Category Archives: Clockwork Empires

Alerts and When to Mystery

Whew, I haven’t written one of these in a while! I’ve been doing some weird back-end programming for a bit, but a few things that I’ve been working on is finally ready for an experiment, so let’s talk about them.

Alert framework

We’re rolling out a new, more robust alert framework.

"To the heliograph! Alert the Ministry that the cogs have whizzled too far this time!"

“To the heliograph! We must alert the Ministry that the cogs have whizzled too far this time!”

The old alerts were good for a few things, but not great for most. They began their life out of a need for a system for opt-in decision making, since we didn’t want to be pushing major choices to the middle of the main screen every time a player needed to make a choice (e.g. what to do about bandits), but the initial implementation of icons down the left side of the screen caused problems: icons alone aren’t enough to get across specific information, and there was still important information in the “ticker” (aka dialogue) box at the top of the screen because of this. Some news like “you got some planks” just didn’t make sense in a dismissable icon with the same weight as “pick your bandit foreign policy”.

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They’re Called Conduits Now: A Tale of the Pneumatic Conveyance Snoot

Now that the biomes are live in Clockwork Empires, I’ve switched gears to finishing another major feature: conduits. Formerly called “dynamics”, we are now calling them “conduits” because it’s a much better name. And these things have been nothing short of a blasted nightmare of complex proposals of various forms from the start.

So now what do we do?

shot111

Ceci n’est pas un pipe.

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Clockwork Empires April Update: THE STARS ARE QUITE NEARLY ALMOST RIGHT

 At the bottom of a strange glowing crater we discovered that –

ce_2016_apr_promo_illustration_small

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 voluminous annotated changelog.

(Don’t own the game? Clockwork Empires can be purchased on ClockworkEmpires.com via Humble or from Steam.)

Want to hear about all sorts of updates via email plus receive silly images from development? Sign up for the newsletter here.


Major Changes

  • We added a variety of new biomes! Select your embarkation point on the map at the start of the game, then discover what challenges and Fun awaits you in your new settlement.
  • REDACTED
  • Enemies will now destroy your precious buildings. Protect them well!
  • Various UI improvements have been improved, and will improve more.

Full Changelog for Alpha 50

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Thatched Roof Cottages

Back in the day I used to play Warcraft 2 over Kali. A popular strategy was developed called the “wall-in”. Perhaps you’ve heard of it, perhaps in a more recent game? To execute a wall in, you’d build farms to close the gap between your town – and it’s precious, vulnerable line of gold-mining peasants – and the outside world so that if some punk tried to pull a grunt-rush, you’d be safe and they’d have wasted their time. When you were ready, you just had a peasant chop a tree next to your farm to open it back up to access the outside world to expand.

A partially executed wall-in.

A partially executed wall-in.

A similar move has existed in Clockwork Empires for quite some time now. It is possible to build absurdly long, skinny buildings at very low cost due. And enemy AI treated them as untouchable, impassible barriers. So you see the problem here: cheap, invincible walls. At least back in Warcraft 2 the walls were legitimate buildings that would be attacked automatically.

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Technical Debt Payment Plans

Technical Debt is a handy metaphor that has been used in the programming community for awhile now. I sort of think it’s one of those things that probably got coined by somebody in the Lean Startup community, or the Agile community, or something like that. The idea of the metaphor is simple: you incur technical debt at the start of a project for a variety of reasons – getting your software started or out the door, for instance; or meeting a release target. At some point, however, the debt collector comes calling. This week, I seem to be paying my debts off: in the case of Clockwork Empires, we incurred a lot of technical debt getting the game into Early Access, with the knowledge that at some point during the process we would have to pay it off in order to get out of Early Access. Well, the point of paying it off seems to be this week.

retry

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The Arctic Dodo and the Desert Fox

In new climates, there are new opportunities and new challenges. And these involve a heck of a lot of little things that need to be attached properly to other similarly little things, or (at the very least) given slight variation between varied biomes. The Arctic Dodo for instance:

dodo_walkby

Look at ‘im go!

Take farming, for another example. What can you grow where? Wait no – it’s not that simple. Wrong question. As a developer, I’m not playing the game, I’m making the game. Try again: How do we control the unlocking of the crop field placement buttons and what feedback do we give if they are locked due to some condition? Then we must handle the same question for cooking recipes which are also locked or unlocked per-biome. Turns out the latter is essentially done and required only minor data entry while the former required a slight expansion to how we define field locking/unlocking.

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What’s That Red Stuff?

Do you see it, right there? That’s the problem. Herein it shall be explained why and then how it is solved.

terrain_colored_w_red

So we’ve had some talk about the overworld lately and the old post about world map generation still stands. Now we’re dealing with the details of living in it, of filling each biome with appropriate textures and objects. This is proceeding rapidly.

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Clockwork Empires March Update: The Joy Of Work

We were digging around in the dirt somewhere and discovered –

ce_2016_mar_promo_illustration_small

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 voluminous annotated changelog.

(Don’t own the game? Clockwork Empires can be purchased on ClockworkEmpires.com via Humble or from Steam.)

Want to hear about all sorts of updates via email plus receive silly images from development? Sign up for the newsletter here.


Major Changes

  • Enormous UI improvements
  • Overhauled Farming system
  • The Economy Subtly Grows

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