Blog | Gaslamp Games

So You Want To Form A Cult

February 11, 2015 by David Baumgart

We’ve been a bit coy about portrayal of cults in Clockwork Empires because we’ve wanted to keep them mysterious. Don’t show the monster. But if a cult forms in the woods and no one bothers to really tell the player what’s going on, did it matter? Perhaps not.

Add three black mana to your pool.

Aside from that, the mechanics we built made it in the player’s best interest to instantly execute anyone they suspect of forming a cult, which happens when you give people any kind of free time. Which is kinda interesting in a brutal way, but if another day of executions is the only valid response to cults, then is this not simply eldritch whackamole?

So we sat back and asked ourselves: Where do we want to go with cults? What player choice should they involve – why would a player want to keep a cult around (aside from morbid curiosity which, granted, our players seem to have in abundance)? How much do we tell the player and how much do we keep as a Fun Surprise?

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Posted in Clockwork Empires, Game Design | Tagged apparently Dark Ritual was op and imba, David Baumgart has taken to arguing with himself in a strange language., It's all about the execution, Join the Colonies Today!, real opium is a valid means to opiating the masses as well, Talking about the cult is less like showing the monster and more like the creepy old guy at the start of the episode of Scooby Doo, Third rule of cult club is bring snacks, why are cultists so happy all the time?
13 Comments

Character Events

February 4, 2015 by Nicholas Vining

I believe it was Rock Paper Shotgun who referred to our previous game, Dungeons of Dredmor, as “a randomly generated spinning roulette wheel of glory and death” (or something like that, anyhow.) Regardless, this is a good design philosophy and one that we can all agree upon. To this end, it is good to put some random events in games – they sparkle things up.

We also have said that one of the key driving forces in Clockwork Empires is your characters; it is very good for them to do various things, based on their personality, character traits, and moods. We want characters – and who they associate with, and who they are organized with – to start making a noticeable impact on the game beyond the incidental impact of being nearby other characters when they do something that may, or may not, affect other members of your settlement.

Dwarf Fortress handles this with Strange Moods; a Dwarf will lock themselves in a room and go insane – or, maybe, produce a strange artifact. Crusader Kings 2 handles this with various events happening, ranging from jousting tournaments to attempting to turn lead into gold.

To generalize this: we have random Character Events.

Well, the content is much more interesting, but that's not much of a choice. Now we also need to get rid of this enormous amount of wasted space.

For instance…

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Posted in Clockwork Empires | Tagged does lord palmerstoke even exist, genealogy should always be dangerous, genealogy should always include vacuum tubes and... what appears to be some sort of large metal coil, it is generally important to wear safety goggles when researching your family tree, later on zebulon crimble was heard to be performing enthusiastic science despite not having any idea what he was doing, let us pursue these scholarly pursuits!, please send coffee as we are very low, Press X for Scandal, the Royal Academy of Science labels their parcels in a very precise manner
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The Fog of War and Other Stuff

January 28, 2015 by Nicholas Vining

It seems like revision 35 of Clockwork Empires, Enola Brimble’s Fine Day In Which Everything Isn’t Going To Explode has been a very well-received! We’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback about it, and we appreciate it; players are appreciating fewer slowdowns, script errors, glitches, stutters, or save errors. So, clearly, we’re making progress.

Some folks are still having save game trouble, and we’re continuing to work on that as our #1 debugging priority (including the folks who don’t seem to be able to load save games at all?) – there are also some OS X speed and crash issues that we are currently debugging. However, we’re glad that people seem to be doing very much better with this latest build.

As the time until the next patch is roughly three weeks away, it looks like we will be primarily focusing the next patch on quality of life improvements – again! We’re rebalancing certain parts of the AI to try and clean up some odd behaviours with combat, social behaviours, and things not working correctly. We’re also just fixing a bunch of AI related bugs. One major quality-of-life improvement that is a new system, however, is fog-of-war, which is getting a rewrite.

Also, fog-of-war is not technically a quality-of-life system. More specifically, it improves our lives, but it makes your life moody and depressing.

“Hello? Nothing creepy going on out there, I hope.”

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Posted in Clockwork Empires | Tagged because general plumbing jobs aren't horrible?, empty houses are generally full of cults - best to purge them with fire, fishpeople in the mist, fog, Martha! The lumber rustlers are back at it!, moody and depressing is a good thing #martha, new monster idea: creepy moody pulsating blackness, seriously it's pretty creepy, the gun is good, war
9 Comments

Clockwork Empires January Update: Enola Brimble’s FINE DAY In Which Everything ISN’T Going To Explode

January 21, 2015 by David Baumgart

Suddenly an UPDATE appears! We’re on to v35, filled with mostly a bunch of completely random little things which aren’t easily summarized in a tagline. But we assure you, they probably won’t explode! Unless they’re meant to. Onward-

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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Posted in Clockwork Empires | Tagged attempted to remove 'meat punching' again but life finds a way, changelog may not include things we did while hung over after new years, characters still half-crazed and volatile don't worry, dust, dust rebalancing, dust refactoring, dusting, ignore the shadowy looking bandit stealing all your alcohol, next patch: "enola brimble turns out to have been wrong about everything", prying characters from the grip of the strangely powerful chair lobby, there's a new drug on the streets of the city and it's called "wooden chair", this is a very badly organized stockpile but oh well, tiny bombs for quag'garoth, we had a bunch of weird bugs related to eating apparently, we'll have to wait til next week for the cabbage charts, what is in the jar enola
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Under the Influence (of Euclidean Distance Mapping)

January 14, 2015 by Nicholas Vining

First off, an announcement: customarily, we release new builds of CE (major ones) at the fifteenth of the month, or as close as we can get to that. This month’s build will be pushed back until next week, owing to the fact that we lost a week and a bit of development time in December due to the Fishmas Holidays; experimental builds will, of course, continue.

That said: Technical Talk Day.

Loosely speaking, this month’s patch is focused on doing spit and polish, maintenance on existing issues, and busting some bugs rather than new gameplay features (although we’ve done a bit of that). In terms of character behavior, you may have noticed that characters occasionally do things that are counter-intuitive; we are narrowing this down as development continues (Daniel has a huge and terrifying spreadsheet). We have received a number of bug reports of the following varieties:

“people wander off into the woods and die”

And, well, that’s about it, really.

Tangentially, here’s a tantalizing sneak peak at the promo illustration for this month’s update.

The solution to this is that people should calculate when they are, or are not, in the user’s colony. We previously did this with a notion of “civilization”, which computed (for each tile) the closest distance between the tile and any civilization in range. The problem is that the way this calculation was done was a) buggy (if a building was not within some radius of the square being tested, which was quite a small radius, we wouldn’t pick it up), and b) slow (using more than one square root per grid tile, which adds up on a 512×512 map.) I finally got sick and tired of this this week, and decided to look up the right way to compute distances.

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Posted in Clockwork Empires | Tagged Big cabbages, Daniel uses the spreadsheet. It's super effective!, horrifying color schemes of data visualization, i like big cabbages and i cannot lie, it turns out that terrifying computer visions is not a legitimate course of academic study, red represents horizontal distance from civilization and green represents vertical distance from civilization if you care, some sort of a rap about weevils, The Lord High All-Purger has a little list..., what else in the codebase is commented out anyhow, what is a codebase but a mound of terrifying comments, when a cabbage walks in with an itty bitty stalk and big leaves all the colonists start to talk
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Mining & Maintenance

January 7, 2015 by David Baumgart

Prologue: Last month we divvied up tasks based on some Agile concept; I believe we’re “writhing” through the next “suffering revolution” on the “Wheel of Pain”, if I have the terminology correct. I proposed that we shove Mineshafts off the current month’s TODO because I didn’t think they were as important as other features. Naturally the task of implementing Mineshafts ended up being assigned to me, as is only correct according to the Iron Laws of Bureaucracy.

Mineshafts

Subsurface mining is pretty straightforward because we abstract the details: the player builds a “Mine” building with a “Mineshaft” module (and at least one door! we’ve had problems with people not putting doors on things!). Once these are built, the player assigns a work crew to the Mine. Using the recent code done for Chapels and Laboratories, the labourers in the mining work crew are transformed into properly-outfitted miners wearing the correct uniform and everything – it’s great to finally get these occupation-specific models into the game properly!

“Hey, you! Stop being sad in my screenshot, you’re bringing everyone down!”

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Posted in Clockwork Empires | Tagged "durnit martha I told yew not to do the carpentries like that on the rickety dingus", alternative game mode: david's depressing toil against entropy simulator, but where is the mindworm cultivation simulation that the game playing audience of 2015 desperately craves, David's gut is feeling like it wants more lentils about now, did we even have code back in 2013, does anybody even know what an Animation Stick is and where do you put it, exploding carpentry workbenches are just another unfortunate part of frontier life, it is important for every colonist to have an appropriate uniform, market research reveals that kids like games where you craft mines, oh Cog it's 2015 already, perhaps today is the day when we go out back and savage the cherry orchard with our mining implements, soon every English sentence will be a string of copyrighted words, the end game may also feature the wheel of pain, the lentil: Prince of Legumes, the robert moog nerve revitalization synthesizer, the tags are flowing strong today with the vigor of a thousand suns, the Wheel of Pain needs repairs before it breaks and David gets free
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Shades of Tofu

December 31, 2014 by Nicholas Vining

[SCENE: The Gaslamp Games Offices. THE NEW OFFICES. DAVID BAUMGART, ART DIRECTOR, enters the Break Room.]

David Baumgart, Art Director, enters the break room. Programmer Art Depiction.

DAVID: Wizards, grain silos, Utretcht, tank simulation… ah, it is good to be a vegan! Horrible frost giants! And now, lunch.

[DAVID opens the door of the fridge. Inside is BEEF JERKY, which leaps out and attacks him.]

DAVID: Alas! I die.

[HE COLLAPSES. Enter DANIEL and NICHOLAS from the Break Room Door.]

NICHOLAS: David is being attacked by beef jerky! It must be Wednesday. Quickly, get him onto the table.

[THEY DO SO. The table collapses. OH WELL.]

DANIEL: The beef jerky is … attacking his mind, somehow. It’s corrupting his vegan essence.
DAVID: I… deny then… my essence…

[SCENE: In David’s mind, terrible flashbacks occur. The company is formed in a basement. Dredmor ships.]

NICHOLAS: Fascinating.
DANIEL: You can’t say that – we’re parodying The Next Generation, not The Original Series.
NICHOLAS: Look! He’s remembering old blog posts… in his dreams.

[DAVID PROCEEDS TO REMEMBER.]

David Baumgart proceeding to remember happy memories (in this case, a carrot.) Programmer Art Depiction.

DAVID: mumble, mumble… Scott Pilgrim ruined it for all of us… mumble…

DANIEL: Now it looks like he’s experiencing good memories.

[DAVID PROCEEDS TO REMEMBER “GOOD MEMORIES”:

– Clockwork Empires’ Early Access Announcement
– That GDC trip where Stephanie got us all Hand Lotion
– Six months of early access updates!
– 4,700+ repository commits
– 22 experimental builds released to the public
– coverage from just about every major PC gaming site on the planet
– The Beauty of Poetry
– Whatever this thing is!]

DANIEL: It’s no good. The Beef Jerky is getting to him. Maybe if we make him… remember bad memories, it will damage the virus. Jerky. Jerky virus.
NICHOLAS: We can induce bad memories with Medicinal Liniments. Remember, under no circumstances take medical advice from me!DANIEL: Aren’t all those good memories *your* blog posts?
NICHOLAS: Whatever. Here, let me stick needles into his head.

[DAVID PROCEEDS TO REMEMBER “BAD” MEMORIES”:

– Making three Clockwork Empires Trailers
– That GDC trip where Stephanie got us all Hand Lotion
– The last time we parodied Inception]

DANIEL: Hang on, let me set this machine to “Programmer Art.” There we go.

[DAVID AWAKES, SCREAMING.]

David Baumgart Awakes from a Horrible Dream. (Also, he is wearing Mittens for some reason.) Programmer Art Depiction.

DAVID: What happened?
DANIEL: You’re on vacation, so we made fun of you in our year-end wrap-up blog post.
DAVID: Ah, it must be Wednesday!

NICHOLAS: That’s it for us, folks. As always, we thank you for your patronage and look forward to seeing you in 2015! Happy New Year!
DAVID: … who are you talking to again?
DANIEL: Gnomes!

[ALL LAUGH. CREDITS ROLL.]

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged "tell me Joseph Nejat what day it is" "It's New Year's Day sir!" "The spirits have given me another chance!", ceci n'est pas un carrot, Dear David how do you art direct with boxing gloves on, Fleshy's Steakhouse, honestly Scott Pilgrim DID ruin it for all of us, it is a cellular peptide cake with mint frosting, look morty if shades of gray is the worst episode of star trek the next generation then america must be wrong okay, programmer art, the blog post is my anvil and MS paint is my hammer, the elaborate descriptions of the programmer art indicate what the art actually is, the happy jig of veganism, the new offices consist of a plain white cube with another plain white cube inside of it, who run art town, Yes David has always had boxing gloves for hands why do you ask
3 Comments

Happy Holidays From Gaslamp Games

December 24, 2014 by David Baumgart

We’re taking the week off! If you’re holding an occult ritual this week, celebrating something more civilized, or if it’s just business as usual, we hope you have a great time doing your thing, and we’ll be back next week 🙂

Posted in Clockwork Empires, Gaslamp | Tagged being silly, content creation, Fishpeople just want to be loved, madness
7 Comments

So You Want To Form A Cult

Character Events

The Fog of War and Other Stuff

Under the Influence (of Euclidean Distance Mapping)

Mining & Maintenance

Shades of Tofu

Happy Holidays From Gaslamp Games

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