All posts tagged with "development"

Technical Director Vining Versus THE VOID

A bug that’s been in the game for awhile, and which some of you may have encountered (albeit very rarely) is the following peculiar circumstance: You start the game, you load up a new map… and suddenly, everything slowly starts to drift into the corner of the map. Finally, you end up with a giant frothing mass of dodos, and colonists, and monsters and who knows what else stuck in one corner of the map, apparently unable to move.

For those of you who haven’t seen it, you end up with the following scenario (screenshot thanks to a forum user):

20160917165146_1

So… what in the world causes this mess?

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Posted in Clockwork Empires | Tagged , , , , ,
3 Comments

Pre-Alpha Testing Has Commenced (Whatever That Is)

The grim realities of testing.

Well, it’s started.  A very small number of builds have gone out into the wild, with minimal functionality, as part of a systems compatibility test.  We have disabled pretty much everything but getting people to keep themselves alive, and some ramifications for not doing so, the least of which probably being death.  Again, the possibility space is very limited with this build so we can focus on the really important stuff like hardware compatibility.

We will gradually be enabling features on the builds that are in the wild, and at the same time increasing the number of participants in our Experiments.  If you’re interested in participating, please sign up for “testing” via the mailing list at ClockworkEmpires.com – I promise we won’t send you any news you don’t sign up for (we hate it when people do that, so we’re not going to be those people).

Posted in Clockwork Empires | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
21 Comments

What’s New In Programmertown?

The best part of game development, for me at least, is when everything suddenly starts working. Quite often, there is a critical mass of code that you end up writing for a game, and then – in the span of a week, or even days – you go from “everything is hideously broken and we’re going to die” to “Oh, this might be fun.” We’re right on the cusp of that right now; programming has seen some setbacks this week, mainly due to an outbreak of flu that has consumed the office. Nonetheless, we’ve been hard at work here in Programmertown, trying to get all the excellent artwork and ridiculous designs that people have come up with integrated into the game as quickly and efficiently as possible. Once again, let us take a tour through my folder of wonderful work-in-progress screenshots.

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Posted in Clockwork Empires | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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Clockwork Empires: PC Gamer Interview, minor FAQ, & other such foolishness

(If you haven’t seen it yet, get yourself up to steam on the scuttlebutt surrounding Clockwork Empires with the PC Gamer preview: Clockwork Empires: a preview of Gaslamp Games’ Lovecraft-laden steampunk city-builder).

Interview

The good people at PC Gamer were also brave enough to interview the Gaslamp partners on the subject of Clockwork Empires: Interview: Gaslamp Games’ mad, incredible vision for Clockwork Empires

Various developers have been spotted on Clockwork Empires threads on the Bay 12 forums, Quarter to Three forums, and the SomethingAwful forums to answer your Burning Questions. Delighted minds are encouraged to round up the best responses and post them somewhere so we don’t have to.

Mini-FAQ

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Posted in Clockwork Empires, Interviews | Tagged , , , , , , , , , ,
16 Comments

An update on updates, Workshops and workshops.

Communication is starting to get tough.  We want to tell you guys about the brand new patch that has a bunch of awesome things in it, but it’s not quite ready.  I can tell you about one thing that we haven’t told you yet though, regarding mods.  I also want to talk about our lack of communication regarding the state of Odin.

First, Mods.  We want to give the mod community a chance to get these fantastic creations in the hands of more people, get more feedback happening, more collaboration, and more generally awesome stuff coming out for people to play with.  To do this, we are piloting a project with Valve and the Steam Workshop platform.  Users will be able to search for mods, comment on them, rate and share them.  The forum will still be here and we will do everything we can to make sure that the mods are available for non-steam users as well, but they have built this fantastic tool, it would be a shame not to use it to let people share content more easily.  Details on how you guys can access the tools for this below.

We also want to tell you all about our new project: the real name of Project Odin, some screen shots that we have been working on, and answer any questions you might have about how it’s not a tower defence game.  The reason we haven’t done this quite yet is that we need to make sure we’re doing things right: registering trademarks, copyrighting what we can, and all that other stuff that keeps games from being duplicated before they’re finished.  It’s lame, I know.  It’s also a big enough problem that it deserves a bit of our time.  We didn’t do a lot of this stuff before Dredmor’s release, and we were lucky that it wasn’t a problem.  I’d rather that we didn’t have to be lucky again.  We are all really excited about this project, and it’s killing us to have to wait to tell you.  Trust me, game development is way easier when you get to talk about it.

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Posted in Dungeons of Dredmor, Gaslamp | Tagged , , , , , ,
9 Comments

A bit more of Dredmor 1.0.7 and beyond

The 1.0.7 beta should be going out to you Steam users with beta access in the next day or two [edit- or Monday for sure; whenever it gets pushed to Steam], provided little else explodes. We’ll keep you posted.

This screen gave me some trouble as you can see. The challenges I faced only grew from this point.

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Posted in Dungeons of Dredmor | Tagged , , , , , ,
33 Comments

So I hear you like a large interface

Here you may see a new display option for Dredmor's UI in the upcoming 1.0.6 patch. It's the little things.

Posted in Dungeons of Dredmor | Tagged , , , , ,
5 Comments

The Roadmap

Here’s a transcription of what Nick posted on the forums earlier today (just to get people to maybe check out our shiny new toy), we’ll endeavor to keep the blog the de-facto “news” source.

I’ve been directed to post some interesting stuff on the forums about what we’re doing next, in order to get as many new people using them as we can. So that said, here’s the plan going forwards, courtesy of today’s company meeting. (Which did, in fact, involve swords.)

– 1.0.6: Linux support and a handful of the more interesting things that need to be fixed. I’d like to get this to the beta testers by Monday. I’d like to do it earlier, but the first part of the week is consumed by rubbish Real Life Stuff. So we’ll see what happens.

– 1.0.7: More fixes, and the introduction of a Super Secret Thing that we’ve… well, I may have talked about it before, and I wanted it to get in for the original game, but I didn’t. So I think we’ll put it in for 1.0.7. Again, I’d like a turnaround of about a week, a week and a half.

– 1.0.8: If necessary, more fixes. This patch may not exist, depending on where we set our cutoffs for 1.0.6 and 1.0.7. Hopefully, we get the female character in by this point.

– 1.1.0: Mod support, including bumping all the strings out of the EXE and into an XML file for the usage of various translation teams. (We have a *really* cool translation announcement coming up later this week, by the way.)

and then various support patches for 1.1.0 moving forward.

There is also the little matter of an expansion pack. Gaslamp as a company – and myself, personally – are universally opposed to charging you for things that should be in the core game. We’re committed to fixing every single one of the one hundred and forty-nine issues in the bugtracker for Dredmor, and we will keep adding more Stuff to the core game every time we send out a patch, so that you always get a little something extra.

We don’t want to try to sell you 99 cent horse armour, either. That’s just… lame.

That said, people have actually *asked* us for an expansion pack, so we have to make one. We think we have a concept for an expansion pack that does justify being spun off to a paid expansion, as opposed to being Horse Armour or Eyebrow Wigs or whatever, and we will be moving on this front as soon as we are happy with the state of the core game. (That is to say, Not Yet. Not For A Long Time Yet.) In typical Gaslamp fashion, said expansion pack will probably be about the price of a package of potato chips. Crawl players will like it. It also won’t be anything you couldn’t put in yourself with the mod support, so in effect we will be putting up an Officially Sanctioned Mod and inviting you to buy it from us. I think this is a reasonable policy. I have no idea when this will be done, either. If I had to pull an estimate out of my posterior, I would guess six months or so. It’ll mainly be frontloading on the art side and less on the code side, and will be something that the company will collectively move on after 1.1.0.

There should also be an announcement about Merch in a few weeks. Buy Merch. BUY MERCH.

So that’s the roadmap going forwards. Questions? Comments? Let us know! That’s what we’re here for.

Posted in Dungeons of Dredmor, Modding | Tagged , , , ,
29 Comments