Category Archives: Clockwork Empires

Go Forth and Monetize!

December 11, 2013 by Daniel Jacobsen

Gaslamp Games Inc. hereby gives permission to ANY third party to use images and sounds from Gaslamp Games Inc.’s video game Dungeons of Dredmor in “Let’s Play” videos, reviews, or any equivalent content on YouTube (www.youtube.com).

If you do choose to use images or sounds from Dungeons of Dredmor on a video, we hereby request that you include the following copyright notice:

This authorization is given if the video is monetized or contains advertisements or other commercial goals. You don’t have to, but if you do, hey that’s cool.

If you make a whole lot of money playing Dungeons of Dredmor, and buy yourself a tasty beverage, we hereby request that you say “Skol” before drinking it one time.

Furthermore, if you are affected by administrator removal of content which you have made due to the inclusion of Dungeons of Dredmor content in a video, please contact us at contact@gaslampgames.com so we can work with YouTube on your behalf.

(Also, we’ll include Clockwork Empires in this statement when it’s ready for the world, and when the world is ready for it.)

Posted in Clockwork Empires, Dungeons of Dredmor, Gaslamp | Tagged copyright infringement what copyright infringement, dredmor, obligatory legalese, send men to summon worms, summon magical youtube lawyers, Temba his arms wide
14 Comments

December Technical Status Update: Santa Quag’garoth is Coming To Town

December 11, 2013 by Nicholas Vining

At a certain point, game development just comes down to iteration. You build a big pile of things, and then you iterate on them. Then, you iterate on them some more… and then some more. Eventually, after enough iterations, you get a game, or the Standard Template Library (whichever comes first.)

One of the major driving forces behind said iteration is the fact that the game is now in the hands of Real People, in limited quantities. We have done five internal test releases so far – a bit slower than I am happy with; the first four test builds mainly focused on performance and getting things working somewhat better on people’s terrible hardware (see blog post from a couple of weeks ago); the fifth test build put combat, barbers, and phrenologists back in the game, as well as turning on More Useful Features (like mining.) So what we have right now is a game buried under a shameful selection of UI failures, which we are now trying to extricate ourselves from for Revision 6. This has mainly led to David learning how to use the Doctor Nicholas Vining Patent XML UI Syntax Guaranteed to Vivify The Spirit and Improve Marriage, which has led to this:

Secretly, I think we’re all just wishing for the good old days when he would send me large Excel spreadsheets of coordinates for Dredmor…

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Posted in Clockwork Empires | Tagged alignment? where we're going we won't need alignment, basically Steampunk The Shining, can we borrow UI concepts from Diablo again? that worked well last time, firearm safety violations, Fishpeople have it tough, Her Majesty's First Regiment of Foot trained for volume of fire rather than for accuracy, hey typographers- tell us what "vertical kerning" means, in other news we argued about if you can get useful wood from cacti, in other other news we watched mashups of Thomas the Tank Engine on youtube for inspiration, in this new and progressive Age it's not "fishmen" it's "fishPEOPLE", Lemarchand's UI widget, Nicholas intentionally makes up new and incorrect words for UI syntax just to drive David even more mad, our random names list could probably use a polishing pass as well, recursive fruit mod, someone let a programmer near the UI, Steampunk Jason Statham, the post title is a trick it's really just about broken UI, the UI must flow, the wonderful point in game dev where you forget that what you've been staring at for months is ugly and everyone reminds you, there was nothing good about the old days just the pain has faded somewhat, tree mutilation is more than a national pasttime
13 Comments

You take the story and you put it in the economic simulator

December 4, 2013 by Daniel Jacobsen

One of the next steps for us in terms of the actual GAME development is going to be the inclusion of work time and not-work time for the characters. This is kind of tricky, because if you have a button that lets you control how much of any given time period a character works, you’re going to want to crank it all the way up. And when the characters get cranky, you’re going to want to just ignore their demands for the good of the production chain. But we want your characters to not be working sometimes, because that means that they can form relationships with other people that they don’t work with, and they can sleep and drink strange liquids and have Super Secret Meetings. It’s important!

This is a trap.

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Posted in Clockwork Empires | Tagged all hail selenia and the fungal plinths thereon, basically everything in the sky is Baleful and most of it is Unblinking, Chairman Daniel Jacobsen nerve stapled half the art team and we haven't heard any complaints since, Daniel used the "f" word, david quickly slaps a drawing of ackbar and a quick Van Gogh knockoff on the blog post and calls it good, excerpts from "101 Sure-Fire Management Tips and Pickup Lines by Successful Colonial Bureaucrat Daniel Jacobsen", has anybody seen my nerve stapler, if you sue us we'll be forced to hire the Wizard Whitman to defend us although admittedly he's been lost for quite some time now in the Law Dimension, it boils down to a plan for starting pub fights, name of moon subject to change, please don't sue us, seriously- don't ask why, some things in the sky are not Unblinking but do not get in staring contests with them, the Unblinking Eye of the Baleful Star watches over all subjects of the Clockwork Queen, what does the communist work party actually do, you can't spell moonfungus without fun
36 Comments

The Joys of Video Card Compatibility

November 27, 2013 by Nicholas Vining

With David taking a quick getaway vacation, and Micah off recovering from not doing anything in academia recently, Daniel and I are quietly holding the fort. By quietly, I mean “stirring up trouble.”

As you may have read, we sent out several builds of Clockwork Empires to various parties recently. Six such parties, in fact. Of these six parties, three of them were able to play the game, and three of them were not. This is what happens when you take code that runs very nicely on your office machine (Windows 7, a Lot Of RAM, a fairly recent video card of Good Quality and Character by NVIDIA, with a Fan Attached To It) and try to run it on somebody else’s machine (Windows XP laptop, 1 gig of RAM, and the video card driver is actually just Bonzai Buddy.)

Output of the game on the Intel HD4000.

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Posted in Clockwork Empires, Programming | Tagged attacking the darkness, clockwork empires, crash what crash, david is on vacation this week so we get to do programmer art which is basically just anything you can make with the flood fill tool, next week we turn combat back on again, programming, secret industry shame, the blackness has come to new sogwood, the predator-esque graphics programmer tradition of displaying defeated video cards in a shoe box on your desk, video card drivers what video card drivers
44 Comments

Pre-Alpha Testing Has Commenced (Whatever That Is)

November 23, 2013 by Daniel Jacobsen

Well, it’s started. A very small number of builds have gone out into the wild, with minimal functionality, as part of a systems compatibility test. We have disabled pretty much everything but getting people to keep themselves alive, and some ramifications for not doing so, the least of which probably being death. Again, the possibility space is very limited with this build so we can focus on the really important stuff like hardware compatibility.

We will gradually be enabling features on the builds that are in the wild, and at the same time increasing the number of participants in our Experiments. If you’re interested in participating, please sign up for “testing” via the mailing list at ClockworkEmpires.com – I promise we won’t send you any news you don’t sign up for (we hate it when people do that, so we’re not going to be those people).

Posted in Clockwork Empires | Tagged and now we spend the next week fixing the game on windows xp and intel graphics hardware because tradition, before the pre-alpha testing was the pre-pre-alpha testing, clockwork empires, crash what crash, david is hiding in san diego until all this hardware compatibility testing blows over, development, everything is terrible, For the good of the Empire, if you've never alpha tested a game it's a lot like the movie Event Horizon, let the great experiment begin, Please don't file reports when the geometries are all wrong, Science, some people just want to watch the world burn but are unable to do so due to rendering errors, the game runs on approximately fifty seven percent of tested computers, what is a blog post doing up it's not wednesday
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The Codebase of Elemental Evil

November 20, 2013 by David Baumgart

Nicholas usually played as Nicholas (race: Half-English, class: Coder, specialization: Graphics, favoured enemy: Writing Documention). But this week we brought the snacks and he got to be the Development Master. That meant the adventure was his pick. We always dreaded his week.

Sean (Half-Scot Artist, specialization: Environment) made coffee of blackest night. Cups filled and SVNs updated, The Gaslamp Games adventurers assembled at the table. Once everyone had quieted down and settled in Nicholas began as he always did. With dramatic pause.

… … …

“This week we enter The Codebase of Elemental Evil: A story of Clockwork Empires.” he intoned.

Tremble, mortals.

Daniel, Viking dual-classed Executive/Programmer, spoke up immediately. “Dude, I don’t think this adventure will motivate team-building. We’ve got four artists, and since you’re DMing we’re down to just two coders. It’s inappropriate.”

Flustered, Nicholas responded “Well hang on! Joseph is sick this week so that’s just three artists, and David said he really wants to do this adventure.”

I chimed in: “Yeah, I mean I’m an Artist/Manager right now, but I’d like to multi-class one more time as a Programmer because the adventuring party could really use more gameplay abilities.”

“Indeed.” said Nicholas portentously.

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Posted in Clockwork Empires | Tagged David casts Comprehend Languages, I don't even know what to write here, if you are the wizard of lua why do you keep running the C++ compiler, Joe Diamond smoked twenty packs a day since he was a boy and he isn't going to stop now, like it or not your art director may be sucked into the hideous web of the occult or scripting, Mr. Diamond - the walls are bleeding in the east precinct, this is like some horrible self-insert fanfic about ourselves, up is down right is wrong and artists are coding
19 Comments

Combat 2: Son of Combat

November 13, 2013 by Nicholas Vining

Last time we wrote about combat, everybody got very excited about entrenching and trenches and gabions and spikes and shooting. Hooray for that. The brief, as I understood it from David “Accurate Simulation of Grain Silo” Baumgart, is the following:

Combat should be tactical and positional. Your entrenchments matter, your set up matters, and it is a tactical, positional sort of warfare.
Combat should be character-driven. How your soldiers approach a task depends on the relative efficiency of whoever is running the show, and of the soldiers themselves.
Combat should be pretty slow, really. Let’s have battles that feel like battles! (Many games have a problem where you send 30 dwarves to attack a Forgotten Beast and it’s all over in a blur of particles or ASCII.) No, let’s give the people what they ask for.
Pip pip, what ho, etc.

As the technical director, when some sort of a system comes up, I usually take a first swing at it before it gets passed on to somebody else, or I keep working at it. This sort of tends to be how I contribute to the design – by brute force implementing whatever I think things should be, but knowing that I won’t get any art for it if David doesn’t like it. It is this heady triptych of unresolved creative tension that makes Gaslamp Games into the swirling beehive of … bees… that it is today.

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Posted in Clockwork Empires | Tagged after all we did finally give you that echidna, at this rate we're going to get eye lasers into every game we make, bringing voxel magic to the masses, clockwork empires, Daniel seriously just corrected David's spelling of "Qeynos" -- what does this say about us?, foreigners look like normal people wearing funny hats, Grunty & Dr. Q will hold that trench!, It seem that Nicholas has been studying at the Brad Wardell School of Beekeeping And Game Design, meanwhile David is gleefully creating squad rate-of-resupply tables in a Dire Spreadsheet, Mr. Steele is collecting overblown 50's era cinema bullet ricochet sounds as we speak, not pictured: a series of charming explosions, Qeynos 4ever, the magic of The Wizard Whitman ensorcels us to this day
17 Comments

Fixing The Economy

November 6, 2013 by David Baumgart

The weeks leading up to the release of the Clockwork Empires teaser trailer were focused on putting together visual polish and gameplay situations to fit a desired narrative. This all looks very pretty but it doesn’t develop the substance of the game — now, we return to substance: the economy.

(Well, at least I am. Other people are working on other stuff which is also cool. But I get to indulge in this post now because it’s my turn! So let’s get some adorable little icons going to liven things up… )

There’s more where these came from, believe you me.

Although we’ve all got input on the design of the game, in broad strokes we’re putting the responsibility for design/implementation of particular areas of mechanics on individual people. Daniel, for example, made himself an advocate for developing character personalities and relationships (see also: his posts about such things as relationships & event knowledge). Meanwhile, I have a passion for, paraphrasing Nicholas here, “optimizing transfer of goods between two grain silos in Ukraine” so, naturally, I’m taking on the role of advocate for economic matters in Clockwork Empires (see also: my posts on loading bays, and going way back, industrial logistics). Putting together a (first draft) of a (vaguely) working economy is my task for this week.

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Posted in Clockwork Empires | Tagged damn you zakharov your wacky antics have killed us all, DLC idea: epic adventures through ferrous metallurgy, every citizen will enter the burning flaming mines for it is their duty, I can't believe I let a reference like "fifth column" go unused, next week will be recitations from chairman yang's pain is just information before the senses book of bumper fun humour, not shown is how every mineral can be produced by punching the ground repeatedly and extracting it in square blocks, note the random drawings of a hammer and sickle, really who hasn't read the wikipedia article on how steel is produced, tinned bread the deliciously horrible treat, ukranian grain silo optimization simulator is best when you do it one grain at a time
33 Comments

Category Archives: Clockwork Empires

Go Forth and Monetize!

December Technical Status Update: Santa Quag’garoth is Coming To Town

You take the story and you put it in the economic simulator

The Joys of Video Card Compatibility

Pre-Alpha Testing Has Commenced (Whatever That Is)

The Codebase of Elemental Evil

Combat 2: Son of Combat

Fixing The Economy

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