All posts tagged with "make icons of gears and stick the icons of the gears to things"

Technical Status Update: A Young Lad’s Message From The Front

Dear Father,

(We have an icon for this!)

(We have an icon for this!)

I am writing from the Trenches at Gaslamp. The final, long, hard push for Early Access is almost upon us; Major Jacobsen says we’ll go over the top any day now. At night I sleep with my keyboard as is Tradition, and think of home. How is home? Where is home? Does it still exist? Are the cats alive?

Will this war ever end?

The Horror.

The Horror.

The men tell me that they have assembled a Changelog; I have annotated it for you so that you may know that we are fighting the Brave Fight here at home, and that soon there will be Release In Our Time. I am pretty sure that Mr. Whitman now has Trenchfoot in his Shoulderblade, and will have to have it Removed with a Scalpel. Mr. Best seems like he will not last much longer; his delerium is fevered and he talks about going back to University and finishing his Doctorate. Meanwhile, they fight the good fight, and many small tickets have been fixed including the fact that doors claim to cost one plank, and do not. It is the duty of every man to care for his tickets, that we may seek victory over The [REDACTED].

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The Fishman

THE FISHMAN

[set, roughly, to the meter of Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven”]

bedOnce upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary,
having just returned from GDC a couple days before,
lying in my bed with con flu, none too happily sorting through
the impressions of the journalists who visited before.
“They struggled with the game,” I muttered, “having never played before.
These struggles I do so deplore.”

clickingAh, distinctly, I remember, it was in my warmest sweater,
as each JIRA ticket crashed like waves upon the ocean shore.
Eagerly I watched the replays, studying hard and searching for ways
to improve the user’s gateway into CE’s dreadful lore.
The mouse clicks were not working, as they once had worked before,
for putting things onto the floor.

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A Very Clockwork Valentine’s

We here at Gaslamp Games wish all of our dear readers to have a very happy Valentine’s day and, as such, have created some cards to assist you in your courtship rituals with the ends of finding the love of the man / woman / boiler / fishperson / infinite black abyss that most fulfills you.

(We also did some actual work on various things, so stick around for that too. I’ve cleverly mixed in development discussion with the silly pictures, and in at least one case they’re slightly related. Mostly they’re not.)


#1. A Very Special Knock On Your Door

ce_valentine0

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Tags and Events

Gin mad engineer

Simulation of Nicholas’s ravings in-engine.

The IGF has announced today that they are removing the Technical Excellence category from their awards because of, quote, “widespread, affordable middleware”. Since I am a shattered pinion of a man, barely holding together and clutching a bottle of gin in the wake of this decision, I… I…

I don’t know what to write about any more.

I lurched into the office this morning. “What do we do?!” I asked nobody in particular. “Let’s… let’s… stop everything! Let’s license Unity! Let’s make a platformer with a lovable quirky twist!” Then David slapped me about a bit.

“You’ve got to blog!” he yelled. “Do it for the children. DO IT SO THEY MAY ONE DAY ENJOY TECHNICAL EXCELLENCE. ”

And so, one day late, we shall blog about technology – because I still believe in a world of Technical Excellence.

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Hundreds of Tiny Icons

Everything is better smaller and removed from any context.

You make a 32×32 image of fame, rasterize glory, and even make an icon of death.

Someone has to do it. Someone must take up this mantle; Someone has to come up with a blog post about something or other because Nicholas & Daniel are too tired from crunching out a bunch of (quite fascinating actually) systems which, however, lack visual polish and therefore aren’t much good to show off. Yes yes, we’re going to fix that giant white cube that says “POWER SAW” on the side.

So why not icons?

You may recall something of this most diminutive Art from such games as, oh, Dungeons of Dredmor which had altogether over 500 skill, spell, and status icons. There’s no reason to think that Clockwork Empires will be any different. (Except less with the magical spells, perhaps; That’s cultist stuff and we Don’t Approve.)

An apparently loyal subject of The Empire could be a secret Revolutionist.

An apparently loyal subject of The Empire could be a secret Revolutionist.

So, as mentioned in a previous blog post, we have thought icons to express what characters are thinking, feeling, and talking about. Being in effect an avatar of bureaucratic panopticon, somehow, cough, you get to see all of this. Your little people will say things which influence how others feel about them while, perhaps, feeling other things entirely. At this point the valid topics of conversation are entirely about the hatwear of social classes. A lower class labourer will speak of their fine flat cap, though this might not go over well with the middle class overseer who prefers a business-like bowler. Among the aristocrats there are even poetically-inclined types who deign to “slum it” and associate with their lessers while wearing the hat-wear of lessers. On the other hand there are ambitious folk who prefer to discuss hat-wear which is above their station such as the regal top hat, though due to their birth they’ll surely never gain acceptance from their Betters. It’s all very awkward and British.

Everything you could need in 64x64 pixels!

Everything you could need in 64×64 pixels!

There are also, as players of Dredmor will recall, very good reasons why I won’t be making any icons in a mere 16×16 pixels — we’ve got more UI space to play with for our target specs. Would you believe that our original plan for Dredmor was the ship as an 800×600 fixed resolution game? Terrible idea. And this time around our UI workflow doesn’t consist of me writing giant passive-aggressive documents and giving them to Nicholas for hard-coding. In C++.

I won’t get into the specifics of UI layout here because I really can’t — our entire plan, based in part on experience from Dredmor and in part from some common bloody sense, is to have a highly modifiable UI system which allows easy iteration. For instance just last week Nicholas fired up some Prison Architect (Hi Introversion! We think you’re pretty swell) and thought some of what they were doing with UI was clever so he had to try it out. He edited some XML and had an approximation working in CE before the end of the day. A few ideas we are sticking with for now, a few are still proposals based on old Bullfrog games and our company-wide Company of Heroes brawls the past few Fridays. Iteration is cheap, which allows us to experiment and rapidly react to feedback. And if you really don’t like the UI, why, you can just mod your own.

All that said, I bet we can beat that 500 icon count for Clockwork Empires. I mean heck, we’ve got like 30 different kinds of hats already, and that’s just hats. Yeah! Art is pain! (Please send wacom nibs.)

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