Category Archives: Clockwork Empires

Thaddeus Bronzewhistle, Loyal Subject of The Queen

April 9, 2014 by David Baumgart
Bureaucracy is of utmost importance to The Empire.

Bureaucracy is of utmost importance to The Empire.

My name is Thaddeus Bronzewhistle and I was born in the 49th year of the reign of The Queen. I left civilization to promote the ideas and ethics of Science. I worship at the altar of celestial order, as is right and proper for a Subject of The Queen. My barber has commented that I am a fine specimen of my Class, with a stance neither above nor below my correct Station in life: The Middle Class.

I'm really awfully glad I'm a Middle Class.

I’m really awfully glad I’m a Middle Class.

 I hold it not against the Creator that I have been placed thus in life, for my Station is the logical result of the Machinations of Fate. But were I born an Aristocrat I would be able to fully devote myself to the Noble Calling of Science, though I shall not indulge in thoughts which are against the Natural Order of the Universe for such thoughts lead to Madness, as well we all know from the terrible stories one may read in back pages of The Empire Times.

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The Fishman

April 2, 2014 by Nicholas Vining

THE FISHMAN

[set, roughly, to the meter of Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven”]

bedOnce upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary,
having just returned from GDC a couple days before,
lying in my bed with con flu, none too happily sorting through
the impressions of the journalists who visited before.
“They struggled with the game,” I muttered, “having never played before.
These struggles I do so deplore.”

clickingAh, distinctly, I remember, it was in my warmest sweater,
as each JIRA ticket crashed like waves upon the ocean shore.
Eagerly I watched the replays, studying hard and searching for ways
to improve the user’s gateway into CE’s dreadful lore.
The mouse clicks were not working, as they once had worked before,
for putting things onto the floor.

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So That Happened.

March 26, 2014 by Daniel Jacobsen

GDC happened! And with it, some exciting announcements that we have been selfishly hoarding for people who deal in the trafficking of humans (to their websites).

Why hello there.

Steam Knight of Her Majesty’s 1st Armoured Guards Regiment reporting for duty.

First, we announced that we will be releasing Clockwork Empires in some sort of paid early access model this spring, with more details to come soon. We decided to run it this way a couple of months ago, but we’ve been discussing it internally for a long time. Clockwork Empires is just a good fit for the process. It’ll be a new experience every time you play it, and we can use the way that people are playing the game to inform our design priorities. Also we can sneak in stuff so if you pull up your game after an update some new and weird things can surprise you, and that’s awesome.

More importantly, we announced the Steam Knight, cleverly hidden in plain sight this whole time, who may be armed with a grenade launcher or one (or two) of a number of other gigantic weapons! There are turrets as well: the Minum Gun Turret (“what we have and what the fishpeople do not”), which can be deployed to protect yourself from waves of Eldritch horrors, crudely armoured bandits in the Grand Australian Tradition, as well as The Stahlmarkian Menace. There are some issues with them so we disabled them for the press build (take THAT press!), but we will soon fix the bug that allows every character in your settlement to sit in the same turret seat and never leave. Ever.

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How To PR: The Gaslamp Way

March 19, 2014 by Nicholas Vining

We are at GDC! More specifically, we are in a Hotel, which we are not allowed to leave. If we leave the Hotel, our PR person will shoot us. What we are doing at GDC is we are demoing Clockwork Empires for Members of the Press, so that they remember that we are alive. So far, the press response has been overwhelmingly positive.

Evan Lahti from PC Gamer got the first hands-on look at Clockwork Empires before GDC; we think he’s some kind of Space Pirate or something. You can find Mr. Lahti’s preview here. Inside you will find many of the secret things we have been working on revealed, including Steam Knights, Cultists, Eldritch Modules, and more. Behold its deadly secrets and quake in wonder. You will also find, revealed therein, that the game will be available – thanks to the dreaded manipulations of Early Access, the Wonder of the Scientific Age – soon for those of you brave enough to help us in the development process. We will be discussing this in further detail later.

Since Evan has already kindly written about our game this week, I’m not going to. Instead, here are some notes on the PR process of showing the game to forty different journalists in a five day span.

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March Technical Status Update: HRRRRRRRNGH Edition

March 12, 2014 by Nicholas Vining

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

March 5, 2014 by David Baumgart

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

February 26, 2014 by David Baumgart

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

February 19, 2014 by Nicholas Vining

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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