All posts tagged with "the empire times shall hear of your disgraceful berry picking and starvation"

Choose Your Own Misadventure

First, a note from the Management: The monthly patch has been delayed due to some last-minute stability concerns but we’re working on it and will update you when we’ve got it sorted out. In the meantime we’ve asked Chris to hold the fort with a blog post about some cool stuff he’s been working on over the last month. Over to you Chris!

It’s time for another game balance post! Last time I wrote about immigration, but that’s not the only big game progression change in this month’s patch: we’ve also added Loadouts.

There's some kind of crazy map there too, but don't worry about that just yet.

There’s some kind of mysterious map there too, but don’t worry about that just yet.

For a rather long time we were extremely generous with the materials given to players when they launched a new colony; this was useful for testing hard-to-get-to midgame stuff, and hadn’t been given a serious balance pass since we implemented the idea of starting materials in the first place. However, just as with immigration, we’ve reached a point where it’s necessary to make players have to work for stuff so they can experience more actual gameplay. And that means not giving loads of high-quality materials at start.

With balance comes opportunity, and this was a real fun opportunity; We’ve always wanted players to be able to bring different stuff to their colony depending on their needs, and being that we were in the middle of balancing your starting materials anyway, what better opportunity to try out a bunch of different settings and see what people like? Thus, we set up a system that allows for different starting loadouts that can change values like:

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Posted in Clockwork Empires | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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Choices, choices.

Once again, we are back to knife-fighting in the pit. This is the traditional game design approach at Gaslamp Games; we fight to defend our ideas, using oversized weapons and our bare hands. Recently, however, somebody has been seen fashioning a rudimentary lathe – a troubling development that will either upset the balance of power or be absolutely useless.

So what have we been fighting about? Well, all sorts of things. Today, let’s talk about the AI. The AI Cabal – Nicholas, Chris Whitman, and myself – have been hashing things out, and what we have is a data-driven, XML-based monstrosity that is sure to please everybody. The whole goal of Clockwork Empires’ AI is to provide characters in the game (currently referred to, in-engine, as Citizens, although this is not something that makes David happy; after all, we are a monarchy) with unique, rational, and relatable behaviours. The plan is to start simply, and add layers of complexity to the game until the goals and aspirations of characters appear to the player naturally and gracefully.

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Posted in Clockwork Empires, Game Design, Programming | Tagged , , , , , , ,
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