It’s been awhile since we checked in with the programming side of things. I put out a call this morning asking “what would people like me to talk about?” Interestingly, the main thing was the UI, and how we’d make it Not Awful. We’re not talking about the context-sensitive UI because we haven’t worked out all the details yet, but we’re working on it. Instead, let’s talk about the general state of programming.
So what have we been up to over in Programmer Town?
It’s amazing how far you can go writing a video game without actually answering really important questions like “how does the game terrain actually work?” In a perfect world, if everything worked as you imagined it would the first time, making video games (on our time scale at least) involves spending a few months building the idea of the game in your head, then spending a year or so whittling each piece out of little wooden blocks and pressing them gently into the computer. This has the added advantage of explaining why our computers are filled with little wooden blocks.
Let’s put a happy little fence right here in this happy little glade. Isn’t that nice?
We’re writing the biome code now (well, another iteration of it) which determines what natural objects exist in what areas, be they desert, tundra, jungle, forest, or maybe something weird like an Healthfully Irradiated crater or a la(r)va field, who knows.
There’s a bit of a process to defining how these things exist, what they get to talk to, and how complicated we want to make them: We hammer out a 3 page document on our internal wiki, argue over it (possibly in THE PIT), make Perfectly Necessary Amputations in some places, and more complexity in others, then start actually writing code. Invariably we’ll forget something or make a Horrible Mistake that causes the world to be impaled with giant spikes of rock that are infinitely tall (it happens) and have to rewrite, but that’s the Creative Process.
Every game tile is currently given a temperature & humidity value, a wateriness descriptor (aquatic, wetland, or land), and an integer value for soil quality. We started with a simple 3×3 matrix of temperature and humidity numbers to map biomes on, but it turned we really wanted swamps because they’re 1. creepy and 2. you need somewhere quiet to throw that body or that artifact which Was Never Meant To Be Found. Similarly, we’d like rich, rolling prairies to cleanse of wild aurochs herds and fill with factories and pipes, and because there was no distinction in our system between the temperature/humidity values of forests and grassland areas, we realized there was a need for some measure of soil quality. In broad terms for our system, fertile soil produces trees and barren soil produces grasses – or nothing at all.
This notion of soil quality may also give an interesting mechanical and ethical/narrative consideration to the act of (profitable, profitable) deforestation.
Don’t eat the apples in the Garden of Potemkin. (And yes, there’s another little fence. I like the fence. Deal with it.)
With this fertility numeric, we can do all sorts of neat things: We can make clear-cutting a forest cause the area over time to yield no trees at all; We can give incentive for crop rotations (if we want to be bothered with that), or we can give you a temporary bonus for, say, slashing/burning jungles by temporarily boosting the soil fertility drastically. Sure, all the animals would die, the area would become a barren wasteland after just a few crops as the topsoil was washed away, and you’d be left with useless land and starving peasants, but that’s okay because you’ve put enough away cash from skimming off the opium plantations to retire your bureaucrat to that manor in the Home Counties, right?
It will of course need to be clear to players what the impact of these choices will be, and you should still be able to just render your terrain a hellish landscape of coal factories (which make coal out of other types of coal) and machinery, each attended by noble clusterings of pipe, but making the hard choices that balance quality of life – and the landscape – with short-term needs (Dagon isn’t going to drive himself back into the swirling blackness of the ocean depths) should make the world feel like more than just a grid to build stuff on.
We’ve been playing our cards pretty close to the chest here at Gaslamp Games when it comes to showing final game assets. You know, put your best foot forward and make a good impression and all that. There were some scenes showing rendered assets (not in-engine) shown in the PC Gamer preview but we have since overhauled much of what was shown there. For today, let us focus on the characters.
Our character artist here at Gaslamp Games, Gentleman Joseph, has been very, very busy.
Just so: The Overseers — Work’s to be done and, by Cogs above, they’ll see you to it.
The Sad Tale of Shiveringhope: A Penny Dreadful Tale for All Hallows’ Eve
Written by Scurrilous Typing-Rogue Mr. Vining with Salacious and Naughty Illustrations of Phantasmal Horror by Mr. Baumgart.
The problem started with the mineshaft.
Problems often do. You take a perfectly good colony like Shiveringhope, once the pride of the seas, and you plunk a bloody great mine on it. Whose fool idea was that? Well, that’s a good question.
Perhaps, it was the fault of Lord Palmerstoke, who, recently scoffed at by the Royal Society, vowed that – before the year was out – a giant, earth-shattering drill would be deployed to probe the earth’s bounties. A drill with a bit made of purest, finest, cavorite, capable of breaking through the earth. A drill with gears made of finest copper and brass, a drill with a giant steaming pipe of steam steaming all over the blasted place. A drill that was so powerful, it could bore into the very Crust of the Earth itself. Never mind that cavorite was, technically speaking, lighter than air, and such a drill would have to be tethered to the earth with a collection of very large anchors. Never mind that brass was a stupid and useless metal for making gears out of. Science would have a way, and besides which – surely, it was the sight of the thing, its massive drill straining underneath the enormous pile of redundant, useless and largely decorative cogs attached to its side, that would make the earth shriek in terror.
Perhaps it was the fault of the Empire Times. Day after day, it bemoaned the state of Industry. Industry, it seemed, was insufficient. Perfectly good labourers standing idle, while the rich loamy veins of earth beneath our feet fail to yield up nature’s glorious bounties – and it was all the fault of the Whig party. One thing led to another, and a very large crate marked “SCIENCE. PROBABLY DANGEROUS. BUT VERY SCIENTIFIC. YES.” in bright red paint showed up at the shipping docks of Shiveringhope, containing a terrifying thing known only as the Crustborer. When it was unpacked by cheap, shoddy labourers under the gaze of a watchful Overseer, passing ladies were known to look at it and swoon, so powerful was its aura of unmitigated phallic majesty.
Our current iteration of the Clockwork Empires meta-game follows you, a bureaucrat of The Empire, on your (in)famous career. In game terms, preceding every instance of the city-building game, you will be presented with the choice of a number of objectives to attempt to complete during the game. Completing these will generate prestige points, which is currently designed to be a voucher system that can be spent to “break the rules”, from something as simple as calling in a favour for some rare machine parts to, perhaps, an airship bombardment strike against an attacking enemy. It’s like using mana to cast a magic spell, but in a strategy game. And it’s politics rather than magic. And you’re a bureaucrat. The pen is your wand; the spreadsheet is your tome. (We can go on like this for some time, you know.)
But a downside of the system that we’ve been discussing is that this mechanic rewards only the people who actually do what the Empire wants and so penalizes people who want to do something totally weird (and possibly awesome/terrifying) that has nothing at all to do with what the Prime Minister wants you to be doing. To solve this we’re considering a system in which prestige is no longer won just from The Empire; other factions will exist throughout the game and, say, by helping or hindering them you will open up the possibility to unlock new objectives for yourself.
Are the Stahlmarkians running dangerously low on festive lager? Send ’em a few barrels and maybe they’ll train some pilots for you. Are the Squamous Crater Beasts running dangerously low on human brains? You probably have a few you weren’t using anyway, and you never know when you’ll need a favor from the Squamous Crater Beasts. Maybe they’ll be so good as to eat the brains of someone you don’t like the next time they come around; Her Majesty’s Detective-Inspector from the Ministry of Extradimensional Containment, say — why, you can’t have him wasting time questioning your overseers about the digs going on beyond the Screaming Hills when there’s Important Digging to be done.
It’s useful to make friends. And they come in all shapes. Some wear pointy helmets. Some are incomprehensible to a sane human mind.
Why not produce Perfectly Safe steam via clean-burning Madness?
You’ve all read Boatmurdered, right?
A “Let’s Play” (or LP) is a narrative write-up of a game playing experience, preferably entertaining. Fans of Dwarf Fortress do this a lot – they’ll either play a game themselves and write up the events that occur into story form, or they’ll pass it between forums members with each writing a chapter for their part of the game.
This is not a recent phenomenon or one limited to the DF community. Or the Something Awful community, for that matter. Over in Paradox land, players of their historical strategy games have written up “After Action Reports”, aka AARs, in a tradition that goes back to tabletop wargaming. These probably started out as purely functional reports of the course of a game, but over time they’ve grown into elaborate alternate histories with characters and drama that don’t exist in the mechanics of the game ending up somewhere between a walk-through and fan fiction.
These stories give a look into gamers’ experience of the games they play – it’s not just what happens on screen; there’s all kinds of imagination at work especially in games that leave room for speculation, implication, and creativity. So sandbox games, building games, simulations, and even especially open-ended RPGs are perfect environment for this sort of thing. (I’ve even seen some Quake fanfic that … wasn’t terrible.) Well, it’s only natural for people to write down the stories they make & experience.
With Clockwork Empires we want to make a game that gives players just that kind of creative space and experience. And of course as game-players and creative people ourselves, these stories are just the sort of thing we love to enjoy & create.
So: could not the principle be applied in reverse? Sure, any game designer does this to some degree eg. “I want to make a game where you’re a hero and go on adventures and find a magic sword and fight monsters!” can be turned into a game simply enough; from story/theme to mechanics. Dwarf Fortress does this quite explicitly as a conscious practice; Zach Adams writes short stories that take place in a fantasy world then he and Tarn sit down and work out what game mechanics might support that story taking place.
We’ve done this too, in a few forms. On at least one occasion we sat down with a grid-mat and some dry erase pens and played out what amounted to a free-form tabletop roleplaying game of Clockwork Empires: It started with an expedition meaning to build a bridge, some wood getting chopped down, then spiraled directly out of control as a Mysterious Statue was discovered, found to spread Madness, dumped in a lake to contain it, then water from the lake used to create ale, then everyone was driven Quite Mad.
There’s a proper write-up of that one somewhere, but for now I’d like to share with you all a story of imagined Clockwork Empires gameplay I wrote while in a powerless cheap hotel in the middle of British Columbia. Join me, friends, for:
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