Author Archives: Daniel

What have you done!? (or: Terrible Histories)

September 18, 2013 by Daniel Jacobsen

Oh man are we ever busy with a bunch of awesome stuff. There are a still a few fundamental engine issues that are being worked out (last I checked we can still accidentally spawn 10,000 Lua instances and destroy the world), but the biomes are starting to really look great, the art team is cranking out fantastic looking machines, people, and now particles (woo!), and the characters in the game are starting to get really upset whenever we start the game up to test a new feature and neglect to feed them.

It's always something.

It’s always something.

Characters will start telling anyone nearby who will listen that they’re really, really hungry.  They start thinking about hunger instead of doing work, and then they keel over.  That is, unless there’s *some* food available, but not enough.  Then they subsist for a while being generally grumpy as they go about filling steam balls and farming cabbages.  Could be worse, they could not have beds.  If they’re not sleeping on beds (which you need to make for them) they start sleeping outside. They really don’t like that.  It makes them angry and depressed.  Eventually the sleep deprivation will get to them and, uh, well currently they only have one terrible option — We’ll talk over some feature by the whiteboard for a while, look back at the screen, and there are just … bodies everywhere.

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The Violence of Designing Everyday Things

August 21, 2013 by Daniel Jacobsen
Do you like our ducts? (Presented with apologies to Terry Gilliam.)

Do your ducts seem old-fashioned? (Presented with apologies to Terry Gilliam.)

I should start by saying that I love pipes.  Seriously, I do.  But people around here don’t believe me.  They think I hate pipes, gears, conveyor belts, and all manner of functional machinery.  I love that stuff!  I just hate seeing it abused for no good reason.  Gears are for doing things, not for slapping to the side of a building just ’cause!

I can say the same thing for what we’ve termed “dynamics lines”.  Dynamics are basically fluids or other commodities that are required for tasks that can be either broken up into discrete units (like pails of water) or piped in (like, erm… water pipes).  We’ve argued about these a lot.  While they’re aesthetically pleasing, if you end up having a giant rat’s nest of pipes for a city, there’s no way you’ll be able to see what’s going on in your settlement.  All of the characters become obstructed by a monstrous network of pipes and axles and other means of transmission and you can no longer tell you’re playing a game or where your favorite character is.

This is a problem.

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Little Tree on the Prairie

July 24, 2013 by Daniel Jacobsen

A lot of our time over the last week on the programming side has been spent updating our internal documentation.  Since we invested so heavily in back-end programming for the game, there are a lot of systems that we’ve written but have not spent a lot of time interacting with yet.  And because we want the game’s content to be malleable enough that people on the team with no programming skill can edit and create content, they need to have reference to consult.  It’s not the most exciting work in game development but it needs to be done.

Steampunk Colorado

From earlier: Steampunk Colorado

While waiting for some last bits of an object systems rewrite to be finished, I’ve been implementing some of the “high prairie” (aka Yellowstone) biome code that we were talking about at the beginning of the month, with the hope that we can start showing some more varied screenshots.  It’s still a work in progress, but here’s where it’s at right now.

High Prairie and Pine Forest biomes

Shown here are the biome generators for the high prairie grasslands and the high prairie conifer forest (two of the planned seven “mini-biomes” of the high prairie biome set).

forest floor texture

Missing from this forest floor texture: empty cans of cheap beer, discarded cogs left by bands of wandering steampunks.

The biome transitions are still basically straight lines at this point and we’re going to try to cram a bit more biodiversity and foliage variation in there to make things seem a bit more realistic (There was an extensive discussion on the subject of diseased trees). Note also that this is the upper plateau segment of the high prairie biome which is dryer and colder.  The lower areas will generally be more green and lush with broadleaf forest.

We’ve done some work to reduce the appearance of terrain texture tiling artifacts (notably some clever spells cast by Mr. Whitman) which has paid off very nicely, and the process of creating terrain is starting to speed up a great deal.

To do this week: work party controls (so you don’t just get anyone doing everything), greener pastures, and hopefully the death of the object framework rewrite. Death in a good way, that is.

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Biomes of Steampunk Colorado

July 3, 2013 by Daniel Jacobsen

Last time we talked about biomes back in February, Mr. Whitman had finished a framework for terrain generator and had implemented a few test case biomes which we have been using in-game for a while just to give us something to hack on to test the features we’re after. This small set of biomes has been the backdrop for a ton of our screenshots lately. You may have noticed a recurring theme of pine trees on a field of green grass with some lakes.

We’re going to start mixing it up in the next month or so. The system we’ve implemented runs on a concept of two or three specified biomes on a given game terrain map (the playable area in any given colony).  Some examples might be a “high prairie” (aka “Steampunk Yellowstone National Park”) biome, a tropical rainforest, a desert, or the Novyrussian taiga.  Within these biomes, we have subcategories of smaller environments that we call “mini-biomes” or “sub-biomes”.

caption

Not pictured: The Underdark.

For our high prairie example, these include the prairie highlands, canyons, conifer forests, aspen forests, or craggy hills. We have some heuristics for determining where these mini-biomes should go within the map.  A fairly simple random walk for determining river directions, which gives us gravel beds, canyons, and actual rivers, and Perlin-based determinations for where forests or hilly regions are placed.

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Starting Gear

May 29, 2013 by Daniel Jacobsen

Just a small update for you guys today. We’ve been designing a lot. My hands are tired.

We’re starting to nail down the specifics of the inventory for starting up a settlement.  A starting load-out is going to be required because, to be honest, you won’t want to start from absolutely nothing.  I mean, maybe you could actually just start with one guy named Steve, with no tools, in the middle of the wilderness. But chances are he would be eaten by a carnivorous tortoise or starve before he’d manage to collect enough useful stuff from the environment to trade for an axe and actually make a half-decent go of things.  Frontiers are dangerous!

Let's get this colony started -- with a bottle of wine, apparently.

Let’s get this colony started! (Beginning with a bottle of wine, apparently.)

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GDC!

April 3, 2013 by Daniel Jacobsen

David, Nicholas, Mr. Dykstra and I were down in San Francisco for the annual Game Developers Conference (as you may have noticed from our impressively slapped together post from last week), and we thought it might be cool to give you guys a little bit of an idea what that’s like, why we were there, and what happened.

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Tales from the UI Skunkworks: Military Management, Episode One of A Gazillion

February 20, 2013 by Daniel Jacobsen

User interface design is, honestly, one of the most difficult parts of creating a game.  Every button has a profound impact on how people will be motivated to play (or not play) a game.  I suspect this is why so many games seem to almost consciously decide not to experiment too radically with UI.  It’s so much easier to just build it the way people are used to rather than building it the way that perhaps it should be.  We’re no different; Dredmor’s UI has a lot of flaws that we didn’t see at the time of development. For instance, it turns out that Inventory Management isn’t actually a super fun mini-game. Even then, we completely overhauled the Dredmor gameplay UI some 4 or 5 times before we settled on a system which is still flawed, and to this day leads people to play the game in a way that detracts from the experience. Such is game development.

Not like this. Never like this.

We are doing our best to apply the lessons learned from Dredmor to Clockwork Empires. Not all of these lessons are applicable, of course, as CE isn’t a Roguelike — and there are a lot more moving parts to control. Granted, there are also a lot more strategy/management style games with real-time mouse-based UIs to draw from, and we have played a ton of them; however, by virtue of making a game that crosses the genre-streams a bit, none of these systems perfectly fit the needs of CE. For instance, dropping a Starcraft control scheme on the game would be inappropriate because Starcraft is (arguably) about competitive micro-managing, optimized build orders, and a bit of gambling on the current “meta”. In contrast, CE is ideally about creating stories within its simulation.

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New Breakthroughs In The Field of Reverse Phrenology

January 9, 2013 by Daniel Jacobsen

As every Modernity-minded subject of the Clockwork Empire familiar with the new Sciences of Personality has learned, each person in Society possesses certain individual Inclinations and Traits which determine their actions in Daily Life. Indeed, the New Science of quantifying and measuring these Inclinations and Traits is certain to lead to great advances in the Art of Education and Employment of Shiftless Wastrels.

— Prof. Eustace Boretrain-Charnickels for the Royal Phrenological Society

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