dgbaumgart

@dgbaumgart

artist, game designer, art director, writer, independent game developer, he/him working in games since 2007 formerly Gaslamp Games, currently mostly Starsector

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dgbaumgart@dgbaumgart· 5h

Happy #GoblinFriday! Put together some test builds, then dove into 1. making the game camera less terrible, which led me to 2. redoing a portion of player turn time-logic handling (related to camera movement) (ooof). Nothing fun to show for a bit except... some in-progress art for "the high road"!

Background art for my goblin game - a ruined roadway crossing bridges between tall seaside rocks with a cliffy coastline in the distance.

dgbaumgart@dgbaumgart· 1d

Supreme Executor Philip Andrada, the Lion of Sindria, from Starsector

dgbaumgart@dgbaumgart· 11d

Get yourself a man who knows how to handle a swivel gun! You'll need this energy when the English come to burn down your tiny fort. (Port Royal, NS back in July.)

Herein I demonstrate how to wield a 17th century swivel gun while making what one imagines is a fierce "war face" that would certainly have come in handy when the English came and burned down the fort this is a reconstruction of.

dgbaumgart@dgbaumgart· 14d

Then did some rote stuff like making sure a few tooltips were aligned and more informative was available, fixed a minor save/load issue, drew an icon for an unimplemented status effect... then saw I had an art item outstanding to draw map tokens for all the hooman "heroes". Fun!

Art for my goblin game - these are the hooman "hero" antagonists.
Top row shows their in-dialog portrait, the bottom row shows their on-map board game-like token.

dgbaumgart@dgbaumgart· 14d

Happy #GoblinFriday! Decided to do a test run through first two scenarios to find if any recent work broke any old content, plus noted any UX things that annoyed me. Figured the first End Turn in the tutorial needed a bouncy arrow (this one is a bit too insistent, I did pull it back!):

dgbaumgart@dgbaumgart· 16d

#Starsector rulesmaxxing writing update: quantitative data only (I forget if @amosolov.bsky.social mentioned adding the ability to have more than one rules file, but that's a feature. Also: new writing is split between the files; size of new file is not indicative of size of that category of data.)

Showing off the growth of the rules data in Starsector for the next update.

A handy chart showing how the in-game dialog has grown, in megabytes.

dgbaumgart@dgbaumgart· 21d

ALSO I did myself a favour and added a dev testing panel to let me add resources, reload rules, dump current memory to a text file, and so on. Very useful, I should have done this ages ago and it only took like 10 minutes. (& Maybe later I'll work on some background illustration.)

A screenshot of my goblin game showing off the (very exciting) dev testing panel that lets me cheat and dump info and so forth.

dgbaumgart@dgbaumgart· 21d

Doing some silly polish too: - Wormsy's dice reroll power now has a special, more intense visual effect on rerollable dice to signal when you get a free reroll! - I'm spending way too much time getting background transitions working better, ie. switching locations while in dialog. Still not working.

A screenshot of my goblin game with a crop from another image comparing "reroll chaos" effects overlaid on dice that can be rerolled. On the bottom is the Wormsy Special Power effect, though it doesn't quite sell it without the little spiral spinning around (a bit faster for Wormsy's power here.)

dgbaumgart@dgbaumgart· 21d

Happy #GoblinFriday! Finished most Troll Bridge dialog. Finnicky bits remain; I had? to add a null memory type for reasons. Copying a memory that doesn't exist should make it "false" - but not just a bool. So this is a universal false for almost all conditionals (vs. int, float, string, bool). Hm.

Screenshot of my goblin game, just a bunch of goblins in the Goblin Swamp ready to move into the world and cause KAOS.

I added shadows under the tokens. That's all I wanted to show off here.

dgbaumgart@dgbaumgart· Jul 13

Also ha-ha still got this on my shelf because I paid like $500 for the privilege of liquidating the extra sellable office supplies and furniture.

An acrylic award from PC Gamer declaring Dungeons of Dredmor the Indie game of the year for 2011.

dgbaumgart@dgbaumgart· Jul 10

So I wrote a debug logger that takes the last dialog rulestack executed and saves all debug info to file so I can figure out where the logic goes awry. Rule logic is a huge part of the game, so it's worth it. The problem: reading condition *target* keys from memory didn't exist! Now it does. 2/2

Here's the text file the game outputs.

validTarget is False here, which means the second number in the operation (the target) wasn't parsed as a valid integer value!

... Except it was, as you can see below where _targetInt is 1. This was a few steps into fixing the problem, and it turns out I just wasn't setting the validTarget bool to TRUE after successfully parsing a memory key into an int. Whoops!

And here Bennybog successfully fails to convince the Troll to let him cross the bridge because he only had 1 snax when the Troll rolled for 3.

dgbaumgart@dgbaumgart· Jul 10

Happy #goblinFriday! Sorting out the Troll Bridge. Been here a while, I know - but it's helping debug dialog/rules logic. You can cross by offering 1d6 snax to the troll. If the troll rolls higher than your snax, the troll just eats them and you can't cross. It wasn't hitting the fail state! 1/2

Dialog screen from my goblin game. Here, Bennybog is attempting to offer the Troll snax to cross the Troll Bridge. Bennybog only had 1 snax, so the troll would have to roll a 1 to accept this offering.

Unfortunately, the Troll rolled a 2 and just ate Bennybog's 1 snax anyway. Fortunately for Bennybog, this still hit the "success" outcome for some reason. What the heck is going on???

Here's a look at the dialog rules logic behind the scene.

... Unfortunately the full condition for the fail state is cut off (sorry!), but it is: $scenario.lastResourcesRollBlockChangeAbs > $snax_just_had

What's notable here is I'm comparing two int 'memories' stored by the dialog system referenced by string 'keys', and it turned out to be the root of the problem.

dgbaumgart@dgbaumgart· Jun 19

Happy #GoblinFriday! Quiet day before a couple weeks off, so going through old locations to touch-up events and add new ones, mostly Dark Forest and Troll Bridge related (see shots). Found obscure bugs to fix (goblins love these). And the game camera is annoying me so might move up redoing it.

The extremely complex start dialog for the Troll Bridge crossing sequence. This is meant to be a bit easy in relative terms, with reasonable options for almost all character types so it can be the 'best' way for goblins to get from one side of the map to the other.

If you just sit at one end or the other there will be a few random events that won't give any particular risk or gains - it provides a good neutral ground to catch your breath on your way to somewhere more useful.

Unless, of course, you somehow truly piss off the trolls. I haven't figured out what that looks like, but you have to account for all possibilities with goblins...

There are a couple interesting repeatable encounters you can only discover if you're lost (as in, have the Lost status) in the Dark Forest. The theme here is lost secrets, so _of course_ you have to be able to discover some of them.

And is this going to be a riff on Old Man Willow? - Kinda! Maybe also that tree in Heroes of Might and Magic where you bury 30 gems at its base to get a level-up...

You can find mushrooms. Did you know you shouldn't eat every mushroom you find in the forest, especially those you can't identify? Bennybog doesn't.

This is a case where a character has rolled against his own stat (Mouth vs. Smarts) and lost, forcing him into eating *every mushroom*.

(I'll tell you now, Bennybog absolutely picks up a couple bad status effects from doing this.)

dgbaumgart@dgbaumgart· Jun 16

In the vein of "real concept art looks like crap", here are some #Starsector concepts for remnant/explorarium ships It's basically just dumping a bunch of shapes and colours and swapping bits around and seeing what hits the right vibe. (Some small ideas even get used way later in other places!)

dgbaumgart@dgbaumgart· Jun 12

Happy #GoblinFriday! Short day- more camping to do! Set up the "Haunted Pines" location - a foreboding, hostile area which will have lots of spirit interactions. Fixed annoying UI movement tweening interrupt error for certain buttons! Also: a coconut test shows the spirit affinity notification.

A screenshot of my goblin game, showing a dialog panel with a description of the Haunted Pines location.

This is meant to be another hostile area that discourages lingering unless a goblin is very well prepared to deal with hostile spirits and extreme weather. It's on the right side of the map, where there is less hooman "civilization" and more hidden treasures - and powerful, ancient things that perhaps don't wish to be awoken.

The plan is you go this way if you need to find some good tools to use against the encroaching hoomans - but such a quest won't be easy!

A screenshot of dialog from my Goblin game. Now THIS is pure test dialog, hitting a bunch of different game systems in succession: applying a negative status effect that halts movement, giving the goblin a new item (a coconut), and giving the Goblin affinity for a spirit.

The coconut was to test if my item save/load code was working correctly because I thought it was double-adding the coconut item. I think this was a false report and I just ran the dialog twice, because this time it seemed to work correctly.

As for the spirit affinity: this is used after the Goblin has done something (via the narrative dialog) that gives them affinity for a spirit. The goblin may then draw upon powers granted by that spirit by using their Ghosties stat and spending the Oooos resource.

Each spirit has "domains" they can affect, and spirits can have overlapping domains. These are used as tags within the narrative dialogs - so, for instance, a dialog can change based on if a goblin can call upon a spirit with the MEMORY domain ie. if they get lost in the woods this spirit can help them remember the way back out.

dgbaumgart@dgbaumgart· Jun 5

Alright, here's a first description encounter for the Wizard Tower. Includes a title block! This is going to be the stronghold of one of the main antagonists, so it's going to be a *very* dangerous place for an unprepared goblin. I want to structure 'delves' via a sort of "5 room dungeon" model.

Screenshot of my goblin game showing a dialog panel that appears when Kreeee the goblin first encounters the Wizard Tower location.

(I haven't fill out *any* encounters here, but I have lots of thoughts. ... Which I'll share at some future point, after they start to actually get implemented.)

dgbaumgart@dgbaumgart· Jun 5

Happy #GoblinFriday! I intended to work on the *Wizard Tower* location, but fell into fixing a list of annoying bugs. The good news is: they're fixed! Best bug: resource gains were limited by the pool of 'floating icons' I initialized at game start, just 20. Any gain over was lost to the aether.

A screenshot from my goblin game which shows a test dialog where Bennybog the goblin is rolling to gain lots of "snax" resource.

He rolled and got 27 snax, and you can see a bunch of little turkey leg icons flying from the bottom of the dialog box over toward the resource display.

Before fixing this, only 20 icons at a time could appear, and only 20 of whatever resource would ever actually make it into the player's resource pool.

I do not wish to elaborate on the dumb code reasons for this, but I will (probably) fix various underlying issues. In the meantime, I just increased the floaty pool to 64.

dgbaumgart@dgbaumgart· May 29

Happy #GoblinFriday! Added interactions to another area today: the Windy Path (I love the double meaning. Could actually draw it to be windier though, come to think of it.) This location is a transition zone meant to be a moderately dangerous/costly place to linger. Encounters reflect this.

Screenshot of a dialog encounter from my goblin game.

This is the default long description you get when you first enter this location, ever. I think maybe I'll add a location name title drop to emphasize that this is supposed to be a "congratulations! you found a new place!" moment.

Screenshot of a dialog encounter from my goblin game.

Here, Wormsy has a bad encounter trying to hide from crows. (Crow-goblin relations will be an important factor in this game. And making crows friendly? That will cost you lots of shinies, my friend, because there's little that crows love more than shinies.)

Screenshot of a dialog encounter from my goblin game.

Here, Eyeball has run into an encounter with not just high winds, but a Gale Spirit of some kind. Luckily she's *very* skillful at dealing with spirits, so can easily talk this one down.

There are a few other ways to deal with the windstorm, and failing them comes with great risks considering the high altitude...

Screenshot of a dialog encounter from my goblin game.

Eyeball is successful! This will give her more of the Oooos resource that will allow her to call upon spirits and their boons.

Note: only 6 dice in the top row! It should max out at 7. I have some work to do...

dgbaumgart@dgbaumgart· May 22

Happy #GoblinFriday! Did a trawl through my Jira TODO board and shoved all the tiny bugs + polish tickets to one side so I could focus more on mechanics & content to build up a feeling for the 'critical mass' of the gameplay. Here, a first look w/ sketchy background, at the Hilltop Tombs area.

A screenshot form my goblin game showing Bennybog the goblin first entering the "Hilltop Tombs" location. The background is extremely sketchy, but shows some windswept hills with piles of stones that enter into the underground. There's a slightly creepy description implying that dead spirits protect the place.

Naturally these tombs contain neat items (and are completely a reference to the Tolkeinverse barrow downs), so go here if you need powerful magical items - or simply lots of Shinies.

Will there be consequences like vengeful spirits and wights and curses? Who can say! Goblins don't worry about such things. Much.

dgbaumgart@dgbaumgart· May 14

Starsector for... I think @amosolov.bsky.social first contracted some spaceship sprites from me 16 years ago! Things have evolved a bit from there, just a bit. fractalsoftworks.com

A faux Starsector "box art" image with fun planets in a space scene

dgbaumgart@dgbaumgart· May 13

Fixed: Orcus Rao would keep giving the player credits as a reward for serving the Hegemony in an infinite loop until the game crashed #starsector

Oh no guy wearing a little Hegemony cap & eyepiece

(Made with apologies to Alex Norris of https://webcomicname.com/ )

dgbaumgart@dgbaumgart· May 8

Here's a good one- I got so many bonus dice that the dialog panel extended the conclusion button below where I can read it. Two notes: - when adding rows for bonus dice, scroll content if needed - ... also should be max 7 dice per row, not 5, so uh that's wrong

Just goblin stuff: Bennybog rolls really, really well against Farmer Grubb's attempt to spot his hiding place. So well, in fact, that the number of dice added scrolled the confirmation button below the visible pane. I need to fix this.

dgbaumgart@dgbaumgart· May 8

Happy #goblinfriday! Diving back in after some rather pernicious bugs (Goblins love bugs, and love to hide bugs), and... ugh, finally setting up a github repo. After being exposed to a decent git UI, my dumb-dumb system of backing up the dev folder manually has been confirmed as too annoying.

A screenshot of my goblin game with FOUR active goblins. Two of them are at Mudcrab Beach, and have a variety of (test) actions they can do.

These goblins have hidden many bugs from me. Can I find them all today? Probably not.

dgbaumgart@dgbaumgart· May 4

Follow your dreams y'all; circa ~2001 (I somehow conned this school program into giving me credit for making Counterstrike maps.)

dgbaumgart@dgbaumgart· Apr 28

Working on a dialog sequence related to the finale of the next #Starsector update. Don't screw this part up, captain!!!

dgbaumgart@dgbaumgart· Apr 18

OK, it works now! Reverted most fonts to Lato (for now!!) and started using Godot's theme system at all correctly now that I understand how it works. Same re. rebuilding UI layouts to work better across different resolutions now that I understand how all the pieces work & logic of the design!

A screenshot of my goblin game showing that the number of dice can now successfully overflow the first row instead of breaking the game.

(Bennybog actually rolled rather poorly here; the average roll is 30/31.)

Also: rolling for resource gains does *not* allow for exploding dice rolls because it'd probably be bad for balance. (That said, I should add it as a possible option, just for fun exceptional situations...)

dgbaumgart@dgbaumgart· Apr 17

I rolled so well that it broke the game. Turns out adding another row of dice to the layout isn't working because, um, I never tested it! Fair enough. (And still messing with fonts and unhappy with them. Free fonts just aren't great. Explains much about the sad state of text in indie games.)

Screenshot of a dice roll challenge in my goblin game. I had two dice, rolled two sixes. That added two more dice, which also rolled sixes... which should add two *more* dice, but the layout broke when it tried to add another row.

Two problems:
1. adding another row doesn't work
2. it shouldn't add another row until it hits 8 dice, as each row can hold 7 dice!

dgbaumgart@dgbaumgart· Apr 17

Happy #GoblinFriday! I finally found the MSDF button & I'm trying to get my fonts in order, again. Tried some out (img): 1. goofy noir/steampunk game 2. way, way too twee 3. this might just be the one. A touch of whimsy + easy reading. 4. too serious 5. what I've been using all along, a little dry

A screenshot of cropped dialog boxes comparing various fonts for my goblin game. They're all from Google Fonts.

1. Oldenburg
2. Sour Gummy
3. Fresca
4. Gelasio
5. Lato

dgbaumgart@dgbaumgart· Apr 11

Had a longstanding item to redo the "fog of war" feature, so I did that today. Had to wrap my head around just a little weird math and some shader coding. (And still need to make the location circles & connection lines go under the fog.) Also redid font rendering. Everything looks weird!

Screenshot of the main map of my goblin game with a new "fog of war" implementation.

Instead of splatting sprites all over, there's now two texture layers drawn overtop the map, a "gray" fog (transparent, to show what you know but don't currently see) and a "black" fog (opaque, to show where you've never seen).

It basically works! Going to need to add some features and adjust lots of details, but I'm glad the texture method was so simple to implement and I don't have to do the weird fog tile system that I was considering before.

dgbaumgart@dgbaumgart· Apr 10

#GoblinFriday! Okay, so making dice contests (pictured) work wasn't hard, nor was building out tooltips. The "cool" thing today is hunting down rules condition error(s). Part 1: At some point I commented out the conditional token parser so everything got set to "equals". Part 2: another thing???