March Technical Status Update: HRRRRRRRNGH Edition

We will be at GDC next week, showing Clockwork Empires to people. How does this impact your life, you ask? First, there will be a Flurry of Exciting Things for you to read. Second, next week’s blog post will probably be more pictures of Sean drinking beet juice or something. Third, we are hard at work adding polish and spit to various parts of the game in order to get it ready to the press. This spit will eventually be transferred to you, the customers. Fourth, this is a terrible metaphor.

This is the paradoxical nature of game development: trying to finish a game, while making your PR department happy. One of the reasons why we have been writing about fungus, querns, and whatever the heck else people are writing about is because we have promised that the Rites of Revelation can be performed by various Reporter-Type Entities from Beyond the Stars. Once things are Revealed, according to the Cosmic Prophecies, we will let you know where you may find these revelations! In the mean time, we shall repeat the ancient chant of our people: “Man, PR is weird.”

There are, however, some exciting Things that have shown up on the programming side of the world. We can tell you about these things! We are now at Revision 12 of pre-alpha testing, for instance, and the game has improved substantially. Some milestones on this front include having in-office testers playing the game, seeing where they get stuck, and fixing these things; and, as of today, expanding our tester pool from our main six testers to a supporting cast consisting of other developers and friends. Next stop: random people from the Internet.

We haven’t actually done a technical status update since December, I guess? So it’s been awhile. Let’s look at some stuff.

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Pickle That Fungus

We know what you really want: An excruciatingly detailed fungus pickling simulator. And I’m going to show you how it’s done. “What, more logistics simulation?” you gasp, somewhat overwhelmed with emotions you can not identify, will not identify. Yes, I answer, because if I’m going to be forced to write this thing two weeks in a row it’s either this or more Bizarre Literary Experiments and we all know how that turns out. (Of course we could always mix the two – a bizarre literary industrial logistics simulation experiment, but then I might be treading on China Mieville’s turf and that guy could totally beat me up.)

Let’s call it a two-part series if that makes you feel better.  Remember that episode of TNG where Riker said “Fire!” and it cut to the end of the season? It’s like that but without the cliffhanger. Or Riker. But we’ll make it work because we’ve got fungus and the luminous mycelium interfacing with the base of our neck, suggesting that this is a good idea after all and why don’t we continue discussing the laudable qualities of fungi.

The elusive black cup fungus - a delicacy, I hear.

Shhh. See there? It is the elusive black cup fungus – a delicacy, I hear.

So let’s walk through the process of adding a harvestable resource to the game and go into a bit more detail about creating a production chain from start to finish. All meat free!

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They’re Made Out Of Meat

Here at Gaslamp Games we each have our “particular enthusiasm” and as previously established, mine is the industrial logistics simulation. Let’s talk a bit more about how that works.

The Many Fleshes

The Observerator Reports: Each entity is of a flesh / Each flesh will be harvested for Study.

Most everything on the game map can have resources harvested from it in one way or another (and we really mean another). Trees, rocks, crops, animals, people, Other Things. You combine these to make other things. The natural environment of your settlement determines what resources are abundant and what resources are not. If you settle on the Black Dunes of Whispering, expect anything to do with resources tagged “timber” to be a lot more relatively expensive. But look on the bright side, I’m sure there are advantages to living on the Black Dunes of Whispering. For example, lots of whispering. And bones.

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Modules and Decoration

As we have discussed previously, the primary tool for augmenting a building’s function in game is a module. Modules include things like doors and windows, and come in two categories: required and optional. Required modules are those which are needed to get your building up and running at all – in the case of a workshop, this would include a workbench, a desk for your Artisan/Overseer to manage their paperwork with, and a door. In the case of a Lower Class House, you need one cot, and… well, again, a door. Doors are good things to put on buildings.

Careful with that hammer! Don't want to let the aetherically-energized gaseous radium out of the Glow-Long(tm) lamp.

The Ghosts of Future Work haunt this carpentry shop. (& The aetherically-energized gaseous radon Glow-Long ™ Gas-Lamp is truly the finest lamp.)

Optional modules are those which upgrade the effectiveness of your building. For instance, a carpentry workshop can have a Power Saw installed. The power saw lets you perform certain tasks (such as making planks) faster, and you can have multiple power saws. You can also have multiple carpentry workbenches, and this might be a good idea as each person can only use one carpentry workbench at a time. If you have a particular desire for planks, which are Useful (for instance, for building more carpentry workbenches), you might want to spend some resources building power saws.

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A Very Clockwork Valentine’s

We here at Gaslamp Games wish all of our dear readers to have a very happy Valentine’s day and, as such, have created some cards to assist you in your courtship rituals with the ends of finding the love of the man / woman / boiler / fishperson / infinite black abyss that most fulfills you.

(We also did some actual work on various things, so stick around for that too. I’ve cleverly mixed in development discussion with the silly pictures, and in at least one case they’re slightly related. Mostly they’re not.)


#1. A Very Special Knock On Your Door

ce_valentine0

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A Day In The Life of an Overseer: A Clockwork Empires Choose-Your-Own-Adventure!

Something like this.

Something like this.

(Dear Reader: In order to supply high-quality content to you, the Reader, in this age of the Internet, we bring you one of those wacky Choose-Your-Own-Adventure blogs in a style that the kids love.)

You are MURIEL COGSPROCKET. You are an OVERSEER for the colony of GREATER MUSHROOMHOOD. You enjoy HATS, BEETLES, and LOOKING INTO THE SEA. Your job is to attempt to SERVE THE EMPIRE and THE QUEEN while not GETTING STUCK or CRASHING.

 

 

Do you…

  1. Attempt to gossip with your neighbour? (If so, please turn to Page 2.)
  2. Attempt to do Overseer work? (If so, please turn to Page 3.)
  3. Go home? (If so, please turn to Page 4.)
  4. Walk into the sea, never to return? (If so, please turn to Page 5.)

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The Power Of Names

Pictured: Smugly Working, arch-criminal mastermind, ne'er-do-well, and blaggard of the Frontier.

Smugly Working; arch-criminal mastermind, general ne’er-do-well, and all-around blaggard of the Empire’s Colonial Frontier.

As we learned in the You Have To Name The Expansion Pack expansion pack to Dredmor which you had to name, names have power. Characters in Clockwork Empires, like Dredmor expansion packs, have names. So what names ought to be given to these people? And how? As fun as it’d be to make up hundreds of Victorian Steampunk names by hand, we have the technology to make robots do the work for us using the power of procedural content generation.

Mind you, procedural content is not a magical solution to all problems. It may indeed involve actual design work to fit interestingly, much less well, into a hypothetical game. So, naming: the care we put into the raw feedstock of the the Hypno-Pneumatic Name-o-Tron very much determines the quality of its denotative extrusions. And here at Gaslamp Games, we intend to provide only the finest extrusions, thick with nuance, speckled by nodules of intertextuality, and offset by an effervescence of whimsy.

The extruder.

An extrusion unit.

This raw name-feedstock creates flavour, theme, & narrative for Clockwork Empires. What’s all this then, story in a procedurally generated sandbox game? – Well, sure! Even though, as usual, we’re just making it up as we go along, there are certain vaguely insinuated guidelines to respect. A bit of structure can be put in place to support a certain range of narratives, if you will, which can be quite enabling to players. We give you a delightful setting and a nudge on the back, you make the game your own from there on out.

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Humble Roguelike Sale

silly_stuff

If you own Dungeons of Dredmor and have had an eye out for new Roguelikes, check out the Humble Roguelike sale going on right now!  Also if you don’t have Dredmor, we’re not angry, we’re just disappointed.  You can fix this.  Go here:

www.humblebundle.com/weekly

 

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