All posts tagged with "buildings now with doors"

March Technical Status Update: HRRRRRRRNGH Edition

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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Posted in Clockwork Empires | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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Hooray for Scripting! (And Other Things We Did In The Past Two Weeks)

Way back in December, we had just implemented a bunch of the character logic for going through the world and doing things using our Finite State Machine model and utility functions. What we discovered was that writing the code for the FSMs themselves was, to put it frankly, a huge pain. Additionally, non-C++ programming members of the development team could not easily add new items and new behaviours to items (mines, buildings, trees, and the like.) Micah J Best, at the end of December, decided that we should use scripting to wrap some of the complexity and hide it from the end user, while simultaneously letting our development team create new objects and FSMs without requiring a programmer to go thrashing about in the codebase. I said, “Fine. Show me a proof of concept and then we’ll talk.”

Fundamentally, Gaslamp’s programming team operates based on spite. If somebody says “oh, well, we’ll never get that done in time”, or “oh, well, it’s too impractical”, somebody usually says “no, it well isn’t” and will jump to the bait. (I did this recently with a pipe system test.) Saying “Well, show me a proof of concept and we’ll talk” is equivalent to putting a red cape in front of a bull.

Over the holidays, Micah found himself stuck in Quebec. With nothing but inlaws, a language barrier, two laptops (one of which was destroyed by a cat), a turkey stuffed with poutine, and spite, he put together the first build of what is our new scripting system. It does, indeed, encapsulate all our programming decisions and is fairly powerful and flexible. We took apart all the character code we wrote in December, ported it to the new scripting system, and have now started using it to implement new things in game. It’s very powerful and, after some back-and-forth, I’m quite happy with how it’s turned out. We’re still fixing bugs and fine tuning how it all comes together, but let’s see how it all works…

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Posted in Clockwork Empires, Programming | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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