Our next experimental build this month, Alpha 44A, marks the implementation of a system I’ve been wanting for a long time: Building Quality! What’s that? Well, let’s start at the beginning:
One of the fundamental game systems of Clockwork Empires is the ability to make customized buildings with floor plans of different shapes and work modules in different places. Up until now, however, the most material-efficient way to play has more or less been to build tiny ‘work/sleep closets’ that your colonists jam themselves into every day. We want there to be consequences for making your colonists work and sleep in such unfortunate conditions.
A hastily-assembled image of what a room with decor in it might look like.
At the same time, we have a ton of decorative modules in the game but they weren’t really seeing use. Part of this, of course, is that we were hiding them under a tiny button in the modules menu. But there’s also the fact that they don’t serve a clear role; giving players a reason to use decor in all their buildings is something we’ve wanted to do for a while.
The People Problem
And now for something a little different. No, don’t be alarmed yet- we’re just letting Chris write the blog post this week!
When developing an early-access game, you have to make a lot of choices about what to prioritize. Do you fix that bug, or implement this new feature? There’s an endless list of things to do and only so many people to do them. Sometimes things that work ‘well enough’ get left alone for long periods – until the time for a rework finally comes around. And this month the time has come to address Immigration.
Time for a bracing game of “Where’s Waldorf?”
The initial immigration system was one of the first events we added to the game so that population would grow over time. Getting more people is a pretty fundamental part of playing a colony simulation game, after all. The system, however, was built on many assumptions that made sense during our earliest-access period, where starvation was the biggest threat – and that’s not how things work anymore. Gaining 3 prestige for taking 3 people is basically a win-win situation, and no-brainer choices like this don’t make for interesting gameplay. Prestige favours only added to this imbalance, as it was possible to more than double your rate of immigration by constantly “buying” new colonists – not at all what we intended when the system was first implemented.
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