(TL;DR: We got the first version of multiplayer working. Skip to the end of the post if you want to read more about that.)

Our debug model placer interface would like to tell you about the fine qualities of The Monarchy.

My time right now on CE is evenly divided between three things: the completion of new features (finishing the dynamics system, at present); revival of old features which stopped working due to bit rot at various points in development (animals, steps leading into buildings, etc.), or moving the pre-alpha from “let’s get it running on computers” to “let’s get it playable on computers where everybody actually moves, and does their jobs under real world conditions.” Hooray! Bug busting.

I like to think of this as making the game less sticky. Basically, what the last part means is this: sometimes, in the current build, people may never pick up a job, or may stop working altogether. Sometimes, under rare circumstances, the game will crash. (this has now been fixed.) Less damning problems include things like misbehaving UI widgets – things that don’t work correctly, things that accept mouse clicks that they shouldn’t (buttons in the UI accepting clicks from scroll bars, etc.) to latency. It is very much like somebody has dumped an enormous jar of honey into your video game, and you need to remove it all – ergo, stickiness. As you may imagine, chasing these through a game with the complexity of Clockwork Empires is quite a mess. Right now, for instance, I am working on the cheerful problem of ensuring people do not get trapped in modules when they are built, which means that before building a building characters must wait for all characters to leave the build zone before they actually go ahead and change the obstruction layer. The problem, of course, is that the builder is also a character – and he’s in the build zone, waiting for everyone else to leave – which means I need to calculate a list of all the squares next to a building or module that are next to it (so the character can build), but not in it (so that the character gets trapped).

“Go! My place is here now, embedded for all my days in the floor of the carpentry shop I myself built. Alas, but for what cruel irony was wrought by these, mine hands.”

These are all easy things, but annoying, and a lot of them have been fixed. Highlights include: not using a destroyed item as a building material for another building (crashes the game); ensuring that if your job item is destroyed, your job cancels correctly (people would get stuck); ensuring that, if your job got cancelled, you started at the start of the next job and not half-way through it (random things, breaking, forever); etc., etc. This is all standard bug hunting, but it’s the difference between a sort of wobbly tech demo and something people can actually play. I’m happy to report we’re grinding our way through it at a good speed, so it’s feeling more and more like a game every day. I know I keep saying that, but it’s true!

What is more interesting, though, is networking.

The half-eaten tub of chili in the middle of this photo really sells it. In other, related, news Nicholas is never allowed to take pictures of anything for Gaslamp Games ever again.

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