dgbaumgart

@dgbaumgart.bsky.social

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artist, game designer, art director, writer, independent game developer, he/him working in games since 2007 formerly Gaslamp Games, currently mostly Starsector https://www.dgbaumgart.com/ https://dgbaumgart.itch.io/

A screenshot of my goblin game showing off the (very exciting) dev testing panel that lets me cheat and dump info and so forth.
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.)
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.
An acrylic award from PC Gamer declaring Dungeons of Dredmor the Indie game of the year for 2011.
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!
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???
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...
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!
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.)
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.
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.
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.
A faux Starsector "box art" image with fun planets in a space scene
Oh no guy wearing a little Hegemony cap & eyepiece (Made with apologies to Alex Norris of https://webcomicname.com/ )
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.
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.
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...)
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!
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
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.
A screenshot of my goblin game! This is an example "dice contest" where Bennybog has a roll against Jorten. This is working great and has nice tooltips. There's a bunch of extra padding at the bottom of the widget that I didn't notice 'til I started posting this - it's due to the minimum height of the widget being set to the old value for the old layout. This layout has less junk, so it can take up less vertical space. That's good!
A working sheet for 128x128 hex tiles. Especially notable is a huge number of coast hex variants to match all possible arrangements of land/water neighbours - and it's not done, at all.
A screenshot of revised dice-rolling system in my goblin game. The white dice are bonus dice which are added if a die rolls a six. Bonus dice can add more bonus dice (because this makes it more fun). So if the spirits favour you - as they favour Wormsy here - you can get truly incredible rolls even if the base odds are fairly poor (in this case, rather under 50% chance of success.) Key here - I should capture a video - is not JUST the tooltips, but the redone timing: dice are rolled, then it checks if a bonus die was added. If so, it pauses for a moment, adds the bonus die (and does visual effects on both the die/dice that rolled 6, and on the new die summoned by their success), then rolls those bonus dice in an additional roll. This loops until all are resolved. Once done, the total is added and FAILURE or SUCCESS is displayed. To truly cap this off, I need to add a fail/success sound effect. ... Also need to get this totally working for "dice contests" between a goblin and another character (or themself). I don't think, as a rule, NPCs will be allowed to have bonus dice unless some weird magic effect is in play. To make up for this I'll have to give them better stats across the board - and increase the challenge of dice checks overall while I'm at it.
A screenshot of a dice roll check in dialog mode of my game. There are an awful lot of fiddly details here that need to be adjusted so they're just right. Much respect to UX folks!
A tooltip for a dice roll challenge! There's another tooltip for the actual dice section that explains the stat being used... though I kinda want to show that in the main layout. We'll see.
Bennybog rolls for how many snax he finds, and "Bennybog found [b]7[/b][color=f4a460ff]Snax[/color]. Continue..." Something broke. (Not my fever, obviously.)
A screenshot of my new unified dice roll widget working in-game. The key thing here is it's one class that drives ALL dice rolls (rather than unique code per type of roll). The dataset that ends up telling this widget how to look and act is also used for the dialog buttons, their tooltips, and even how dialog rules are executed - and has to be passed down a LONG chain of classes to finally arrive at actually rolling the dice. The problem is I also had semi-unique data structures for each type of roll, built to suit each individual type of dice roll. And: ugggh. So what I'm doing: putting everything into one simple data structure that is shared between all buttons, tooltips, and dice rolls so they're all pulling from the same source of truth. (This is not a great thing to do while sick, but watch me do it! I have coffee! It'll be FINE!)
A base template for a simplified, and unified, dice rolling widget. It will handle all of the different ways the player rolls dice in the game, and it'll use a simplified layout that offloads extra data into informative tooltips. A classic coding situation: It's not that this is hard, it's just work I've avoided doing. And now that I have all the ways dice rolling works more-or-less coded out already, I just need to pull all of that one-off code into a unified Thingy that is adaptable enough to cover each case. And this shouldn't be hard, they're not that radically different. And what I gain: in the future, as I iterate effects and UX, and fix bugs, and improve the art, it'll all happen *in one place* rather than having to update everything in four different places. Now, um, I just need to do it. I'll get back to work.
Troll bridge encounter. Here, Eyeball tries to sneak onto the bridge - and runs into a troll. (Eyeball doesn't have a very good "sneek" stat.) HOWEVER I think it'd be fun to add "exploding" die rolls - so when I do that, if you roll a 6, you'll get a chance to roll another die. If that gets a 6, guess what? Another! Goblins should be able to achieve very unlikely victories on occasion when they're willing to (unwisely) attempt impossible odds.
This is how the map for Scenario 2 starts, more or less. In the upper left are tokens for Jorten the Fighter and Kreeee the Goblin - Kreeee has been captured (note the bars on his hotbar element in the lower left) and Jorten's goal is to sell Kreeee before Wormsy can help him escape. Wormsy, meanwhile, is on the right side of the map, across the river. Based on decisions at the start of the scenario, she can appear anywhere between the Goblin Swamp (lower right, bushy trees) and the Tavern itself, where Kreeee is. Crossing the bridges requires being sneaky, clever, or having lots of resources. And Wormsy starts with *nothing* on this map, so basically the player has to figure out the basic mechanics of exploring locations and acquiring resources in order to solve the problem presented by the map in order to fulfill their objective(s). Like I said: open-ended. _However_ this requires that all those circles have something interesting to do in them! That's a lot of scripting and dialog to write, but: it'll pay off, because once I have something there, they'll be useful for every other scenario I make in the game.
This shows the file size of rules.csv from two previous Starsector updates - and today, in dev.
Character info panel. Not great, not terrible. The new part is the left section with the "Will-o'-the-wisp" placeholder - this will show all the spirits that the goblin knows about, and show what boons that spirit may grant. I'd like to have this all be a bit more wishy-washy so it feels like ~*~* magic *~*~* and less a grid of buttons, but I'll worry more about all of that in a later pass. In the short term: I just need to get this working. Which I won't do today, but I've revised the design doc slightly and got the placeholder layout done. Just, ya'know, it needs all the code now.
Here's a bit of dialog where Wormsy is escaping with the help of a friendly crow. (I see crows and goblins as potential allies, provided the goblins are willing to give up some number of snax and/or shinies.) Note also: the objectives widget on the right side has an expand/collapse button (WHICH WORKS). To explain the significance of this dialog, which is quite old: I changed how a lot of dialog script commands and basic timing things work ie. how a camera moves and how the game waits for it to finish, or not, before executing more commands. So when I loaded up scenario 2 (this one) I found that telling the camera to spend 2 seconds panning to Wormsy wasn't working - it'd move in about .3 seconds then fire the next thing. Turns out the time wasn't being used *at all*. Fixed that, then: the map was pitch black until *after* the camera finished moving. What? It turns out the map fog wasn't updated until the next step of game start. Fixed that. Then: no fog at all, no map connections drawn 'til the camera got to Wormsy. I was calling the functions to update map fog and refresh map connection visuals too late in game start. Fixed it. Then: opening the dialog flashed the background then faded quickly to black. Weird! Well- this is actually a dev command I set up, but I'd like to be able to *start* the dialog with a black background because it involves Wormsy waking up from unconsciousness with no idea where she is, so it fits to have the black fade to the background art after a few lines of text. So: made it so dialog BG color can be set from outside of dialog mode. And so on and so on like this. Just lots of little fixes and adjustments. (I am, of course, going to have to go back and fix the start of the other scenarios because they were janked together using slightly broken commands that now work correctly. Such is game dev!)
Luci with big big yellow eyes (that want food, probably) on his red blanket, which always makes him look quite striking.
Tiny kittens that were only 6? weeks old when this picture was taken.
Screenshot of my goblin game. Bennybog has been caught by hoomans (via a test command) and now has bars over his character portrait in the UI. No real need for this, but it's one of those "little touches of joy" that's fun to see in a game. (I mean, sticking goblins in cages isn't joyful, but little unnecessary things where the developer is just having fun are always nice to see.)
Luci the cat in front of his empty food bowl. His eyes are the o's in the word Food. He wants food.
Screenshot of my goblin game. If you could see the mouse cursor, you'd see it hovering over the "Windy Path" (I kinda love the ambiguity of that name). That location, however, has been set to locked. At some point in cleaning up the movement UX, I lost the little locked icons, so I had to dig back through that code and figure out where it got missed- quite easy. The problem: I didn't like my drawn-in-10-seconds locked icon. So I made a new one that fits with the icon style! Took about a minute.
A screenshot of my Jira page which shows an item "make BubbleZone game map element". It took me quite a while to figure out what the heck past me was talking about here, then it came to me: as a first-take on adding animated elements to the world map, I want to be able to define an Area (that's a Godot object that can be a polygon, an ellipse, a capsule, etc) in which animated bubbles appear out of liquid and pop -- in this case used for the swamp part of the map to liven it up a bit. Not super high priority, but I still do want this. I'll write an actual description so I don't forget what this means again.
A test case for showing the dice reroll tutorial. I really botched the position calculation so the tutorial element is almost completely off the left side of the screen with just the end of the arrow pointing out.
The Classic Simpsons bit: Lionel Hutz asks "Can you imagine a world without AI?", sees visions of world peace and happiness, then shudders at the thought. This is literally every business executive right now.
The poundcake has a large divot eaten out of it. In the background, a blurry little gray tabby cat is pretty sure she didn't see anything unusual happen in the last hour.
The upper left corner of the map for my goblin game. It's got lots and lots and lots of little trees, fading toward brown/purple/gray at the edges where you're not supposed to worry about. In the middle there's The Tavern, where Terrible Adventurers hang out. Below that are some golden fields leading to Grubb's Farm, where you can steal food (and a giant turnip in the tutorial scenario). To the right is the river with and old-looking stone bridge - that's the Troll Bridge, and if you want to cross, it's going to cost you. You can try to sneak over, or talk your way through, but the Trolls will look poorly upon such shenanigans.
This is the save/load modal panel. I'm trying to make it less ugly, so I've offloading some secondary information that was in the save game entry buttons into a tooltip (which, btw, was ending up on a layer *under* this panel, so I had to shuffle things around there). The quicksave/load is still incomprehensible, but I'll fix that up another time. Also, everything is too greenish-brown. I mean yes, this is a goblin game, but we can do better!
A Starsector dialog - the player is in some kind of trouble involving a bad propaganda broadcast and has come to Rayan Arroyo for help.
A dialog from my game. Bennybog the goblin finally manages to pull a giant turnip out of the ground. He was, of course, spotted in the moment of victory, so we'll see how that goes... As for the memory rewrite, the weirdest error that resulted was the arrows showing what direction you were moving on the map were pointing the wrong way... sometimes. Turns out this was caused by an erroneous "check if value is greater than" call where I put the "return" keyword on the wrong line... and it worked, but was wrong. On the upside, I can do things like pull out chunks of memory grouped into a "context" and do stuff with them - save, delete, re-add later. Plus a bunch of other stuff works really cleanly, particularly save/load to file. What's next? I just need to make sure all the existing stuff works correctly so I can get an ultra secret test build out to a couple people.
I deleted a file with code! Possibly for the first time ever.
Revised save/load menu. You don't have to click over to a different mode to save/load anymore. It ain't pretty, but it's all there.
This is my save/load menu showing its various states. Clockwise from the upper right: 1. The base menu state which has Quick save/load (writes to one fixed file slot), Save/Load Game (which opens a sub-layout), and some other straightforward buttons. 2. Save game layout. Either choose a new slot or select an old one to save over (which amounts to deleting it and making a new one, so I'm not sure why I'm bothering with this. What I really need is just one interface to load a game, save to a new slot, or delete an existing save [with confirmation] ... so count that into a clean-up pass.) 3. Select a save file to load. See notes in part 2; but in short: needs a delete button per-save (and the text is going to need to be left-aligned). 4. When you hit the save button, you get a modal confirmation alert!
A screenshot showing the in-game modal menu that allows quick access to save/load -- and it works! Well, not the actually Save Game / Load Game buttons because I need one more step of UI to actually show a list of save game instances that correspond to files in the save folder. That'll, uh, come up next.
A screenshot of my goblin game. We see an NPC token "Jorten the Fighter" sitting on a map location "Royal Preserve". He moved there all on his own (using the NPC navigation function given commands through a series of memory flags created based on a dialog script call.) The gray-background text box is the Godot console output. This is stuff I specifically call to print to the log. The white-background text box is a save file showing everything held in Jorten's personal memory. You can see character name, info, stats, and some other junk. The important bits start with "ai_". ai_active: means he'll try to do something based on other memory flags that will be searched for automatically. Set this to false and he'll just sit in place doing nothing on the NPC turn. ai_followPath: this is the name of behaviour Jorten is going to carry out - "follow a pre-defined path". ai_pathNodeCount: this is the number of nodes in the path - and this is our bug! Not there is only ai_path1 and ai_path2 - I did not update the number of nodes remaining after Jorten moved to the first node in the last, though I did successfully move every node "down" in the list by one entry. Once Jorten is done 'consuming' all the nodes, ai_followPath will automatically delete itself and if there are no other relevant flags (there are not), Jorten will set ai_active to false and just chill... at grubbs_farm, if this all works. I have a note to allow an optional script trigger when the path completes, so we could start it all over again and send Jorten somewhere else. (a behaviour for patrolling between two points is planned but no implemented, btw) Anyway. Basically works! I'm going to have to make a "ai_pursueTarget" next, I think so Jorten will automatically chase Bennybog around the map in the tutorial scenario...
A screenshot of my testing list for the end of the "Bennybog Steals a Turnip" scenario. It looks like a bunch of goblin-themed gibberish.
My cats being lazy poops on a chair.
A sloppy checklist in a JIRA ticket. This is probably not Agile-approved methodology .... .... but maybe it'll work for us!