A Fishperson raider driven to violence by the plundering of their young for food rushes from the fog to beat a colonist with a coral club. Their fellow Fishperson-raider, a few steps behind, fires a spikegun with a ‘pop’. The terrified colonist falls over dead. The Fishperson with the club pauses at this, then turns and runs from the corpse in horror, back into the fog.
Watery vengeance!
I didn’t anticipate this, though I wrote the script that made it happen: Seeing the corpse they created by killing the colonist pushed the Fishperson over the morale threshold that flips a switch that makes the fleeing behaviour much more likely. I had thought to simply have Fishpeople become demoralized by seeing other dead fellow-Fishpeople, but it was triggered by any humanoid corpse at all. A small mistake, but a really cool effect because it implies that these Fishpeople are not merely “the goblins of Clockwork Empires” but people of a sort that may, in their way, sympathize with your colonists. — Just so, sympathy is the goal of the latest efforts to increase the complexity of Fishpeople to start becoming more than ‘enemies’. Once enough features are fleshed out enough, perhaps they can become friends, albeit creepy fishy friends with some funny ideas about how things work and a penchant for inducting their land-based friends into the ways of The Deeps.
No one’s perfect.
Building A Better World Through Video Game Violence
To cut right to the point, the questions I’ve been asking myself surround the role violence plays in the tone of Clockwork Empires.To start: I don’t believe that violence for its own sake is interesting or desirable because, well, it’s unpleasant. Unpleasantness, however, definitely has a use in the aesthetic and narrative experiences that games explore (- to say that games are just about “fun” misses so much of what is going on in them!)
So let’s dive in.
Things that can happen.
The Clockwork Empires frontier is not a peaceful, gentle place and it’s important that we express to players that there are terrible, terrible consequences for Knowing What Should Not Be Known, Digging Too Greedily And Too Deep, or simple things like “not planning a stable food supply” or basic colonial defense. Things happen.
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