It’s been an exciting week! On July 16 we launched sales for “Earliest Access” to Clockwork Empires, then on July 18 we distributed the game to the public for the first time. It may not be our first time at the rodeo but it’ll always be scary to launch a game after keeping it hidden away (for over two years, in this case).
We come bearing videogames!
The Launch
It’s all gone really well! There were a lot of parts that we needed to test in the real world instead of sitting on private servers and this goes not only the game content itself, but our distribution and payment partners as well as our supporting websites. As Nwabudike Morgan put it, “Each interdependent piece must be materialized simultaneously and in perfect working order.” That’s pretty much what happened and we had a smooth launch; go team!
People are buying the game and are having fun with fishpeople, starvation, and building stuff. People are finding all kinds of fascinating bugs and telling us how we should make the game better. We sent out a hotfix yesterday, rev27C — changelog at the end of the post — which fixed more than a few things, and we are now fixing a bunch more stuff and putting together some new content for the next update which should be coming early next week. (We had to delay the hotfix by a day because you guys found so many Fun and Interesting bugs.) Special props go out to Dienes for telling us how we really ought to fix this or that script error before we even get a chance to look at the bug reports.
We’re also figuring out how to best communicate with fans, working out how to keep up a rapid pace of iteration, developing new features, and maintaining an active dialog about the game going in the forums.
Earliest Access
Certainly, a lot of people are skeptical of Early Access as a general concept because it’s not always been handled well. Obviously we want very much to do it right and I think it’s fair to say that it’s super important to get this right. So we’ll keep working at communicating the state of the game, informing you of updates, and responding to support requests rapidly. If we mess anything up please tell us so we can fix it and make sure it doesn’t happen again. The whole point here is to be receptive to feedback from you. Yes, you! Also that guy!
We’ve also seen people interested in Clockwork Empires holding off from Earliest Access because they believe that it may be in too early a state for them to get the enjoyment they want for their time. This is a good thing! It says that we’re doing a decent job at communicating what you get when you buy Clockwork Empires at this time. It means we’ve put enough information out there that players can make an informed choice about getting involved or not. For those who bought the game and are helping us out now: awesome! Those who want to wait a bit: also awesome!
A review of Important Links
You can buy Earliest Access to Clockwork Empires here via the Humble widget just below the featured video. The page also has screenshots of the game and a roundup of press writeups.
This site shows an overview of our twitter, forum, and blog activity. If you scroll down, there’s an FAQ and a support form to fill out if you’re having problems with the game (doing so will automatically generate a ticket to our internal tracker, it’s all quite clever).
Clockwork Empires: Development Progress
Want to read a high level overview of progress on the entire Clockwork Empires project, broken down into various sub-categories? Then this is for you.
Here, have these icons just because.
Changelog (for 27c)
- FIXED clearables should no longer produce floating job icons, will no longer accept commands if already designated for clearing
- FIXED descriptions of Lingonberries and Saskatoonberries were switched
- FIXED Beer icon is now consistent across all UI.
- Civilians will now hit back when attacked in melee combat. Sometimes. They’re still not very good at it.
- Removed a bunch of unused REDACTED (for now)
- FIXED: “nullhandle message” crash in wield_tool.fsm
- FIXED: put the hierarchical connected component stuff back
- FIXED: removed developer hotkeys
- FIXED: crash wielding a deleted tool
- FIXED: crash looking at a thing that has been removed from the game
- FIXED: Tinning Aurochs Beef no longer creates errors (but getting it via event does, so it’s been removed for debugging)
- FIXED: standardized use of “pipes” rather than “pipe” in all jobs/commodities. Should fix errors in producing pipes.
- weighted consume food jobs higher so that it will interrupt generic utility=1000 jobs before starvation alert triggers
- FIXED: consume food at table was missing minimum hunger requirement
- frontier justice gets unique death alert
- FIXED: misnamed job in workshops.edb
- FIXED: Audio settings from the launcher should now work
- FIXED (possibly?): Music, SFX randomly not turning on (please inform us if this is not the case)
- FIXED: job system did not correctly handle the case of aborting a job when an object was destroyed, and another job was also trying to use the object. (The “job item lost or misplaced” case.)
- FIXED: broken modules now correctly register as “broken” or “not broken” again (one cause of the “pick up item, drop item, pick up item” loop)
- FIXED: terrain starting as black after setting terrain quality to low, then starting a new game
- FIXED: laudanum bottle missing icon
Receive Update News via Email
Are you signed up to the Gaslamp Games email list? Why, you could be receiving news of updates and developer blog posts as they happen! Sign up here.
Alrready signed up? Here’s what new: We’ve added an option called “ALL patches and fixes for Clockwork Empires” for those of you who want news of every single hotfix and test patch we release for Clockwork Empires.
If you’re already signed up, just view any email you’ve received from us and find “update subscription preferences” at the very bottom and slightly to the right. Click on that, then you should then be given the option to change the categories of emails you receive.
Bonus Fan Comic
This comic made by “caffeineLich” is amazing. We have the best fans. (Edit: If you don’t have a Gaslamp forum account, use this link instead.)
Oh, good, the frontier justice getting an alert is nice. Makes it easier to tell which engineers I should avoid after sapping their sentries.
It is every testers final duty to go into the tanks and become one with all the bugs.
Hm. What advantages are afforded by becoming The-One-With-Many?
I only came across one bug that I don’t recall what it is and my people die for starvation all the time. Like the game though.
Maybe a stupid question but will the patches autoinstall through Steam?
Love the game btw!
Yes, patches will auto install through Steam unless you manually deactivate that function.
Don’t know why after the update, when trying to chop logs into planks a screen pops up and says,” Wrong number of parameters sent to Transform item (expected 3,/ sent 2).
Yup, we got that one. It”’ be fixed for rev29!
When is rev 29 planned to be released because this log cutting bug causes the colony to screech to a halt.
The patch should come out early this week.
You should be able to build everything required for a Carpentry Workshop without using any planks – the building itself plus carpentry workbench. This will then allow you to produce planks.
Ok first off update 28 is working 100% better. All my buildings are actually producing stuff and my colonists are working in them as soon as they are built. New problem or just easier to notice problem is that I fill up my job list with a mess of jobs to do and the only jobs getting done are clearing and building and randomly some mining. What happens is the job gets a flag on the map and it gets put in the job log and in the job log a colonist will get assigned to do the job so it seems all good in job town but in reality when you check the colonist listed in jobs as doing the job you find him to be off doing other things which may have to do with that the colonist is assigned to a building but is not being taken out of the list of colonists free to do other things.
I love the “feature” to promote dead people to overseer and them coming back alive 😀
Does anyone know whether the game plays under wine?
Ya just no one will start working in it very quickly because i cant furnish it like you know with required items that need planks which i cant make because i need the building that needs the planks that i need to get the planks to build the building to make the planks. I did get some one to work in the mill after i built a second one and then when they made planks they would go to the million furniture jobs that were in my job list then sense they would try to fulfill all the planks needed because I’m on day 75 by the time the mill is running. Then I noticed the job would sit for forever with no one completing the furniture and then it would empty of items needed delete itself from the job list and still look uncompleted but like if its a cot colonists would start using it so I cant tell whats done or not my job list is still so full that if i click to chop a tree I get the circle graphic but no job flag and nothing in jobs not that i could find it in the list of 200 plus furniture jobs. Mind you I’m on day 112 I have at least 1 of every building and 2 of some due to the glitch that i cant finish buildings but colonists will still move in if its the second unfinished of the same building. oh and if the overseer of a group in charge of a building dyes that building will not ever be usable again colonists must be afraid of ghosts. Also if a group starts working at a building and you add more colonists to the group to speed up production the extra colonists just sit idle and never help at the building.