The current “meta” for Clockwork Empires experimental branch players is to ding up their relations with the Bandits by one point so they can be stay neutral and avoid Bandit attacks forever. This is a little too convenient, and entirely due to the Bandits not being fully integrated with the new faction code created since the implementation of diplomacy via the Foreign Office.
So let’s make this fun.
Bandits make everything awkward.
First off, an announcement: we have decided to suspend development of simultaneous networked multiplayer for Clockwork Empires indefinitely. There are, simply put, technology issues and design issues that we don’t feel we can satisfactorily solve in the foreseeable future. Furthermore, we don’t want to devote time to addressing those issues if that time will detract from the single player experience, which people are currently enjoying and which is the major thrust of the game. Support will exist in engine for round robin “let’s play” games, and we will continue to build that out as we work our way out of Early Access and into a new stage of development, which we are tentatively calling, uh, “Access.” As always, we thank you for your patience and understanding of the harsh realities of game development.
That said, let’s talk about “Access.”
Somebody recently posted on Twitter that polishing a video game was a straight forward process: if it doesn’t move, make it move; if it moves, put a sound effect on it; if it moves and has a sound effect on it, add a particle system. That’s a pretty accurate guide, honestly. In our case, we went into Early Access with a few things that were not in the best of states, and one of the ongoing things that needs to be done in order to transition them from “Early Access” into “Access” is to address the problems that people have with them. In some cases, this is a question of making some changes, watching the feedback, and then continuing to improve the system or re-designing it. Sometimes, such as in the case of cults, or emotions, or what-have-you, we have to take a few swings at this particular issue.
Interior furniture concepts, once interiors become A Thing.
What’s in a name? Names have power. To know the True Name of a thing is to have power over it! … wait, wrong world. In any event, names are rather important to the narrative flavour of a game so we’ve made some effort to ensure that when you see a good Clockwork Empires name, you know where it came from.
I love this man’s name.
A party of traders from a Foreign Land showed up and they insist that we really need –
This update will go live to every Clockwork Empires player via Steam!
We have also updated our Clockwork Empires: Development Progress Report! It contains the annotated changelog and possibly extra secret saucy details maybe or at least a new picture of a cat so check it out!
(Don’t own the game? Clockwork Empires can be purchased on ClockworkEmpires.com via Humble or from Steam.)
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(Note that this is a slightly shorter changelog than usual due to the holidays.)
Major Changes
Trade Depot
Foreign Office / Foreign Relations
Food & Cooking
UI/UX
Combat
Workshops / Commodity Production
Cults
Other
Want the full annotated changelog? Read it in the Development Report!
Food! It is delicious. It is vital to your colony! It… requires a lot of work to balance!
Food has been a large part of our gameplay for awhile now, but most of our balance efforts have centered around farming; essentially you solve the “How many farmers do I need, growing what” problem for the duration of the game. However, part of maturing Clockwork Empires into a deeper game is tying our systems together in various ways – with the ideal results providing interesting choices for the player. We’re starting to do just that, in a place that hasn’t received balance loving for quite a while: The Kitchen.
Behold the new condensed Kitchen Recipes! They’re roughly grouped by use.
Previously, the kitchen had about a zillion recipes and not much interesting to do with them – they were simply ways to convert one raw food into one cooked food. We attempted to simplify this by creating the Basic Food recipe, but that still left us with a lot of stuff you could make and no particular reason to pick any one over the other. That changes now!
We have these little turns of phrase to represent design concepts. One such phrase going back to Dredmor is “put it in the Hat Pack”. I consider this a form of subtractive design.
So: The Hat Pack is an expansion pack for the game you’re working on which is shrouded in the mists of the future yet-to-be. (And as the name suggests, the content is a bunch of useless hats.) You put a feature or idea into the Hat Pack when you need to kill it, cut it, remove it from the game; but you don’t have the heart to kill it. So you quietly put it in the Hat Pack and shove it at the back of a closet to be slowly forgot.
(Or not. I want to say that features have legitimately been revived from the Hat Pack, but the notable example that comes to mind is the facial hair equipment slot for Dredmor that involved a bunch of false beards and mustaches to enhance your powers. Never happened.)
We are still out of the office until January 4th, 2016, at which point the terrifying cogs of progress begin turning once again. Today’s blogpost, therefore, is put together out of whatever images I can find on my computer. Which is okay, because we’re really interested in Trade Depots today, and I took a lot of screenshots of Trade Depots. But first, a little history.
Here is the first version of the Character Info screen for Clockwork Empires, circa January 2013 (right at the point where, maybe, we had little characters running about and doing something.) For those of you who are wondering how much optimization has already gone into the game, we seem to be running at 28 FPS here despite… not rendering much of anything.
One year later, we had moved to this:
It’s been quite a year, hasn’t it? We’ve released a major update each month – and periodic experimental patches to boot. Clockwork Empire has progressed steadily through development!
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So let us take a moment this holiday season to reflect upon the changes of the last twelve months.
How, you ask? Why, through the power of vaguely consolidated changelogs! To soften the blow of an immense wall of text which is perhaps rewarding mostly to the development team, let’s first revue the promo art from January to December of 2015!
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