All posts tagged with "it has been determined that landmines are not in fact “fun”"

Fight or Flight

Colonists are fickle creatures. You must take good care of them or they’ll starve to death. Or join a cult and start murdering for Quag’garoth (as one typically does when left without supervision).

What I’m getting at is that we’ve got quite a challenge in making colonists act like little virtual people. Part of how colonists end up acting is up to how the player manages then, as it should be in this business of interactive media. But the larger part of the iceberg (to our perspective) is making this possible to say nothing of engaging in the first place, and that’s up to how we hook up the pipes behind the scenes to enable colonists to express varied, interesting behaviour based on stimuli which can be observed and often manipulated by the player.

Fishpeople hate landmines.

Fishpeople hate landmines.

A sprawling example I’ve been dealing with lately is how to make colonists respond to danger. Fight or flight, easy, right? Well …

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Keep Our Troops At The Front Firing!

In other words: Ammunition. (Because we know that everyone loves counting bullets.)

Herschel Boot knows what's important.

Herschel Boot knows what’s important. (Mind the Errant Viscera.)

But no, it isn’t about counting bullets and shouldn’t be. Let’s back up the discussion a step and deal with –

Why Ammunition?

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What Would You Say You Do Here?

An overview, with examples, of actual game development I’ve been doing with very few silly jokes.

Daniel has suggested that the fine readers of our humble development blog would not be so interested in the finer points of small business accounting even though it is utterly essential to our ongoing operations. Nor, he contended, would something so removed as a personal “Clockwork Empires Reading List” actually be relevant to the nitty-gritty of development as-such. Indeed, it is not always easy coming up with something to write here as many, many needs must be somehow balanced and the same goes for this.

I suspect, somehow, that a changelog direct from out SVN would not be helpful, though it contains gems (each an individual SVN commit entry) such as:

5836 – work*

5798 – fixing stew**

5796 -Making laudanum and sulphur tonic should theoretically work (when modules are fixed)***

* It was a vague day, one supposes.

Choose wisely.

Choose wisely.

** It works now. Before, stew was a valid ingredient for itself. This is in fact Realistic but also Not Useful for the purposes of game logic.

*** This is a valid sentence, as “should theoretically work” refers to both “making laudanum” and “sulphur tonic”. The description is incorrect however, in that just the making of these things should work; the Sulphur Tonic does not actually work.****

**** It was observed in a design discussion that the Sulphur Tonic should not actually work, just that it should cause people to think that it worked. This is a valid game mechanic in Clockwork Empires. I recall also Daniel wrestling with the problem of making people not go mad when they consume human flesh if they don’t know it’s human flesh when they eat it.

See the things we have to deal with?

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