My current push on Clockwork Empires right now – in addition to the usual horde of performance fixes, crash fixes, and save game fixes (in fact, save games are currently the purview of Mr. Micah J Best who is sorting through a list of long-standing issues as we speak!) – centers around two things:
- Creating player motivation to develop their settlement’s economy. You can produce things, but there is often not much reason for you to do so (unless those things are the precious life-giving foodstuffs which stand between Civilization and Cannibalism).
- Improving the process of placing modules. In particular:
- In the most recent build, you cannot add modules to a building after the building is constructed, nor can you remove modules after a building is constructed to make room for new modules;
- If you want to place a bunch of beds, you have to click on the bed icon, then click on the blueprint, then click on the bed icon again, then click on the blueprint again, and it’s all quite a lot of bother;
- If you want to make five Middle Class Houses, and put beds, chairs and tables in each of them, you can’t put down three house blueprints, then all of the beds, then all of the chairs, then all of the tables;
- Decor (as a category of objects you can place in buildings) is kind of buried so our colonists are deprived of lovely photographs, lanterns, and all the other junk used to decorate buildings.
As it happens, these two problems are interrelated, and this is what I am working on this week.
One of these things is not like the others.
