Category Archives: Clockwork Empires

Earliest Access Status Update

July 18, 2014 by Nicholas Vining

The general consensus around the office is that today’s Earliest Access launch went better than any launch that the company has done in the past. People seem to be having a good time; while there are some crash bugs, they seem to be pretty manageable.

Awkward name for a military squad or sign of [REDACTED] infiltrating the highest levels of the Empire?

Awkwardly named squad or sign of REDACTED infiltrating the highest levels of the Empire?

Here are some Helpful Notes on some of the most common technical issues players are having:

  • If your game will not start, it looks like you have a computer that is running an international version of Windows; known examples that break the game are French and Polish operating systems. We are working on figuring out how to unbreak this (by which, I mean “trying to remember how I figured this out for Dredmor.”)
  • If your game suddenly stops displaying terrain, set the terrain quality back to “High” and restart the game (there’s no functional difference any more anyway, and this option should be removed.)
  • If your game is not displaying anything at all, you probably have an Intel HD3000 or HD4000, which are not officially supported yet. We will be working on these in the future. (The newest generation of integrated Intel hardware seems to work okay, which is surprising!)
  • If you have an NVIDIA card, and your terrain does not display, and your terrain quality is set to high: update your drivers. There seems to be a bad batch of drivers floating around somewhere.
  • In general, updating your drivers is a good idea.
  • If you get no sound: possibly, try running as Administrator? We haven’t quite figured this one out yet, but Top Men are Working On It.
  • If you are having problems with reclaiming your key, drop us a line at contact@gaslampgames.com and we will sort you out.
  • If you have any other problems, head to our forums ( https://community.gaslampgames.com/ ) and check the current bugs thread, and if it’s not on there, you can post about it there OR submit a report through the Clockwork Empires Portal ( http://portal.clockworkempires.com/ ).

There is a pretty good list of “known bugs” at this point, and we will be slaving away on a patch in the office this weekend with an eye towards pushing it to the public on Monday (July 21st). This should take care of a handful of random crashes, as well as some low-hanging UI fruit that players have been especially eager to have us fix.

We are then going to shoot for a more “content-y” patch on the following Friday (July 25th).

the_colonies_rumours

We have personal assurances from the Colonial Minister!

As always, we thank you for your patronage and we look forward to further delighting you with Colonial Incursions as we proceed from “Earliest Access” to “Early Access”, and then – at long last – “Finished Game.”

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Clockwork Empires: Earliest Access FAQ

July 17, 2014 by Nicholas Vining

Some questions and comments about tomorrow’s Earliest Access launch:

Q. “When will builds go out?”
A. “Roughly 10AM PST.”

Q. “The game crashed, broke, or otherwise did a terrible and monstrous thing. It is now sitting in my living room and hogging the couch, throwing empty beer cans at the cat. It has given me Ghost Neck, and many other diseases that we read about on your blog. What do I do? Who do I complain to?”
A. “If you want to submit the bug quickly and get back into the game, your best bet is the support form, which can (as of some time this evening) be found at portal.clockworkempires.com.  Our forums also have a list of known bugs and we regularly check for new ones at community.gaslampgames.com.

Q. “Is there OS X or Linux support?”
A. “Not for Earliest Access, no. We have unpolished, internal ports that are not ready for prime-time. We hope to have this up for the first or second incarnation of Steam Early Access in August.”

Q. “What’s the ETA on save games?”
A. “Save games have a critical bug in them right now, which we are still hunting down. Micah has not moved from his desk for the past one hundred and sixty-eight hours and has now grown some kind of third eye in the middle of his forehead. Expect these to show up next week.”

Q. “In the eight hours since you invented it, Earliest Access has ruined PC Gaming forever! What IS THIS THING?! How do we know what to expect, and where should we go to understand what we’re buying?”
A. “An enormous project status page, clearly outlining all the work we have done in the past two-and-a-half years as well as the expected roadmap for everything going forward, can be found here.”

Q. “What are testers saying about the current state of the game?”
A. “The earliest build is best described as an occult cabbage-farming simulator with fishpeople.”

Q. “Are you fishpeople?”
A. “Blup. I mean, no.”

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Clockwork Empires: Earliest Access

July 16, 2014 by Daniel Jacobsen

At long last, we are pleased to announce that Clockwork Empires has hit what we are calling Earliest Access – it launches on Friday July 18th, and you can buy it now! Earlier than Early Access, we are continuing our legacy of innovation by daring to release Earlier than any other Early Access developer.

ce_earliest

So what is this? This is, in fact, the Early Access for Early Access. It’s like Inception.

Buying a copy of the Earliest Access build will get you a Steam key, which you can then use to play Clockwork Empires. Your Earliest Access will be upgraded to a copy of the Steam Early Access version when we launch it in August; you will also, subsequently, get the finished game when it’s done.

An overview of the current status of the Clockwork Empires project as a whole can be found here, and we will be regularly updating that page at the same time as the major game content updates so you can see how far along we are.

We will also of course continue to update our development blog, send update emails to people on the mailing list that want them, tweet about development here, and participate in forum discussions here.

Why “Earliest Access”?

Earliest Access is our opportunity to take our testing to a larger scale than our internal testing while retaining as much of our ability to communicate directly with fans as possible.  The game needs more hardware compatibility testing, large-scale bug hunting, and some more UI iteration before we’re ready for Steam.  Also some fun stuff will be added through the process because we can’t help ourselves.

Earliest Access will last about a month, at which point we will launch on Steam Early Access sometime in August.  (We’ll be announcing the actual date of the Steam Early Access release near the end of July.)

Steam Early Access will be the final stage of evolution before the game explodes out of its cocoon.  We will be releasing monthly content updates as well as hotfixes when necessary, implementing the remaining content, and checking off the features that will make the game “complete”.  We cannot absolutely guarantee a final release date but our plan is to set it “when the content that we’ve talked about is in the game”.  As an informed guess I’d estimate that this will take roughly 9-12 months from now. (Both of these numbers are, conveniently, divisible by 3.)

When Early Access first became an option, we honestly had our doubts about the process.  Some games have had issues with early access, and some have been tremendously successful both for the developers and the fans.  What has become apparent is that it is a very powerful choice for games and developers that can take advantage of the opportunities.  It may be the single best way to connect with the games that you’re interested in playing before they’re released, and simultaneously the best way for us to hear you.  We are going to do our best to learn the lessons of those who have gone before us, and get your help in making Clockwork Empires as awesome as humanly* possible.

Earliest Access is available for purchase at ClockworkEmpires.com and will be available to play on Friday, July 18th.

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The State Of The Empire: Summer 2014

July 9, 2014 by Daniel Jacobsen

It’s time for real talk.

We are indeed launching an Early Access version of Clockwork Empires this summer and we want to make sure that people know what they’re going to get if they purchase the game at the first opportunity. The classic pitfall of Early Access games is for a developer to give players unrealistic expectations about what the then-current state of the game is and this is something we absolutely want to avoid doing. So yesterday we spent a couple of hours having a meeting in accordance with Traditions of Gaslamp Games where we discussed various areas of the project, how we’re progressing with them, and how much of this progress is actually visible to a player of the game.

Let’s go over over the categories discussed in detail.

{ read this article }

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Technical Status Update: A Young Lad’s Message From The Front

July 2, 2014 by Nicholas Vining

Dear Father,

(We have an icon for this!)

(We have an icon for this!)

I am writing from the Trenches at Gaslamp. The final, long, hard push for Early Access is almost upon us; Major Jacobsen says we’ll go over the top any day now. At night I sleep with my keyboard as is Tradition, and think of home. How is home? Where is home? Does it still exist? Are the cats alive?

Will this war ever end?

The Horror.

The Horror.

The men tell me that they have assembled a Changelog; I have annotated it for you so that you may know that we are fighting the Brave Fight here at home, and that soon there will be Release In Our Time. I am pretty sure that Mr. Whitman now has Trenchfoot in his Shoulderblade, and will have to have it Removed with a Scalpel. Mr. Best seems like he will not last much longer; his delerium is fevered and he talks about going back to University and finishing his Doctorate. Meanwhile, they fight the good fight, and many small tickets have been fixed including the fact that doors claim to cost one plank, and do not. It is the duty of every man to care for his tickets, that we may seek victory over The [REDACTED].

{ read this article }

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Hot Testing Action and Starvation

June 25, 2014 by David Baumgart

The Gaslamp Games office is heating up.

Top Men sweat furiously, cursing script errors and crashes. Top Buttons are unbuttoned, frantic SVN commits hammered out. Meanwhile Daniel “Action CEO” Jacobsen blasts some Kenny Loggins to set the mood. In other words, we’re implementing a stricter quality control protocol for pushing test builds of the game as we get closer to the danger zone. People have been putting decisive, serious looks on their faces while they nod with their arms crossed.

Cooking! It's pretty important.

Cooking! It’s really important now, actually.

{ read this article }

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Modules, Interrupts, Memory Leaks

June 18, 2014 by Nicholas Vining

The Road to Early Access basically looks like the Road to El Dorado, except the musical numbers are worse. Right now I am still in a land where I have to actually sit down and do all the stuff I’ve been putting off for the course of the product. Two things that fall into this category are “putting modules in the corner of a building” and “interrupts.” Oh, and “fixing the memory leaks.”

In The Colonies there are unfortunate occasions wherein real estate looks bigger on the outside than it is on the inside. (See also: "Mad Architects Of The Frontier And Their Terrible Creations".)

In The Colonies there are unfortunate occasions wherein real estate looks bigger on the outside than it is on the inside. (See also: “Mad Architects Of The Frontier And Their Terrible Creations”.)

Putting modules in the corner of a building has been something that, since the start of the project, would blow up the game. There were a number of things causing problems here: first off, the code to actually handle the case of inserting the small “module footer” that forms the foundation of a module was blowing up if you put it in the corner of a map. This has been fixed. Second, when we finished a module’s foundation, we would delete the edges on the floor plan, and merge the leftmost and rightmost edges together. Obviously, this is not the right thing to do if a foundation piece is at the leftmost, or rightmost, edge of a blueprint – you end up collapsing two edges together that are at 90 degrees. So this has been fixed for the outside of modules. The inside of modules still breaks, because there is some funny business going on with how we construct interiors that I have yet to track down – but we’re making progress on long standing issues.

{ read this article }

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Building A Better World Through Video Game Violence

June 11, 2014 by David Baumgart

To cut right to the point, the questions I’ve been asking myself surround the role violence plays in the tone of Clockwork Empires.To start: I don’t believe that violence for its own sake is interesting or desirable because, well, it’s unpleasant. Unpleasantness, however, definitely has a use in the aesthetic and narrative experiences that games explore (- to say that games are just about “fun” misses so much of what is going on in them!)

So let’s dive in.

He shouldn't have eaten the caviar.

Things that can happen.

The Clockwork Empires frontier is not a peaceful, gentle place and it’s important that we express to players that there are terrible, terrible consequences for Knowing What Should Not Be Known, Digging Too Greedily And Too Deep, or simple things like “not planning a stable food supply” or basic colonial defense. Things happen.

{ read this article }

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