So instead of the big Technical Status Update, which we’ll probably do next week, let’s look at a very small slice of life that makes a big difference. A lot of people ask me what it’s like doing game development, as a day-to-day process as opposed to the big picture; this is a good example of what it’s actually like on a given day, what graphics programmer thought processes are like, and so on and so forth. Also, I’ve included the picture of a tortoise next to a pile of ammunition that David refused to last week.

One of the things that I did recently was to fix the shadow code up a bit. Shadow code, you may recall, was one of the first things I did for CE, simply so I could figure out where people’s feet were. We rendered a shadow map from a fixed view point, and so you got chunkies like this:

Note that this picture looks fine – until you zoom up close, at which point you’ll see the problem. Shadow artifacts like that occur when the shadow map in question – which is basically a texture – stretches so that more than one pixel on the screen are covered by the same texel of lighting information. The end result was that – in addition to the chunky artifacts you see on the rim of the shadow, as you moved around the map close up, shadows would shimmer like a heatwave as you moved about the map. The first type of artifact can be described (loosely) as spatial aliasing; the second type of artifact is what I would call temporal aliasing (that only appears when you move.)

The general solution is to implement what are called Cascaded Shadow Maps, where you have multiple shadow maps in a big stack; areas of the screen that are closer to you are rendered in one shadow map, areas further away are rendered in another one, etc. Well, that’s no use for CE; everything on screen is about the same distance from you at all times.

I didn’t want to just change the zoom level of the shadow map as you zoomed in with the mouse wheel. In particular, I worried that it would be a shimmering mess of jaggies that would look awful, just awful, when you zoomed in and out; in other words, we’d be replacing one sort of aliasing with another sort of aliasing. I considered more and more dramatic solutions, including having enormous shadow maps that we updated sporadically and doing all kinds of other wacky stuff, until finally I wondered if the temporal aliasing caused by just zooming in and out on the shadow map would really be all that bad.

In fact, it was totally fine. Shadows now look like this:

with no noticeable change in performance, and look just fine zoomed out as well. If I had to name a reason why this works, I’d say that any possible changes in which sample we pull from the texture as we zoom in and out are masked by the small 9-tap percentage closer filtering we use on our shadow maps to give them nice, soft edges.

Moral of the story: good programmers challenge their assumptions constantly.

When all is quiet, the Rubbish Beetles scurry from their burrows and perform the duties Nature has seen fit to assign to them.

Continuing forthwith: All et up from that tin of Doctor E. Sanin’s Patent Tinned Meat* Slurry Product? Just toss it aside with nary a care. Divested the shipping crate of its contents of finely enameled bric-a-brac (including a set of commemorative plates featuring portraits of our fine Prime Minister)? Toss it on the heap with the rest of the rubbish. The world provides its obviously limitless bounty to us to be used, dear reader!

Ms. Tortoise (centre bottom) is unimpressed by progress on the new Autopneumatic Lumborium while Edwina Cogwright (centre left) is confused by the floating mechanical eye looking down on her.

In darker news, rumours surrounding the matter of shadows appearing, as Mr. Zedekiah Swinglever’s letter to the Empire Times put it, “most vexingly angular and wrongly geometried” is in perfectly capable hands. It is had on good Authority that Her Majesty’s Ministry for Investigation into Affairs of the Unnatural & Occult has one Mr. Nicholas Vining – an expert in theories & applications of matters pertaining to Luminous Aether – consulting in the investigation into what is clearly a Cultist conspiracy.

We are assured that the issue will be resolved before the week is out and that any cultist rioters, labourist agitators, or suspected Republique Mechanique spies will be shot.  Cog save the Queen!

Not an in-engine screenshot.

We’ve all played lots of games and almost all of them are about combat in one way or another so this seems like it should be a fairly straightforward problem to solve. But CE is not like most games; Not at all. Combat is not the central game mechanic and focus for the game, merely one possible component in a much larger system. It can’t be allowed to take over the game and unduly tax a player’s attention, nor should it be irrelevant or some kind of tacked-on side-game as seems to be the pitfall of combat systems for a number of classic city-builder games. In CE, combat should tie in with as many other game systems as possible so that it supports the other mechanics in play and in doing so enriches the overall experience. Simple enough, eh!

With those requirements in mind I tried to sum up CE’s take on combat in a sentence: “Combat should be slow, mostly positional, and have its outcome determined by supply and setup instead of tactical micromanagement.”

The pace shall be deliberately slow so a player can take the time to properly assess the effects of their decisions and have time to adapt their strategy to failures. (And besides a slower pace, the game can be paused outright in the manner of tactical combat in classics like Baldur’s Gate or Darklands.) Outcome determined by supply and setup instead of moment-to-moment Starcraft-style micromanagement means decisions most important to the outcome of combat can be made well ahead of time. This makes it a game of strategy over tactics, and tactics over twitch. To further that point, as is proper in a city-builder game, thoughtful positioning is everything: just as it’s important where the mines are built in relation to the middle class housing and the metalworks, just so it is important to be mindful of the placement of your defensive wall, the artillery squad, and Steam Knight patrols. Rather than a reflex AWP shot, think of it more like gardening, albeit bristling with barbed wire and Redcoats.

The Chain of Command & Command Disposition

Mjr. General Ogden Cogsbold’s timid manner is reflected in the behaviour of the entire regional military.

Clockwork Empires is a game about characters, not just the cold mechanics of supply chains and industry. Therefore the character of your soldiers must be essential to the outcome of combat. In the post about overseers and work crews it was implied that the character of an overseer is reflected in the performance of the work crew they lead. It’s just the same for military squads with NCO and officer leadership of military squads having an even greater effect which we call “Command Disposition”. And I daresay, the hierarchical theme of top-down leadership fits nicely into 19th century military doctrine.

Now, the Command Disposition — in addition to how a squad is manned — can act a bit like scripting orders for squads like some kind of really lightweight version of Dominions 3 tactical combat. Assign a bookish and stubborn NCO to a squad and they’ll tend to be defensive and stick to their trenches. Assign an aggressive, violently-inclined NCO to the same squad and they become more likely to order a bayonet charge against the enemy. There’s a bit more to it than that of course; equipment has an effect, so Steam Armour equipped squads will be used for the role of assaulting defenses and artillery equipped squads will stay back and merrily bombard the enemy.

(I will also admit here that the random leader personality trait generation of Paradox‘s Victoria as well as Hearts of Iron III’s command structure system have had a good bit of effect on my thinking.)

It is worth stating of course that the personalities and interactions of characters is a whole system unto itself which has effects that are felt in combat which is a subject which deserves a post of its own.

Managing Defeat

For many combat games, once the sequential play-through has its reloads trimmed off, the timeline looks like a straight line of victory after victory after victory. The player has power over some kind of quantum multiverse which allows them to select the timeline in which they won every battle. In contrast, we want players of Clockwork Empires to be able to fail, but we want it to be a rewarding experience to fail. As we keep saying in interviews, “Things going spectacularly wrong makes a great story.” Remember the Alamo, the Charge of the Light Brigade, the Battle of Isandlwana, and Dredmor’s planned release date!

Defeat should be a bloody good story. A player who keeps a stiff upper lip and endures defeat should be rewarded with narrative richness. And that said, we game designers should be nice enough not to punish them by making their entire game collapse because a squad of soldiers had a bad day. So we must soften defeat from the traditional red mist and bone chips model that’s had such a strong tradition in games.

So: Combat won’t be a meat-grinder. The Starcraft-style RTS has its soldiers eagerly fighting to the death – and always to the death. In CE an individual character’s willingness to fight affects whether they will actually stick around to fight. Sometimes a coward is a coward, but a player can stack the odds in their favour by choosing the right military leadership, setting their squads in good defensive positions, keeping troops well supplied, and doing everything else they can to keep moods positive.

Concepts for field fortifications based on American Civil War era gabions which I spelled “galbion” and know is incorrect so no one has to correct my spelling now, thanks.

It must be said that with all the character-driven action in mind, there’s very much a balance to be struck between characters’ willingness to follow orders and the player being able to actually play the game in any meaningful sense. This goes for civilians as well because if your lumberjacks are more interested in dancing jigs and drinking gin than ever getting to work, this game is going to get really frustrating.

Pictured: Steam Knight pulling on invisible rope.

Back to the subject of defeat: Even victory can be made expensive to slow down runaway success. Combat actions wear down characters’ stamina, and suppressing fire saps willingness to act – perhaps in the manner of Jagged Alliance 2 in which suppressing fire would actually reduce action points. When in a tight spot, buy some time with ammunition! (Though supplies are limited and must be properly restocked.) Further, the best combat positions are of course immobile defensive works in the grand tradition of something between the American Civil War and World War 1. Anything strong enough to punch through those static defenses, be it artillery batteries or Steam Knights, requires a solid supply of fuel and munitions which in turn requires careful use of terrain, guarded flanks, and measured advances. (By the way, these logistical themes are explored elegantly in Unity of Command. Hi Tomislav!)

Not pictured: the Lightning Gun.

Right! Well, there’s more to it than all that: equipment, types of soldiers, the exact personality traits which affect combat, types of units via squad equipment attachments, the role of armour and artillery and static defenses, psychological effects of combat, and of course how the heck the UI for all of this is going to work. It’s all very early in the design process and what we’ve got here is largely a statement of goals & high-level plans for how to meet those goals using the other systems in the game as a framework. The details are very much subject to iteration as the game hits testing so there’s not much use in getting into the gritty specifics. But in all I hope this has given you an idea about where we’re planning to go with combat in Clockwork Empires.

Q. What, no cavalry? A. Not on horses, no. The Gaslamp Way does not involve doing anything so mundane. Plus it’s actually really hard to animate horse cavalry properly in limited space. The Mount & Blade or perhaps Total War series are about the closest you’re likely to get at this point. That said, keep in mind: Nothing So Mundane As That.

Q. Are there tanks? A. Of course, because what else would Steam Knights keep their high-pressure steam in? (Surely you’re not referring to those burdensome Stahlmarkian Landkreuzers?)

Q. Can you fight your friends in multiplayer? A. Naturally, and didn’t we cover this already? Every Gaslamp Games Press Release is Totally Serious About Everything.

Welcome to another edition of The Gaslamp Games Games Development Weekly Heliograph Circulation. Today we discuss the manner in which the Middle Class is employed to oversee the labours of the Labouring Class by means of organization through the newest methods of Scientific Management.

We shall demonstrate this week’s study in the field. First, a sampling of tools has been laid in careful rows on the ground. Each tool is associated with certain Jobs, as documented by our associates of the Royal Society of The Clockwork Empire for Improving Natural Knowledge, Misters Vining & Whitman (which you may recall have recently described various phenomena including studies on Plebeian Collision Avoidance In The Common Mob & an investigation into so-called “Animal Jobs”).

So, proceeding: tools at-hand, the Colonial Bureaucrat must initiate action by stamping a properly filled work order which designates a site on the landscape. This task can range from “Chop Trees” to “Flatten Land” to “Find Nature” (wherever it’s hiding). This order is then directed to a work party overseer (who is implicitly of the Middle Class and therefore of correct Station to command a group of Lower Class labourers). The work party overseer’s squad collects tools fit to their assigned task while the overseer heads directly to the work site.

In the heliotype below we see a work crew gathering axes for their “Chop Trees” task:

A feller needs a chopper that’ll hack it. (Meanwhile, the only tool the Overseer needs is Management Skills.)

Don’t mind the Wrong shadows of those flowers; That’s obviously the work of cultists. You’re not a cultist, right? Right, good. So pay them no mind. Every loyal Subject of the Empire sees only what they need to see to perform their Duty, so help them Cog, hip hip huzzah and all that.

Equipped with proper tools, the work crew proceeds to the designated copse. The overseer begins the task of hand-waving — the essence of management — while the labourers get to the chopping.

“Umm we need these trees all chopped down so if you could go ahead and come in on Saturday that’d be great.”

Indeed, our sample case in no mere anecdote. The entire range of toiling can be described & efficiently executed by means of this new method of Scientific Management.

Take for another example the flattening of land: the chaotic encrustings, crude hills, and savage mountains of Nature must be cleared and prepared by hand for proper Civilizing by means of vast constructions of factories, roads, tenements, walls, and pipes! Observe in the heliotype below the collecting of shovels by a work party named “The Pleasant Flies” for some unknowable reason:

Steampunk Charles Darwin oversees the collection of shovels for certain Digging Experiments.

And look at our boys go! The vigours of frontier life are a sight indeed and their fruits shall enrich our Betters while, surely, embiggening the spirits of all.

A great trench is dug; Naturalist looks on vacantly from exceedingly & increasingly awkward vantage point.

To review our Study:

1. A work party is overseen by a Middle Class person whose relevant skills influence the disposition & efficiency of the tasks being carried out by each labourer.
2. Jobs for work parties are created by the Colonial Bureaucrat.
3. Labourers will see to their own collection and use of appropriate tools to the task assigned to them.
4. Hip hip huzzah and all that.
5. It is important to chop down all the trees, tear down every mountain, fill in every valley, and cover the world with Progress.

TODAYS BUG: There’s a Hole In The World

Upon firing up the current build, and er, stepping from the research zeppelin? Something something. Regardless, I was confronted with an irregular black void, a Scar on the face of the World. It sat there, being-not, doing nothing, filled with nothing. I peered in to see only blackness staring back, accusingly.

Don’t look directly at it!

I sent the above heliotype attached to a report of the phenomenon to one Mr. C. Whitman (suspected Wizard, freelance), hoping he perchance knew of some method of magicking the fabric of the world back together before anything comes out from this Void — or the Investigators catch wind of this. That wouldn’t do at all. It’s such a fine colony we’re building, it’d be a shame if it had to be burned to the ground all over again to root out cultists.

Emigrate to Inviting and Delightful shores of Pristine WEST ANTIPODIA untouched by Civilization & Cog-fearing subjects; Vast PROPERTIES await Discovery Taming and Exploitation by Enterprising & Energetic Persons of Business & Family yearning for Open Land and the famed Vigors provided by the Savage Airs of

COLONIAL ANTIPODIA.

Dear reader, do forgive this writer’s indulgence in excited quotations, but our bored copy-clerk producing grist for his Pewterbolt & Daughter Automated Typesetter must in turn be forgiven his Penchant For Flights of Imaginative Fancy, for he knows only a small gray desk in a small brick office in one of the more homely quarters of The Capitol. Yet this clerk dreams of a transformative life on the wild Open Frontier; Why, in such a life a humble office clerk might remake himself in the crucible of the Sublime! It is among the higher callings heard by those who go to the Colonies.

This is not his story, however, for it may be presumed that he remained a humble copy-clerk for many years.

The clockwork of our narrative is driven by one of Mme. Cordelia Philomena Tinsrife who, at the time of these events, held the title of Chief Bureaucrat of the Royal Charted Colony of New Sodbury Market.

She was a decorated veteran, a former sergeant hardened in battle by many conflicts on the Frontiers, including the most formative and ultimate experience in her career to do with “The Unpleasantness At Tarsmoke Fells” which we of course know is Not Spoken Of. Nonetheless, without Speaking Of It, medals were awarded to the few survivors and each was politely but firmly asked to Never Speak Of It Again cheerio each must do their duty good show Cog Save The Queen and all that why not sign on with the Royal Charter South-Southwest Antipodian Trading Company? Why, they’ve need of solid soldierly folk like yourself in their ranks it’s a grand opportunity if I daresay and one might not expect to find much better what with the way things turned out (punctuated here by a Very Deliberate Look given by the Investigating Commissioner over lowered spectacles) and so forth.

We must credit Mme. Cordelia Philomena Tinsrife for she took that sound advice from the Investigating Commissioner and sought her fortune & career with the Royal Charter South-Southwest Antipodian Trading Company.

Let us travel together, dear reader, on the steam-locomotive, coal-burning airship, & turbine-propelled sea-steamer of Imagination. We fly from that stuffy little office in The Capitol past the great booming Engines of Wealth and Progress bellowing forth that happy Smoke of Industry, across the verdant home counties Improved by the latest Acts of Enclosure & construction of Great Mills astride each river, to the gray sea crashing under the rust-red cliffs & their sanguine effluvia we love so dearly and then away from our native shores across the Oceans on journeys of days turned to weeks.

We set the scene of Mme. Cordelia Philomena Tinsrife’s assignment from The Company on one somewhat harried bluff selected for its commanding presence above those “inviting and delightful shores of pristine West Antipodia”. The hinterland forests are not quite so “untouched by Civilization” as they were that day the Royal Charter South-Southwest Antipodian Trading Company established its latest enterprise of New Sodbury Market, but they are still impressive nonetheless and provide valuable timber for the Empire.

It must be noted at this point, dear reader, that there was and is no market established in New Sodbury Market – no, not yet – but one cannot but admire the spirited ambition our settlers established in a stroke of Mme. Cordelia Philomena Tinsrife’s pen.

And just so Mme. Tinsrife occupied herself from the hours of six ’til four on each day in her office, a right and proper place for a bureaucrat, flanked by cabinets of files and papers, smelling of ink and wax and all the reassuring reagents of her craft. Entrenched so, she stamped and signed and sent-away-for all the good things which a bureaucrat summons from the body of our great Empire: shining copper plates, clever & intricate machine parts, fortified brandy, chemical explosives, matched boots (forty pair), brass fittings, a sampling of the latest in fashionable hats, sheets of tempered glass, pungent sacks of coffee (50 stn.), and all the multitudes & the many things the growing colony of New Sodbury Market required.

“Madam! It’s, I do apologize madam, it’s -but there’ve been events most troubling!”

Mr. Gideon Millchock, assistant clerk to the Colony’s Chief Bureaucrat, had burst through the door of the office of Mme. Tinsrife, setting forth a gust of that Vigorous Air which in turn upset certain consignment orders leaving the Business of the Empire slightly askew and smudged with ink. Mme. Tinsrife lowered her spectacles and gave the wheezing Gideon Millchock a Very Deliberate Look.

Gideon continued, uncowed: “I — sightings, Madam, Mister Brazenton’s workparty? Timber duty? They’ve reported sightings, Madam. Sightings!”

Mr. Gideon Millchock wrung his large hands as if they were a beached sea serpent tangled with itself and gasping its last and generally in a manner most Annoying and Low to Mme. Tinsrife’s eye.

“What manner of sightings, Mr. Millchock, the details of the matter please.” said Mme. Tinsrife.

“You, ma’am, but not you. And me, but not me, with a party of soldiers and labourers.” said he.

Gideon proceeded to describe a meeting of Brazenton’s work-party with himself-but-not-himself as well as her-but-not-her, dressed oddly in garb not befitting their proper Profession (though Brazenton had not inquired for it might give to unseemly Implication). Much confusion was had for these doubles claimed to be from a Royal Chartered Colony just over the hill and inquired quite forcibly what Brazenton was doing in the middle of what was clearly indicated to be Uncharted Wilds in the Zone of Exclusive Exploitation granted to the Royal Charter South-Southwest Antipodian Trading Company.

Amidst the argument, Brazenton managed to have a runner sent, hence Gideon’s interruption.

Mme. Tinsrife frowned, for this was feeling like just the sort of thing which was Never Spoke Of Again. But duty is duty and Cog Save The Queen and The Glory Of The Empire and all that; forms must be filled and once questions are raised they must answered.

“Gideon, send for Sgt. Bellwethers. Have him assemble his squad and accompany us to meet these… visitors. Now, if you please.”

As you know, dear reader, it is The Bureaucratic Act – of putting seal to official writ – by which things are made Real in the Empire. This Reality is the Truth of Ministries and Notes and Records and Documents confirmed as real as is ever to be needed to any Cog-fearing subject of The Queen in this Modern Age of Empirical Discovery and Scientific Order which rests the solemn weight of Knowledge in Recorded Facts. By writ and seal the Empire is Built!

But, it must be conceded, it is by musket & cannon that the Empire is Kept. This Mme. Tinsrife knew very well.

Cordelia, if we may be forgiven presuming a rapid familiarity with the primary subject of our narrative, pulled open the drawer of her bureau and drew forth her old service revolver. She brushed the stack of consignment forms to one side and took a moment to re-check the oiled clockwork of the pistol. The device – a Coalburn Royal Arms patented 4-shot revolver – had served her well in the Siege of Kolesograd and saved her life, though not her military career, during the events the Times had referred to obliquely as the “Unpleasantness at Tarsmoke Fells”.

It should be noted here, dear reader, that while the Empire Writes the Real, it too can Unwrite what it deems Ought Not Be; notably to our narrative Certain Events at Tarsmoke Fells & any hope of Cordelia Philomena Tinsrife’s having a future in the Army. She knows this very well too. But in a small act of rebellion she remembers to herself what happened there, years ago. It is Real to her alone, at least, for she has Written it all down in a very small diary hidden beneath the floorboards of her accommodation, just in front of her cabinet of dishware & teas. Do not worry on her behalf, dear reader, for her secret rebellion is quite safe between your treasured company and this writer.

Cordelia loaded four cartridges into the Coalburn then rose from her desk to begin a proper Investigation.

[CONCLUDES PART 1 OF A Troubling Account of Doubles in Certain Regions of Colonial Antipodia FROM THE SECURE ARCHIVES OF HRM'S MINISTRY OF INVESTIGATION INTO MATTERS OF THE OCCULT & EXTRAPLANAR AFFAIRS, PREPARED BY LIEUTENANT-INSPECTOR EZEKIAL LELAND STEELBOLT]

When last we left the programming team, I think I mentioned that Chris Whitman was working on Animals. Well, we now have Animals. The Common Aurochs wanders the fields and streams alongside its more robust wooly cousin and the occasional family of plump deer.

Shadow Aurochs brood mooily in darker portions of the landscape.

Aurochs and deer travel about in herds, and will look for food. A large part of their behaviour comes from ‘not wanting to move to new areas where there are things that they don’t like, namely humans’; by default, wild aurochs and deer will attempt to avoid humans and civilization. Since animals do ‘Animal Jobs’, or as Mr. Whitman put it, ‘Animal… Jobs?’, we extended this system to provide a preference for, or against, things that your in-game population may like or may not like. For instance, it is possible that a work crew’s overseer does not like aurochs all that much, and therefore will look less favourably on jobs that will put him near the smelly things.

Characters also got the start of rudimentary steering functions. Here we see forty characters aimlessly wandering around without tasks:

Here is a scene consisting of one hundred and fifty characters, moving from place to place, at about twenty frames per second:

I’ve turned on character steering debugging mode, which shows velocities (cyan), paths (green), and collision spheres (green, or red if colliding). Characters forward project their velocities using swept spheres to try and evaluate if there is a collision; if so, they will attempt to move away from things. They also try to maintain good separation from each other in general, similar to standard flocking algorithms. Right now things still need tuning, but characters in general make a pretty good attempt at steering around each other when they are about to collide. I expect I will end up spending more time on it as the game progresses.

It is worth noting that the 150 characters are all fully simulated, and will do things like feed themselves, perform tasks such as tree chopping and building creation, and generally bumble about from place to place. We are far from done optimizing – in particular, character skinning still occurs on the CPU – but this makes me feel pretty good about the game’s eventual performance.

Mr. Whitman has also been busy working on what we should call ‘dependency resolution’ – making characters smart enough to put things in stockpiles if stockpiles exist, putting things not in stockpiles if there are no stockpiles or no full stockpiles, and generally knowing what to do with themselves when they’ve picked up something. Jobs now have requirements blocks, and lists of requirements that they fill; if a character wants to do a job, but has to do another job to fill a requirement of their first job, they will now do so.

We now support Fog of War, like your favourite RTS games:

“We really need you to find that rock.”

Here we see a naturalist attempting to reach a pre-determined exploration point, designated by the small rock in the corner. (We’re using rocks to represent order points as a placeholder.) Orders are a new type of command you can issue to specify that you want somebody to do something at a certain geographical location that is not tied to an object, a building, or a person; examples of orders include “Explore”, “Flatten Terrain”, “Perform Geological Survey” and “Search for Nature”. Quite likely this will expand to include certain types of military operations, and other things.

We also put in some things from Creepy Week… but we’re not ready to show them to you yet.

The rest of the month looks to be occupied with workshops, building, and events. Exciting times! We’ll keep you posted.

You will note at the end that we give a new, intended approximate release date. We’ve decided to push our intended release date for CE back a bit, from “late this year” to “early next year”, around February/March 2014. Simply put, this is a large game and we need more time to do a good job of it and make it fun. (Also, we don’t want to compete with a bunch of console launch dates.) We hope you guys understand, and we promise the game will be better as a result.

Sunday.

Daniel: Got in late in the afternoon, haggered after attempting to move myself to Vancouver (unsuccessfully) in 2 days by cramming everything in a minivan.  Bought the most expensive public transit pass of my life for a 1-way trip to downtown ($9!  thanks Bart).  Found hotel, collapsed in a heap until the other guys arrived, then we went to eat dinner at the restaurant that David dubbed “Fleshy’s Steakhouse.”

Nicholas: Went for dinner – to the steakhouse in the hotel lobby, which was good and featured a great deal of bourbon. David watching me eat steak tartare, with a mixture of fascination and revulsion, will haunt me for about the next two weeks.

Vowed to put Fleshy’s Steakhouse in Clockwork Empires.

A Yellow Obleskian Monolithic terrifies the conference attendees.

Monday.

Daniel: Watched some talks given by indies and AI teams doing squad shooters trying to get some ideas for squad tactics in CE.  Some neat stuff there, and if we ever get back to Dredmor development the XCOM AI system would work very neatly there.

Ran into Tomislav Uzelac of Unity of Command – awesome guy!  We had lunch, griped about troubles with distribution and getting funding for games.  I believe this is the point where I drenched myself in steaming hot coffee and seriously scalded my left hand.  The coffee shop would later be dubbed “The Burning Hand”, and for some strange reason, I kept going back.

Nicholas: Watched more AI talks. In particular, the “future of AI” talk was interesting; the first half of the AI talk was about our message-passing system (well, somebody else’s version of it) and the second half of the AI talk was about our utility function system. The animation talk for the new Hitman game was both invigorating and terrifying, because we don’t have an animation controller yet.

Snuck into the Sony PS3 indie event. I was going to go crash another party (the IGN one) but I collapsed, in a heap, with mysterious chills.

I woke up later, trying to find somebody for dinner, at 10 PM. My good friend Avery, formerly of Popcap and now at, uh, Z2? – was up for it. Dinner, however, turned into “Drinks.” Drinks turned into “Drinks at the Goth Club. And dancing.” So that happened at “Death Guild” at the DNA Lounge. It was good. We ended up going for pancakes at 4 in the morning, and talking about the secrets of life and death.

Chris Dykstra, our business manager, found a note on his door when he arrived at the hotel: “Gone networking at goth club. Please wake for breakfast.”

David next to a statue of Transdimensional Zombie Reagan.

Tuesday.

Daniel: Met Jurie Horneman!  We talked about how weird it is trying to find a job title that makes sense in an indie studio.  Had a salad, sat in a great park near the conference with Jurie, Tomislav, Nicholas, David, and some new friends and talked about transmitting mechanical force over distances.

At this point I think we sneaked into a major “Announce Party” from a gigantic game publisher and drank as much of their beer as we could before we hurried out to a gathering of game developers at a weirdly awesome bar.  We left when the people dressed as lobsters got on stage.

Nicholas: Somewhere in here we also went to the Spacechem talk, which was awesome. Zach probably has worse tutorials than we do. Another networking event took us back to the DNA Lounge, where we would spend three nights in a row out of a possible five. David ate vegan pizza at the DNA lounge’s attached pizza shop, and felt good about it.

The pizza was named after Morrisey. Or possibly Sting.

Daniel: Oh yeah, Zach!  That guy is awesome, you should buy Spacechem.

Wednesday.

Daniel: Meetings day!  We had the opportunity to meet our assigned Valve human for the first time!  Very weird to have some great working relationships with some great people that are crucial to your business and never to have met them in person (this is a recurring theme across indie game development).  That was really cool.  Met our new (awesome) PR person for the first time too! We had a lot to drink in a hotel lounge that has windows like the Death Star.

Nicholas: Went to a very strange Indie Party. It was, frankly, kind of dead, so then we went to the Valve party and invited various people as our +1s. Our new PR person successfully bonded with the company, through alcohol. The Valve party was fantastic. After it died down, I went *back* to the Indie Party and caught the tail end of a DJ set by Phil Fish, who is… surprisingly nice and totally unlike his Twitter feed in person. A mystery wrapped in an enigma, like all good Canadians. At this point my very good friend James showed up, gave me a 12 year old Scotch in a shot glass, and we ended up going out for pancakes at about 4 in the morning and talking about the secrets of life and death.

David, dancing at the Valve party.

Thursday.

Nicholas: Breakfast, at 8:30 AM, with Alex Evans, the Technical Director of Media Molecule. He was, apparently, “impressed by my hangover control.” Alex and I talked about the joys of technical directorship and mainly just wanting to be left alone, and hashed out a cool thing for Clockwork Empires which you will see… later. Thanks, Alex, for supplying the missing piece!

Then: Meetings! First with AMD, then with NVIDIA. People want us to do things for them, and I got a handful of technical contacts for CE.

At some point, Chris Dykstra burned his hand at the Coffee Shop of the Burning Hand. Cue chanting – “one of us! one of us!”, etc.

Did not go to any of the night’s party invitations. We had a choice between either Skrillex, or Humpty Hump. I was going to choose Humpty Hump, and was disappointed that this was not something I could do due to Exhaustion.

Daniel: Received tiny bottles of artisanal Texan vodka from a guy named Eric.  Thanks Eric!

Daniel assumes the Despair Position prior to our meeting with NVIDIA.

Friday.

Daniel:

Seriously dogmatic tea drinking.  Sat next to the Path of Exile dev team talking about their upcoming features (which I can’t talk about, game developers / tea drinkers code and all that).  Talked to Evan from PC Gamer about how the project is going, which we will tell you guys more about soon!

Nicholas:

David burned his hand at the Coffee Shop of the Burning Hand. “One of us! One of us! Burning Hand! etc.” I think the coffee shop staff were quite terrified of us by then.

We also showed Clockwork Empires to the first people outside of the office to have seen it – Matthew Steele, our composer; our new PR person, Stephanie Schopp; and Ash Matheson, a long-time friend of mine who is currently serving time at EA Bioware as a lead for a team of people doing some stuff. The reactions were exceedingly positive, and made us feel better.

Stephanie, in particular, went from “This game looks cuter than I imagined it looking when you described it” to “OH MY GOD THAT THING IS THE STUFF OF MY NIGHTMARES” in about 30 seconds. Well done, everybody.

Random encounters with Andrew Dice at Carpe Fulgar and Rob Zeboyd at Zeboyd (makers/porters of Recettear and the upcoming Penny Arcade game, respectively.) In the end, we staggered back to our hotel, and were too tired to do anything but get food at the restaurant that looked, in my words, “like somewhere my father would eat and where we should absolutely never go.” Terrifyingly efficient service ensued, in a fine and somewhat European tradition of being scowled at by a 70-year old woman while you eat.

Saturday.

Daniel: Went back home, cleaned entire apartment.

Nicholas: Played board games with editorial staff of PC Gamer, then stopped downtown to drop a stuffed Diggle off for a long-time Gaslamp supporter. In the process of doing this, I discovered that I was Very Late for my flight checkin at SFO and desperately hailed a cab. The cab driver, a calmly mustachioed man, told me that, quote, “on his honour, and on the honour of San Francisco, I would make it to my flight.” He then asked me if I like Zamfir. Why yes, yes I do.

Cue fifteen minutes of the cab driver yelling and navigating his way through traffic back at the hotel, listening to passive-aggressive pan flute music. At one point he pulled into my hotel’s taxi line up and yelled, “Bellboy! Get this man his baggage! The honour of San Francisco depends on it!” The Bellboy did so, and we pulled out into San Francisco traffic at approximately one hundred and fifty miles per hour.

I did, indeed, get to my flight. My one regret is that I did not burn my hand at the coffee shop. Now I will never know what it is to fear the night.

We were also able to sign some deliciously long-simmering business deals at GDC, and have secured additional funding for our work from various interested parties, including a Major Console Developer. As a result, we are uniquely positioned to fully leverage our suite of intellectual properties in the next-generation console and mobile spaces. In order to uniquely leverge our leverage, we have “revamped” Clockwork Empires in order to make it more suitable for next-generation consoles. Market-driven research, made possible by our new funding, has revealed that gamers don’t actually enjoy complex simulations or sandbox-based gameplay. Instead, they want two things out of their videogame dollars:

1. To be connected with, emotionally, at an intense, raw, and devastating level that can only be made possible by next-generation consoles.
2. Gears, possibly attached to turrets.

As you guys know, we at Gaslamp pride ourselves in taking a genre and putting our unique, zany spin on it. To this end, uh… let’s just do a press release.

April 1st, 2013 – Gaslamp Games, makers of the popular cooking minigame Dungeons of Dredmor, is proud to announce:

Blood & Steam: A Clockwork Empires Game

* * *

Join the ruggedly strong-jawed & generically handsome brown-haired twentysomething Corporal Lance Wingerstrong of Her Majesty’s 3rd Steam Knights Brigade on a quest for Queen and Country — and revenge. Lance must regain his family’s honour and in the process uncover the grand conspiracies of the villainous Stahlmarkian Baron known as Axel Helmut Kupferrad Von Schwarzezug as he attempts to find a shorter name for himself (the Baron, that is, Corporal Wingerstrong has a stout Clockworkian name that any upstanding lad of the Empire would be proud to bear) at any cost.

* * *

“Clockwork Empires is such a promising IP,” notes Gaslamp Games’ CEO Daniel Jacobsen, “that it would be a shame to just make one game out of it. It’s a natural step to expand the adrenaline-pumping, city-building action of Clockwork Empires into the realm of first person turret sequence shooters.”

“Maybe I’ve just been huffing oven cleaner this week,” he added slyly from atop his throne made of human skulls, “but I am really excited about corridors. Corridors full of steam! And maybe some pipes.”

Technical Director Nicholas Vining has employed his experience working with The Goddamned Lithtech Engine to design photo-realistic, paradigm-shattering next-generation graphics. Mr. Vining was unavailable for comment, having accidentally dropped himself into a parallel universe in a paradigm-shattering accident, but a note on his desk indicates that he was very excited about “inflamed follicle rendering technology” and “glistening cubes of meat.”

With exciting new weapons powered by steam, aether, clockwork, and derring-do players will experience deep and long-lasting Emotional Stories about Characters and Things or Whatever as they totally blow away wave after wave of Stahlmarkian Blitztroopers.

David Baumgart, art director of Gaslamp Games explains: “oh god hrrrrrp” and then vomited, weakly, into a bucket of wine coolers. This is because he is an Artist and therefore Volatile during Press Release Writing Sessions (and at all other times generally), but we are trying to understand his intent; Possibly something about a “gyrocopter boss fight”.

GROUNDBREAKING FEATURES LIST:

• Nearly 6 hours of next-gen cog-spinning, steam-simmering high-pressure gameplay!
• Turrets!
• Deploy ten exciting new FPS weapons, including the Gear Spinfusor, the Portable Tesla Coil, the SimCity Authentication Server, and the Big ****ing Gear!
• Put Gears on Everything! Put Gears on your Gear! (Additional gears available through our Gear Store for reasonably-priced Digglebucks.)
• Deploy Zeppelin Strikes to Punish Your Enemies… With Zeppelins! (Tiny ones, driven by Diggles.)
• Realistic Steampunk Guns (which players can purchase through our partnership with Perfectly Ethical arms manufacturers!)
• Dynamic exploding organ physics!
• Day-1 Expansion DLC allows you to join Her Majesty’s Anti-Paranormal Invigilators For Horrifying Missions against the Selenian Moon-Fungus!
• Tap “Q” repeatedly at any time to snub rivals in your squad!
• Tap “Q” once to do other things!
• Turrets!
• Redeem organs for additional emotional devastation!
• Deep moral simulations allow players to define the character of Corporal Wingerstrong in keys areas of Uprightness, Temperance, and Forthrightness.
• Choose one of three endings by pulling one of three levers at the end of the game! (The levers are attached to gears. Also, maybe, turrets.)
• Over 10,000 procedurally generated achievements to unlock!
• Always-on Internet connection required to interface with the live Clockwork Auction House!
• Gaslamp’s unique dual key authentication system: two Gaslamp employees stand behind the player as the game is booted and must simultaneously insert and turn a pair of unique activation keys.
• New unit duplication technology reports that you have shot more Stahlmarkian Blitztroopers than we can actually simulate you shooting at!
• And the enemies that you do shoot at probably just teleport from place to place!
• Historically Accurate Simulation of Steam Powered Armour Combat created with an approving nod by actual veterans of the Great Antipodean Obeliskian Campaign raised from the dead by our team of wild-eyed Novyrus Volticians just for this purpose!
• Emotional devastation can be converted to Digglebucks!
• Turrets!
• Special Guest Star: Beyonce!
• Turrets!

Coming soon, exclusively to a yet-unnamed next generation console: BLOOD & STEAM: A CLOCKWORK EMPIRES GAMES GAME OF GAMES

Edit:

• Tacked-on Multiplayer!

Another Lesson In Etiquette

Mr. Hamilton (a relation, it has been discovered, of one Lady Hamilton to whom has been ascribed Much Scandal), Environmental Artist employed by the esteemed Company of Gaslamp Games, demonstrates the mindful consumption of health-giving beet juice at a local “cafe” suspected to be frequented by poets and their ilk.

(Please dim the lights for the Magic Lantern Show.)

1. The Gentleman drinks.

2. The Gentleman is shocked by the vulgar flavours of unboiled vegetable known to Polite Society to be fit only to peasants and certain radical Whigs.

3. The Gentleman calls upon his Upbringing, summoning the Stiff Upper Lip to embolden his Spirit.

4. The Gentleman presents a can-do cheery attitude as befits the keeping of Pleasant Company.

5. “Death is the only release I shall know.”

(We’re at GDC and unable to be of much use talking about Clockwork Empires. Please accept heartfelt apologies from the management.)