Clockwork Empires is an exceedingly complex game. Each new system interacts with each existing system in ways we necessarily can’t predict. And unpredictable consequences are, to some degree, the goal of any sandbox game worth its cabbage. But there are failure states where the whole web of systems kinda slumps over to one side, repeating the same beeping noise. This isn’t interesting, so we have to poke and nudge the game back to where it does interesting things again. This is called “Game Design”.
Is that metaphor getting awkward? Let’s get to the specific example I had in mind: balancing food & farming gameplay in Clockwork Empires. This is going to go into Exciting exhaustive detail!
Farming, step one: kill anything that isn’t human.
(By the way, we’re doing the big monthly update of Clockwork Empires next week! The Development Progress page will be updated at that time. Details to be released soon.)
The State Of The Empire: Summer 2014
It’s time for real talk.
We are indeed launching an Early Access version of Clockwork Empires this summer and we want to make sure that people know what they’re going to get if they purchase the game at the first opportunity. The classic pitfall of Early Access games is for a developer to give players unrealistic expectations about what the then-current state of the game is and this is something we absolutely want to avoid doing. So yesterday we spent a couple of hours having a meeting in accordance with Traditions of Gaslamp Games where we discussed various areas of the project, how we’re progressing with them, and how much of this progress is actually visible to a player of the game.
Let’s go over over the categories discussed in detail.
{ read this article }
19 Comments