In the interest of your Betterment, Gaslamp Games presents:
Another Lesson In Etiquette
Mr. Hamilton (a relation, it has been discovered, of one Lady Hamilton to whom has been ascribed Much Scandal), Environmental Artist employed by the esteemed Company of Gaslamp Games, demonstrates the mindful consumption of health-giving beet juice at a local “cafe” suspected to be frequented by poets and their ilk.
(Please dim the lights for the Magic Lantern Show.)
[Warning: This is a very technical post.]
It’s not easy writing a complicated simulation. There are lots of complex, interconnected moving parts to worry about and when something goes wrong, it can be hard to figure out where that small, broken thing is in the midst of a larger picture. We recently discovered that the game was running… unreasonably slowly, shall we say? My desktop was getting 15 FPS, and it wasn’t clear what the problem was. On Chris Whitman’s machine, which uses a slightly different graphics card than my computer, our FPS was in single digits. I don’t like optimizing too early – as Donald Knuth pointed out famously, “premature optimization is the root of all evil” – but something was going on. Finally, sick and tired of the problems, I decided to get some answers.
There were three solutions for profiling that we looked at: Intel’s VTune, what we might call a ‘classical’ profiler which you can download a 30-day trial of from their website, and Telemetry, a different sort of profiler made by RAD Game Tools (specifically by Brian Hook, who you might know from such games as Quake 3.) RAD Game Tools also provided us with a 30-day trial of Telemetry, and this gave me an interesting opportunity to compare two profilers. Finally, we tried our luck with NVidia’s GPU Perfstudio to see if we could figure out what was happening on the graphics card.
Three profilers. One slow down. Who cracked the mystery? Find out below.
These actually have nothing to do with what Nicholas is doing but It Was Decided that the post needed some more visual accompaniment. Think of it as a tenuous thematic connection.
From just about the beginning we’ve been into the idea that Clockwork Empires should involve running giant assemblies of pipes and cog-laden axles across settlements to transmit energy and water and completely harmless high-pressure superheated steam between various machines and factories. The basis for this came early: if we’re to embrace the aesthetic we desire we need to fully embrace the visuals of mechanization, of machines and factories and the wonders of technology of this Age of Progress & so forth. If we hide the machines inside the factories then you won’t be able to see any of the Fun gears and pipes. So, the breakthrough: put the machines, the pipes, the gears on the outside of the factory.
For the sake of simplicity we’ve rolled pipes, axles, and anything else that falls into this category of things-that-connect-to-machines into a category we call “dynamics lines” (whereas “dynamics” are water, mechanical force, steam, voltaic energies, nourishing goo, etc).
Very, very old concept art playing around with the idea of exposed pipes & axles.
This has not been without controversy in the Gaslamp Games Design Discussion And Knife Fighting Arena because this is both intrinsically insane and poses some really difficult problems with being able to clearly express what is actually going on in the game.
There’s a very particular feeling that you get at the beginning of a good game. It’s taking the first step into a unexplored world, secrets hidden by fog-of-war, operating on rules you have not yet learned, filled with dangers you’ll only know how to overcome after they’ve beaten you the first time around.
“Strike the Earth!”
It’s very important to get the beginning of a good story right, and with our goal in Clockwork Empires being to have the player create stories through the gameplay, well. It’s an obvious point of importance (to say nothing of game design in general requiring a strong ‘hook’ – it’s just good design). Getting this right is going to be iterative by necessity so I’m not going to indulge in discussing our pile of speculation on approaching the problem just yet. It’s wrapped in some dreadfully unfinished UI anyway. So, rather, I want to talk about a personal approach to a very particular detail that I’m trying to slip into the game.
(Shh; Don’t let the other guys know about this. Daniel might insist on putting lutefisk into the bloody game again, and don’t get me started on Nicholas’ creepy poet obsession.)
“Moving out!”
To me, personally, getting the beginning right is a bit about capturing what I felt back when I was playing games as a kid with no knowledge of how they were made. Certainly my memory is flavored by a heavy helping of nostalgia but the experience was, I think, something very much more than the sum of its parts because the processes behind the game were completely magical to me. Before I knew how scripting worked, how computer graphics were made, how to program a UI, I could reasonably expect anything to happen after that first step into the game-world.
Though we may not manage quite that, the simulation-centered gameplay of Clockwork Empires is going to be a damn good attempt at enabling players to feel something like that when they make landfall at behest of the Queen onto an unknown and Perfectly Safe shore.
(Especially with the Fun we’ve been cooking up in the art room during the last couple weeks. Examples of key phrases: “stretchy tentacle rigs”, “like a malevolent blob of phlegm”, “head should come off about half the time”, “the glow needs to be more unnatural”, “figured out how to make it fold into itself”, and so on. )
As for my own little indulgence, it’s this:
(From a standpoint of technique I’ll only say that it bugs the hell out of me that I did the correct perspective on the paddlewheel while somehow botching the giant drive-cog by doing the exact wrong thing. So, it’s wonky; let’s all agree that the matter is settled and that there was a gross error in Mr. Ambrose Dorian Chainsly’s — not to be confused with the Lower Bilgestreams Chainsleys with their indecorous ‘e’ — patented process as detailed in “A New And Curious Method Of Arrangement Pertaining To Gearspring’s Cog Manufacturing Autodynamo”. We shall send a strongly worded to Mr. Chainsly immediately, but for now you’ll have to make due with these landing craft, self-annihilating drive-wheel vibrations be damned!)
It’s surprising what you can find stewing in your head for eighteen years.
(Also: not a half-bad punchline to the old “An Overseer, a Selenian Polyp, and The Cog Pope walk into a pub … “)
Last time I wrote a programming team update about Clockwork Empires, I made a comment that was somewhere along the lines of “the game is starting to hit that point where it transitions from a bunch of technology bits to something that looks like a game.” Well, we’re a lot closer to that goal than we were last update. Some of the edited highlights:
User interface design is, honestly, one of the most difficult parts of creating a game. Every button has a profound impact on how people will be motivated to play (or not play) a game. I suspect this is why so many games seem to almost consciously decide not to experiment too radically with UI. It’s so much easier to just build it the way people are used to rather than building it the way that perhaps it should be. We’re no different; Dredmor’s UI has a lot of flaws that we didn’t see at the time of development. For instance, it turns out that Inventory Management isn’t actually a super fun mini-game. Even then, we completely overhauled the Dredmor gameplay UI some 4 or 5 times before we settled on a system which is still flawed, and to this day leads people to play the game in a way that detracts from the experience. Such is game development.
Not like this. Never like this.
We are doing our best to apply the lessons learned from Dredmor to Clockwork Empires. Not all of these lessons are applicable, of course, as CE isn’t a Roguelike — and there are a lot more moving parts to control. Granted, there are also a lot more strategy/management style games with real-time mouse-based UIs to draw from, and we have played a ton of them; however, by virtue of making a game that crosses the genre-streams a bit, none of these systems perfectly fit the needs of CE. For instance, dropping a Starcraft control scheme on the game would be inappropriate because Starcraft is (arguably) about competitive micro-managing, optimized build orders, and a bit of gambling on the current “meta”. In contrast, CE is ideally about creating stories within its simulation.
Bachelors and bachelorettes! Are you alone this Valentine’s Day? Do you crave romance, and find yourself unable to obtain it at your local convenience store, bar, or motorcycle repair shop? Fear not, we’ve got you covered, for Gaslamp Games knows what you like. We present, for your Romantic Indulgence:
THE SAD, STRANGE TALE OF JOSIAH NUTPIN
THE SCANDALOUS TRAGEDY THAT IS UPSETTING THE NATION
a work of Salacious Bawdy-Fiction Composed on the Type-Writing Device
with Erotic Daguerrotypes by Mr. David Baumgart
Shrub Week. The words echo through the blasted hearts of the Gaslamp Games art team. After the last week, they know no love, no joy; only hand-crafted foliage assembled in the no-man’s land enduring a tense ceasefire between Haste and Artfulness.
We need shrubs. Lots of shrubs.
It all began several weeks ago on a rainy day in Vancouver (which, admittedly, could be any day in Vancouver). My proclivity for punctuality and organization was goaded by the Stick of Management through the bars (of Necessity) which walled the Cage of Fixed Deadlines. The wielder of this device of torment? Everyman-by-night and notorious beer-sampler Gaslamp CEO Daniel Jacobsen fixing me with an executive gaze through that smug little webcam perched on my leftmost monitor (the one with the strange hydraulic arm which may someday unleash its blind, hateful power). The challenge? Complete the entire “non-tree plants” section of the Project Odin Minimum Viable Product Art Asset List.
Challenge Accepted.
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