dgbaumgart
@dgbaumgart.bsky.social
810 followers 200 following 610 posts
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/
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dgbaumgart.bsky.social
I put together a version of my free hex/square painterly tile sample pack for Itch.io. This is like a little mini-tour through all my terrain tilesets, and best of all, they're gratis!

Get it here -> dgbaumgart.itch.io/hex-and-tile...

(Guess I should tag stuff,) #gamedev and #indiedev I think.
A small sample of square and hex tiles that I'm giving away for free. 
This is just a subset of the full pack, and it includes: mountains, jungle, snowy pine forest, volcano, grassy plains, castle, broadleaf forest, cactus desert, farmland, calm sea, starry void, and blank dirt in both square and hex format.
dgbaumgart.bsky.social
I think you're right. Fffff
dgbaumgart.bsky.social
I kept repeating "First, I reject the premise of the question. Second, as a start and minimum action, enforce laws at all."

Over and over. aghhh
dgbaumgart.bsky.social
These people need to be WAY more skeptical of industry claims.

Also, my god, the "AI" industry needs to be held to a bare minimum of existing laws, to say nothing of ethics. Then it needs to be highly regulated, at least at the level of gambling [in Canada], and its ongoing harm mitigated. Somehow.
dgbaumgart.bsky.social
Went through this. Observations:
- The questions all presume "AI" is necessary, desirable, &will deliver on the hype; oof.
- The committee that wrote this must read LinkedIn all day, because their brains are a very particular kind of oatmeal.
- Jesus, these are the people in charge of policy? Dire.
dgbaumgart.bsky.social
(In the photo, see that white-on-blue painting of five vector-line spaceships in the upper left? Wait 'til someone realizes that it might be one of the first pieces of computer game fanart ever made. He's had that thing around since I could ever remember.)
dgbaumgart.bsky.social
Here's a fun short interview podcast with my dad about winning a Spacewar tournament in 1972: www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w...

The irony? throughline? of me working on Starsector now is not lost upon me. And the sheer historical accident of that event happening to be a 'first' is not lost on him.
BBC World Service - Sporting Witness, The first Esports tournament
In 1972, the first ever Esports tournament was held at California's Stanford University
www.bbc.co.uk
Reposted by dgbaumgart
keithwdickinson.bsky.social
Today is a day when arts degrees are worthless, but the product of those degrees is so valuable it would kill an entire industry if they were made to pay for it.
dgbaumgart.bsky.social
English!

But man, the French throws me for such a loop. If it sounds like what (very little) I learned, they're from France. If it's difficult to parse, it's Quebecois. If I have no idea at all, it's Edmundston Acadian? I dunno; mostly we just drive through the remote bits w/o stopping.
dgbaumgart.bsky.social
Naw, this was from a few weeks ago. Was going through the pics and had to share it.

Accents: my better half has family from potato country in the middle of NB and they do indeed have a distinct way of speaking. It's somehow "rustic" but doesn't fit into anything I could point at elsewhere.
dgbaumgart.bsky.social
Me to m: "Which do you prefer, 'brain thoughts' or 'proclamations of the skull tyrant'?"

M: "I prefer silence."
dgbaumgart.bsky.social
Shediac, New Brunswick is wild y'all.

(I know, wrong colour.)
A photograph of myself in front of a giant, monstrous lobster [statue]. There is a statue of fisherman between the monstrously huge claws of the lobster; his hand is held at his brow, looking out toward the horrors of the sea.

My posture mirrors his; my hand is shading my eyes, also shaded by sunglasses and a hat, as I look to the horrors of the sea.
dgbaumgart.bsky.social
I don't like drawing horses... but I think I'm OK with these.
Gotta mess with scale a bit to fit 'em into the 128x128 box.

(I feel like there are people who are really into horses who can knock this stuff out off-the-dome. I am not one of those people.)
An in-progress worksheet wherein I am drawing icons for medieval cavalry.
- Top left and top right are sketchy line drawings of two horses.
- Bottom left is 'light cavalry' built on the horse from the top right. 
- Bottom right is 'heavy cavalry' aka a knight in full armour with a lance based on the same horse sketch.

Horses have lots of weird legs and muscles and I have no idea where they all go. Feels like one of those things where people who are into horses get really into this stuff and I am simply not one of those people.
dgbaumgart.bsky.social
God, I'm taken aback. I've had many positive interactions with him in a weird corner of the online indie game space for, jeez, I think for almost 15 years? I'd never really reflected on what a constant he was, just out there being a low-key good guy for so long.

We're all poorer for his loss.
andyaml.bsky.social
Absolutely devastated by this news. SpaceDrake was no doubt a huge influence in drumming up interest for Japanese indie games localized into English and pushing for them on digital distribution storefronts like steam. Huge loss. Might be time for another playthrough of Recettear in his honour.
A tweet from Robin Light-Williams (@BlondRobin) stating the following: Hello to anyone reading this. I am Robin Light-Williams, formerly lead translator for Carpe Fulgur. I am very sorry to announce that my friend and business partner Andrew Dice, @SpaceDrakeCF, has passed away. Pursuant to that, Carpe Fulgur will be ceasing operations.
dgbaumgart.bsky.social
(I'm probably going to do an update pass over a bunch of my assets using Goblin Time - my basement, which my office is in, decided it needs potentially expensive repairs, so I think I've got to kick my income up a notch. Going to discover just how bad a problem we've got next week. Hope it's small!)
dgbaumgart.bsky.social
I released an update to my icon pack "Food, Spices, & Drinks"! Added 12 icons people requested in the comments over the past year or so.

dgbaumgart.itch.io/icons-food-s...
Added to version 1.1.2: icons of cream, butter with knife, a bunch of beets, cocoa pods, cranberries, butter w/o knife, bananas, cocoa seeds/nibs/whatever those things are, a pumpkin, a jar of jam, cucumbers, and chocolate bars.
dgbaumgart.bsky.social
I'm interested in your take on Whiskerwood, if one is to be had!

[It... appears to be doing quite a lot of what I imagined CE would do mechanically, pre-pivot(s)]
dgbaumgart.bsky.social
(_Foundation_, it's you!)
dgbaumgart.bsky.social
Haha, (well the problem is that video games take a long time to make and they're difficult to make money on!)

... But yeah, a section of my brain has been dedicated to this for years and years...
dgbaumgart.bsky.social
The brilliance of SMAC, writing aside, is how the social engineering tied most game elements together. That's the MOO1-like element; lean into that. And pull back on the proliferation of atomized elements: tiles, buildings, units. Somehow.

(The unit designer can definitely get cut, btw.)
dgbaumgart.bsky.social
Okay, hear me out.

If the great design pitfall of Master of Orion 2 was being too much like a Civilization game - individual buildings/ships thus micromanagement bloat - what if we could have a Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri that was built on the design philosophy of Master of Orion 1 instead?
dgbaumgart.bsky.social
[10 and a half hours of driving later] Quebec? Folks, it's too big. We need Petit Quebec. Maybe just take out Trois Rivieres and half of the Gulf of St. Laurent, it'll be fine

*ducking thrown bagels* what, I'm right
dgbaumgart.bsky.social
<3 (The HoMM call-out is particularly interesting. Never thought of that before.)
muffinlord.bsky.social
fractalsoftworks.com Starsector. Calling it anything other than "the most thoughtful large spaceship/fleet combat game" feels like a disservice. It's one part mount and blade, one part escape velocity, and weirdly, one part heroes of might and magic, but not the part you might think?
fractalsoftworks.com
dgbaumgart.bsky.social
Also hey, my friend Sean is looking for work! He's a 3D environmental artist, and we worked together back in the day at Gaslamp Games.

www.artstation.com/merrigore
A spooky, dusty apocalyptic sci-fi bunker Looking out the window of a ruined building into the trees near sunset
dgbaumgart.bsky.social
... and minimum-spec hardware.

(Wish I'd come up with this second part to the joke earlier! agh)
dgbaumgart.bsky.social
testing new Starsector content at the minimum supported screen resolution
A drawing of a Victorian man peering through a microscope which displays images at 1280x768