Hi there! I'm Nicholas, one of the founders of Gaslamp Games and the lead programmer for Dungeons of Dredmor. I'm glad people are looking forward to Dredmor's release - it's been a long time coming, let me tell you.
Regarding whether or not Dredmor holds up as a Roguelike: I can only speak for myself, but my aim from day one has been to create a game with the complexity of a title like Nethack while significantly streamlining the entrance barriers. To my mind, one of the joys of Roguelike gameplay is the interaction between complex mechanisms and the variety of said mechanisms. Dredmor embodies this by ... well, letting you do a lot. You have a lot of skills to choose from, and a reasonably complicated skill tree mechanism you can ascend. There are traps to disarm and re-arm, there are shops to steal from with demonic shopkeepers, there are monster zoos, graveyards, various forms of quests that you can complete... we go on and on. So you can do a lot, and we hope to expand on that in future expansions with post-release content and patches. (Some stuff hit the cutting room floor in favour of shipping an actual game, and ... well, that happens in a commercial title. At some point, we want to get paid. But we're looking to put it back in afterwards.)
Our philosophy has been to keep the best of the Roguelike experience while being very... well, blasphemous. For instance, as I'm sure you've noticed, we don't use ASCII. There may also be a mouse involved in gameplay.
More libelliously, our dungeon is a little shorter than the average Roguelike dungeon too; we just found that it worked better for us as a small indie team. Dredmor itself is actually fairly moddable, so I will be waiting to see if the community decides to produce a "more traditional Roguelike" Dredmor mod with the tools that we have provided.
There are three levels of saving/death interaction: a mode that allows you to save at and restore from checkpoints, a mode that lets you find "Get out of Jail Free" cards in the dungeon which, upon you meeting your demise, will teleport you one level up to safety - until you run out of them! - and the traditional Roguelike death system that we all know and love (amusingly titled "Going Rogue" in the difficulty menu.) This was the most effective compromise between the Roguelike faction of Gaslamp/our beta testing pool and the less Roguelike faction of Gaslamp/our beta testing pool. A great deal of debate has been had over just who we want to alienate.
The checkpoint mode is, for all intents and purposes, legalized save-scumming. That, to my mind, is a philosophically objectionable thing, but we have enough people who want it that we decided to go ahead and do it. I choose to simply ignore its presence, although it consumes me like a cancer upon my liver. The second mode is a little bit like having a liberal sprinkling of Amulets of Life Saving around the dungeon. (We don't have Amulets of Life Saving.) The third mode... well, that's the great Rogue taste you love with zero calories.
Regardless, one of my jobs is to make sure that the Temple of the Roguelike audience has a good time playing it and raves about it to all their friends. We have drawn a lot of inspiration from Crawl, Nethack, and to a lesser degree ADOM in its creation. I think Crawl has been the seminal influence, although our skill system is very much inspired by Lost Labyrinth and, to a lesser degree, World of Warcraft (?!)
Anybody who wants to get in on the beta should drop me a private message with your name, e-mail and background, and we'll get you set up for our next release (version 0.8, coming Really Damn Soon Now.) We have Windows and OS X builds going, and a Linux build is forthcoming as soon as I decide that I want to fight yet another linker. There should be another video trailer later this week as well, and I am hoping to send The Temple a few exclusive screenshots for your pleasure.
Any questions, just ask. Now, if you'll excuse me, Lord Dredmor awaits....
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