An overview, with examples, of actual game development I’ve been doing with very few silly jokes.
Daniel has suggested that the fine readers of our humble development blog would not be so interested in the finer points of small business accounting even though it is utterly essential to our ongoing operations. Nor, he contended, would something so removed as a personal “Clockwork Empires Reading List” actually be relevant to the nitty-gritty of development as-such. Indeed, it is not always easy coming up with something to write here as many, many needs must be somehow balanced and the same goes for this.
I suspect, somehow, that a changelog direct from out SVN would not be helpful, though it contains gems (each an individual SVN commit entry) such as:
5836 – work*
5798 – fixing stew**
5796 -Making laudanum and sulphur tonic should theoretically work (when modules are fixed)***
* It was a vague day, one supposes.
Choose wisely.
** It works now. Before, stew was a valid ingredient for itself. This is in fact Realistic but also Not Useful for the purposes of game logic.
*** This is a valid sentence, as “should theoretically work” refers to both “making laudanum” and “sulphur tonic”. The description is incorrect however, in that just the making of these things should work; the Sulphur Tonic does not actually work.****
**** It was observed in a design discussion that the Sulphur Tonic should not actually work, just that it should cause people to think that it worked. This is a valid game mechanic in Clockwork Empires. I recall also Daniel wrestling with the problem of making people not go mad when they consume human flesh if they don’t know it’s human flesh when they eat it.
See the things we have to deal with?
The State Of The Empire: Summer 2014
It’s time for real talk.
We are indeed launching an Early Access version of Clockwork Empires this summer and we want to make sure that people know what they’re going to get if they purchase the game at the first opportunity. The classic pitfall of Early Access games is for a developer to give players unrealistic expectations about what the then-current state of the game is and this is something we absolutely want to avoid doing. So yesterday we spent a couple of hours having a meeting in accordance with Traditions of Gaslamp Games where we discussed various areas of the project, how we’re progressing with them, and how much of this progress is actually visible to a player of the game.
Let’s go over over the categories discussed in detail.
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