Cultivating Gameplay: Game Design in CE

September 10, 2014 by David Baumgart

Clockwork Empires is an exceedingly complex game. Each new system interacts with each existing system in ways we necessarily can’t predict. And unpredictable consequences are, to some degree, the goal of any sandbox game worth its cabbage. But there are failure states where the whole web of systems kinda slumps over to one side, repeating the same beeping noise. This isn’t interesting, so we have to poke and nudge the game back to where it does interesting things again. This is called “Game Design”.

Is that metaphor getting awkward? Let’s get to the specific example I had in mind: balancing food & farming gameplay in Clockwork Empires. This is going to go into Exciting exhaustive detail!

Farming, step one: kill anything that isn't human.

Farming, step one: kill anything that isn’t human.

(By the way, we’re doing the big monthly update of Clockwork Empires next week! The Development Progress page will be updated at that time. Details to be released soon.)

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RockPaperShotgun Bundle, now with over 1,000% more Dungeons of Dredmor!

September 4, 2014 by Daniel Jacobsen

RPS_humbleweekly

RPS put together a Humble Bundle with 7 of their all-time favorite games, and Dungeons of Dredmor is in it!

Let’s be honest, you probably have Dungeons of Dredmor already. It’s okay, we all do. But I bet you don’t have the other 6 games that RPS (who share your similar awesome taste in games) thinks are basically the best thing of their respective years?

Didn’t think so. But now’s your chance!

Did I mention how great you look today? You look great today.

 

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Sympathy, Violence, Consequences

September 3, 2014 by David Baumgart

A Fishperson raider driven to violence by the plundering of their young for food rushes from the fog to beat a colonist with a coral club. Their fellow Fishperson-raider, a few steps behind, fires a spikegun with a ‘pop’. The terrified colonist falls over dead. The Fishperson with the club pauses at this, then turns and runs from the corpse in horror, back into the fog. 

Attack of the fishpeople!

Watery vengeance!

I didn’t anticipate this, though I wrote the script that made it happen: Seeing the corpse they created by killing the colonist pushed the Fishperson over the morale threshold that flips a switch that makes the fleeing behaviour much more likely. I had thought to simply have Fishpeople become demoralized by seeing other dead fellow-Fishpeople, but it was triggered by any humanoid corpse at all. A small mistake, but a really cool effect because it implies that these Fishpeople are not merely “the goblins of Clockwork Empires” but people of a sort that may, in their way, sympathize with your colonists. — Just so, sympathy is the goal of the latest efforts to increase the complexity of Fishpeople to start becoming more than ‘enemies’. Once enough features are fleshed out enough, perhaps they can become friends, albeit creepy fishy friends with some funny ideas about how things work and a penchant for inducting their land-based friends into the ways of The Deeps.

No one’s perfect.

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Instancing, AZDO, and Performance Optimization

August 27, 2014 by Nicholas Vining

WARNING: This is a technical graphics rendering post! If you are not interested in the nitty gritty of OpenGL performance optimization and what I did this week, then what you should know is “Hey, we’re making the game faster!” and “Well, you should probably update your drivers if you haven’t done so already.” The fact of the matter is that this is a blog post that will be most interesting to people with an interest in graphics programming, but this is a game development blog after all, and this is game development!

(We’ve left a whacky animated gif at the bottom of this post as a reward for making it all the way through. No cheating! -ed.)

In unrelated news, you shouldn't let cultists run your farm.

In unrelated news, you shouldn’t let cultists run your farm.

One of the things that has been talked about recently in the graphics programming community is the problem of driver overhead. Every time a graphics programmer makes a drawing call to the video card, the driver sits in between your game and the video card and looks at everything the game sends it. It checks to make sure you didn’t feed it garbage and that everything is valid, so that you don’t end up crashing the computer in a fiery blaze of glory or a blue screen of death. These validations add up and take time – every time you switch states, every time you change textures, and every time you draw something, the little man in the driver needs to go through and sort it out. This takes time, and slows the game down.

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Clockwork Empires 30B released: Saves, Unicode.

August 25, 2014 by Nicholas Vining

We’ve pushed version 30B to the public branch today, which will contain saves as well as support on Windows for user names with Unicode characters. If you have the update, you should see “Version 30B” on your screen in white text in the upper right hand corner. You shouldn’t need to do anything else.

Whoever controls the stew controls the colony.

Whoever controls the stew controls the colony. Here, the Law of Stew reigns merciless.

Saves are still a work in progress, and there are a handful of bugs we’re fixing, so keep a sharp eye out. If your save fails to load the first time, try it again (we’re not sure what causes that quite yet but we have Top Men on it). If you get a random crash related to saving or loading, please let us know on the forums and send us a .DMP file.

Further work on saves will be put into the experimental branch for testing purposes. You may also find other Exciting Work for Clockwork Empires version 31 (which we will elaborate on in a future blog post.)

Thanks for your patience everyone!

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Early Access Update Schedule (& An Extra Special Update)

August 20, 2014 by Nicholas Vining

EDIT: A quick note to the above – we are still testing save games this weekend, with an eye to getting the last few bugs out. If you would like to try them, please switch your Steam build to the experimental branch – the version number should be “30B” – and let us know how it goes. We’ll let you know when the official release goes out here, and via e-mail if you are on our mailing lists. Sorry for the delay – hunting mysterious crash bugs and fixing things is time consuming business. — Nicholas

I think it’s always a miracle when a video game actually gets released, in any form. It’s also a very weird feeling having three years of work launched, for a product that is not complete yet – but there it is, we are in Early Access. The trick now, of course, is to get Clockwork Empires out of Early Access – and that is what we will be focusing on next.

Common scenes from players' Early Access experience.

Common pastoral scenes from players’ Early Access experience.

With regards to Earliest Access: it very much appears to have been the right decision. We launched on Steam in a pretty good state and ended up with only a few issues that we were unaware of. We have seen some excellent streams of Clockwork Empires appearing on Twitch and people have put up some wonderful YouTube videos that invariably end with everybody being eaten. It is also nice to do an early access launch for the simple fact that it had none of the Sheer Terror! that accompanied the launch of Dungeons of Dredmor, or any of our expansion packs. I would highly recommend Earliest Access as a thing for people considering Early Access to do: in terms of our primary goal of having the smoothest launch possible into Early Access, it seems to have worked perfectly. Many of the improvements we put in the game between Earliest Access and Early Access are a result of the diligent feedback of players and their willingness to criticize/talk about their experiences. As always, we thank you for your support.

Similarly we’re now seeing some excellent suggestions through Early Access on our Steam forums, which we are currently working our way through.

With that said, how do we get OUT of Early Access? The plan going forward is as follows.

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Clockwork Empires Now on Steam!

August 15, 2014 by Daniel Jacobsen

We heard of this “Steam” thing, and it sounds like a pretty good online store for steam-related things or whatever. So we decided we should probably just go ahead and put our steampunk game on it. Here goes.

> Get Clockwork Empires Early Access on Steam <

We were also sent this helpful video from the Colonial Ministry to get you started.

Or you can buy it direct from us here, and get a Steam key in the process.

We’ve compiled a HUGE progress report of the game, which you can find here.  We started it last month with our “earliest access” release, and we’ve updated it for Early Access.  We will continue to update this page on a monthly basis as we release major patches.

Mac and Linux users should expect full native support sometime in October.

Save games and support for Unicode paths will be in the opt-in experimental branch on Steam over the weekend; if things go according to plan, these will be pushed to the default branch early next week!

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Ripe for Harvest! (And the CE rev30 Update)

August 13, 2014 by David Baumgart

Upcoming “Early Access” Launch of Clockwork Empires

On Friday, August 15th Gaslamp Games is going to be launching Clockwork Empires on Steam Early Access. We’ve been hard at work stoking the boilers and polishing the cogs for the big day. If I may be so bold: the game receives noticeable jumps in quality as each patch is released and we’re pleased with how things are coming along.

We will, by the way, be updating the Clockwork Empires: Development Progress page alongside the Steam launch so you can follow along with the overview of project progress as we transition from “Earliest” to “Early” Access. (Speaking of, the latest Clockwork Empires update patch notes can be found at the bottom of this post.)

Around here, it’s not just knife-fights and musical numbers – sometimes we even do some game design! Let’s talk about what people really play Clockwork Empires for: cabbage.

Farming Overhaul

That's no pumpkin!

(For our sharp-eyed readers: Can you find the pumpkin that isn’t a pumpkin?)

No, this is about farming actually. Farming got an overhaul and I’m going to talk about it.

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