Author Archives: David

Political Change Through Faction Crises

“Begin with a function of arbitrary complexity. Feed it values, “sense data”. Then, take your result, square it, and feed it back into your original function, adding a new set of sense data. Continue to feed your results back into the original function ad infinitum. What do you have?”

– The Clockwork Empires game simulation! (Thank you, Academician Prokhor Zakharov.) Specific acts in the simulation itself may provoke crisis events. Crisis events allow a player to change their settlement’s policy toward certain factions. I’ve talked about this subject before a little in “Event Design Using Twine”. Let’s pull a newly implemented example: A Fishperson finds a source of meat and butchers that meat, then consumes it. Perfectly natural, but in conflict with the pseudo-Victorian values of the player’s faction. What do you do?

fishpeople_politics2

Obviously.

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Fishy Foreign Faction Missions

Players order their colonists around in the grand bureaucratic tradition by creating assignments which are claimed by workcrews with the appropriate filters toggled. This is all very appropriate, hierarchical, and Victorian. What about the other factions in the game, won’t somebody think of the Fishpeople, the Bandits, and the Foreigners?

The first goblin-level implementation of Fishpeople involved spawning a whole mess of ’em and giving them the desire to rush the player’s colony and murder everything in sight, human or cabbage. The second level implementation of this sort of thing saw Bandits spawn with a notion of a group that has a home camp. The improvement pass on this gave bandit gangs names, leaders, and connected the morale state of bandits to one another.

Worthy allies or anti-monarchist revolutionaries?

Worthy allies or anti-monarchist revolutionaries?

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Clockwork Empires May Update: We Built This Colony With Hugs

Once more, a stack of Clockwork Empires updates appears in a neat pile. We present for you:

ce_2015_may_promo_illustration_small

This update will go live to every Clockwork Empires player via Steam!

We have also updated our Clockwork Empires: Development Progress Report!

(Don’t own the game? Clockwork Empires can be purchased on ClockworkEmpires.com via Humble or from Steam.)

Want to hear about all sorts of updates via email plus receive silly images from development? Sign up for the newsletter here.

Patch Notes:

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Event Design Using Twine

And by twine I don’t mean building a game from bits of string and duct tape, but rather using Twine, the “open-source tool for telling interactive, nonlinear stories”. It’s basically a supremely easy way to build a “Choose Your Own Adventure”.

So that’s cool, but even cooler (to us) is how useful it is to designing events for Clockwork Empires. “This is madness!”, you say, but no – this is Gaslamp!

A simple event in Clockwork Empires.

A simple event from the current version of Clockwork Empires.

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Clockwork Empires April Update: Atlas Ironcog And The Airship Mast

Once more, a Clockwork Empires update appears from a crate that fell from the sky. We present for you:

ce_2015_apr_promo_illustration_small

This update will go live to every Clockwork Empires player via Steam!

We have also updated our Clockwork Empires: Development Progress report!

(Don’t own the game? Clockwork Empires can be purchased on ClockworkEmpires.com via Humble or from Steam.)

Want to hear about all sorts of updates via email plus receive silly images from development? Sign up for the newsletter here.

Patch Notes:

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The Increasing Trouble of Frontier Ruffianage

In the Gaslamp Games office we have some phrases to describe game design pitfalls. For instance “bruising the fat” refers to trying to make an aspect of the simulation unnecessarily detailed (and let me disclaimer that by saying that we have all the love in the world for Dwarf Fortress – it’s just not a road down which it is reasonable for us to follow). “Playing Starcraft” is giving the player too much ability to micromanage an insignificant system in order to optimize their in-game power. When a combat enemy simply swarms at the player for no particular reason but to get defeated, that’s “goblins”.

bandits1

Bandits in Clockwork Empires started off as “goblins”, then in a second major iteration received a concept of a home camp, individual morale, and the player got a choice between fighting and letting the bandits take what they want. Funny thing is, just about zero players were interested in letting the bandits take their stuff without a fight because that simply isn’t done in games. Players chose to fight even when their military was strained, and even if it was quite likely that the bandits would steal something easily replaced like logs or fungus (until, that is, bandits received a Robbery Upgrade that had them prioritize booze and other good things, as bandits should).

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Clockwork Empires March Update: Don’t Tell The Ministry

Once more, a Clockwork Empires appears, but be sure that you –

ce_2015_mar_promo_illustration_small

This update will go live to every Clockwork Empires player via Steam!

We have also updated our Clockwork Empires: Development Progress report!

(Don’t own the game? Clockwork Empires can be purchased on ClockworkEmpires.com via Humble or from Steam.)

Want to hear about all sorts of updates via email plus receive silly images from development? Sign up for the newsletter here.

Patch Notes:

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Booze, Madness, and Fiscal Responsibility

This was going to be about why you shouldn’t chug two bottles of hard liquor – and it still is, really. A matter of weeks ago, colonists in Clockwork Empires could (and would) drink to great excess when they were the least bit upset. Which is almost okay in a semi-grimdark Historically Accurate Frontier sense of things, but the point at which a colonist  knocks back multiple bottles of whisky is going too far, for lots of reasons, not the least of which is that we’d expect a normal human to have horrible alcohol poisoning after such a stunt. Plus the economic balance is uninspiring, considering the opportunity cost of making booze vs. bread (related, tangentially, to a re-balancing adjustment that doubled hunger growth).

Sure could use a drink.

Sure could use a drink.

So what’s booze to do in Clockwork Empires and how can it help my colony when it’s turning into a big mess? And how do cults work into it?

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