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:
All posts tagged with "clockwork empires"
Yet Another Technology Status Update
Posted in Clockwork Empires |
Tagged a blog post where everybody dies is the best kind of blog post, clockwork empires, gathering but not hunting due to Vegan influence on project management, happy hunger games, happy little bushes, if your head falls off in the woods can you still write a poem about it, luckily we vetoed showing off Nicholas' special "programmer UI" progress, may the odds be ever in your favour, Nicholas' personal vendetta against poets rages on, poetry, premature head removal, the bamboo is insufficiently poetic, the code team doesn't get out enough and thought bamboo should be categorized as aquatic vegetation, the first authentic British Columbia clear-cutting simulation, the Roanoke simulation is now complete, too soon for Roanoke jokes? Gaslamp Games apologizes., what does a bamboo even do anyway, you can't eat most poetry
27 Comments
27 Comments
Tales from the UI Skunkworks: Military Management, Episode One of A Gazillion
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.
Posted in Clockwork Empires |
Tagged after the animator soundly trounced the entire company in Starcraft 2 we resolved to never play it ever again, alternative proposals for bureaucracy management include Coggy the steampunk managing gear assistant, apparently capybaras live in swamps and this is a thing, clockwork empires, gaslamp management has recently been forced to sit at the strange table at family weddings, hip hip huzzah for org charts!, management is a real place and you will go there if you misbehave, somewhere in the empire is a ravine full of muskets, tenement housing as user interface, the rest of the staff does not want their family to play Clockwork Empires for fear of not being invited to family dinners anymore, the Unblinking Eye of the Baleful Star watches over all subjects of the Clockwork Queen, time to redo the building creator again, yes steam armour is lovely, you have to ensure that each overseer fills out their timesheets correctly
40 Comments
40 Comments
The Sad, Strange Tale of Josiah Nutpin
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
Posted in Clockwork Empires |
Tagged clockwork empires, despite the presence of so much moon fungus it turned out not to be a major problem at all, do not ask what happened to the number one or number two telescopes, erotic daguerrotypes mainly consist of pictures of a woman's ankles with occasional shots of a knee, it's beginning to look a lot like fishmas, many people try to record on wax cylinders but most of it is just amateur phonography, never smoke the cigars, on the bright side if CE tanks we can always make a webcomic, penny dreadfuls, pigeon racing is the minigame that's sweeping the nation, please don't ask what happened to greater ponysparkle, remember you can't spell fungoid without fun, selling wax cylinder recordings is a hard living for a man and it nearly bankrupted edison, tawdry fiction, the statue of quaggaroth is the best make-out spot in town, this is the best valentine's day ever
35 Comments
35 Comments
Shrub Week
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.
Posted in Clockwork Empires |
Tagged clockwork empires, daniel recently went to a lua conference and got ripped on something called creepy uncle stockhausen's 100% germanic winter fun time ale, do we really have to come up with a bunch of new silly fungus names for another game, don't eat the blue mushrooms, hidden in the bamboo foliage is the invisible panda, is that the odious puffball we spy, ni, other plants produced during shrub week include tobacco and opium, our toadstool business is mushrooming, please enjoy your festive jar, science victories, shrubs, Stahlmarkians wouldn't misplace your brain jar that's for sure, the dire cabbage can also be fashioned into a craft beer but nobody actually wants to drink it, the dire cabbage can also be harvested with a pruning snoot but the flavour is spoiled, the dire cabbage is a stahlmarkian treat, the geometries are all wrong, the hydraulic arm flexes its muscles preparing for the day when it can finally strangle the art team, the phrase card trick means something different if you're an artist apparently, the vegetarians on the team got very hungry during shrub week, to harvest the dire cabbage you first need die kohlaxt from our previous game, weeks
23 Comments
23 Comments
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…
Posted in Clockwork Empires, Programming |
Tagged all hail the space meteor, all loyal sons of shiveringhope shall remember the day when it all went terribly wrong, art is pain, buildings now with doors, chris whitman is also the wizard of sometimes just staring at the ceiling and going why, chris whitman's wizard powers are many and varied, clockwork empires, everything is fine in greater swamptown, hot loading is the hottest form of loading, programming, purported sightings of invisible geometers are impossible due to their invisibility and are probably just caused by indigestion or something, rumours of the space fungus meteor are purely rumours and any reported sightings of the space fungus meteor are probably caused by stahlmarkian propagandists, the auroch is the vainest of all animals, the hen is standing in the middle of the screenshot looking confused, the mod community will not be allowed to experience joy only suffering, the overseer does not correctly oversee, the overseer will oversee if he wants to retain the polygons for his eyeballs, why does that auroch keep standing in screenshots looking at its reflection
19 Comments
19 Comments
New Breakthroughs In The Field of Reverse Phrenology
As every Modernity-minded subject of the Clockwork Empire familiar with the new Sciences of Personality has learned, each person in Society possesses certain individual Inclinations and Traits which determine their actions in Daily Life. Indeed, the New Science of quantifying and measuring these Inclinations and Traits is certain to lead to great advances in the Art of Education and Employment of Shiftless Wastrels.
— Prof. Eustace Boretrain-Charnickels for the Royal Phrenological Society
Posted in Clockwork Empires |
Tagged clockwork empires, gather the bees and smear them over your body, gathering the bees and smearing them over your body is actually a legitimate cure for arthritis, it is unseemly to be seen in last year's hat and you risk dishonour and failed marriages, next week: the Clockwork Empires personality test for LiveJournal, obsess over all the things, skull fractures for all, the behavioural traits of the lower classes is a study in applied plebotomy, the gooey center of the brain contains delicious nougat, the hope center of the brain is very very small, the laudanum center is curiously close to the poetry center which is in turn curiously close to the bee center, traits
20 Comments
20 Comments
What’s New In Programmertown?
The best part of game development, for me at least, is when everything suddenly starts working. Quite often, there is a critical mass of code that you end up writing for a game, and then – in the span of a week, or even days – you go from “everything is hideously broken and we’re going to die” to “Oh, this might be fun.” We’re right on the cusp of that right now; programming has seen some setbacks this week, mainly due to an outbreak of flu that has consumed the office. Nonetheless, we’ve been hard at work here in Programmertown, trying to get all the excellent artwork and ridiculous designs that people have come up with integrated into the game as quickly and efficiently as possible. Once again, let us take a tour through my folder of wonderful work-in-progress screenshots.
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8 Comments