Category Archives: Clockwork Empires

An Industrial Logistics Simulation For Everyone

September 25, 2012 by David Baumgart

The Clockwork Empire needs factories. It is an age of Industry, after all: Great Engines of Production grind through the bounty of the Earth: coal, ore, lumber, lower class workers! All are thrown into the gears of the great machines and boiled, mixed, stamped, lathed, baked, churned, then finally delicately extruded into sprawling stockpiles: the Wealth of The Empire!

Clockwork Empires is a city-building game which takes place in a fantastical industrial revolution. Factories are central to the character of the game because they are a physical embodiment of technological change and social & economic restructuring – progress! – from a medieval artisanal mode of production (something like Dwarf Fortress) in which individual craft skill is celebrated to a properly industrial machine-of-machines mode of production, alienated workers and all, in which the size and sophistication of factories is most important.

Besides, attaching together lots of moving machines is intrinsically neat.

Very early factory & logistics concepts: the splendor of Brick and Brass.

Construction Design Goals

So let’s break this design problem down a bit. What are we here at Gaslamp trying to do with factories in CE?

  1. The structures themselves are going to be procedurally generated. So there is not just one model for all steel mills that you plonk down in rows – you get to make decisions about shape, layout, and decor up to a point and as much as you desire.
  2. Individual factories will make specific products (vs. generic factories making abstracted production points, as in a game like Civilization). CE is about an Industrial Revolution, after all, so let’s dive in on the deep end and relish the details!
  3. The choices made by players need to matter, from internal composition of the factories to their placement in the settlement as parts of a larger civil & logistical system.
  4. Factories need to be identifiable by type at a glance even with structural customization and, better yet, they must be interesting to watch.
  5. Even where buildings are concerned, people are important. Characters make a game more engaging because they build stories. And anyway, the effect of industrialization on people (rich and poor) is extremely important to what’s going on in CE.

We’ll get to how these points will be addressed more specifically. But first let us take a relevant aside into a few games that are, in part, inspiring Clockwork Empires and which have themselves made gameplay involving production and logistics compelling.

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Evolution of a 3D Engine

September 19, 2012 by Nicholas Vining

One of the major reasons behind announcing Clockwork Empires – as I think I mentioned before – is that we want to talk about what we’re doing. We want to keep you in the loop, and we want you to feel happy, informed, and involved. Accordingly, we’ll be posting lots of work in progress stuff. Again, this is a work in progress and will not (and does not, even!) represent what we’ll be shipping in a year and a half; this is a catalogue of the journey, but not the destination. However, it’s a pretty interesting journey.

Yesterday’s moment of excitement was discovering that all our characters were too small, and occupied one sixth of a “game tile” rather than one quarter of a tile. Queue massive re-export. Ah, well. These things happen in game development, and we deal with them and we move on; the key thing is to try to make sure that it doesn’t happen again.

So, let’s not talk about that. Let’s look at some screenshots. Because we’re vicious and evil, we’re not going to show you up-to-date screenshots; instead, we’re going to show you things from the cutting room floor. Way back when we started Clockwork Empires, we put a screenshot button in the game so that we could easily take pictures of our work for analysis, sharing with friends, putting up on the blog, whatever. Because we did this so early, we have an interesting collection of archival footage. So here’s some stuff for anybody interested in seeing how you pull an engine together.

To get you in the mood, here is a construction animation:

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Clockwork Empires: Alright, Now What?

September 6, 2012 by Nicholas Vining

We’re back from Penny Arcade Expo! This was our first year as an exhibitor; while previous years have been reasonably epic (most notably for me, at least, was 2010, which was the year I crashed a panel with Steve Jackson), this year blew them all away. We got to meet a bunch of you, we got to hand out 100 Stuffed Diggle Menaces,  and we got to see the Hat of Bergstrom. We also had a few good times with some members of the remote team who don’t normally work at the Vancouver office, most notably Chris Triolo and Ryan C. Gordon, who just happened to be in town that day. I got a Valve tour! Daniel was on a panel! We went to Notch’s party! The list goes on and on…

Now we’re back, the question becomes: now what do we do?

The main thing that PAX impressed upon me was just how much work we have to do between now and next year on Clockwork Empires. Next year, we want to be showing this game, and we want it to be in a presentable state. That’s fine. We have a long, rather hard road ahead of us, and we’ll get there, but the question is… what do we do until then?

So here’s the plan. We’re an independent studio that is really not beholden to anybody but ourselves. We want you to know what’s going on and how we’re progressing; we want you to get excited for Clockwork Empires, and we want you to let us know how you think we’re doing. We’re going to open things up as much as we can, and we’re going to write while we do so. We hope you’ll like it. We’ll try to be honest, and we’ll try to let you know the good news as well as the bad news. You’ll be getting posts from me on the programming stuff, David on the art side of things, Daniel on AI (and maybe ranting about “business stuff”), and all of us on game design.

Let the great Developing begin, er continue! To that end, here is random art. What do you folks want to hear about?

Clockwork Empires serves the needs of all, from the clothing needs of growing alternative religions to the logistical infrastructure required to maintain a respectable zeppelin fleet in these challenging times.

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Clockwork Empires: PC Gamer Interview, minor FAQ, & other such foolishness

August 29, 2012 by David Baumgart

(If you haven’t seen it yet, get yourself up to steam on the scuttlebutt surrounding Clockwork Empires with the PC Gamer preview: Clockwork Empires: a preview of Gaslamp Games’ Lovecraft-laden steampunk city-builder).

Interview

The good people at PC Gamer were also brave enough to interview the Gaslamp partners on the subject of Clockwork Empires: Interview: Gaslamp Games’ mad, incredible vision for Clockwork Empires

Various developers have been spotted on Clockwork Empires threads on the Bay 12 forums, Quarter to Three forums, and the SomethingAwful forums to answer your Burning Questions. Delighted minds are encouraged to round up the best responses and post them somewhere so we don’t have to.

Mini-FAQ

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Clockwork Empires: The Press Release

August 27, 2012 by Daniel Jacobsen

aka: “Project Odin”

August 27th, 2012 – Gaslamp Games, Inc., independent game developers and makers of the critically acclaimed Dungeons of Dredmor, are pleased to announce their new title, Clockwork Empires, for the Windows, OS X, and Linux platforms.

The Clockwork Empire is expanding! Brave people, seeking glory and wealth, are setting forth for uncharted lands in search of fame and fortune. This is a new age of Science – fearless naturalists, clever tinkerers, and brilliant inventors hold sway over the imagination of the common folk, wielding voltaic energies and constructing chromed brass clockwork engines. It is an age of The Arts – poets lie expiring on every street corner, crying for Reform and more laudanum, while the Empire Times spews forth from the great presses of the Capitol, filled with stories of inspiring hubris and adventure from The Colonies. It is an age of Trade – the many arms of the Imperial Chartered Antipodean Trading Company lurch across the oceans like the limbs of a commodity-crazed octopus, dredging untapped markets for wealth and glory. It is an age of Politics – scheming agents of the Empire skulk through the slums and grottoes of the colonies, dodging anarchist schemes and cultists’ rituals, and fulfilling secretive missions on behalf of Her Majesty the Queen. Meanwhile, in the Capitol, favours are curried in the Houses of Parliament and the Panopticon between the artistocratic Lords and the rising classes of Industrial Barons.

Fly the Union Cog over all three identified corners of the world!

But not all is well in the Empire. Strangers gather under lampposts and in bars, telling stories of Those That Live Beyond The Stars, operating in invisible geometries from another dimension. The Queen, some whisper, has been locked away at the behest of her own Prime Minister… but to what end? The Church of the Holy Cog prays for the salvation of the Empire, yet everybody fears the indescribable colors that trace lines through the darkest woods and beyond the reassuring glow of the gas-lamps. The fortunes of the Clockwork Empire are watched, silently, by unseen eye-clusters and malevolent entities trying to breach the walls of reality into this world.

Take on the role of a Junior Bureaucrat (Colonial Grade), sent forth to seek fame, promotions, and natural resources to feed the ever-hungry maw of industry and commerce. Build mighty colonies, fill them with magnificent factories and tortured machinery, and harness the power of steam and energies brought forth by determined, unregulated men and women of Science!

Glory is yours to seize; the world is yours to do with as you please. For fame and fortune, for Science, and for the Queen and the glory of the Clockwork Empires!

But wait, there’s more!

Herein, the good folk of Gaslamp Games present a small selection of their “penny dreadful” game development features, demonstrating wonders never-before seen in plebian entertainment:

  • Dynamic, city-building, citizen-simulating action. Every imperial subject has a purpose and agenda of their own, and their interactions are rich, exciting, and often lethal!
  • New “procedural extrusion” technology lets you design your colony the way you want! Buildings are procedurally generated and extruded directly from the aether to your specifications!
  • Tame the uncharted continents by land, sea, and air! Set forth in mighty Zeppelins to do battle with Sky Pirates, or take to the seas in search of fortune and probably sea serpents!
  • Create magnificent acts of plumbing, link together mighty gears, and build ominous Megaprojects!
  • Tangle with the machinations of malevolent entities! Scry the legacy of the Invisible Geometers, fumigate the baleful moon-fungus of the Selenian Polyps, and cleanse the scuttling creepiness and poor personal and moral hygiene of your everyday, average cultist.
  • Losing is still fun! When your colony fails miserably, earn medals, promotions, and titles as befits a true politician and scion of the Empire!
  • Multi-player mode, with up to 4 players, lets you co-operate with your closest friends to build a glorious city… or fight a horrifying economic battle to total annihilation!
  • Round-Robin mode lets you share your Clockwork Empires with friends! Take turns running a colony directly into the ground then argue for fun-filled hours about whose fault it was! (Like Monopoly but with more exploding Zeppelins!)
  • Rendered in glorious GaslampVision! Thrill as the colours are brought to life by Gaslamp’s team of caffeine-addled artists labouring under the technical specifications of our elite programmers* to bring you a game that is rendered in Each of the Three Dimensions! New multi-core technology by Actual University Students lets you use every last ounce of power in your computer to run a thrilling and vivid simulation!
    (* We’ll see about that, Nicholas. Soon. – David)
  • Featuring the new Dynamic Soundtrack Orchestra – the Soundtrack that Adjusts to Your Gameplay! (Mr. M. Steele, conductor)
  • No always-online DRM requirement, unlike certain other games we don’t want to mention. You know who you are and your mothers are very disappointed.
  • Comes complete with the Gaslamp Games Quality of Excellence that you know and love, and if you don’t like something you can mod it yourself in the best tradition of Empire Craftsmanship!

For more information, Gaslamp Games invites you to subscribe to their Awful Circular, available at www.gaslampgames.com on the Inter-Net Tubes.  For more exciting information about the latest Gaslamp Games endeavor, visit PC Gamer!

Cog Save the Queen! Huzzah and all that.

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