Dungeons of Dredmor may be one of the best games you have never played. It was released last year for PC and was a big hit for those who bought an indie bundle some time in late November. I jumped on the band wagon about the same time Anthony Burch started shouting it's praises. The game isn't your usual dungeon crawler as a good mix of difficulty, praise and random spawns gets you through each difficult dungeon.

I recently spoke with David Baumgart, the principal artist and a designer for the small studio, Gaslamp Games who are the creators of Dungeons of Dredmor. I have to say it was awesome to talk to anyone from that studio, as I can't wait to see more of the cool stuff they bring out in the coming years. So what do you do, David, how long have you been in the industry and what are some of your biggest inspirations?

GG:  I'm currently, the lead art guy at Gaslamp Games, though this being a small studio I also do game design, writing, and all sorts of other little jobs. We all wear lots of hats. I've never really been in "the industry" proper, though I've worked as a freelance artist on games from late 2007 onwards. Most of that has been on a lot of small games mostly for browser or iOS by very small teams or lone coders. Sadly, the majority of these projects never get released. I've certainly learned appreciation for the amount of attrition there is in game development. The most successful project I've worked on apart from Dredmor is probably "Starfarer" by Fractal Softworks. 

My biggest inspiration is from all the games I grew up with in the 90's: Darklands, Civilization, Monkey Island, Master of Orion, Doom, Ascendancy, Railroad Tycoon, Settlers 2, Quake, Fallout, Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, System Shock 2, and so on. The golden age of PC games, in my mind, though nostalgia probably drives a lot of how I talk about them. I always wanted to make those games and I used to draw out entire games on whiteboards and run them for my friends in a sort of hand-drawn D&D, though unfortunately I never knew about D&D when I was a kid! 
Now I get paid to do this, basically. It's pretty great. 

QJ: What was the inspiration behind Dredmor and how long was it in production?

GG: Nicholas Vining, Gaslamp's lead coder, would have the best answers for what started Dredmor because it's really his baby. He started Dredmor with a now-defunct game development start-up back in 2005 or so. The driving conceit of Dredmor was going to be that it was a numberless graphical roguelike. I'm not sure how it was planned for anything to make sense without numbers and only rudimentary graphics but we eventually came to the consensus that this was indeed a terribly unworkable idea given what we had to work with. 

To make a long story short, it was a difficult development with many slow periods and lots of being really poor and racking up debt. Back in 2008 we expected to be able to crank the game out in a month or two. Two and a half years later, we shipped. I did freelance work to pay rent while working on Dredmor whatever extra time there . It should suffice to say that I'm really happy it's worked out so well. 3. What inspired the art style?
Dredmor's final art style is the result of a lot of compromise on my part with the engine Nicholas had previously built and the art he'd already previously commissioned from a handful of freelancers. When I joined the project in 2008 I had a look at all of the existing art and noted what I wanted to redo and what I wanted to keep. The 'keep' list ended up being the player and monster sprites and the inventory bag. Everything else was redrawn, though I had to fit the visual framework already baked in to the engine, particularly the style of dungeon tiles with that perspective which drives so many people crazy.

To speak of it personally, I love baroque, gritty pixel art (and don't have much use for slavishly retro aesthetics for their own sake). If I'd made the game from the ground up it'd probably be something darker, less cartoony, more along the lines of the great masters like Adrian Carmack, though not quite so morbid as that. I love the medieval gothic ambience of stuff like Darklands and you can probably see that influence skulking around in some of the items and environments. The characters themselves were originally drawn by some freelancers, primarily Bryan Rathman who took a lot of inspiration from the old Lucasarts adventure games. The Guybrush Threepwood in the hero sprite is perhaps obvious. Later for the Realm of the Diggle Gods expansion pack, we hired Chris Triolo to take on animation and he's done a lovely job of it.   

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