All posts tagged with "beware the highjacking of your loading bay doors by science criminals"

March Technical Status Update: HRRRRRRRNGH Edition

We will be at GDC next week, showing Clockwork Empires to people. How does this impact your life, you ask? First, there will be a Flurry of Exciting Things for you to read. Second, next week’s blog post will probably be more pictures of Sean drinking beet juice or something. Third, we are hard at work adding polish and spit to various parts of the game in order to get it ready to the press. This spit will eventually be transferred to you, the customers. Fourth, this is a terrible metaphor.

This is the paradoxical nature of game development: trying to finish a game, while making your PR department happy. One of the reasons why we have been writing about fungus, querns, and whatever the heck else people are writing about is because we have promised that the Rites of Revelation can be performed by various Reporter-Type Entities from Beyond the Stars. Once things are Revealed, according to the Cosmic Prophecies, we will let you know where you may find these revelations! In the mean time, we shall repeat the ancient chant of our people: “Man, PR is weird.”

There are, however, some exciting Things that have shown up on the programming side of the world. We can tell you about these things! We are now at Revision 12 of pre-alpha testing, for instance, and the game has improved substantially. Some milestones on this front include having in-office testers playing the game, seeing where they get stuck, and fixing these things; and, as of today, expanding our tester pool from our main six testers to a supporting cast consisting of other developers and friends. Next stop: random people from the Internet.

We haven’t actually done a technical status update since December, I guess? So it’s been awhile. Let’s look at some stuff.

{ read this article }

Posted in Clockwork Empires | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
8 Comments

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.)

{ read this article }

Posted in Clockwork Empires | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
15 Comments