In the planning meeting last month I was tasked with “adding some creepy stuff”. Lovely, easy! Right?
As is ever the case in a game such as Clockwork Empires, with as many complex systems interacting with as many other complex systems as we have here, it turns out that much of simply “adding some creepy stuff” consists of tracking down the creepy things we’ve previously made then testing and updating them so they play nicely with all the other new things (creepy or otherwise) we’ve made. Plus there are the back-end refactoring passes that have made certain things obsolete, left other threads hanging, and the usual additions of better systems to replace old bits that were a little rougher and/or hacky. So there’s cleaning up to do which not only makes things work better, but makes things work better with other things. This explains how a subtask of my primary directive, “make sure all the eldritch transformations work”, turned into “review all cult-related actions and events” which turned into “overhaul every instance of madness in the game to work with both aforementioned items and with new madness visualization”. Then I found myself fulfilling the contingent requirement of “check every single job in the game and make sure it’s doing what it ought to be doing with what it should be doing it with, and split the 8000 line jobs definition file into smaller files”.
Adding some creepy stuff is not necessarily straightforward. Happily, that last paragraph describes what I did for the last major patch.
“Blood, mostly.”
