First, let’s do the big announcement:

We’re thrilled to announce that we will be releasing Clockwork Empires on Steam Early Access on August 15th for $29.99!

The “Earliest Access” process has been extremely successful, and we couldn’t have done it without all of those fine players who have helped us out by participating. People are sending us horrifying/exciting bug reports every day and are making useful design suggestions; in short, it’s everything we wanted to get out of our “Earliest Access” and as a result of these weeks of intensive effort by both players and our development team, we will be moving Clockwork Empires into the larger spotlight with a much improved, more polished experience.

Thank you, Earliest Access players – we couldn’t have done it without you!

And with that said, there is going to be lots to do in the next two weeks.

Development

The last two weeks have been crazy.  It’s a weird experience bringing a project three years in the making to a state where random people start reading your scripting comments.  It’s been incredibly rewarding to see people having such a good time and being so enthusiastic about providing feedback.  While we haven’t responded to everything, we’re doing out best and we’ve definitely been reading everything anyone says, and it has been really helpful in deciding how to prioritize developments appropriately. Our perspective is so close to the game that although we have a Giant List, we do not know as well as a new player how the game experience will be impacted by one feature versus another — hearing about what is unclear to a new player upon first launching the game is actually a terrifically helpful piece of feedback.

The Earliest Access process is going phenomenally well, and we couldn’t have done it without everyone who wanted to be a part of it. So again, all of us here at Gaslamp Games would like to thank you.

We’ve filed almost 250 bug reports in the last two weeks and resolved almost 150 of those. Bugs have ranged from dead characters coming back to life to have conversations about communism (this keeps happening), to a plethora of invisible buildings and nasty, unpleasant crashes (which we are slowly but surely stamping out). There’s also a small issue where colonists only sleep once in their lives (but this might just be Nicholas). We have also had a lot of rather usual, but less player-facing bugs fixed this week that involve (exciting!) memory management and serialization.

Many players have requested better stockpile support, which was on our list prior to Earliest Access; we have bumped this up in priority due to how often it has been requested, and some of this work can be found in the latest update (Revision 28). Filters and a stockpile viewing panel will be added in the next build (Revision 29)

We’ve also resolved some issues with hardware that we weren’t able to test without your help: some videocards have issues with terrain appearing pitch-black (as it does) and these issues have been resolved. We are still working on Intel chipset support, specifically related to the dire Intel HD4000. There’s still some other really Fun stuff going on with the Intel chipsets that we want to support, specifically related to laptop manufacturers not allowing people to update to the latest drivers, which we need.  We’re hard at work on it though; thanks for letting us know!

(Alongside all the bug-fixing, tech, and UI improvements there’s also some Fun Stuff that we want to sneak in to the game but can’t, of course, tell you about. Rest assured that your Fun is always a priority at Gaslamp Games.)

We’re halfway through Earliest Access now and we’ve got two weeks to go and we’re going to make them count.

Eager players line up to “Join The Colonies”.

Changelog for Clockwork Empires rev28, launched to Earliest Access players on July 28:

• Removed “chop log directly into a plank” and “cut stone directly into bricks” due to micromanagement. (Build a Carpentry Workshop, already!)
• Added icons for Lingonberry and Saskatoonberry preserves crate commodities
• Subtly re-organized building icons to suggest a build order
• FIXED: added default melee attacks for very unconventional weapons (caused rare scripterrors)
• added a seed memory to each new colonist (to normalize moods a bit at start of game)
• vaguely improved and massively cleaned up harvestable Nature objects (oreNode, tree, forageSource, and clearable) – still job assignment issues w/ stumps & new saplings though.
• harvestable nature objects will create job icon immediately rather than waiting for overseer to accept job (better feedback for player)
• memory weighting adjusted slightly (a bit less overall madness)
• Internal rewrite of stockpile code: stockpiles are now considered used/not used based on if they are empty or not, and stockpiles should no longer jam up with half-empty squares.
• Stockpiles will show their borders with a different colour model (placeholder ’til final assets are done)
• Enhanced “flee” job based on Dienes’ suggestions; colonists much smarter about running away from danger
• various minor character texture fixes in
• added a bunch of new head and hair models
• made sure all tools & weapons use correct melee attack animation
• FIXED: “tin exotic caviar” job should work correctly
• FIXED: commodities no longer float in stockpiles
• FIXED: Character info window remembers its position and no longer defaults to topleft corner of screen
• FIXED: Workshop window remembers its position and no longer defaults to topleft corner of screen
• Gravesites now enabled (however the corpse picking up/dropping animation is not in yet)
• (FIXED: digging graves requires a shovel and a HUMAN corpse, not ANY corpse)
• Houses can now be renovated.
• FIXED: numerous memory leaks
• FIXED: Cleaned up memory storage for clean game exits
• FIXED: Fixed memory footprint overrun in save games (saved games still not publically available)
• FIXED: floating unremoveable job icons should no longer happen
• FIXED: dead Colonists job description is no longer stuck on what they were doing before they died
• FIXED: workshop job using tool when interrupted will no longer permanently attach tool to character’s hand
• FIXED: no work party icon will not appear on dead colonists and will remove itself from colonists who die