All posts tagged with "blog egg forest meat bacon and blog"

Mo Commodities Mo Problems

In Clockwork Empires you have a few fundamental game-pieces: agents that do stuff for you (colonists), places on the map they do stuff at (buildings/modules), and things produced by and consumed to build or upkeep the former categories: commodities. In other words, commodities are the food, planks, bricks, and so-on your colony needs to survive and grow. As such, commodities are very important to everything. So it is, by extension, very important indeed that a player knows how many of each commodity they have, what the commodities are good for, and how to make any commodity they don’t have but would quite like to have, thank you very much.

Glorious commodities everywhere just awaiting glorious logistical organization!

Glorious commodities everywhere just awaiting glorious logistical organization!

We’ve been working on tightening up these systems, both in the backend code and in the frontend code for expressing what’s happening in-game to the player. Let’s visit some of the work done toward these ends.

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Quality of Life Improvements, Offices, Forest Meat

With Clockwork Empires becoming significantly more stable over the course of the last few patches, we are seeing a lot of people playing the game for much longer, which means that – in turn – when a bug happens, it’s the sort of thing that gets at you rather than just being something to be ignored. The pain threshold has, shall we say, shifted.

These things happen.

These sorts of things happen.

I’m trying to deal with a few long-standing issues this week, which mainly means dealing with small annoyances that detract from the quality of life of a Clockwork Empires player.

For instance, we have now fixed the work crew window slowing the game down when you are faced with > 100 citizens (and Daniel is busy doing Experiments on the work crew window anyway, so who even knows what it will look like after we’re done.) Similarly, the code base now correctly picks a random object from the list of items that can fulfill a job instead of just the last one; this has the nice and useful effect of making it so that citizens randomly distribute themselves in buildings to sleep in at nap time, instead of just choosing the last building chosen. David is in the process of sorting out the problem of citizens getting stuck in an infinite loop of burial, which occurs when a bandit corpse somehow thinks it’s at (0,0) on the game map which is usually stuck in a mountain. There is some work going on to make things more consistent, like ensuring that you can consistently cancel jobs and assignments in consistent places with consistent interfaces, that sort of thing.

And then there is the problem of people dropping meat onto forest meat.

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