All posts tagged with "exciting logistics"

Mo Commodities Mo Problems

In Clockwork Empires you have a few fundamental game-pieces: agents that do stuff for you (colonists), places on the map they do stuff at (buildings/modules), and things produced by and consumed to build or upkeep the former categories: commodities. In other words, commodities are the food, planks, bricks, and so-on your colony needs to survive and grow. As such, commodities are very important to everything. So it is, by extension, very important indeed that a player knows how many of each commodity they have, what the commodities are good for, and how to make any commodity they don’t have but would quite like to have, thank you very much.

Glorious commodities everywhere just awaiting glorious logistical organization!

Glorious commodities everywhere just awaiting glorious logistical organization!

We’ve been working on tightening up these systems, both in the backend code and in the frontend code for expressing what’s happening in-game to the player. Let’s visit some of the work done toward these ends.

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Quick, Put More Logistics In It!

As part of the workshop->upgrade->Snoot->cover the world in progress cycle, we have an exciting series of new economics problems: how to make upgraded modules actually useful, and how to make workshops not terrible. The solution that we have elected to try, and which Daniel bullied me into writing (which took a week, and then I quite like the results so it’s not so bad) is to have workshop jobs assigned per-module, rather than per-building.

"Progress!"

“Progress!”

For Revision 50D, we let you explicitly assign a task to a given module (“Make Planks”, “Make Cot”, etc.) The # of workshop modules indicates the # of tasks. A worker will do the task assigned to the first module in a row. If the first module is busy, they will move to the second module; and so on, and so forth. Modules are organized in the workshop in terms of priority, and can be moved up and down (i.e. if your power saw is first in the queue, if it is empty people will try to use it first.) So if you have:

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They’re Called Conduits Now: A Tale of the Pneumatic Conveyance Snoot

Now that the biomes are live in Clockwork Empires, I’ve switched gears to finishing another major feature: conduits. Formerly called “dynamics”, we are now calling them “conduits” because it’s a much better name. And these things have been nothing short of a blasted nightmare of complex proposals of various forms from the start.

So now what do we do?

shot111

Ceci n’est pas un pipe.

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Clockwork Empires May Update: We Built This Colony With Hugs

Once more, a stack of Clockwork Empires updates appears in a neat pile. We present for you:

ce_2015_may_promo_illustration_small

This update will go live to every Clockwork Empires player via Steam!

We have also updated our Clockwork Empires: Development Progress Report!

(Don’t own the game? Clockwork Empires can be purchased on ClockworkEmpires.com via Humble or from Steam.)

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Patch Notes:

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Keep Our Troops At The Front Firing!

In other words: Ammunition. (Because we know that everyone loves counting bullets.)

Herschel Boot knows what's important.

Herschel Boot knows what’s important. (Mind the Errant Viscera.)

But no, it isn’t about counting bullets and shouldn’t be. Let’s back up the discussion a step and deal with –

Why Ammunition?

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Pickle That Fungus

We know what you really want: An excruciatingly detailed fungus pickling simulator. And I’m going to show you how it’s done. “What, more logistics simulation?” you gasp, somewhat overwhelmed with emotions you can not identify, will not identify. Yes, I answer, because if I’m going to be forced to write this thing two weeks in a row it’s either this or more Bizarre Literary Experiments and we all know how that turns out. (Of course we could always mix the two – a bizarre literary industrial logistics simulation experiment, but then I might be treading on China Mieville’s turf and that guy could totally beat me up.)

Let’s call it a two-part series if that makes you feel better.  Remember that episode of TNG where Riker said “Fire!” and it cut to the end of the season? It’s like that but without the cliffhanger. Or Riker. But we’ll make it work because we’ve got fungus and the luminous mycelium interfacing with the base of our neck, suggesting that this is a good idea after all and why don’t we continue discussing the laudable qualities of fungi.

The elusive black cup fungus - a delicacy, I hear.

Shhh. See there? It is the elusive black cup fungus – a delicacy, I hear.

So let’s walk through the process of adding a harvestable resource to the game and go into a bit more detail about creating a production chain from start to finish. All meat free!

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They’re Made Out Of Meat

Here at Gaslamp Games we each have our “particular enthusiasm” and as previously established, mine is the industrial logistics simulation. Let’s talk a bit more about how that works.

The Many Fleshes

The Observerator Reports: Each entity is of a flesh / Each flesh will be harvested for Study.

Most everything on the game map can have resources harvested from it in one way or another (and we really mean another). Trees, rocks, crops, animals, people, Other Things. You combine these to make other things. The natural environment of your settlement determines what resources are abundant and what resources are not. If you settle on the Black Dunes of Whispering, expect anything to do with resources tagged “timber” to be a lot more relatively expensive. But look on the bright side, I’m sure there are advantages to living on the Black Dunes of Whispering. For example, lots of whispering. And bones.

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From The Humble Loading Bay All Things Follow

At some point last week we decided that what Clockwork Empires really needs is loading bays. You know, that bit of a building trucks back onto to load and unload goods. No, really. And it’s going to be great!

This is not some sign of utter mundanity, rather, it’s one intersection in a web of interlocking game systems which are forming in Clockwork Empires. And it’ll be key to so much more than a hole in the wall your labourers toss crates through; No, this is Exciting Logistics! This is how everything fits together through space and time, how the labour of your fickle characters is turned, by use of machines and production structures, into valuable commodities which may be improve the well-being of your colony, be used to construct massive factories — or weapons, or perhaps sold off for the greater glory of the Royal Charter Antipodean Trading Company and The Empire. (And that’s why I love Exciting Logistics so much!)

stockpile/logistics

Logistics! Excitement! (This is what happens if you put a lot of effort into cleaning up your concept art. And I admit, I’d totally play a game that looked like this, distribution arrows and all.)

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