A Clockwork Empires update has been discovered, but at what terrible cost? We present for you:

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

We have also updated our Clockwork Empires: Development Progress Report! Let’s try something new this month and include the overview section from the development report in this blog post, like so:

September 2015 update notes:

If I were to sum up this month’s work, it would be that we worked on addressing the question of how a player queries the state of a character then how the player makes decisions which affect that state. (You like that sentence? Chris said it needs another comma, but I told him No!) … Naturally the full story is ridiculously complex.

This month is a story of rabbit holes, of the noble intention of working on a seemingly superficial feature, prying back the cover, and ending up elbow-deep in wires and pipes. Possibly we found Lemarchand’s box holding up a leaking conduit and now We have such pointers to show you. I’ll give a shot at working this into a comprehensible narrative provided we all acknowledge that broad strokes are being painted with here.

First, to follow up on the revised Work Crew UI panel from last month, we set our sights on a revised Character Information panel. Sounds great, natural progression! What goes into this character panel; what is a colonist but a miserable pile of memories? Digging in to memories, ah, looks like this system needs some core operations re-jiggered to work according to our present assumptions. We’ll also roll the madness system back into being attached to memories and put a better display on the character panel. And while we’re at it, we should better visualize the emotional effect of memories. While we’re at that, being able to better visualize memory lets us rebalance the effects of memories – let’s do that. We really ought to check every instance of memory creation in the game while we’re at that; and every social job that is executed based on mood state to change mood state – heck, let’s check every job in the game while we’re there. Oh dear, this’ll need fixing; and this. We’ll also need to provide players better means to address negative moods and madness, so let’s get the “office” type building infrastructure working properly so that we can make, for example, effective chapels that give real feedback about their state (and this follows up nicely on the barracks from last month).

Got all that? Let’s review:

1. redo character info panel
   1. overhaul memory system
      1. review all memories in database
      2. review all memory creation points in script
      3. add madness to appropriate memories
         1. review all madness-related systems
            1. review cults & fix them to use revised madness
            2. rebalance all madness jobs
      4. implement the Lament Configuration with linked lists
   2. review & balance all social jobs
      1. review & balance all jobs in the game, period.
      2. oh hey, it turns out some jobs worked based on outdated assumptions. Re-do or can them!
   3. properly implement office system
      1. redo Chapel in particular to use new system
      2. meddle with theology, generally
      3. cults again, probably
   4. where we’re going, we won’t need eyes. Or roads. I always get those ones mixed up.
2. attempt to re-activate the black hole for some reason
3. release album

And that’s not including the stuff I couldn’t cram into a tangled web of related systems, which would be some optimization & finishing on stockpiles, some /other/ UI, and the whole workshift and time of day system. Plus the review of all jobs fixed a number of outstanding AI errors. And we did more balancing. And … it’s in the changelog and in the sub-categories listed below.

It’s not clean and easy to explain, but we think players will be very pleased with progress from Alpha 42 to Alpha 43. We’ve particularly made an effort to address the divide between player knowledge about characters and what those characters choose to do. Next month should be interesting as well – we hope to focus more on finishing the backend for core system (like offices) and – well, we’ll talk about that next month.

(Read the entire development report at the Development Report.)

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

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Patch Notes for alpha 43:

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