 our fancy way of saying that DD’s gonna get some cute little radial menus soon. Booyah!
This week’s an interface update, folks. The most noticeable change is the movement of building panels into the Kingdom’s sidebar, which involved a fair bit of code reshuffling to make the new system work as intended (you may read that as code for “here be dragons and / or uncaught bugs”).
As those of you who read our blog post on the subject are already aware, we’re trying to get certain tasks and game areas done and dusted in a very definite manner. We’ve already abandoned most trivial balancing concerns (favouring user interface and player expectation problems) and we’d like to get the Kingdom locked down soon, too. Expect regular poking at that over the next few weeks.
Since the changelog generally does a good job of explaining what already IS changing, we’ll mention here that the coming weeks are also going to see more changes made to the in-dungeon interface, mostly related to combat interactions and supporting animations for “everyday” stat adjustments.
We’ve been receiving a lot of feedback from new players recently about their experiences with the early stages of DD. Our thanks to all of you – even the horribly confused ones. Especially the horribly confused ones.
You always have to be prepared to look at what you’re spending your time on during a game project and ask yourself: Is this really necessary?
This is doubly true of a project that’s got a budget and a limited runway in terms of when you can afford to still be working on this thing… So during a some recent time off during a public holiday, inbetween trampolining and exploring the mountains along our south coast, I had the chance to take a step back from the work-face and consider a few things.
The biggest question: Is the Kingdom worth it?
Specifically, is the graphical representation of the Kingdom in Desktop Dungeons worth it? It performs fine as a progression menu in the game, it gives players meaningful goals and manages quests, etc. That’s all great, but do we need it to look as detailed as we’ve been trying to make it?
We only recently managed to replace that menu with something resembling the Kingdom concepts of old, why did it take us so long? Well, it turns out that getting all that art to play nicely with progression is incredibly tricky. Finding an artist that could take on Lurk’s singularly detailed painted style was one thing (Hi Dorianne!), but we also had to do a lot of engineering to make it work the way we wanted it to.
I spent 4 months on a tool that would allow Dorianne to work on the Kingdom in a similar way to how she’d worked wonders with the tilesets. We had endless back and forth sessions on what individual buildings should look like and how they interacted with their neighbors from both a graphical and functional perspective as a sort of stealth menu. And it’s worth noting that this wasn’t an acrimonious process! We were all pretty happy with everything, it was just taking forever. It didn’t really matter that the buildings and their upgrades were all written up in the game’s design wiki years ago, things had to be concepted, painted, re-sampled to lower resolutions, touched up, polished, re-drawn, transferred to polys, integrated into display groups, logically tied to mouse actions and put into the overall progression before they were even viewable in the game. Yes, the LayerSet editor allowed us to do WYSIWYG edits, but that mostly resulted in tons of re-drawing and polishing, which took up tons of time.
Time which we’re starting to have problems affording.
So, the question burned away while I was trying to remember how to stop pulling to the right during backflips: If we don’t have the fully-featured Kingdom we see in our heads, what takes its place? Once I got back to the office, I lobbed the same question at Marc and we tried to be as ruthless as possible. We decided that we needed to have the Kingdom done and dusted by the end of this month. If that meant going with a simpler, less rich version of the Kingdom screen that was essentially a skin over simpler buttons, so be it. The deciding factor would be how efficient we could get with the production of the Kingdom we really wanted, so out came the big lists of stuff that needed doing and we crunched at that until we had a critical path.
This week is heavier on bugfixes again, but we’ve made a few interface and design tweaks according to recent player concerns (don’t get too excited about balance though, we’re keeping our interference super light on that from now on).
The new effects icons should start rolling out this week, and will continue doing so for a while (you may remember us teasing the concepts for those in previous blog images). We’ve also got more significant plans for Kingdom interface improvements which will hopefully be gracing your screens next week. We’re not just talking about artwork, here – extra user interface optimisations are lurking off the port bow, cap’n.
A few other ragtag changes of note: we’ve done teensy tiny tweaks to the Tinker and Transmuter challenges which should make them more readable and consistently doable (mostly by massaging the RNG, so let’s see how well a more subtle approach works). We’ve also done away with the initial buying of prep slots, at least for now, so hopefully that’ll make the play experience a bit smoother in this area.
When parts of QCF Design went to good ol’ San Fran for this year’s GDC, I opted to stay on my home continent due to a combination of local life admin and an extreme hatred of sleeping in airport lounges between flights.
Mongezi Feza: Free JamBy
"Mongs," as he was affectionately called, was not an avant-garde player or a trad playerrather he was pure energy, directed in a tight beam at whatever group of musicians he was working with: the members of the Blue Notes, the Brotherhood of Breath, his trio with Johnny Dyani and Okay Temiz, or with the Bernt Rosengren Quartet on this new archival release by Ayler Records.
Feza was brash and unpredictable; he brought a new sensibility to European trumpet playing that had many fine exponents, but few that could match his verve. Like other members of the Blue Notes, Feza participated in a range of products and, as Free Jam amply demonstrates, usually dominated them. Ayler Records, which releases live recordings from figures like Albert Ayler and Peter Brötzmann, has the chance to play with history a bit on the release. Feza was a guest performer with Rosengren's quartet (the saxophononist being the other well-known participant) and probably brought along Temiz with whom he had been working during that year (1972). What was a trio of Stockholm performances in November and December is packaged as a Feza album, the song titles presumably made up and Feza vaulted into the role of leader. Not that he would have minded-his playing throughout the double disc is confident and bears the full weight of his experiences.
Free Jam is least successful when it rambles; whether Feza would have liked to have this performance released is unanswerable. Its triumphs, usually at the end of these rambles, are when the band locks into joyous grooves reminiscent of the best ensemble work of the Brotherhood of Breath. Such moments come during the aptly titled "Themes of the Day" (I or II). The tight flow of Rosengren's saxophones against Feza exclamations, propelled along by a band that probably never heard such sounds in their life (to borrow a phrase), makes this a valuable document. Being a jazz trumpeter seems to be dangerous work but at least Mongs made the most of his time on this planet, and sincere thanks to Ayler for giving today's listeners a chance to hear him.
Track Listing
Disc One:
1. Theme Of The Day I
2. Group Notes I
3. Group Notes II
Disc Two: 4. Theme Of The Day II 5. Moong's Research I 6. Group Notes III 7. Moong's Research II 8. Moong's Research III 9. Moong's Research IV 10. Group Notes IV
Personnel
Mongezi Feza: trumpet; Bernt Rosengren: alto sax, tenor sax, flute, piano; Tommy Koverhult: tenor sax, flute, euphonium; Torbj
Album information
Title: Free Jam | Year Released: 2005 | Record Label: Ayler Records170 kilometres from Belgrade and 80 km from Šabac, being an administrative centre of the Mačva Region it belongs to, there lies Mali Zvornik. Through the bridge Novi most and border crossing with Republika Srpska, Mali Zvornik is connected to the major road Zvornik–Тuzla–Sarajevo. The railway from Šabac ends in the very place. The municipality Mali Zvornik was established in 1955 when the Hydro-power plant on Drina was officially pun for the first time, and the settlement Mali Zvornik was pronounced an administrative centre of the new municipality. Most of the settlements of this municipality are situated along the river Drina or its confluents. The largest tourist attraction in Mali Zvornik is situated underground