Clockwork Empires version 1.0 has emerged, glistening, from its development-spore and launched on Steam! We are out of Early Access and into the wild frontier that calls for Colonial Bureaucrats to manage bustling colonies and chop down all the trees and maybe start a cult maybe for Progress and Civilization! You can purchase Clockwork Empires through Steam or the Humble Store (which provides a Steam key*) for a 10% discount for the next week!
* We will be setting up non-Steam distribution of Clockwork Empires via the Humble Store and possibly other online distributors in the near future.
The Development Progress Report has been updated with a full annotated changelog for version 55A to version 1.0. We’ll put the full changelog at the end of this post for those interested in seeing what the last month month of Early Access has brought to the game.
This is not, of course, the end of work on Clockwork Empires: We shall be continuing support for game stability and bugfixes, and we have a list of additional content and some small features we’d like to add post-release.
Oh, did you catch the launch trailer by the way? Here it is again:
Major player-facing additions this month
- performed a huge UI improvement pass for release
- also a huge balance pass, including making the later biomes more difficult
- added the Steam Knight Manufactory!
- added Achievements
- much stability & polish
- oh yeah, we’ve released the game to 1.0 with all that entails!
Begin Full Changelog for version BETA 55A to version 1.0 of Clockwork Empires
Colonist Behaviour
- awkward hugging made less likely to cause errors
- “Drunkard” trait now additionally causes happier memories from drinking
- “Hale and Hearty” trait now additionally causes barbershop treatments to heal more
- “Mushroom Lover” trait now additionally gives happy memories when eating fungus-based foods
- when deciding initial feelings toward other colonists, Overseers will now consider Labourers beneath their notice for friendship/rivalry unless said Overseer has the Common Mingler trait
- made colonist auto-burial timer check itself more often (colonists are not given automatic burial orders if hostile enemies are nearby; this will now be checked upon every new workshift.)
- colonist traits now affect certain climate quality of life effects
- added booze vat pathing check to get drink / fill vat jobs
- vicars can now convince cultists to leave their cult
- “Made a friend/rival” memories will now have the name of said friend or rival
- balance: Steam Knight presence now affects safety QoL
- balance: added more despair and anger overall
- balance: made people slightly more upset in general
- balance: when your colonists die it will now decrease your empire standing a bit
- FIXED: scripterror when using Leyden weapons
- FIXED: military holding commodities while fighting
- FIXED: characters would occasionally get stuck and stop moving when the entity “thinklocking” them would disappear w/o releasing the thinklock (in particular, if a spectre talked to a colonist then disappeared due to sunlight, the lock would not be released.)
- FIXED: enraged characters will no longer build buildings
- FIXED: Safety quality of life calculation for colonists was incorrect on days 2 through 5
- FIXED: if a scientist is enhanced due to REDACTED their lab will properly update its skill display
- FIXED: murder
- FIXED: scripterror in military_interrogation_event.fsm
- FIXED: some eldritch memories didnt give (enough) despair
- FIXED: spectres should no longer freeze people in place forever under certain rare conditions
- FIXED: slightly incorrect string compilation in conversation memories
- FIXED: edge case error in ai_damage
Non-colonist characters
- doubled trader mission time
- Occult Inspector now inspects buildings more intelligently
- made dormant spores more Fun
- FIXED: steam knights freezing!
- FIXED: possible steamknight issues with placement /not/ into buildings
- FIXED: added safety check to fishpeople group deletion notification
General Gameplay Balance
- changed overseer workplace cap modifier to scale w/ number of overseers
- balance: adjusted incidence of bad guys in biomes according to difficulty scheme
- balance: made certain enemies send more dudes when you’re later in game
- balance: reduced Fishpeople incidence in desert biome
- balance: non-temperate biomes impose various and increasing QoL penalties from tropics, desert, to cold as most penalized
- balance: more vicious will spawn in non-temperate biomes
- balance: biomes with extreme weather may produce unpleasant memories
- balance: military interrogation has been made less effective by 50%
- balance: doubled trade crops value
- balance: added extra bandit spawning in desert + cold
- balance: bandits in more difficult biomes now get better gun loadouts
- balance: decor object trade value updated
- FIXED: overvalued steam radiator (and other decor items)
- FIXED: Bricabrac now has a trade value
Workshop/Buildings
- added the Steam Knight Manufactory. Have fun!
- more workshop interior textures changed
- optimized Laboratory science refresh function
- science has undergone a massive overhaul: The number of techs has roughly doubled. A number of advanced modules now require research before they can be built.
- balance: Overseer house has had the windows requirement moved to its 2nd bonus condition
- Assembly Workbench now has 2 access points (down from 4)
- added naturalist’s office info to module descriptions
- the Trade Office now has a module todo list that will determine how many traders arrive. Range is currently 4 – 14. (Traders will always use the best office in your colony to determine how many to send, rather than adding multiple offices together)
- added some new options for increasing standing to the Empire via the Foreign Office
- added more feedback to Foreign Office when changing standing
- FIXED: ammo recipes now all make 1 ammo as intended
- FIXED: a large number of incorrect recipe costs
- FIXED: that typo in the laboratory
- FIXED: house demolition crash
- FIXED: invisible buildings
- FIXED: airship masts work again
- FIXED: rare door scripterror when a door was built before its parent building (or something)
- FIXED: missing Steel Plates recipe
- FIXED: connected components would fail to be computed correctly when creating a building with weird shapes (the actual problem is more detailed than that, but let’s go with that one)
- FIXED: various path stutters related to the new connected component code, involving animals not correctly finding corrected components that ignored doors, various other issues with aquatic entities, etc.
- FIXED: building can no longer consist of two discontiguous blueprints
- FIXED: steam knight chassis recipe output is no longer world’s most expensive landmines
- FIXED: incorrect recipe ingredient info for various products
- FIXED: dismantle objects assignment beacon now works correctly
Events
- replaced Sunny Day event with much more varied “Unusual Weather” event w/ unique effects per-biome
- some events that spawned characters now properly allow clicking their event popups to zoom to those characters
- made major eldritch events more Fun
- re-added Ominous Dreams as event arc
- Novorous Logging moratorium now checks for larch/bamboo farming
- added Arguing Rivals event
- if your Empire standing gets low enough the Ministry will limit and eventually entirely halt immigration until you pull it back up
- balance: made Foreign Invasion redcoats not take > 7 days to despawn
- balance: removed revolver locker chance from ministry supplies in foreign invasion event
- balance: made disturbance points at slightly higher at low end of scale
- balance: made cults easier to trigger
- balance: adjusted weights of various events
- balance: doing airship crash research now gives standing reward
- FIXED: scriperrors in certain cases in “arguing rivals”
- FIXED (55J): scriperror in cult art, fishperson cult arc
- FIXED: scripterror with criminal work crew foreign office event
- FIXED: some buildings would say you didn’t have required modules when eventlocked
- FIXED: bureaucrat desk couldn’t be used for event arcs
- FIXED: rare crash when using Aerial Surveillance
- FIXED: order to kill all fishpeople now works correctly
- FIXED: grimoire event had ending error if researcher died
- FIXED: scripterror in Above 30 Population event
- FIXED: scripterror in certain cases in Arguing Rivals
- FIXED: possible scriperror in Mad Carpenter
UI / UX / Text
- performed a major overhaul of the Colonial Handbook; all pages have images and have been reformatted to be easier to read
- replaced many intrusive pop-ups with alerts
- tooltips for missions (in Foreign Office) are now minimum sized and shouldn’t overrun container
- added descriptions for sub commands (in bottom left menu)
- improved alert tooltips (for pop-up alerts on right side of screen)
- improved visibility of colonist traits via gameplay and fluff fields (ie. traits that affect workshop are highlighted)
- rewrote a bit of the “wrapped label widget” to make the constructors more sensible
- mineral survey waypoints now use assignment beacons (which is very nice)
- consistency: any string that says “Cheap Cabinet” has been set to “Simple Cabinet”
- Mine will give alert if assigned an owner and it has no supplies to operate
- Naturalist’s Office will give alert if set to a different mode w/o Overseer assigned
- Naturalist’s Office will give alert if set to a work mode w/o supplies for that mode
- all instances of “citizenry” changed to “colonists”
- adjusted Safety Quality of Life description so having a low rating doesn’t (necessarily) say that you have few soldiers (it’s possible to get a low rating due to other factors)
- exclusive windows (ie. history log) now make a noise when they close
- improved load screen UI
- overhauled Trade Office interface
- improved layout for character info panel
- edited embark screen to show biome difficulty of site selection
- added cancel button to the load screen
- added per-workshop backgrounds to Overseers window (makes it much easier to see which overseer is assigned to which workshop)
- made expression widget bgs round for thought/dialog
- added better tooltips to Workshop production menu
- polished up character info panel
- moved “Unassign Overseer” to the top of the overseer assignment element (in building panels)
- added detailed tooltips for terrain objects
- added informative tag icons to map objects
- did better tooltip requirement visualization for buildings
- added hitpoints, quality to building tooltips
- proposing and cancelling trades now work properly and update the UI on time
- emoved zoom to worksite button for character panel (it did not really work)
- FIXED: shortened some more overflowing memory names
- FIXED (internally, really this time): cancelling a gabion creation job no longer leaves ghosts
- FIXED: farms now display their farm type in the office creation menu
- FIXED: dead colonists will no longer display a job as if they were alive
- FIXED: changing the order of the workshop modules in the workshop didn’t work properly
- FIXED: some more memory name ui overflow
- FIXED: minor typosFIXED: some minor text overflow in the foreign office
- FIXED: work crew UI now uses disabled scrollbar thumb properly
- FIXED: the label for “sleep” wasn’t showing in the character info panel
- FIXED: crashing the game when viewing the credits
- FIXED: flashing character nametags
- FIXED: new tooltip code no longer crashes the game if a product has no explicit definitions in data files
- FIXED: overflow of recipe tooltip for product details in workshops
- FIXED: farm overseer assignment display updating
- FIXED: overflowing tooltip in house dialog
- FIXED: blank tooltip on overseer in overseers panel
- FIXED: embark icons flickering to incorrect states when switching between them
- FIXED: clicking on the minimap while zoom-to is selected will now correctly reset it
Biomes / Nature Objects
- adjusted ground textures in alpine terrain to look colder
- added some more difficult stuff to provide Fun / blood for the blood god in harder biomes
- renamed “Lacquer Tree” to “Lacquer Plant” (to imply that “Chop Tree” is not an appropriate tool to use with them)
- mine survey point visuals redone
- added informative tag icons to map objects
- balance: non-temperate crops made more difficult
- balance: increased vermin spawn and animal spawn timers (for less spam)
- balance: forage output and regrowth time increased
- FIXED: vermin will not spawn in invalid positions (caused pathing errors)
Engine/Tech/???
- optimized connected component code to fix stuttering when flattening/building
- FIXED: stutter when placing gabions, buildings, or flattening terrain
- FIXED: scaling issues on fullscreen for Windows if the aspect ratio of your monitor exactly matches your suggested resolution (unngh)
- FIXED: Longpork pie used incorrect model
Wish to peruse the full annotated changelog? Read it in the Development Report!
Have fun and let us know through our mysterious portal or forum if anything goes wrong.
WOOO! finally ! congrats!
Congratulations on the release.
What about the Linux version?
Party line on the Linux version: I wanted to get it done for release, but it just wasn’t happening due to:
a) me being busy
b) Ryan being busy
c) our build engineer having to do Desert Bus for Hope this month
Well, I’ve now cleared up a) at least; assuming that the post-release fires aren’t huge, I’ll just get on with it in the next little while. It should be pretty quick – we had it working in house at one point, and most of the issues are with Steam packaging.
Sad to hear you didn’t make release, but totally understand why.
Fingers crossed for a quick and painless tidying up of the Linux version 🙂
Thank’s Nicholas.
I’m just excited to play, and understand being busy, but a part of me had long hoped that the Linux build would hit during early access, so I’ve been antsy to play.
Very excited to play. I’ve followed development all along, and the game looks great.
Huzzah!
I’ve been watching this game for nearly 18 months now.
Just bought it and downloading now 🙂
Thank you, hope you have fun! Let us know if anything is wonky eh?
My very first game, it dropped me in the middle of a swamp in the very corner of the map, without an inch of flat land inside the entire viewing area.
After about an hour of trying to level everything enough to make farms and feed my people I said screw it and loaded a new world.
Congratulations, gents! Thanks for your stellar efforts.
> multiplayer was promised
> then multiplayer was going to come out the second week of early access
> now 1.0 is out, no mention of multiplayer
Hmmmmmmm………… Starting to sound like one of those situations where devs arbitrary declare a project done so they can PR a second wave of purchases.
Yes, we intended to do multiplayer when we started the project. We announced in January of this year, here: https://www.gaslampgames.com/2016/01/27/the-great-building-creator-rewriting/ as well as on our internal forums and the Steam forums that we would not be able to do multiplayer.
In short, we cut multiplayer so that we could put all of our effort into making the single player game better. It always sucks to cut features, but this was absolutely the correct choice in terms of allocating limited development resources.
If you purchased the game in Early Access with the intent to play multiplayer I can only recommend that you request a refund from Steam offering that as your explanation. I can’t speak for what they will do at that point because we are not privy to their process, but I think that should work out.
Yeeeeeah! Released in my Birthday! I am so happy! Gonna play tonight. 🙂
I’m great fan of your games since Dredmor, even bought plush Diggle! Woohoo!!
Happy birthday! 😀
Thank you very much! 🙂
Congratulations guys, I have been following this blog for years and I am very happy to see that this ship has sailed into the open waters of version 1.0+.
Thanks for sharing so much about the development process – you’re pretty unique! Keep it that way!
Feels like yesterday that I was scrawny doodles of module logistics. ;o;
I love it so much I am doing a forum Let’s Play of it, please feel free to enjoy and/or recoil in shuddering horror from my massive array of ineptitudes 😀
http://brokenforum.com/index.php?threads/glory-and-madness-on-the-rustic-frontier-lets-play-clockwork-empires.10435/
Congratulations! I enjoy the game and this dev blog.
I’ve been playing clockwork empires for a while, and I have to say, I have LOVED this game. My friend and I talk about it all the time-efficient build orders, how fishpeople aren’t actually people and thus its okay to kill them without mercy, that there is no cult and you need to drink until you see four of me but not five, etc etc.
I do have one question though: Why was the feature to make your own custom sized fields and stockpiles removed? From a game play standpoint, it seems to be to limit the amount of food you can produce with one overseer, making it so you only need one or two slaves to fully optimize a field.
Anyways, thanks for bringing us this great game!
Hey, glad you’re enjoying the game!
I’ll answer your questions in turn-
1. Fixed-size fields: The amount of food you get from a field is not connected to its size, it’s purely based on the amount of work you put into the field based on your Overseer skill and number of Labourers assigned. So resizing the field would not make any difference – the only important consideration is there have to be enough “crop” gameobjects for a fully-staffed workcrew to work.
So, given that changing field size doesn’t affect output, and a field size that is too small will not allow a work crew to work correctly, and if it was really small, it was possible to create a field that couldn’t grow any plants at all! We decided to fix them and tie the amount of land fields take up to a sort of balancing mechanism. So Chilli fields are very small but don’t output much food per unit of work put it, while Wheat fields are huge and output a lot of food per unit of work put in.
2. Fixed-size stockpiles:
Basically, it would be possible for a player to drop a bunch of stockpiles together so they have like 10 stockpiles with between 1 and 3 squares. Players assumed these stockpiles would automatically join together – but they don’t. These would all be treated as separate stockpiles with unique filter settings and they could easily all be filled up with a piece of stone in each or something. Basically, the organization system would break down and become confusing both to the player (and to the internal job system – which would do its best, but it’d look like it was going crazy even though it followed the exact system set by the player).
So it was essentially done so players can’t accidentally create a confusing mess. Same idea for fields, really.
Again, glad to hear you’re enjoying the game!