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.
For instance…
Under the Influence (of Euclidean Distance Mapping)
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.
{ read this article }
15 Comments