from Terraria.
- Added belt, glove, and pant slots. Added belts, gloves, and pants (10 of each)
- Added some more items.
- Added anti-magic field sprayers and anti-magic effects.
- Added monster taxonomy flags.

Head over to the Gaslamp blog for a trailer and five screens for Realm of the Diggle Gods.

Gaslamp has an update on their blog, discussing the success with the recent Humble Indie Bundle, that v1.07 and then v1.08 aren't far away - and the name of the expansion is Realm of the Diggle Gods:

So what else doth he have in store for you?

- 1.0.7: Now that the Humble Bundle is over, Krong is free from the chains of his period of exclusivity and is eager to spread the gospel of a new patch, with a female hero and mod support and all manner of good and crafty things besides.

But lo,

- 1.0.8: is just about done, and should be out either Thursday or Friday. So he shalt simply wait until then, and pass the savings on via Steam and Desura (and yea, to the Humble Bundle customers besides.) All praise to Krong, for he doth not force you to run the auto-updater more so than usual.

and yea:

- Linux Humble Bundle users: let it be known, Krong feels your pain from his throne covered in the flesh of the finest penguins. We hath addressed your issues, and lo, we hath rolled our fixes into Dredmor patch 1.0.8 – for it is good patch, and it doth fix the random crashes and the general instability.

Last but not least, there is an expansion. It is spoken of in the words of the great prophecy, wherein dwarves with giant beards do toil over the finest of new levels and features. Soon! Soon a sign shall come to the Youtubes, in the form of a great Trailer, and the chosen of Krong shalt follow the hyperlink to the trailer wherein all his mysteries shalt be revealed, including a release date which is much, MUCH closer than you think.

And yea, the name of the expansion shalt be:

The Realm of the Diggle Gods.

That is all. As you were.

The latest Humble Bundle has added Dungeons of Dredmor for those that pay more than the average. As I write, that means anyone who pays more than $4.02 gets the original Introversion bundle (Darwinia, DEFCON, Uplink etc) and also gets bonuses of Aquaria, Crayon Physics Deluxe and Dredmor. If you haven't already bought Dredmor, this is a great way of getting some excellent indie games and chipping a bit into charity at the same time.

To be more accurate, Gaslamp Games has a new website and that obviously affects Dungeons of Dredmor. No new content that I'm aware of at this point but hopefully that means the expansion is coming along!

You can get Dungeons of Dredmore for 50% off at Desura. It's $2.49 for the next ninety hours.

The Gaslamp site has some shots from the Dredmor expansion to distract us as they continue work on the 1.07 patch.

Dredmor v1.07 is progressing along according to a new post at the Gaslamp blog:

The 1.0.7 beta should be going out to you Steam users with beta access in the next day or two [edit- or Monday for sure; whenever it gets pushed to Steam], provided little else explodes. We’ll keep you posted.

There are also two screens snips of options - choosing the new female hero and a difficulty option offering "No time to Grind" with smaller floors.

Head to the Gaslamp blog for a preview screenshot of v1.0.7, showing off the new female hero.

DIYGamer has interviewed the Gaslamp team behind Dredmor, discussing how the team came about, the early days of the project and more. When asked if the sales success has been better than anticipated, Nicholas Vining replies "Ohhhh, yes".  A bit on the future:

DIYGamer: So looking ahead to the future, what’s next for Dungeons of Dredmor in terms of updates?

D Baumgart: Well, we’re doing some big content updates — a female hero character was shown just the other day. And yes, we’re doing an expansion.

Nicholas Vining: The female character will be coming out some time in November, with the same patch as our long-delayed mod support, and the expansion will be adding all sorts of new stuff for both the main game and the additional update. Not sure when it’ll land yet, though.

D Baumgart: We haven’t actually officially announced the expansion anywhere, really, just alluded to it a bit. So there ya go.

Nicholas Vining: There is an expansion.

Dan: Huzzah!

Nicholas Vining: My three title choices are “The Realms of Masochism”, “The Hole of Festering”, and… what was the other one? Needless to say, these have all been boycotted.

Well, we knew it was happening but Gaslamp has officially owned up to an (as yet unnammed) expansion for Dredmor, which they plan to release before the end of the year:

As you may have heard, the cat is officially out of the bag: we are going to be offering a paid expansion for Dredmor.  While rumors about the possible inclusion of eyebrow-wigs are totally unfounded, evidently… um, this is something people are interested in!  We’ll do some testing involving cubes with eyebrows in physics puzzles and see what happens.  The Expansion is planned to be released before the end of the year.

As far as actual content, there will definitely be:

• more skills
• more monsters
• more levels
• more items (crafting skills, weapon types)
• more recipes
• and a few other *things* which we’re still keeping under wraps

One of the exciting things that is coming out of the expansion is that we are finally implementing our mod system in all its splendour and using it to implement the expansion, which means that all of the things mentioned in the above list you will be able to tinker with to your heart’s content.  We are really looking forward to seeing what you guys come up with in this regard, and hope you’ll share your creations with us!  The mod patch, which will also include our fantastic red haired heroine, should be ready for your perusal sometime next month.

There's a post on the Dredmor blog with a few small images representing some of their future plans for Dredmor but leaving the facts to "frivolous hearsay and idle speculation". There might be nuance I'm missing but the central message is clear: there will be a female hero option.

Gaslamp has released v1.06 for Dredmor - full patch notes in this announcement. A small snip:

GAMEPLAY: The resistance statistic now gives you a roll to block corruption attacks.

GAMEPLAY: Mace and Axe skill trees have been revamped and enhanced.

GAMEPLAY: Lord Dredmor can no longer be stunned or charmed.

GAMEPLAY: Reworked Necronomiconomics.

GAMEPLAY: Smithing is now a Warrior archetype.

GAMEPLAY: Sneakiness has a -20 modifier.

GAMEPLAY: Elemental Weapons now have some Elemental Resistances. Or something.

GAMEPLAY: Added a bunch more items, including a keytar.

GAMEPLAY: Some crafts are now unhidden by default.

GAMEPLAY: Added the Mosolov Cocktail! Don’t drink it all at once.

GAMEPLAY: The 2X bottom bar is now implemented. We’ll do the rest next patch.

COSMETIC: Monster spellcasting now shows up on the text ticker.

COSMETIC: More minimap icons!

INTERNAL: Hidden Fun Stuff to make it so we can turn on the mod support without breaking everybody’s save games. (That said, we have to put it in the patch before the mod support so that… well, so that it doesn’t break everybody’s save games.)

INTERNAL: Hidden Fun Stuff, related to the Other Hidden Fun Stuff.

LINUX: You can haz it.

...and more details about that Linux port you can see in that line above, incuding the "arcane" method of accessing it:

As we noted in the previous blog update, we now have Linux binaries. In fact, we snuck them into the Steam distribution, so that those of you who bought the game from us on Steam can install it and run it natively on Linux. The port is done! It’s up to date. The distribution methods, though, are a bit arcane… so pay attention! There will be a quiz.

There will be two – at least! – separate channels for purchasing a Linux build of Dungeons of Dredmor that do not require fiddling about with WINE. This option is only suggested if you bought the game on Steam for Windows, and want to run it under Linux. If you have *not* purchased the game, we recommend you wait until we have a better distributor for your needs. That said, the following is a crash course in how to build it.

1. Install WINE. Install Steam under WINE. Install Dredmor, from Steam, under WINE.

2. Find where Steam has hidden Dredmor on your computer. In general, it will be somewhere like Steam/steamapps/common/Dungeons of Dredmor

3. Copy all that stuff out onto your Linux box in the location of your choice.

4. From that directory, run chmod -x Dredmor* {amd64,x86}/*

5. Run Dredmor.

6. Note that Diggles are not like penguins, and will not give you free software and/or herring. In fact, they want to kill you.

Linux is still somewhat in beta, as it hasn’t gotten much testing. Please let us know how it goes.

"So I hear you like a large interface" offers a single preview screen showing an upcoming interface option in Dredmor for those who run hi-res screens.

Dredmor is about to graduate to v1.06 and the Gaslamp blog has the patch notes. They are too long to post in full, so here is the intro, which suggests new distribution options are coming soon:

… I swear, when I started working on Dredmor I had more hair on the top of my head. Time to go get the razor.

In happier, hairier news: Patch 1.0.6 is coming down the hopper. Our entire motivation for Patch 1.0.6 is to ensure that, when we release the Linux version, we can simultaneously release Windows and OS X versions that have the same set of gameplay changes and new items… so patch 1.0.6 is not as large as patch 1.0.5. It is also not as large as 1.0.5 because, well, we’ve mainly been working on the Linux port and new distribution stuff. We hope to have a *huge* slate of announcements within the next week or so about where you will be able to buy Dredmor; Chris Dykstra, our Director of Business Developmentation, has been working the phones so that we can distribute for you so hard, so bad, so smooth, that you’re never going to want to buy games from anybody else, ever again.

Dredmor has been reviewed at Frictionless Insight, with a score of 4.5/5. They obviously enjoyed it but do warn the game may be a shock for casual console gamers:

That's part of the charm. Rogue-like games were challenging. Especially back when games were controlled with flaked obsidian and you had to keep the campfire stoked lest the game crash, so much detail was astounding, even if it was presented as hand-carved ASCII characters. I loved those games, but none of them ever made me laugh. Dungeons of Dredmor contains all that fun and depth, in a fancier graphical package. More importantly, it's funny. Dungeons of Dredmor is laugh-out-loud, I-can't-breathe-and-my-belly-hurts funny.

Frankly, as much as I enjoyed Dungeons of Dredmor, this is a game for a limited audience. If you had to follow the link to find out what a Rogue-like game is, or if your first gaming experience was on a console, go talk to those old men setting in rocking chairs playing Archon in front of the hardware store before you consider taking up Dungeons of Dredmore. You'll only risk $5, and it will be worth it, but go into the experience prepared. If you remember chiseling small triangles into clay tablets and trying to stuff them into a 14.4 kbit/s modem, this is about the best way you can spend that $5 you were considering dropping on a fancy coffee.

The Dredmor blog has a roadmap for the next few releases (including a "Super Secret Thing" in v1.07) and also canvasses the possibility of an expansion down the road. Here's the first part of the post:

Here’s a transcription of what Nick posted on the forums earlier today (just to get people to maybe check out our shiny new toy), we’ll endeavor to keep the blog the de-facto “news” source.

I’ve been directed to post some interesting stuff on the forums about what we’re doing next, in order to get as many new people using them as we can. So that said, here’s the plan going forwards, courtesy of today’s company meeting. (Which did, in fact, involve swords.)

- 1.0.6: Linux support and a handful of the more interesting things that need to be fixed. I’d like to get this to the beta testers by Monday. I’d like to do it earlier, but the first part of the week is consumed by rubbish Real Life Stuff. So we’ll see what happens.

- 1.0.7: More fixes, and the introduction of a Super Secret Thing that we’ve… well, I may have talked about it before, and I wanted it to get in for the original game, but I didn’t. So I think we’ll put it in for 1.0.7. Again, I’d like a turnaround of about a week, a week and a half.

- 1.0.8: If necessary, more fixes. This patch may not exist, depending on where we set our cutoffs for 1.0.6 and 1.0.7. Hopefully, we get the female character in by this point.

- 1.1.0: Mod support, including bumping all the strings out of the EXE and into an XML file for the usage of various translation teams. (We have a *really* cool translation announcement coming up later this week, by the way.)

and then various support patches for 1.1.0 moving forward.

There is also the little matter of an expansion pack. Gaslamp as a company – and myself, personally – are universally opposed to charging you for things that should be in the core game. We’re committed to fixing every single one of the one hundred and forty-nine issues in the bugtracker for Dredmor, and we will keep adding more Stuff to the core game every time we send out a patch, so that you always get a little something extra.

We don’t want to try to sell you 99 cent horse armour, either. That’s just… lame.

As promised, v1.05 of Dredmor has finally been released - head over to the Gaslamp blog for the rather lengthy patchnotes and fire up Steam for the auto-patch:

The Windows version of Dungeons of Dredmor has now been updated to patch 1.0.5. (OS X users: we’re having one last Lion Issue, so we are working hard to resolve this; you guys should have your patch either later today or tomorrow. Probably tomorrow.)

Let us know what you think in the comments. Also please remember that this is not intended to be the end-all and be-all of fixes; this simply addresses everything we got done. (I have another one hundred and thirty seven issues, of varying levels, in the bugtracker, so we’ll be addressing your favourite issues as soon as we can.)

After yesterday's Dredmor news post, David from Gaslamp jumped in to say they had decided to release the v1.04 patch on Tuesday 6th. Since I didn't get the chance to update the news, here's a new post for anyone who doesn't read the forums:

Okay, final patch release date for 1.0.4 can now be confirmed as Tuesday morning – the morning of September 6th, 2011. We’re putting one last beta out even as I speak, and the actual release candidate will be sent to Valve over the weekend. Why are we doing this? Well, frankly, because it’s a very bad idea to ever release a patch on a Friday. That’s just asking for something to go wrong and for everybody to be frustrated over the long weekend. So go enjoy your last few moments with Dredmor 1.0.3, and throw some Lutefisk on the grill.  Next week, there’s a whole new Dredmor waiting for you.

"Maybe Friday" is the takeaway from the latest Gaslamp post on Dungeons of Dredmor. They also discuss their move and a new office, new distribution deals on the horizon, a Linux port and what v1.05 might hold. An excerpt:

Dungeons of Dredmor patch 1.0.4 status

We released the second iteration of the 104 to testers yesterday and it seems pretty stable. Lots and lots of small fixes, tweaks, and rebalancing plus a few new features (like the “digest” button), some new content, and some new achievements (pictured above).

There are also known smaller issues, tweaks, fixes, and new content that aren’t going into the 1.0.4 patch because we want to ship a patch sooner rather than never. We’ll push them to the next patch. Your patience in all of this is very much appreciated; we’re a tiny team.

We’ll try to assemble a comprehensive list of changes when the actual patch ships – this may be as soon as Friday, if all goes well.

Gaslamp has kicked up an update on the expected patch for Dredmor:

A user on Twitter has pointed out that it’s been three weeks since we put up a patch status update. What’s going on, Gaslamp? So here’s the approximate status and time line.

The patch, as it stands, is done. I’m waiting for one piece of art from David, and he assures me that he can paint it tomorrow, but I’m ready to drop it in when he says he’s done it. We’ve spent the weekend testing it internally, and are going to pack it up and send it out for external beta testing on Tuesday. As soon as the external beta testers give it the all-clear, we will fire it your way. There may be a second call for external beta testers next week; I need to get everything sorted out. I would like the beta to take about a week, so that I can put it up next Monday. There will be a content patch thereafter.

Thanks for sticking with us while we get this sorted out. The entire mess has been complicated by my moving, badly, and thus not having a real office until last Wednesday. Nonetheless, David and I are in the same building again, and we have plans to entertain you. I still don’t haveInternet at the new apartment yet, mainly due to working on this patch, so no doubt I will be in the office a lot until I manage to get that sorted out. I need my fix.

It's nice to see Dredmor getting some attention from major sites, such as this review at Eurogamer. The score is 8/10 and they obviously liked it a lot:

There are some lovely systems in place here. Instead of character classes, you pick a starting load-out of seven skills from a collection of 34 (I counted). While you can read through all the little descriptions, for your first few play-throughs it's probably worth just pressing the random button and seeing what you end up with.

Alongside standards like boosts for each particular weapon class, you can use vampirism to change the way you regain health, opt in and out of various magic abilities - a typical example is Viking Wizardry - and improve your chances with burglary, critical hits, and handling fungus. It makes for a system with great tactical depth and replayability: heading back into the dungeon with a different build can lead to an adventure that feels nothing like the last one - and that's before you start augmenting your character as you level up.

Rock, Paper, Shotgun has one of their roundtable Verdict reviews for Dungeons of Dredmor. It seems they like it a lot:

Alec: Yeah, me too. I had to stop playing it because it was stopping me from playing everything else, but whenever I think or talk about it there’s always that sense that I should go back. ‘This time, I’ll get it right. I’ve got this idea for a build’ or ‘right, I understand that trying to disarm acid traps isn’t worth the risk.’ It’s just forgiving enough, I think. Upon death, while you’re probably furious, you never really feel hopeless or that the experience wasn’t worth it – or indeed that it doesn’t bear repeating.

John: Shall we stop talking and just go play it?

Alec: That’s a very good idea. But should the people buy it?

John: I think everyone should definitely buy it.

Alec: Me too! Except the people who don’t think it’s hardcore enough, of course. But they’ve probably already bought it and completed it in ten minutes anyway.

John: Those people are losernerds.

Looks like Dredmor has achieved enough profile to attract the lumbering attention of IGN - good for them. Their review has a score of 8.5/10 and here's a snip:

Death isn't always such a bad thing though, since the game's awesome character creation system makes it highly replayable. You may even welcome it as an opportunity to test out new abilities. Thankfully, fine-tuning your custom character is an easy, intuitive process. Instead of pre-defined classes, you start out by picking a handful of abilities from a selection of 34 different skill sets – each sporting a stylish and humorous hand-drawn icon. While they tend to skew evenly between the schools combat, magic, thievery, and crafting, you can mix and match these powers to suit your play style. I got a huge kick out of building a burly, axe-wielding psychic warrior who regained health by drinking blood and was adept at both the fine arts of mushroom growing and mathematics. Even better, as you level up, you can then spend points to unlock additional abilities within each skill tier you've chosen, granting you sweet new powers.

Gaslamp has an update on Dredmor with a bit of background and a list of items they have fixed. The list is a bit long, so head over to read it,  but here's the first paragraph of the post:

We’re still grinding away on the next patch; this is slightly complicated by the fact that I am moving on Sunday, so my apartment furniture consists of nothing but my desk, chair, and a never-ending sea of boxes. There are two practical sides to this, however. The first is that I will be in the same city as David, which can only increase The Madness. Gaslamp will have shared offices again! David may yet drink decent coffee, if I have anything to do with it! And so forth. The second consequence is that I was originally slated to begin a Ph.D in Computer Science as of September; this has now been pushed back to January 2012 so we can wrestle the madness a little bit more, and ensure that Gaslamp is well set up to work on the next thing. (Who knows if I make it there in January, either. At the rate things are going, all bets are off. Dredmor may have spelled the end of my academic career… or not. Who knows. It worked for Jeff Vogel…)

They have also been interviewed at GameCareerGuide with an emphasis on the studio and development rather than the game itself. Here's the opening question:

Tell us about the founding members of Gaslamp studios.

Nicholas Vining: Gaslamp has three founders: David Baumgart, Dan Jacobsen, and myself. I'm the Lead Programmer slash Technical Director, which means I'm responsible for doing most of the day-to-day programming work on Dredmor, as well as setting the overall technical direction that we move in as a studio. Most of the code in Dredmor is mine.

David does anything that involves pixels, because the rest of us aren't allowed to go within forty feet of Photoshop any more. Interestingly enough, he also designed most of Dredmor's combat system.

Dan's role in the company is that of the wandering samurai - he moves from town to town, attacking the things that need attacking. On a given day, that can be anything from mild programming tasks, through to designing complex systems, all the way to running internal playtesting and sorting out the nightmare of badly written contracts that Gaslamp's employees and contractors operate under, most of which were written by disbarred lawyers from somewhere in Nevada. He picked up the nickname "Citizen Daniel", and I don't really know why. I think it's a reference to Citizen Kane. So that's the three founders.

On top of that, the capable Derek Bonner runs our servers, and Matthew Steele is responsible for all of our fabulous sound effects and music. We are extremely fortunate to have recently taken on Chris Dykstra as our director of business development; together with Citizen Daniel, they form the business acumen department, and are collectively responsible for hustling deals, nailing down distribution, and hopefully making us all fabulously wealthy.

Gaslamp continues their daily updates with a mea culpa over Dredmor launch issues, and particularly the save game compatibility. Here's a partial grab:

First off, the good news. We have managed to fix the save file issue, and we will have a patch in your hands tomorrow. So hold onto them. Mac Users, we are still waiting on some information from Valve about the correct way to build Mac Patches. Again, thanks for hanging in there. Your patch is coming.

A few apologies are owed as well. Obviously, breaking save files is a bad thing. This is our mess, we made it, and now we get to live with it. I am not happy with the fact that we have been having teething troubles after launch. This is, bluntly, not how I want Gaslamp Games to be run. I want us to be the company that is so freakin’ awesome you tell your friends how awesome we are. The programming side of things is my fault, and I apologize for that as well.

The simple fact of the matter is that we were not expecting sales in the volume that we got, and we were not expecting the response that we got. I honestly thought we would make… maybe a thousand sales during the entire lifetime of the product. We are… doing somewhat better than that, and as a result we are doing our best to try to deal with the fact that we now have to support a massive user base, with no money, no staff, and no time. Consequently, we have been scrabbling around trying to get everything sorted out, and when we were testing the reasonably large patch that was about to come out, this slipped through the cracks at the last minute. We didn’t go back and re-test the savegames after we put together a last minute fix for a shopkeeper issue, and ka-blam, there’s nothing left to do but to pick up the bodies. It’s a mess, and our forums are probably on fire as well… I haven’t had the heart to look.

So, yep. There’s mud on all of our faces. Mainly mine, because whenever there are bugs it tends to be a programming issue.

Another update on the next patch for Dredmor. Full patch notes are on the Gaslamp blog but here's the intro:

EDIT: Windows users, your patch has been sent to Valve, and we will let you know as soon as it is up. OS X users, we’re testing your patch now, and it might be up a little later, but certainly no later than tomorrow morning. The Changelog below has been updated to reflect the final last, few things that snuck in. — Nicholas

First a quick reminder: today is the last day you can get Dungeons of Dredmor at 10% off – save all of fifty glorious cents. That said, onto the meat:

Some folks have been asking what the deal is with the promised 1.0.3 patch, so here’s the deal. The patch is done; I’m not adding any more code to it. However, we still have to give it a quick playthrough tomorrow before we can let it loose upon the world. This is to make sure that we haven’t added any more crash bugs, corrupted save games, or all the rest of it; hopefully this turns out to be a good strategy.  I would test it myself, but it’s now 3:30 AM in Victoria, and doctors keep telling me that I need at least four hours of sleep, preferably more. Foolish men of medicine, what do they know?

The 2X UI scaler has been moved to patch 1.0.4 (the next patch), as has in-client leaderboards. Doing the 2X UI properly – making it all pretty and stuff – is going to take at least another couple of days. I think, however, we have now taken care of most of the other major complaints.

From the Gaslamp blog:

EXALTATIONS UNTO KRONG! While he cannot disclose any sales numbers, he is exceedingly pleased by sales of Dungeons of Dredmor, bringing Krong in all his glory to the masses (and also that slimy, good-for-nothing Lutefisk God.) Long has his anvil-shaped heart awaited this moment, and he thanks his chosen Mightily.

Nonetheless, he hears the people crying. “Krong,” they say, “why hast thou forsaken us? Our game, it crashes. Our game, it has small icons. Our game, it lacks keyboard binding interfaces, yea, and other certain necessities.” And Krong didst look upon his people, in their despair… and wept.

And lo, so it came to pass that Krong didst re-chain Gaslamp Games to their anvils, and Gaslamp Games has come forth in order to help the people. And lo, a great Patch came to pass upon the land, to be released Early Next Week.

What is in said patch? Krong is so very, very glad you asked.The following bugs have been fixed:
- Fixed: Anvils of Krong spawning in hallways for no good reason
- Fixed: crash that occurred when moving up stairs or down stairs, randomly
- Fixed: Knightly Leap now covers the full span of Knight Movements.
- Fixed: shopkeepers doing odd things when picking up and dropping items after load/save
- Fixed: crash when using invalid missile sprites
- Fixed: merchandise not cleared when you go downstairs
- Fixed: backwards conditional logic on ranged monster attacks means that monsters were not consistently casting spells; fixing this makes the Dungeon 95.2% nastier.
- Fixed: Current Active Skill crossing over between new games
- Fixed: the bug with save games overwriting themselves if you have two characters with kind of the same name.

And the following new things shalt be added:

- Key binding interface.
- Automatic Saves in the Case of Crashes.
- Changes to how Permadeath works. We’ll now delete the file when you actually die.
- Auto-loot toggle.
- SHIFT-Click and Click Reversal Button. (Makes SHIFT-Click work like CLICK! Makes CLICK work like SHIFT-Click!)
- Rapid selling of items in the store, yea, by holding the SHIFT-Click button and smacking the inventory while standing in a shop.
- Fifty New Achievements
- Steam Overlay Support, yea, though it is Experimental and Requires your Graphics Card To Support OpenGL
- In-game Leaderboards, Yea, For Messing With Your Friends
- Steak Grilling
- Magnification of UI elements to TWICE their Size (Yea, Though We Know Not How Far We Can Get With This In The Allotted Time, Though We Are Working On It)

All Glory Unto Krong!

EDIT: There will be future patches. We’re not dealing with content and gameplay balancing yet because we want to get this stuff fixed. Likewise, we’re not turning on the Mod Support yet because we want to get the core gameplay fixed. Et cetera, et cetera.

There's an update on Dredmor blog that says a new patch is up on Steam after they fixed an audio bug that was producing some crashes. Next week they will start on some UI improvements, such as scaling at high resolutions:

We’ve put up another build which has a fixed audio driver, and resolves a few other little issues. We have tried to make this backwards compatible with previous save files, but one of the things we added in this patch was also backwards load/save compatibility… so we’re going to have to work out the kinks here a little. If you make a *new* save that crashes and can’t load it, or you still get a random crash (we know about one descending, then ascending stairs, which we have seen a bit – but it might also be the audio thing, so we’re just going to wait and see… also what are you doing going back *up* the dungeon anyway?), send us an e-mail, preferably with a save game or crash dump, and we’ll get on it.

That said, so far everybody who was having crashes has reported that this build has cleared it up. Whew.

(Profound thanks to Ryan C. “icculus” Gordon, who debugged the first audio crash, then confirmed that the second audio crash was, in fact, “something that has just never been triggered in the past eight or so years in SDL_mixer.” We have now broken SDL_mixer about eight times and aren’t allowed to keep breaking it any more.)

I don’t know when the next patch will be up – probably not until some time next week – but we are going to try to start resolving some of the UI Clunkers people have reported (getting the keyboard/mouse movement a little more consistent, adding UI scaling, etc.) I would also like to turn on the Mod Browser and Weekly Challenges, but getting the core game running well is the top priority for all of us.

Meanwhile, RPS has some brief impressions:

You can sort-of disable permadeath, which entails asking the game to let you load old saves, but while that’s a route to achieving more I know full well I’d only feel like I was cheating. The thrill of a good roguelike is narrowly avoiding death and, when death comes, going out in spectacular/pathetic fashion. So, for me Dredmor is a game about dying – that’s something I’m more than comfortable with, it’s just that I’m dying very quickly at the moment.

Part of that is, I suspect, because I’m trying to do to much. There’s a huge skill tree in there, massively customisable in order to create your own bespoke class, as well the inevitable megaton of loot. There’s also crafting and teleporting and traps and stealing and sneaking and… well, pretty much every RPG feature you care to name, bar talking to the monsters. So I’m getting a bit too distracted by trying to build a new mace or working out how to summon a moustache golem than I am on simply surviving. Which has the added pain of meaning that when I die, I lose a ton of cool stuff I’ve built an unlocked. Sigh.

One patch has been released for Dredmor on Steam and, reading the official blog, they are working on another after finding some glitches with the first:

EDIT: Today’s patch, while fixing the random crashes for some people, has added a new one for other people. We’re on it. Please keep sending us your broken save files too, especially if they were entirely produced *after* yesterday’s patch. — Gaslamp Games McManagement

Hi, everybody. We’re… a little overwhelmed, and also going about with large grins on our faces. Being #1 on Steam – even if we have been cruelly deposed (for now!) by the Curse of Cthulhu Saving the World – is quite the rush. We should ship games more often. Thank you all for your support and patronage; we’re looking forward to kicking it up to the next level.

We have fixed a few bugs that came out of the woodwork. The random crash bug is fixed, a save corruption bug is fixed (there may be more), the Infinite XP glitch is fixed, and the infinite-money-in-shop glitch has been resolved as well. We will be sending a patch off to Steam as soon as we have finished testing it a little more.

The wait is finally over with for the roguelike Dungeons of Dredmor. It is available from Steam right now. You can get it from Steam for a little less than five dollars. That's about the same price as a venti cafe mocha from Starbucks.

For those of you who don't remember Dredmor is a roguelike game that offers a great dungeon romp to kill the big bad Lord Dredmor. Jay Barnson wrote a great preview for it and you could also check out my preview. I tried to cover most of the technical aspects of the game. I'm sure they have changed a few things since the last time Jay or I played, but the previews should give you a genereal idea on what the game is about.

Thanks, Drithius for posting a comment about it's release in the forums.

There are some Dredmor art files to use as icons, forum profile pics and so on on offer at Gaslamp:

With the release of Dungeons of Dredmor imminent [that is: tomorrow], why not faff around a bit with silly drawings?

Have you been itching for a Dredmor skill or spell icon to use for your forum profile? We have just the potion for your condition! Do you need some hot, raw hi-res Dungeons of Dredmor paintings to use for your desktop background? We’ve got the answers to your desires. Just want to get a peek at a few random, silly images that Gaslamp Games has been kicking around? Well, you’re in luck.

Maybe you’re just a diggle-fancier; that’s OK too.

I present to you the Dungeons of Dredmor Community Art Mutilation Pack: A lean zip file filled to the brim with the delicious scrapings from my Dredmor art folders.

Nicholas Vining from Gaslamp Games has updated the blog on this game.     Perma-deaths,  achievements, steam leaderboard and fixesare all discussed.  An excerpt:

We did, however, add some fun stuff. First off, permadeath now works. If you die, we actually delete your save game! Mwa hah hah. By contrast, non-permadeath now works very well as well. You can save your game wherever and whenever you want, and it’s always there for you to carry on if you get slaughtered. Just remember to save as often as you feel that you can.

Gaslamp has a FAQ titled On the Folly of Giving Money Directly to Developers, which covers various question such as why the game is a Steam exclusive (it isn't - others are coming after the Steam release) and why they aren't distributing directly. In essence, they believe the safety of a good distribution deal outweighs losing a cut of the sales. A late snip:

The next best alternative is that we set ourselves up with a credit card processor and run our own storefront-based, money-taking web-solution. This assumes you have a credit card, which can also be a bit iffy in this day and age. It also exposes us to the problems associated with running an in-house electronic commerce system; we have to build a system that is secure enough that you feel comfortable giving us your credit card number, and we also have to ensure that it is secure enough from our end that the money ends up in our bank account and not sent to the First International Bank of Lulzsec. Again, if anything goes wrong, it could destroy Gaslamp. Writing your own software solutions for these things is dangerous; again, look at Project Zomboid, who built a clever cloud-based updater system only to realize that pirated copies were slowly bankrupting them. We don’t want to be in that situation, which is why we’re using third-party publishers and distributors.

A final option is something like BT Micro; a service that handles all the credit card processing and transactional downloading for you. This isn’t a bad idea, although it does leave the problem of providing you with updates.

Anyhow, that’s our thought process. For those of you who want to give us money directly – we love you, but we really, really can’t take it. I hate to say it, but waking up and knowing that you still have a company in the morning and that your accounts haven’t been frozen is worth a slice of your revenue stream.

The waiting for Gaslamp Games to release Dungeons of Dredmor is almost overwith. Gaslamp Games Dan Jaconson has just written a blog detailing the release date which is July 13, 2011. You will be able to get the game through Steam. I'll let him tell you about it:

Gaslamp Games is proud to announce that we have partnered with Valve to release Dungeons of Dredmor on the Steam platform for the exceptional price of $4.99 on Wednesday, July 13th. Gaslamp Games is dedicated to providing classic dungeon crawling adventure in the spirit of classic roguelikes to both seasoned and casual players alike.

“Our business acumen department has been hard at work within our underground lava-fortress for the last several weeks devising a distribution system for our product, pushing tiny models of software packages and legendary beasts around a map of the middle planes with wooden dowels,” said Gaslamp’s Daniel Jacobsen. “However, after the tragic death of the Last Gryphon at the hands of the overzealous Gnomish Flying Couriers, we decided that we needed a more proven content delivery system.”

Dungeons of Dredmor will be available through the Steam distribution network in both Windows and OS X flavors.

Gaslamp Games have updated their website with 12 screenshots of the RC4 version. Each screenshot has a description added to it, so head over there and watch it for yourself. It really is a rather interesting show and tell where you get to see e.g. the inventory screen and the level up screen.

RPGCodex's MisterStone has done a preview of this game. As you remember our own Skavenhorde interviewed David Baumgart, the artist at Gaslamp Games. Here's a snip from the RPGCodex preview:

Another big difference between Dredmor and other roguelikes can be seen in the way food is handled. There is no starvation in Dredmor. That being said, in order to regenerate hit points or magic points at a reasonable rate, you need to eat food or drink booze respectively. Since in the Big Three roguelikes you can regenerate mana and hit points by just sitting around (often quickly enough that running around a post in order to heal yourself is a viable tactic), I don’t really see this as an example of dumbing down the genre. In the other games, you essentially trade food for hit points when you camp out (time not spent exploring makes you hungry and brings you closer to starvation), whereas here you eat something in order to regenerate.

With Dredmor almost ready to ship, Skavenhorde catches up with Gaslamp to discuss this humorous, graphical roguelike. Here's a snip:

RPGWatch: What are some of the main stats and secondary stats that the character will have?

David: The six primary stats are Burliness, Nimbleness, Sagacity, Caddishness, Stubbornness, and Savvy. We used to have normal stat names but one day I was listening to a podcast on pen & paper RPG design and it brought up the point that you should focus the mechanics of your game on what the game is actually about. Is the game about hope? - make "hope" a stat. When you make a stat it becomes something the player will focus on and will be rewarded for focusing on.

Dredmor doesn't have anything as avant-garde as "hope" as a stat, but I figured we could make these names a little more interesting to signal to the player that they weren't dealing with a normal game here, and that these stat names might imply a bit of undermining of the usual upstanding heroic virtues.

Anyway, these primary stats trickle down to a ton of secondary stats that actually matter in game. Some are pretty obvious like "dodge", "melee power", and "alchemy level".

Less obvious is "enemy dodge reduction" which I ought to explain: Basically, a Real Hero never misses, right? What actually happens is that the enemy dodges an attack which was aimed true (of course). So instead of increasing your ability to not-miss, you're really reducing the enemy's ability to dodge your attacks. It makes sense!

Read it all here.

If you've been waiting for Dungeons of Dredmore then the wait is almost over. It has officially gone gold. I'll let Nicholas the Technical Director at Gaslamp Games do the honors:

There are now zero outstanding issues on our “must fix before ship” list. We’re going to play Dredmor internally for about 24 to 48 hours, and if we don’t find anything we desperately need to fix, we now have a Dungeons of Dredmor gold master build.

Nearly there, folks – we’ll have this in your hot little hands as soon as we can. Speaking for myself: having been working on Dredmor since 2005, it is *very* odd being done.

Gaslamp has some screens from the Dredmor tutorial - which they point out is an unusual addition for a roguelike.

This popped up on our forums yesterday but Gaslamp has now posted their price for Dredmor on their blog. It's seriously underpriced at $4.99 in my opinion, but hey - who doesn't like a bargain?

We can now announce that the price for Dungeons of Dredmor is $4.99. There will be more on this later, including the hows and whys of this decision, but we think it’s the right one.

More fun announcements coming soon! Watch this channel!

No, they're not quite there but this blog post at Gaslamp Games says Dredmor is "so close to the end it's amazing" and discusses getting that polish on a game that makes all the difference:

Shipping a game is the single most painful part of the development experience. As Citizen Daniel recently pointed out, most of the major Dredmor design decisions were made months ago, if not years ago. David took the spartan mechanics that we originally had and have polished them until they glisten. Most of the major UI strategies were worked out months ago in our basement bunker, when we originally decided to start adding tooltips to the game (a move I initially resisted, but now can’t imagine the game without.) All the content has been around for awhile. So what are we doing now? Really, all we’re doing is polishing. Polish, polish, and more polish. Of the bugs in the tracker, there is only one known crash bug in the game: if you put spores in an alchemy kit, the game will crash. (Spores are a miscellaneous item and hence a bit broken in places.) Everything else consists of little things: graphical alignment issues, UI errors, readability issues, things not firing when they should be firing, dealing with scenarios that most people won’t encounter in normal gameplay. And yet, we’re fixing them.

The Dungeons of Dredmor blog points to a couple of new previews as well as a user video and an update on the beta. Rather than link everything separately, I'll just send you over to their post.

Answering Unasked Questions is a new post at the Dredmor site - although I can assure the team the eyebrows question has been asked! A sample:

“What’s up with the eyebrows?”

They took on a life of their own. Originally the eyebrows were fairly large due to making art based on up-sizing the Hero sprite whose features were necessarily exaggerated to be visible in tiny pixel art form. Then from there … oh, from there they just grew and grew. I think we thought it was funny to make them bigger. It’s like how wizards and Russian politicians have huge eyebrows because they’re so powerful. We were drinking a lot of coffee; it made sense.

You get used to it. Takes time.

(And about FLCL: Our eyebrows showed up before I’d heard of FLCL. I’m not an anime/manga guy at all so this similarity had to be pointed out to me.)

“Is there Permadeath?”

Yes. It is an option you can enable.

“Why is this game so silly?”

It just happened this way. Maybe it’s just the chemistry our team has together. Granted though, the game was probably made from the start to have some levity to it — see the monster animations as a starting point. We rolled with it.

Really, the silliness is probably due to three guys being stuck in a basement with piles of caffeinated drinks and listening to totally awesome fantasy metal.

Rampant Games serves up their second Dungeons of Dredmor preview with Skavenhorde adding his experience:

Now comes the part I loved: the stats. Those lovely complex stats. First your six main ones: burliness, sagacity, nimbleness, caddishness, savvy and stubbornness. These stats affect your secondary skills as well as affecting how many hit points and mana you have. Next come the eighteen secondary stats like melee power, block chance, armor absorption, enemy dodge reduction, visual sight radius, haywire chance (critical hit with magic), smithing level and so on.

In addition to the stats there are sixteen different damage types and sixteen different resistances for those damage types. David Baumgart, the Principal Artist from Gaslamp Games says, “There are the three mundane types of damage like crushing, slashing and blast damage which can be blocked by your armor. Everything else can be blocked by resistance to the specific damage type (mundane damage types can be resisted as well). Each damage type has an effect associated with the damage. Crushing often has a stun or knockback, slashing and piercing may have bleeding damage or other wound effect, conflagratory (fire) will have a burn effect, voltaic (electricity) will often stun and so on.”

Ten new Dredmor screens are available from the official blog.

Rampant Coyote has kicked up a preview for graphical roguelike Dungeons of Dredmor. Here is a snippet from the preview:

I’m playing the beta of the upcoming indie graphical roguelike Dungeons of Dredmor. It’s a game with its tongue in its cheek that takes advantage of its randomness with amusing word combinations and general silliness. The 2D art and animations, the descriptions, the objects, many of the feats (“Fleshsmithing,” “Necronomiconomics,” and “Fungal Arts”), and so forth are filled with humor and silliness that all seems to say, “Don’t take this game too seriously!”

 

But it wraps a set of mechanics that belong in a pretty serious roguelike. The player must explore a randomly generated series of dungeon levels filled with traps, treasures, and monsters. Everything is turn-based, though an extended lack of input will cause your character to whip out a mobile gaming device and amuse himself. At least at medium difficulty – it doesn’t hold your hand to keep your initial forays in any way easy… or even balanced. In one dungeon, I opened the one and only door leading out of the first room to get swarmed by Diggles with no real hope of victory. Fortunately, that bit of bad luck has proven to be an exception, but the pile of corpses I’ve left in the dungeons are a testament that “survivable” doesn’t mean “easy.” But after leveling a couple of times and picking up some halfway decent gear (and potions), things tend to go more smoothly.

TGSource has a preview for the roguelike title Dungeons of Dredmor. The article gives you a sneak peek into what makes this game both appealing to hardcore roguelike vets  as well as people who are new to the genre. Here is a snippet:

After only a few more tries, and a few more dead adventurers, I finally started to figure it out, and was soon marching through the halls, slaying diggles left and right (little squeaky bastards). Make no mistake, Dredmor is not a “simple” roguelike. Unlike many roguelikes though – and besides the aforementioned clickable interface – it boasts beautiful, hand-drawn graphics: your character stomping around not unlike a Mr. Threepwood, spells causing bursts of smoke and flame, creatures of all sizes, shapes, and colors shambling towards you. The effort put into the art of the game is astonishing, and one can tell that the project is truly a love-child of its creators.

 

Another area in which the game provides more than the standard roguelike experience is in its humor. With every item and creature having an informative mouse-over entry, there is a good amount of text, and the developers took it upon themselves to make it worth your time to read it, if not only to inform you, but to get a good laugh or two as well from a bad pun or a witty, self-aware comment or a sudden, unexpected Mortal Kombat-style voice-over. Even the general atmosphere of the game blew my mind in its wackiness: wait, there is a god-shrine to the Lutefisk God?! And you’ll know you need better armor when you’re either constantly gobbling down one of the game’s 10 varieties of life-giving cheese or using a bucket or a safety-cone as a helmet.

Gaslamp Games also has a brand new website for Dungeons of Dredmor.

Gaslamp has kicked up a new trailer for Dungeons of Dredmor, offering around two minutes of gameplay vision.

Gaslamp Games has kicked up half a dozen new screens from the Dredmor beta.

There's a short Dredmor update that talks about difficulty levels in this should-be-released-soon graphical roguelike:

To lay it right out, there are three difficulty levels. The thinking on each:

• Easy
  This is for the more casual player who is interested in exploring and enjoying the non-crunchy content of the game. I should say though, “casual” does not mean “Bejeweled”; the dungeon certainly does fight back and you’ll have to pay attention on any difficulty level. This one is just more forgiving.
• Medium
  This is the baseline which I’m balancing the other levels against and how I usually test the game while choosing random skills (which are not necessarily optimal). There should be reasonable difficulty and the game should be winnable at this level with any chosen skill set … and enough inside knowledge of game mechanics. Some character builds will probably be pretty rough though, like the ley-line walking, blood-magic-using non-spellcaster who specializes in both shields and dual wield.
• Hard
  This is for players who want to die. Repeatedly. I want to make this very difficult even for myself with said inside knowledge. Insane fans should have to exploit game mechanics to beat the game. No doubt this is the sort of thing that the classic roguelike game is all about.

These are all produced by tweaking variables in a file appropriately named “tweakDB.xml” which contains entries for a large number of variables from “minimum horde size” to “bbq chance”. Naturally you can edit these as you see fit, for example to change the “tooltip border size” to different values for each difficulty level, if that was something you think is sorely needed in Dredmor.

There's an interesting post on the Gaslamp Games site that responds to a comment on the advantages of traditional open-source roguelikes (and the like) with their lengthy iterative developments. The article goes on to describe the development of Dungeons of Dredmor since 2004 and is a worthwhile read for anyone following the game:

In a recent online discussion about Dungeons of Dredmor, somebody said – and I paraphrase: “Commercial roguelikes will never be as good as free roguelikes because the multi-year, evolutionary development process that results in amazing games like Crawl will never be commercially viable.” Here we have somebody who likes roguelikes, and who should like Dredmor. Hopefully,  he will support us – here is a man, after all, who could be a customer, and any failing to attain him as a customer is a failing on our part as a business – but his concern is legitimate. Can a commercial roguelike be as good as Crawl, or Nethack? Well, I think we can… but let’s talk about this.

First off, it is worth noting that Dungeons of Dredmor has had a multi-year evolutionary development process. Dredmor, as a product, started development in 2004, about four years before Gaslamp Games existed in any way, shape or form. Dredmor originally started as a project code-named “Orion” – in fact, this is still the name of the Visual Studio solution – and until Ben McGraw made his major contribution to the project by naming it “Dungeons of Dredmor” it was going to be called “Heroes: Wanted”… blech.

There's a status update report on Dungeons of Dredmor at the Gaslamp Games site. The game won't make April but it looks like they are close. Here's an excerpt but head over for preorder and feature information:

So how is Dredmor coming along?

More slowly than we hoped, but steadily.

The game is making incredible progress that leaves us feeling much better about our finished product. We do want to release the best product we can as reasonably quickly as possible and we’re fixing all the horrible crash bugs (and polishing many little rough spots, particularly finicky UI issues). All major features are in, but a few small ones are trickling through because the gameplay suggests some good fits.

If we’re to be charging money for a product, we want to make sure it’s worth it to you. Yes, waiting sucks, and scooting deadlines back is ridiculous (and all too common), but I assure you it is better that we do it this way.

When will Dredmor be released?

Before Duke Nukem Forever. That’s one we’re definitely sticking too. Thankfully, they make it easy for us

Or more specifically: Within a month. We’re actually “pulling the lever” within a week. That is, we’re starting the process of release (that sound you hear is inevitability); we are assembling our fleet of Business Acumen to make this all happen.

So: Dredmor shall be released in the merry month of May.

Gaslamp Games has kicked up another Dredmor update that includes new screens:

We’ve just declared Dungeons of Dredmor beta 0.94.1.

It’s a beautiful thing how much this has come together. I can see it looking back just a week — and two weeks, a month, the changes are huge! We have a real game here which is almost ready.

What’s new in this version? Oh, all sorts of things: new stairs that aren’t awkward, custom scripted rooms (which means we can do Very Silly Things), lots of UI polish, lots of new dungeon content, many more varieties of monsters — and spellcasting monsters.  Tons of bug-fixes. Lots of new sounds. Players actually getting to level 4 or 5 of the dungeon. Lots of new things.

We’re confident enough to start sending copies out to a couple press outfits and we’ll be mining the beta list for testers as soon as we figure out a protocol for all of this.

Yeah, it’s all a bit of a blur right now. My mind is still decompressing from this last crunch cycle. (And shall be back at it soon enough, I assure you.)

So here, have some pictures.

The humorous graphical roguelike Dungeons of Dredmor is due this month, so I thought I'd post their latest update:

We’ve finished Dredmor 0.94, and are busy trying to figure out what we need to fix for Dredmor 0.94.1 (a handful of minor bugs that weren’t worth stopping the build today for) and 0.95 (???) Based on where we are right now – the start of the game is looking good and polished, but the end game and middle game is still in need of work. We’re looking at how to address that with 0.95, but here’s where it gets encouraging: most of what is left in the TODO for the game – the entire game! – is scripting and content creation. Not much code appears to be needed from me, which leaves me relegated to bug fixes, little pieces of polish, and of course tackling some of the last few little design issues. I’m sure that my bugtracker will fill up again, but it’s very nice having only seven code issues sitting between me and shipping.

We've briefly covered Dungeons of Dredmor before - you may recall the indie, humorous, graphical roguelike.  Immortal Machines has a podcast interview and they're quite an entertaining bunch, so worth a listen for indie fans.