Yes, finally, Realm of the Diggle Gods is now available on Desura. Linux users, bask in the powerful new Desura Expansion Technology! (Many thanks to Tim Jung at Desura for patiently poking things with sharp pointy sticks.)

Buy it here: http://www.desura.com/games/realm-of-the-diggle-gods

It’s not quite as soon as we originally expected, but you can’t rush these sorts of things. A free DLC pack is like a relationship – it’s, um … this analogy is going nowhere. But if you really can’t wait, feel free to join in on the ongoing patch and DLC beta through our IRC channel.

As with everything we do, we're completely serious about the name.

Expanded Features

• Steam 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.

You Have To Name The Expansion Pack for Dungeons of Dredmor will be released very soon – We just need to do a couple rounds of testing and hook up all the Steam Workshop internet-pipes. If you would like to participate in the beta have a wander through our IRC channel.

To the modders:

Thanks guys for keeping the lid on this one for so long – and for the ridiculous amount of hard work you’ve put into this whole thing. Seeing as how the whole pack is built on your scripts and designs, it could not have happened without you.

This pack is for you and all the other modders out there – here’s hoping the Steam Workshop helps you get your work out to Dredmor players everywhere*.

(*For values of everywhere that are on Steam, of course. Um. There’ll always be our modding forum for everyone else.)

More screenshots:

We've finally got the mine cart rails that Nicholas always wanted. If you bug him enough maybe he'll add the ability to ride them!

We need skills. Lots of skills. Also higher levels of crafting, finally, so you can make that Magnetronic Plate Armour and Sword of Necropoking you've had your eye on.

Brax has new shops from which to sell his dubious wares. Just try to tunnel-exploit through the lava moat!

Because we knew you'd want to kick trees down, there's new content for the Realm of the Diggles Gods as well as the core Dungeons of Dredmor levels.

We’ll keep you posted.

Mr. Triolo is currently contemplating how one might animate a chicken

There is a lot of concept art floating around on our repos that we’re trying to use to give you guys an idea of the fact that a lot of work is being done right now, not just in art but in the code as well.  We’re having to do a lot of “architecture” programming before we can start putting the game together on top of it; the main reason for this is that Odin is multiplayer, and multiplayer games just work differently.  We are taking the opportunity to do some optimization to ensure that the game takes advantage of all these newfangled “cores” we hear about in the computer stores these days as well.  Again, if you have your toes in the programming world, you know that this can be tricky.  (If you don’t but you are curious, check out this educational wikipedia article on race conditions!  If you don’t like circuit theory, feel free to skip that.)

We are also taking some time to actually get organized.  The game is going to take more than a year to get done (not six like the last one!  maybe two though) and one of the biggest issues with making a thing that takes as long as games do is that it’s difficult to keep all the important stuff in your head when you haven’t thought about it in a while.  We were guilty of a lot of this on our first (failed) project, and we were guilty of more of it on Dredmor.  I’m sure it will happen for Odin as well, but my job over the last two weeks has been getting us set up with a way of managing our project stuff so that we can be as organized as possible with as little effort as possible.  (For those of you who are interested, we’re using Atlassian, and it seems pretty awesome so far.)  I’m also starting to understand why so many indies make all their games, start to finish, in a month.

Coming soon: some Dredmor news pertaining to toys, the Steam Workshop, and some new content!

A potential terrain style that we have since scrapped for technical reasons (orange didn't test well)

But in the meantime I wanted to showcase two excellent modders’ works, lccorp2 and FaxCelestis.

Radiant Wizard by lccorp2

“You have immersed yourself in the energies of all things luminous to gain great power, at the cost of your physical body deteriorating.”

Radiant Wizard is designed to transform you into the ultimate glass cannon and that it does. As pure a Wizard skill as it can be, your offensive capabilities will become limitless, but the tradeoff is extreme.

With every point put into the skill, you get penalties to your health, physical stats and defenses. On top of that, when you get hit in melee you’ll get more and more debuffs.

You’re not entirely helpless though. Amongst the straightforward offensive spells like Prismatic Spray (a spell which uses all damage types), you get access to an AoE that stuns monsters in a radius around you, and a spell that buffs your defenses but with heavy mana costs. The ultimate ability, Transcendence, turns you into a powerful dragon and wreaks havoc upon your surroundings.

All in all this is one of the only pure wizard mods out there and is definitely enjoyable if you’re itching for some spellslinging. I recommend having some escape skills however because you really don’t want to be ambushed with these melee combat penalties.

  Inquisitor by FaxCelestis

“The hammer of righteousness is strong in your arm!”

Inquisitor is a warrior skill not far off from your typical paladin but it has a few surprises. Unlike most warrior skills this one uses mana to power abilities.

Your first ability, Smite Evil,  only works against undead and demons. Thankfully the rest of the abilities work against everything, preventing the mod from being a one-trick pony.

That's a cheeky little bat.

The Inquisitor’s arsenal includes brittle attack and defense buffs, passive resistances, and even a huge heal spell that costs a lot of mana. Perhaps the most interesting ability, Know Thine Enemy, reduces the overall stats of monsters and silences them. It has a low cost so you can use it on pretty much anything, making fighting magic-using enemies much easier.

This mod is a solid choice for melee users who desire to spend their mana, something I’ve personally always wanted. It’s solid all around without being too powerful.

That’s it for this spotlight! Stay tuned for more amazing work made by our community. As always you can find a lot of us on the IRC channel or on our forums.

First: the Indie Megabooth at PAX East was, by all accounts, an epically awesome thing.  So obviously the only reasonable thing for me to do was talk to the great guys over at Fire Hose Games about getting in on the party for PAX Prime!  It’s still super early to tell what exactly is going down, but chances are very good that we’ll be there, showing off one or two of a few of our super secret projects.  I’ll fill you in when I know a bit more about what’s going on.  Also, they probably won’t be super secret for that much longer, we just have an over-abundance of scheming to catch up on.

Secondly, it’s official, we now have Top Men working on secret Dredmor toys.  The first prototypes of the plush diggle are currently being developed by our people on the inside at ShouldBee.com, but as soon as we have some pictures for you guys we’ll let you know.

Here's a picture of the cause of most of David's spelling errors.

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.

In the mean time, why not buy some shirts? (Or, for that matter, stickers.)

• STEAM: Steam Cloud support!
• STEAM: All save-games are now cross-platform, as part of Steam Cloud support. Your old save games *should* work, but if you are worried please send your hero to a gruesome death before installing the update. (Beta RC games: will not work. Sorry.)
• FIXED: Invisibility now works as it says on the tin.
• FIXED: Blackjack works again.
• FIXED: Breakable walls survive after being loaded and saved.
• FIXED: added a flag to targetHitEffects that lets said effects apply before, or after, the hit calculation. (i.e. to fix Blackjack)
• FIXED: player hit effects on items (Anemone Belt, Spiky Belt, etc.) now work
• FIXED: Bookshelf crashing w/bony wand recipes.
• FIXED: “Playing for Both Teams” achievement now works.
• FIXED: You can now load more than one mod at a time on OS X.
• FIXED: Item spawning on Levels 11-15 now works correctly. You can now have item levels up to level 20.
• FIXED: a number of timing exploits.
• FIXED: a number of load/save corruption issues.
• FIXED: Uberchests not opening after you load and save.
• FIXED: The Mace of Windu now uses the correct art.
• FIXED: Installing all the skill mods will no longer overflow the main mod loader screen.
• FIXED: Area of effect related crashes.
• FIXED: Game lockup when fire fields or other damage fields are deployed off-screen.
• FIXED: Mods can now load manTemplateDB.xml.
• FIXED: Monsters in mods now load correctly.
• FIXED: Crash when doubly polymorphed.
• FIXED: You can no longer eat your own belt by right-clicking it. Really, this time.
• FIXED: You can now start the game with pants.
• FIXED: Magic reflection is now in! It reflects missile spells. Go nuts.
• FIXED: The game will now remember which mods have been loaded.
• FIXED: The game will now remember if Disable Click-To-Move is activated.
• FIXED: Disable click to move also disables auto-walk to doors.
• FIXED: Plunder (Diggle Gods).
• FIXED: Invisible Geometries now works as intended.
• FIXED: Invisible Geometries now also drains mana.
• FIXED: Pacify effects now respect the amount tag (Emomancy: “Depressing Elemental Blast” now works better.)
• FIXED: Polymorphing now longer closes all of your windows.
• FIXED: Don’t allow “_” or “.” in the hero’s name.
• FIXED: Haematic Phylactery now works as intended.
• NERF: Cheesy Omelette HP restore down from 56 to 36.
• MECHANICS: Blungecap Vampirism now does Necromantic Damage.
• MECHANICS: Holy Hand Grenade is entirely rewritten.
• MECHANICS: Bleedout Pain is now an amountF tag.
• MECHANICS: Buffed alchemy tree passive bonuses.
• MECHANICS: Wand Lore now also grants additional Magic Resistance.
• MECHANICS: Various things now scale by things other than Magic Power.
• MECHANICS: The books “The King in Yellow” and “Malleus Maleficarum” may not immediately kill you any more.
• MECHANICS: Added a bunch of new types of buffs and proccable effects.
• MECHANICS: Big Game Hunter and Fungal Arts now work slightly differently.
• MECHANICS: Changes to combat ordering. The new combat ordering is as follows:
  • If you dodge, no damage.
  • If you crit, and your opponent counters, no damage. If you crit and your opponent blocks, normal damage. Else, critical attack.
  • If your opponent counters, counterattack!
  • If your opponent blocks, 1/2 damage.
  • Else, normal damage.
  • At present, this only affects melee combat.
• MECHANICS: Changed behaviour of Haematic Phylactery.
• UI: Ubercrafting now has filters, which can be highlighted and toggled.
• UI: Autosaves now auto-save once every 5 minutes, in addition to going up and down stairs.
• NEW CONTENT: some new rooms.
• NEW CONTENT: A bajillion new recipes.
• NEW CONTENT: A bajillion evil traps.
• NEW CONTENT: a high-level shield because there was an extra craftDB entry David didn’t want to delete.
• NEW CONTENT: Some new monsters on the Diggle God expansion floor levels.
• NEW CONTENT: Hungry and Thirsty Diggles will now drink your booze and eat your food.
• SYSTEMS: Upgraded to SDL version 1.2.15. This fixes a bunch of bad things that happen on OS X.
• SYSTEMS: Rewrote the entire audio engine, fixing various lag issues and lurches when loading from disk.
• SYSTEMS: Removed previous image loading library.

You know the drill; Mystery, portent, etc.

Please rest assured, this is perfectly normal.

Fortunately, Gaslamp Games is here to help you through this time of change and transition with our Dredmor-for-iPad Frequently Asked Questions guide. So here goes:

Q. When will the game be done?
A. “When it’s done.” We’re currently still in pre-alpha, and a lot of  stuff still isn’t working right. (For instance: water, textboxes, going downstairs, that kind of thing.) So … yeah, we’re still working out the kinks. We’ll keep you up to date as we know.

Q. Will Dredmor be available for the iPhone?
A. Probably not; we’d have to redraw absolutely everything. The game fits on an iPad because the iPad’s minimum resolution is 1024 x 768 – the same resolution as our minimum game resolution. We’ll test – at some point – to see if the retina display on the iPhone 4S makes this viable, but we don’t think it will work.

Q. Will the game be available for Android?
A. This… is an interesting question. While SDL 1.3 supports Android, at least partly, there are two reasons why we might not go ahead and do this. The first is insufficient demand – my personal experience with Android on previous products have been that Android sales are a very small fraction of iPad sales (in fact, less than the ratio of Linux sales to Windows sales.) Consequently, it’s not entirely clear that this is something that we will actually make money on – especially on the tablet market, where Android tablets are still somewhat of an unknown factor and where the iPad still occupies 75% of the market share.

The second reason why we might not support Android is because the infrastructure for Android is so, so, hideously broken. Again, it’s *worse* than the Linux situation, which is kind of amazing. In order for us to ship on Android, we have to be convinced (more specifically, as the Technical Director for the studio *I* have to be convinced) that we can actually ship an Android version of Dredmor and have it work. Given that there are a number of horror stories floating around about people who test their software on 300 Android devices and get everything working, only to release and have everything explode on Day 1… I’m just not confident that we can do this. It is possible that we might put together an Android release for a *very* limited selection of devices (Kindle Fire, Samsung Galaxy Tab, ASUS EEE Pad Transformer) where we have some hope of having things run in a fashion that we’re happy with. That said, we’re still looking into this, and the iPad port (by virtue of the market share we mentioned above) is still the top priority.

Q. Are you redoing the control scheme? That looks suspiciously like a mouse cursor.
A. Yes. The mouse cursor is in for debugging only; we are reworking the control scheme to make it 85% more Tabletty.

Q. Will there be mod support?
A. Unknown. We would like it, but we are not making any promises.

Oh, these are neat; I can't help but wonder whatever in the world they might be for.

The stars are right, and you know what that means: It is the privilege and pleasure of Gaslamp Games to announce Dungeons of Dredmor II 3D, a sequel to the rather strange 2011 Indie Roguelike hit Dungeons of Dredmor (called Indie Game of the Year by the madmen of PC Gamer Magazine).

Suddenly, a pre-alpha screenshot appears! Click to view full size.

A first look at the dungeon. Using lots of placeholder assets for now, so please pardon the mess.

Like any respectable developer, Gaslamp Games acknowledges that once you’ve got something good, the only rational course of action is to beat yearly sequels out of the IP. Given that we could afford to hire some more artists and rustle up some Maya licenses, the obvious move was to take Dungeons of Dredmor in an entire new direction where we can explore additional, ahem, depths of gameplay yet unseen.

Dungeons of Dredmor II 3D Features

As an independent studio, Gaslamp Games is uniquely poised to create revolutionary new gameplay features that would be stifled in the publisher-dominated game industry. New features include:

• Entirely 3D dungeons built with procedural generation to create unique levels, traps, and puzzles sadistic enough to confound every John Urist!
• 600 bazillion damage types! Damage enemies with x-rays, phlegmatic damage, poking, subtraction, melancholia, insinuation, gluten magic, freemasonry, and liver!
• New, avant-garde soundtrack by experimental Japanese noise group Violent Onsen Geisha!
• Powered by the shocking return of a 2012 version of Ken Silverman’s Build Engine, used in such hit games as Redneck Rampage, Duke Nukem 3D, and Shadow Warrior!
• Eleventy quintillion cheeses, each with their own damage type! Includes your favourites (Churpi, Khoa, Paneer, Brimsen, Remoudoi, Sirene, Anari, Molbo, Danbo, Tybo, Handkäse, Weisslacker, Kaseri, Höfðingi, Skyr) and more!
• Use our in-app store to purchase Digglebucks to upgrade equipment, buy new inventory slots, and reverse negative Krongings!
• Play our awesome tie-in social and mobile games to increase “quest resources” to get the best ending!
  

  Get 12 "likes" on this post and we'll give you a lutefisk for free.

• Dredmor 2 will use that one really annoying, unreadable font from Dredmor for everything, and not just the title text!
• Even smaller, more numerous and indecipherable stat icons!
• 3D-accelerated coloured lighting effects the likes of which haven’t been seen since the far side of 1998!
• You still can’t see what your character is wearing – because, well… the hell with it!
• Explore new challenging gameplay mechanics set in the Red Light District of Amsterdam!
• Collect a series of tiny, magical hats by mastering The Third Dimension!
• New, revolutionary, Artificial Stupidity technology makes previously smart monsters into gibbering morons!
• 98% More Indie than Other Competing Indie Roguelikes!
• Scads of Day-1 DLC include the ability to load and save games, and to have the ability to secretly save extra copies of your games in case you die suddenly with permadeath on!
• New Crafting Systems include Yogurt Making, Elven Drycleaning, Bavarian Crafts, and the Human Centipede!
• Cameo appearance by Famous British Person Peter Molyneux as Brax the Salesdemon!
• Get ****ed up on Mushrooms!
• Space Wizards!

Dredmor 2 will be launching on all fine Social Gaming Platforms near you. Have your credit cards ready.