For those of you who have bought the game, we thank you for your patronage and appreciate it. We are currently working our way through the usual list of bug fixes and improvements that you discover are necessary as soon as you launch a game; those of you who are sending us crash dumps or bug reports, we’re reading them all and are working our way through them as fast as we can. For those of you who have written to let us know that you’re enjoying the game, we really appreciate that too.

Pictured: Gaslamp dev team squashing bug reports.

We pushed a hotfix last week which fixes the following issues:

• FIXED: some incorrect tooltip descriptions for ingredients required for producing certain modules
• FIXED: possible to get into a state where tutorial won’t advance if too much time passes before conditions for advancement are met
• FIXED: removed mention of assigning overseers to stockpiles from tutorial
• FIXED: gold reward bar now defaults drops at start position rather than map center
• FIXED: various text typos
• FIXED: a certain type of REDACTED will no longer get stuck inside buildings
• Cleaned up the embark screen a bit.
• FIXED: crash demolishing a house
• FIXED: some achievements

This hotfix for build 1.0B was *also* labelled build 1.0B, since it didn’t break your saves. We are now moving onto things that *do* break your saves, which means that we are going to push fixes to our experimental branch on Steam instead. (For those of you who don’t know how this works, we have an experimental branch on Steam where we push code for testing and feedback; you can opt into it on Steam by right clicking on Clockwork Empires, selecting properties, and picking “experimental” on the ‘Beta’ tab.)

Things that we have fixed so far (a not-complete list):

• people lugging random belongings into the wilderness to drop them off, and not stockpiles
• the crash when placing windows on buildings
• various OS X specific crashes
• work benches suddenly being duplicated, or unable to have their priorities changed
• a memory leak in the particle system code
• demolishing a building will now auto-unassign its overseer
• players are no longer allowed to assign a new overseer to a building that’s been ordered demolished
• many uses of word “citizen” changed to “colonist” for consistency
• strange display names for many combat jobs have been cleaned up
• no memories were created by “blame enemy” action
• stew pots are no longer left floating in the air after a kitchen job is interrupted
• overseers could have their job roles removed from offices in seemingly random cases related (probably) to skill gain

We will be rolling this to the experimental build in the next couple of days. Watch this space, our Steam news page, and our forums. For those of you not on our forums, please consider making an account; we’re very nice and there’s cake.

Moving forward, the plan this month is to have another stable patch (call it version 1.1) by the end of the month. This patch will be a mixture of bug fixes, UI/UX improvements, optimization, and some new content. For my part, I have a list of crash issues that I am sorting through as fast as I can; after that is taken care of, my focus will be on optimization, fixing various issues with flattening terrain, and then finishing these fellows:

Yep, roads. It’s about time. Obviously the final product will not have those weird lines across them. I wanted to get these in very badly for 1.0 but I just didn’t have the ability to get the UI issues sorted out in time. I’m also hoping to get some love in for fences and gabions while I’m at it, so that people’s colonies may have Fences and be Colonial and Proper.

There are also two major slowdowns that we’re seeing in people’s save games with large colonies; fortunately, they are fairly low-hanging fruit. For the technically inclined, one is that we spend too much time switching render batches drawing widgets (which manifests itself when you have a lot of characters with complex labels running around); the other is that we do a lot of unnecessary work in our skeletal animation code (which manifests itself when you have a lot of characters running around.) Hopefully this will fix some of the performance issues that people have been having on lower end machines, and with higher-end colonies.

Another short-term priority is Steam Workshop support, and mod support in general. We’ve already received a bunch of smaller script fixes from Users Like You(TM), and people appear to be itching to do more.

We are also catching up on all the paperwork that didn’t get done last month. This is really not very exciting, but it’s a fact of running a company.

On an administrative note: we will probably not be doing weekly blog posts every Wednesday any more. This is due to a combination of being in a post-launch mode and not a pre-launch mode, that it’s really difficult blogging every week about bug fixes, and – frankly – we need to let the blisters on our fingers heal up after blogging every week for something like five years. We will keep you up to date in this space; it’s just that it will be intermittent moving forwards. We will continue to participate in the forums here, and as we have time elsewhere as well.

Again, thank you for your support! We hope you’re enjoying the game, and as always feel free to drop us a line if you have crashes, bug reports, suggestions, or just want to chat about The Baleful Eye.

* We will be setting up non-Steam distribution of Clockwork Empires via the Humble Store and possibly other online distributors in the near future. 

The Development Progress Report has been updated with a full annotated changelog for version 55A to version 1.0. We’ll put the full changelog at the end of this post for those interested in seeing what the last month month of Early Access has brought to the game.

This is not, of course, the end of work on Clockwork Empires: We shall be continuing support for game stability and bugfixes, and we have a list of additional content and some small features we’d like to add post-release.

Oh, did you catch the launch trailer by the way? Here it is again:

Major player-facing additions this month

• performed a huge UI improvement pass for release
• also a huge balance pass, including making the later biomes more difficult
• added the Steam Knight Manufactory!
• added Achievements
• much stability & polish
• oh yeah, we’ve released the game to 1.0 with all that entails!

Begin Full Changelog for version BETA 55A to version 1.0 of Clockwork Empires

Colonist Behaviour

• awkward hugging made less likely to cause errors
• “Drunkard” trait now additionally causes happier memories from drinking
• “Hale and Hearty” trait now additionally causes barbershop treatments to heal more
• “Mushroom Lover” trait now additionally gives happy memories when eating fungus-based foods
• when deciding initial feelings toward other colonists, Overseers will now consider Labourers beneath their notice for friendship/rivalry unless said Overseer has the Common Mingler trait
• made colonist auto-burial timer check itself more often (colonists are not given automatic burial orders if hostile enemies are nearby; this will now be checked upon every new workshift.)
• colonist traits now affect certain climate quality of life effects
• added booze vat pathing check to get drink / fill vat jobs
• vicars can now convince cultists to leave their cult
• “Made a friend/rival” memories will now have the name of said friend or rival
• balance: Steam Knight presence now affects safety QoL
• balance: added more despair and anger overall
• balance: made people slightly more upset in general
• balance: when your colonists die it will now decrease your empire standing a bit
• FIXED: scripterror when using Leyden weapons
• FIXED: military holding commodities while fighting
• FIXED: characters would occasionally get stuck and stop moving when the entity “thinklocking” them would disappear w/o releasing the thinklock (in particular, if a spectre talked to a colonist then disappeared due to sunlight, the lock would not be released.)
• FIXED: enraged characters will no longer build buildings
• FIXED: Safety quality of life calculation for colonists was incorrect on days 2 through 5
• FIXED: if a scientist is enhanced due to REDACTED their lab will properly update its skill display
• FIXED: murder
• FIXED: scripterror in military_interrogation_event.fsm
• FIXED: some eldritch memories didnt give (enough) despair
• FIXED: spectres should no longer freeze people in place forever under certain rare conditions
• FIXED: slightly incorrect string compilation in conversation memories
• FIXED: edge case error in ai_damage

Non-colonist characters

• doubled trader mission time
• Occult Inspector now inspects buildings more intelligently
• made dormant spores more Fun
• FIXED: steam knights freezing!
• FIXED: possible steamknight issues with placement /not/ into buildings
• FIXED: added safety check to fishpeople group deletion notification

General Gameplay Balance

• changed overseer workplace cap modifier to scale w/ number of overseers
• balance: adjusted incidence of bad guys in biomes according to difficulty scheme
• balance: made certain enemies send more dudes when you’re later in game
• balance: reduced Fishpeople incidence in desert biome
• balance: non-temperate biomes impose various and increasing QoL penalties from tropics, desert, to cold as most penalized
• balance: more vicious will spawn in non-temperate biomes
• balance: biomes with extreme weather may produce unpleasant memories
• balance: military interrogation has been made less effective by 50%
• balance: doubled trade crops value
• balance: added extra bandit spawning in desert + cold
• balance: bandits in more difficult biomes now get better gun loadouts
• balance: decor object trade value updated
• FIXED: overvalued steam radiator (and other decor items)
• FIXED: Bricabrac now has a trade value

Workshop/Buildings

• added the Steam Knight Manufactory. Have fun!
• more workshop interior textures changed
• optimized Laboratory science refresh function
• science has undergone a massive overhaul: The number of techs has roughly doubled. A number of advanced modules now require research before they can be built.
• balance: Overseer house has had the windows requirement moved to its 2nd bonus condition
• Assembly Workbench now has 2 access points (down from 4)
• added naturalist’s office info to module descriptions
• the Trade Office now has a module todo list that will determine how many traders arrive. Range is currently 4 – 14. (Traders will always use the best office in your colony to determine how many to send, rather than adding multiple offices together)
• added some new options for increasing standing to the Empire via the Foreign Office
• added more feedback to Foreign Office when changing standing
• FIXED: ammo recipes now all make 1 ammo as intended
• FIXED: a large number of incorrect recipe costs
• FIXED: that typo in the laboratory
• FIXED: house demolition crash
• FIXED: invisible buildings
• FIXED: airship masts work again
• FIXED: rare door scripterror when a door was built before its parent building (or something)
• FIXED: missing Steel Plates recipe
• FIXED: connected components would fail to be computed correctly when creating a building with weird shapes (the actual problem is more detailed than that, but let’s go with that one)
• FIXED: various path stutters related to the new connected component code, involving animals not correctly finding corrected components that ignored doors, various other issues with aquatic entities, etc.
• FIXED: building can no longer consist of two discontiguous blueprints
• FIXED: steam knight chassis recipe output is no longer world’s most expensive landmines
• FIXED: incorrect recipe ingredient info for various products
• FIXED: dismantle objects assignment beacon now works correctly

Events

• replaced Sunny Day event with much more varied “Unusual Weather” event w/ unique effects per-biome
• some events that spawned characters now properly allow clicking their event popups to zoom to those characters
• made major eldritch events more Fun
• re-added Ominous Dreams as event arc
• Novorous Logging moratorium now checks for larch/bamboo farming
• added Arguing Rivals event
• if your Empire standing gets low enough the Ministry will limit and eventually entirely halt immigration until you pull it back up
• balance: made Foreign Invasion redcoats not take > 7 days to despawn
• balance: removed revolver locker chance from ministry supplies in foreign invasion event
• balance: made disturbance points at slightly higher at low end of scale
• balance: made cults easier to trigger
• balance: adjusted weights of various events
• balance: doing airship crash research now gives standing reward
• FIXED: scriperrors in certain cases in “arguing rivals”
• FIXED (55J): scriperror in cult art, fishperson cult arc
• FIXED: scripterror with criminal work crew foreign office event
• FIXED: some buildings would say you didn’t have required modules when eventlocked
• FIXED: bureaucrat desk couldn’t be used for event arcs
• FIXED: rare crash when using Aerial Surveillance
• FIXED: order to kill all fishpeople now works correctly
• FIXED: grimoire event had ending error if researcher died
• FIXED: scripterror in Above 30 Population event
• FIXED: scripterror in certain cases in Arguing Rivals
• FIXED: possible scriperror in Mad Carpenter

UI / UX / Text

• performed a major overhaul of the Colonial Handbook; all pages have images and have been reformatted to be easier to read
• replaced many intrusive pop-ups with alerts
• tooltips for missions (in Foreign Office) are now minimum sized and shouldn’t overrun container
• added descriptions for sub commands (in bottom left menu)
• improved alert tooltips (for pop-up alerts on right side of screen)
• improved visibility of colonist traits via gameplay and fluff fields (ie. traits that affect workshop are highlighted)
• rewrote a bit of the “wrapped label widget” to make the constructors more sensible
• mineral survey waypoints now use assignment beacons (which is very nice)
• consistency: any string that says “Cheap Cabinet” has been set to “Simple Cabinet”
• Mine will give alert if assigned an owner and it has no supplies to operate
• Naturalist’s Office will give alert if set to a different mode w/o Overseer assigned
• Naturalist’s Office will give alert if set to a work mode w/o supplies for that mode
• all instances of “citizenry” changed to “colonists”
• adjusted Safety Quality of Life description so having a low rating doesn’t (necessarily) say that you have few soldiers (it’s possible to get a low rating due to other factors)
• exclusive windows (ie. history log) now make a noise when they close
• improved load screen UI
• overhauled Trade Office interface
• improved layout for character info panel
• edited embark screen to show biome difficulty of site selection
• added cancel button to the load screen
• added per-workshop backgrounds to Overseers window (makes it much easier to see which overseer is assigned to which workshop)
• made expression widget bgs round for thought/dialog
• added better tooltips to Workshop production menu
• polished up character info panel
• moved “Unassign Overseer” to the top of the overseer assignment element (in building panels)
• added detailed tooltips for terrain objects
• added informative tag icons to map objects
• did better tooltip requirement visualization for buildings
• added hitpoints, quality to building tooltips
• proposing and cancelling trades now work properly and update the UI on time
• emoved zoom to worksite button for character panel (it did not really work)
• FIXED: shortened some more overflowing memory names
• FIXED (internally, really this time): cancelling a gabion creation job no longer leaves ghosts
• FIXED: farms now display their farm type in the office creation menu
• FIXED: dead colonists will no longer display a job as if they were alive
• FIXED: changing the order of the workshop modules in the workshop didn’t work properly
• FIXED: some more memory name ui overflow
• FIXED: minor typosFIXED: some minor text overflow in the foreign office
• FIXED: work crew UI now uses disabled scrollbar thumb properly
• FIXED: the label for “sleep” wasn’t showing in the character info panel
• FIXED: crashing the game when viewing the credits
• FIXED: flashing character nametags
• FIXED: new tooltip code no longer crashes the game if a product has no explicit definitions in data files
• FIXED: overflow of recipe tooltip for product details in workshops
• FIXED: farm overseer assignment display updating
• FIXED: overflowing tooltip in house dialog
• FIXED: blank tooltip on overseer in overseers panel
• FIXED: embark icons flickering to incorrect states when switching between them
• FIXED: clicking on the minimap while zoom-to is selected will now correctly reset it

Biomes / Nature Objects

• adjusted ground textures in alpine terrain to look colder
• added some more difficult stuff to provide Fun / blood for the blood god in harder biomes
• renamed “Lacquer Tree” to “Lacquer Plant” (to imply that “Chop Tree” is not an appropriate tool to use with them)
• mine survey point visuals redone
• added informative tag icons to map objects
• balance: non-temperate crops made more difficult
• balance: increased vermin spawn and animal spawn timers (for less spam)
• balance: forage output and regrowth time increased
• FIXED: vermin will not spawn in invalid positions (caused pathing errors)

Engine/Tech/???

• optimized connected component code to fix stuttering when flattening/building
• FIXED: stutter when placing gabions, buildings, or flattening terrain
• FIXED: scaling issues on fullscreen for Windows if the aspect ratio of your monitor exactly matches your suggested resolution (unngh)
• FIXED: Longpork pie used incorrect model

Wish to peruse the full annotated changelog? Read it in the Development Report!

Have fun and let us know through our mysterious portal or forum if anything goes wrong.

As always, a we owe a huge thanks to our Early Access players for being a part of this awesome ride. We could not have done it without all of you.

So many icons! (These are not, however, my favourites.)

There was enthusiastic support for this notion. So much for that threat. Still: an Artist never bluffs, so this week we’re going to talk about My Favourite Icons.

Oh yeah, heads up: the first one is cannibalism, so brace yourself for Thematic Imagery.

First, these will be in no particular order. This isn’t about comparing and judging, this is only about what makes me feel good.

“Cannibalism”

(Off to a fun start, aren’t we!) Yes, cannibalism! It’s just … dark and bloody and maddened and I quite like how it captures that feeling.

“Cannibalism Extreme” 

For those who know it, this is of course a reference to the Black Paintings by Goya, in particular what is perhaps the most famous, called “Saturn Devouring His Son”.

I believe the previous cannibalism icon is a refinement of this one, but I’ve left this in the files because I enjoy not only how the icon itself captures that theme of self-destructive madness (which is essential to the darker bits of Clockwork Empires) but the Black Paintings themselves are an expression of an artist driven to express a sort of maddened despair, which ties in again to those dark parts of Clockwork Empires. This is what maddened despair in the game is all about, at least in terms of a character’s inner mindset.

“Fishperson Happy”

It’s just so happy. And cute. But a little deranged perhaps? And all those sharp teeth …

I like how this captures the essence of Fishpeople in Clockwork Empires. Though the design behind their implementation is a bit contentious for various reasons, from contrary aesthetic goals that try very hard to tread around Lovecraft’s original racist imagery to purely mechanical issues with how Fishpeople had to be implemented as “the goblins of CE” to provide a combat challenge in early Early Access … uh, in spite of all of that, I still enjoy hearing player’s reactions to the fishpeople. Because whatever else, it’s never entirely clear what they are supposed to do with them. Are they friendly? Evil? Do you feel bad when they are attacked? One way or another, I think they’re evocative.

“Late Night”

It’s peaceful, colourful; reminds me a bit of the amazing nighttime scenes from Monkey Island and Loom that I love so much and were so influential to me when I first experienced them growing up.

The shape is also meant to suggest the medieval “book of hours”, or the uh – hang on, copy-paste time: Très Riches Heures. From wikipedia, here’s a sample:

So you know, passage of time, suggestion of the round ‘celestial sphere’ and so on. These icons are used to show the shifts of the day, and just so this book portrays the passage of time and what is done with it.

It sure beats having a boring clock.

“Exploration”

There’s some kind of hyper-real tactility to lushly rendered tools and objects which I greatly enjoy. Reminds me of the richness of art in inventory in, for example, Diablo 1. Everything contributed to how rich it felt to interact with objects from the art to the sound to the smooth drag & drop. It’s a wonderful experience.

Similarly for the Lucasarts games, though they were a bit less lush in the whole experience, the stylized richness of inventory was a real treat.

(You can see why, perhaps, I had so much fun drawing items for Dredmor back in the day.)

“Vegetable Stew”

The previous commentary applies very much to the commodity icons in Clockwork Empires. I’m showing this one because it’s based on a delicious vegetable stew I had a couple days before — here’s the recipe if you’re interested, it’s really easy to make!

“Fungus Category”

I did icons for a number of ‘general categories of items’. Here for instance we have fungus. Now it’s quite a challenge to jam a variety of fungi into one composition inside a 64×64 icon, and it reminds me somewhat of trying to draw a food-based still life painting – because it’s not enough to just jam the objects together, they have to work together.

Here’s a vegetably example from one Pieter Aertsen:

What can I say? That looks like a tasty pile of food.

I’ll wrap it up here. I can ramble about the icons in this game all day and at great length, but that gives an idea of what my thoughts were when making a few of them that I enjoyed.

In the meantime, back to work and getting the game ready to launch. We’re all nervous – and excited!

Fish Massacre At New Sogwood 3: The Enbloodening

On the one hand we have combat-hardened veterans of the Frontier who have sunk hundreds of hours into Clockwork Empires. These players derive grim pleasure from deconstructing our systems then optimizing them for maximum in-game effect while rampaging cannibalistic cultists tear each other apart amidst volleys of gunfire. On the other hand, we have players who just bought the game (or will soon buy the game) who are mostly fascinated by watching their colonists live little lives and decorating houses. Both players have legitimate needs! If a swarm of fishpeople busts into this latter fantasy and eats everyone, that player gets really upset. If a swarm of fishpeople doesn’t bust into the fantasy of the previous player type, they get really upset. And everyone is upset with us if we do any of this without giving proper warning.

So there are some questions to answer here, and it’s not as simple as it was for Dredmor where we put in buttons for “easy”, “medium”, and “hard” plus a toggle for permadeath. Clockwork Empires has a rather more diverse range of mechanics in play vs. more diverse player types – and a lot more systems complexity.

Fair and unfair challenges

A player must be given the information they need to overcome a challenge in the game. If this is to do with low-level game mechanics, it is simply a matter of good UI to provide information like “The Barracks is out of ammunition”. If we created difficulty by making that information inconvenient or tedious to acquire then we’d fall into creating unfair challenge that isn’t within the fair terms of gameplay.

A lack of information can be useful – and fair – when it’s appropriately high-level and within the arena of gameplay. For example, we don’t tell you exactly what cultists are getting up to – finding out and countering them is a legitimate challenge. There is also follow-through involved here: a player should be told why they failed a challenge (or why they succeeded) so they can better master the game. Or failing that due to the inevitable Doom of facing the latest Eldritch Horror, at least we can provide a fuller sense of the narrative at work.

Nothing to see here.

Opt-in Difficulty

We want to be sure that players opt-in to difficulty rather than accidentally fall into a pit of spikes. This relates to our “no tornadoes” rule – if something is going to blow up your colony, we’d like to make sure it’s something you either asked for or were given ample warning about.

Certain major cult events follow this rule in a broad sense, though they must skirt around the details a bit to lend the game a sense of mystery. If we simply said “in X days if you don’t do Y then Z will happen” then it wouldn’t be much Fun at all.

Instead, a somewhat longer process takes place: Hints are dropped that this character is upset for such-and-such reasons, if only you built a Chapel or a Pub or cooked some nice food. If left upset, characters can switch to a new behaviour state which creates an explicit pop-up alert – more warning. If left unresolved, certain events will start drawing upon characters in these exceptional states, sometimes scaling up in magnitude of effect. These will also create alerts. Not only does this allow a player to (try) to avoid certain consequences, the warnings provide a narrative build-up TO said consequences.

The design counter-challenge is that it is theoretically possible for a skilled player to succeed at the game so well that they nullify all organic challenge event sequences. We don’t want to force skilled players to sandbag their own play to see neat events, so this is where higher levels of difficulty opt-ins become useful.

For example, before even starting the game proper, providing information as simple as saying “this biome/loadout is easy” vs “this biome/loadout is hard” allows players to make informed decisions about their upcoming game.

Scaling Difficulty

This is a straightforward matter of scaling challenge to player success. If a player is doing well, their colony can absorb more punishment. If they’re doing less well, we should generally ease up a bit. Much of this is already done behind the scenes, particularly concerning the number of enemies one meets in the game.

A subset of this question is allowing players to lose – a game rigged to kick you when you’re up and help you when you’re down becomes less interesting when the artifice of the situation becomes obvious. There comes a time when we should “encourage” a player to lose and start a new game rather than drawing out a slow, boring death-spiral. Various mechanics already encourage this, such as colonists becoming upset at combat and death and becoming more likely to engage in extreme behaviour. Spreading fire is occasionally the most terrifying enemy a player can face.

This Is Fine.

Still, we’re always considering more ways to channel player experience into appropriate scaled challenges using the systems at-hand.

Overall, we – well, Chris mostly – are taking a step back and gauging the arc of a complete game of Clockwork Empires as a unit. Some bits need speeding up, some slowing down, some more difficulty, some less, and there need to be some juicy bits buried at the end to build up to experiencing. The obvious part of this process is adjusting the mechanics that must be contended with, but there lies a vast and subtle experience of UI which channels information back to the player to complete the gameplay loop and determine everything that the player believes is happening. And this, I contend, is rather more important than whatever actually happens!

We’re pulling it all together as we speak.

We first released the game for purchase in “Earliest Access” over 2 years ago, and we’re proud of just how far the game has come, in part thanks to our dedicated early-access players. Clockwork Empires has changed quite a bit but, the central concept has stayed the same: manage the growth of a colony of settlers on the steampunk frontier, as they learn to deal with the horrors of the unknown.

We’re putting a hold on the “Experimental” builds leading up to the launch date so we can surprise you with some more stuff when the time comes, but expect new events, more cults and monsters, along with all the other polish that you would expect as the doomsday clock ticks ominously forwards to midnight and version 1.0.

This will, of course, not be the last update for Clockwork Empires, but we have reached the point where we feel that the important elements are all here (or will be before The Time). We will of course continue to find and fix bugs as they appear, add content and adjust the balance of the game beyond version 1.0 – while the game won’t see support forever, just like our previous title Dungeons of Dredmor, the journey doesn’t end on release.

If you’re interested in the road that we traveled to get to this point, I would invite you to take a look at the Development Progress report that we have kept up-to-date every month since August 2014. (And if you’d like to check out the game in the weeks before release – or just wishlist it – the steam store page can be found Here.)

We want to thank everyone who has been a part of this journey with us: supporting us by buying Clockwork Empires, talking with us about your experiences, pointing us at new (and sometimes old) bugs, sending us saves and crash dumps, and giving us suggestions to improve it. I can, without any reservation, say that we could not have done this without you. We are grateful to be able to create games for you, and doing it with you has been an amazing experience.

Long live the Clockwork Empire!

From a historical perspective, producing firearms requires a fairly sophisticated industrial base. In Clockwork Empires, pre-Beta 55, producing and using any firearms beyond the default pistols also required a fairly sophisticated industrial base. And by fairly sophisticated industrial base we mean that pre-55, the very first weapon upgrade could only be rushed by an experienced player in a minimum of an hour or two of gameplay in a mad rush toward the Metalworks. And that’s with laser-like focus and insider knowledge of mechanics. (If advanced players take this comment as an invitation to see who can rush to firearm production the quickest, then let’s do it!)

Fun with the grenade launcher.

A new player wouldn’t stumble into the weapon upgrades for many more hours than this – say 6 hours, for the sake of argument. Take a random citybuilder game like Anno 2205*; It has an average playtime of  *checks* 22 hours on Steam. Imagine if players didn’t manage to acquire a single weapon upgrade for the Barracks until they were 25% through their total experience with the game — and likely further, because this is a generous thought experiment. This is highly sub-optimal because it not only hides a kinda cool part of the game (guns gun guns!) from new players, it also sandbags the entire sense of progression through the Barracks modules by back-loading all the content. There are additional painful effects such as making Bandits and other enemies a lot more challenging than intended for a huge portion of game-time.

So what is to be done?

Guns must be made in the metalworks because of Realism. But when we’re using the word “realism” in game design, what we mean is not a realistic simulation of real life — this is effectively impossible — nor even an abstracted simulation of real life — this is not Fun. What we mean when we say “realism” is the concept of a game object or mechanic feeling consistent with expectations, of feeling narratively consistent with the rest of the game. There’s a truthiness to a “realistic”-feeling game mechanic.

The problem is, guns are made of metal. That feels true and expected. But if we lock guns up in the Metalworks, then you can’t get guns until you’re deep into the game’s industrial progression. How do we solve this?

We could provide guns some other way – trade perhaps? It doesn’t feel quite as good as crafting them yourself, however. So while we did add a few places to acquire gun upgrades outside of industry, we don’t want that to be the primary solution.

Why not make some guns that don’t require metal? Sure, it sounds silly at first, but we can make this “realistic” – it’s all in how we sell the idea. And heck, historically, guns were made out of stupid things like wood slats bound together that shot stone bullets. So why not?

A well equipped Barracks receiving grenade ammo. I’ve selected the Grenade Launcher to arm my soldiers because it’s awesome.

So, first: default pistols are described to be “standard civilian sidearms” which “require no special ammo”. This way the game-world acknowledges that although these are firearms, they are common among civilians and therefore outside of the military supply chain. And though they use ammunition, supplying said ammo is beneath the concern of the player and all neatly abstracted away. This Is Fine.

The next level weapon is the musket. This was renamed “improvised musket” and the description implies that civilian pistols are used as a base and somehow modified to turn them into crude musket-analogues. This builds on the abstraction, but justifies in game-terms that you can do this in a mere Carpentry Workshop using simple planks. Next is the Tripistol – a single triple-shot three-barreled pistol. It is renamed the “Ceramic TriPistol” and also implied to be modified from civilian pistols but somehow requires ceramics. Maybe it’s a really stumpy, thick pottery vessel that shoots a load of crude buckshot? Whatever the case, it gets the job brutally done and acts as the next upgrade and requires only a Ceramics Workshop.

By switching up the descriptions and item names a bit and adjusting costs to reinforce their flavour, we’ve opened up weapon progression to the early stages of the game. Now you can start upgrading your Barracks almost as soon as you finish a Carpentry Workshop! And it feels good to make this investment – and it is quite rewarding when you use your new albeit crude weapons to blow away some thievin’ Bandits.

Victory … ?

Almost any gameplay device can be made to feel “realistic”; It’s just a question of making the rest of the game support the truthiness of its own world-building. And bringing progression mechanics that were hidden in the mid/late game into the early game can be a very nice hook to get new players into exploring seemingly obscure game mechanics.

[*Chris has observed to me that combat is an endgame activity in the Anno series for reasons that make sense for the Anno series. The general point still stands that Clockwork Empires seeks to make combat a part of the entire gameplay arc therefore it makes sense to integrate combat progression earlier vs. what Anno is trying to do. And regardless, the point stands as a general rule for game design! Good talk.]

This update will go live to every Clockwork Empires player via Steam!

We have also updated our Clockwork Empires: Development Progress report!

Don’t own the game? Clockwork Empires can be purchased on ClockworkEmpires.com via Humble or from Steam.

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Major player-facing additions this month:

• implemented an Office Supply system to replace the upkeep system
• added biome unlocking
• redid guns & ammo (pew pew)
• added madness and enraged states
• and made enormous improvements to UI all over the place

Begin the full Beta 55 changelog!

UI

• text input boxes now have a caret
• keybinding widget now works in Configuration screen
• added Serpent Bell icon
• UI for all offices has been given a polish
• UI for all offices now has various alerts for reasons why work cannot be performed due to lack of overseer/modules/supplies
• mine UI now displays more information
• added visual cue to indicate that a module must be affixed to a wall
• all recipes should now grey out correctly depending on your materials
• all modules in the game now have sort IDs and will display in the Modules Menu in a much more logical order
• added/improved tooltips on a large number of constructions and buildings
• renamed some office UI to try and make it a bit more clear
• added more info to character panel tooltips
• fixed order strings so they now also work on the filter buttons on the module placer UI
• added randomized start backgrounds
• added command tooltip details
• did polish changes to where tooltips show up
• made improvement to tutorial controls image
• did major update to all tutorial text
• redid a number of building tutorial images
• wrote all Colonial Handbook help files
• removed a mysterious sound that played when nothing happened
• workshop button now turns red when commodities are unavailable for a production that is set for a job
• area designation stamps now highlight what objects can be selected
• “Designate Building” dialog now attaches to blueprint for confirmation once it is drawn out
• lack of booze for Public House will generate alerts
• Fishperson-related alerts should have sounds more consistently now
• added product listing to mine tooltip
• failure states for workshop jobs now show properly
• added parent container code for office UI buttons
• Quality of Life is now a first class element in the character info panel
• Combat tooltips pared down significantly
• building quality display improved
• can now add widgets to the front of a container’s stack
• scrollbar track clicks are now more useful (sorry track clickers, i never do it, didn’t realize what a sorry state that was in)
• improved nametag code, incorporated alert icons into nametags
• made interactive objects like rocks and trees have tooltips that are anchored and show up instantly rather than being on the cursor and having a delay. Some new players weren’t seeing them at all, so this should improve their visibility.
• all instances of “work crew” have been changed to “overseer” to make difference between LC/MC chars clearer
• you will now be alerted if you build a building with no door
• FIXED: static buttons for work crews
• FIXED: finally fixed our scrollable vert boxes so they don’t do weird things with scrolling too far and their padding isn’t horrible. Finally. After i think 2 years of this bug.
• FIXED: edge cases for the building confirmation window
• FIXED: offset so that modules menu isn’t below the screen
• FIXED: progress bars with “0” percent in them still showed some percent
• FIXED: lock up in character screen when character had maxed out skill tree or zero skill
• FIXED: bug where unassigning an overseer wouldn’t immediately update the window.
• FIXED: Tutorial FYI text boxes can now expand properly.
• FIXED: tooltips being basically everywhere.
• FIXED: image buttons not pushing their size appropriately
• FIXED: gameSimRequireGameObject not working correctly for requirements; various other graying behaviours not working correctly
• FIXED: a bunch of bad button typecasting
• FIXED: a number of bugs in production menu grey-outs
• FIXED: loading bay door claiming to add -1 quality in tooltip
• FIXED: scrollbars not sizing correctly on OS X
• FIXED: a number of buildings that displayed the wrong cost in the buildings menu have been fixed
• FIXED: long-standing issue with wrapped text
• FIXED: janky scrollbar movement while the game is unpaused
• FIXED: wacky QoL tooltip offset
• FIXED: workplace limit display not being reset properly on save/load
• FIXED: crash in stamp area designation mode when an interactive object in the area is deleted (such as, say, setting fire to a mushroom)
• FIXED: discrepancy of carpentry icon in command button vs. module category

Economy/Offices/Workshops

• upkeep removed as-such; it’s being replaced with Office Supplies!
• Naturalist’s Office now uses ammo for hunting, paper for surveying (scouting is free)
• Foreign Office now requires paper to do bureaucracy
• Foreign Office workers will prioritize use of modules that increase their work speed ie. Bureaucrat’s Desk
• Barbershop now requires Medical Supplies to do healing; if Sulphur Tonic is available, it will be used to make healing more effective and more pleasant
• Chapel now requires Iron Cogs as votive material to perform religious services
• Academy now requires paper to do training; if ink is supplied, it will double speed of training
• Mine now requires trusses to operate
• Laboratory now requires Science Materials to perform research
• added a number of new commodities and workshop recipes to support the new office overhaul
• added sugarloaf to traders
• added additional safety aborts to consume supply calls in fsms
• made artifacts tradeable
• added small vs. large stockpiles
• added a new mining tech
• clarified bric-a-brac display names
• “Workbench” is now “Assembly Workbench” and is used only to make modules, except in the kitchen
• added new module: Decor Workbench. Makes all relevant decor items for that workshop
• removed module recipes from ceramics/carpentry workbench
• removed decor recipes from all modules that aren’t Decor Workbench
• Mine now caps depth if you don’t have modules required to dig deeper
• removed basic brew, added back individual brewing recipes
• added Workplace system
• sulphur made more easily mined
• naturalist now requires musket locker to hunt
• “Explore” command now works (from Naturalist ui)
• Naturalist’s Office can now do targeted “Survey” and “Hunt” commands
• product of fishpeople butchering humans no longer (always) auto-claimed by player
• balance: Chemical Works has been moved earlier in the game progression (for ammo)
• balance: changed cost tiers of a vew buildings to streamline the early game
• balance: lowered quality bonus from rugs since they don’t block walkspace and are therefore superior to normal decor
• FIXED: incorrect Ceramics Workshop tech modifier display
• FIXED: you may now place the Lower Class Rug
• FIXED: foreign office error
• FIXED: trade bool on dormant spore
• FIXED: Boxed Macroscope constuction
• FIXED: increased range of Naturalist survey for minerals job so they wouldn’t get stuck in the middle of the map doing nothing
• FIXED: scientists will now only use equipment inside their own laboratory
• FIXED: added check so traders won’t leave and never come back, forever
• FIXED: Pub did not stock booze until ordered to
• FIXED: sometimes modules would suddenly stop working until demolished and rebuilt
• FIXED: Larch farms would grow orange cubes
• FIXED: various cost/quality display on various modules
• FIXED: Bureaucrat’s desks properly count as desks in the foreign office UI

Characters

• removed skill effects on tree chopping/foraging
• added better feedback to early safety Quality of Life rating
• made reactions to horrors more expressive
• foreign civilians will properly flee from horrors
• added “Cry over Body” job
• made Occult Inspectors slightly more expressive
• hunger emote now more expressive
• balance: QoL effects adjusted to have more effect but not be completely extreme
• balance: Immigration now takes longer between waves the later you are in the game (max immigrants increases as well, however)
• balance: Chapel effects now emphasize lowering despair
• balance: Pub effects now emphasize lowering anger
• FIXED: attempt_emote.fsm
• FIXED: scripterror in building name change
• FIXED: some food was tagged as both overseer and labourer-preferred
• FIXED: added check for scripterror when bandit group self-deletes

Jobs/Assignment

• construction assignments will now always be prioritized over other work assignments
• rewrote all flatten terrain code. flatten terrain jobs are now not listed in a giant bulky mess at the start of the assignment, but are assigned first-come-first-serve. this fixes lurching performance issues when a user has a lot of flatten terrain jobs selected, as well as… works…
• moved flatten terrain to assignment beacon, so it can be cancelled etc.
• Flatten terrain target height now displays in tooltip
• added a safety check for if you removed a worker from the academy while they were working
• removing forageables can be done via left-click, per object
• FIXED: assignment beacon drop zones now only show those beacons visible for the current selection mode
• FIXED: assignment beacons now correctly encompass all objects inside (Although it is a little conservative)

Biomes

• added new ore distribution – varies based on climatic zone
• added locking and unlocking of embark locations by biome type
• removed the Alone loadout
• added details for unlocking biomes
• balance: added more high ground in temperate swamp biome
• balance: added more guaranteed starting surface clay/stone

Military/Combat

• Barracks now displays weapon stats & otherwise has a useful UI
• Barracks now used to supply ammunition to soldiers; different weapons use different types of ammo. If ammo runs out, soldiers will default to using pistol
• weapon power/damage/range rebalanced
• military may now do “cull troublesome animal”
• Steam Knights made more reactive to threats
• gave better icons to most military techs
• updated/improved costs of all gun lockers (can now build “Improvised Muskets” in Carpentry Workshop, can build “Ceramic Tripistols” in Ceramics Workshop)
• “Rally” command now works (from Barracks ui)
• balance: fishpeople made weaker
• balance: bandits given worse weapons
• FIXED: obeliskian_melee error
• FIXED: military culling of bad animals
• FIXED: civilians will now only consider melee/ranged attacks if they are not within some distance (X) of a military character

Events

• balance: increased starting food amounts
• a huge number of events now trigger sounds on firing
• made significant improvements to Meteor Shower event arc
• fix to Event Arc-related science jobs
• fix to Event Arc-related selenian AI
• added airdropcrate pos test
• minor cosmetic improvement to Artist event arc
• added more cult stuff
• improved more cult stuff
• added additional safety checks to Rogue Stahlmarkian start
• supplies requested via the foreign office will now take a bit of time to arrive
• balance: changed arc point build + some arc mindays + costs
• FIXED: added safety check for scripterror in fishperson cult arc
• FIXED: added safety check for scripterror in rogue stahlmarkian
• FIXED: Mysterious Ore drop position
• FIXED: issue in tutorial that prevented it from progressing
• FIXED: player didn’t get ownership of bar of gold gift
• FIXED: incorrect action text on bandit spawn FYI alert
• FIXED: incorrect Novorusian text
• FIXED: bug where minimum number of immigrants could be 0
• FIXED: crashed airship event weirdness
• FIXED: dead cultists will no longer offer assassination services

Engine/Renderer

• crash DMP reporter now correctly reports crashes when triggering MSVC internal error or SIGABRT
• rewrote assignment beacon rendering code to fix floating outline ugliness
• added terrain decal scene graph to render assignment beacons and other “zone-like constructions” after terrain but before objects
• FIXED: crash deleting a stockpile
• FIXED: crash deleting a house
• FIXED: crash deleting a workshop
• FIXED: in the event that the game didn’t crash while deleting a thing, it would appear with a graphical artifact glitch
• FIXED: on rare maps, all characters and everything in the world will suddenly start sliding into the lower left corner of the screen
• FIXED: disappearing modules
• FIXED: crash deleting farm and building new farm
• FIXED: misc other crashes
• FIXED: crash deleting modules

Wish to peruse the full annotated changelog? Read it in the Development Report!

Have fun and let us know through our mysterious portal or forum if anything goes wrong.

When a player advances to a point where their pile of accumulated resources are effectively limitless, then they’ve basically won the economic game, which makes it easy to explore the rest of the game without serious challenges (aka “fun”). This blog post is not about dealing with that end-game state however, it’s about delaying that end-game post-scarcity utopia in a way that is interesting. Building a colony in Clockwork Empires is very much about the challenges faced – and overcome – in the journey from a handful of colonists alone in the wilderness to bustling industrial powerhouse. If we let that journey finish too quickly, then the game experience is poorer for it. If we mess with the player’s journey by throwing random tornadoes at them to blow up all their stuff, that feels unfair and frustrating.

The question is, how do we slow accumulation rate or subtract from a player’s resources outside of food requirements and construction costs? … And have players enjoy it.

Certain negative random events arise from the simulation itself. Perhaps the Novorusians drop an air-crate onto your gunpowder stockpile – boom! Or a Bandit raid can disrupt the entire industry of a colony for a shift as everyone flees and soldiers respond. These tend to be occasionally catastrophic, very random, and rare (and intentionally rare because as noted the idea that “random tornado destroys your colony” feels very unfair to players). Due to the combination of volatility and generally negative feel, these events simply aren’t suitable for keeping the player using their commodities on a regular basis. We needed something more.

A first attempt: Module repair

Remember this? This was an early attempt at a continual resource sink. After colonists used certain modules X number of times, they’d require repairs using a random material. It handled itself automatically, draining resources via repair jobs.

This was mostly ignored because it was insignificant (which players liked because it didn’t cost them meaningful amounts) and it was unnoticed (because the system gave poor feedback). In fact, most people didn’t even realize it was happening. It wasn’t clear what a module might cost in repairs before you built it, what it cost after it required repairs, or how long it’d take before a module required repair. From a player perspective, small numbers of random resources sometimes disappeared but it wasn’t really something to think about.

This system did not fulfill the role of acting as resource sink. And it could not be ramped up in cost enough to be a useful resource sink because it did not give enough information to the player to effectively respond.

A second attempt: Upkeep

This second attempt was very effective at getting player attention and focusing that attention! -But perhaps more in an Eye of Sauron sort of burning-hatred kind of way. There were a few reasons for this.

How it worked: upkeep was like repair, but time-based. And it was centered on buildings rather than individual modules (so that instead of creating “Repair Module” job times the number of modules, it’d create “Perform Upkeep” times the number of buildings; a far smaller number and therefore less overseer-load). You have to pay X widgets over Y time or else the modules in a building would break down and become inoperable.

The fires of not-paying-upkeep costs rage within this workplace!

Upkeep had to be paid in a series of tiered “upkeep trunks”, special commodities used only for upkeep. These were intermediate commodities because then we could allow the player to use equivalent but totally different resources to produce the same upkeep trunks. This way, upkeep could be paid, for example, in the form of Planks -> Trunks, Stone/Clay -> Trunks, or Glass -> Trunks. Ideally this would allow players to dump whatever basic resource type they had in abundance into the upkeep system, rewarding different types of specialization.

The use of intermediate commodities however increased cognitive load, as in: players had to choose to build these and track their numbers and worry about having enough of them before their workshops blew up and became useless. This additional cognitive workload was entirely negative; it felt like additional work simply to stay afloat, rather than you putting your work toward gaining something.

There were other problems: The roll-out of the system was also punitively balanced and buggy, making the system both expensive and unreliable. Worse, the system would punish players who built many additional modules, whether they used them or not. And building additional modules works to reduces player micromanagement by allowing additional  orders per module to be queued – but upkeep punished the player who did this with additional costs. This turned into a classic Water Finds a Crack design error that rewards a player with a more efficient economy for making their game require more micromanagement.

On top of all this, there were all sorts of technical edge cases that had to be addressed: what happens in a building that’s in a lack-of-upkeep inoperative state but the player builds a new module? Does the building require more upkeep to be operative, or the old amount? Does the module start in upkeep-fail state or active? The former feels wrong or unfair but the latter would break the consistency of the system. And so on.

Player feedback.

After a number of experimental iterations where we would perform a rebalance and receive more negative feedback, we stepped back and had a long internal discussion about what we could do to rework the system in a way players would enjoy. Some key points:

• We simply must make the player pay more resources over the course of the game
• It has to have a positive-feeling effect rather than being all negative
• It can’t reward optimizing the fun out of gameplay

Office Supplies

So how do you turn a negative into a positive?

Well if upkeep is supposed to be paid to keep things running, then not paying upkeep imposes a punishment. What if instead players were rewarded for paying upkeep? So it’s like you charge-up your buildings by paying upkeep rather than having them shut down when you don’t pay.

And let’s simplify it because Workshops (kitchen, carpentry, ceramics, metalworks, chemist) already give rewards for paying resources: you put commodities in and get more advanced commodities out – and workshops are so fundamental to the game that losing access to them is incredibly punitive. So forget workshops. What about offices? At the time, the office class of buildings (barracks, naturalist, public house, chapel, laboratory, foreign office, mine) – defined their role by taking in labor and performing a service – the lack of any resource requirement cut them off from the game’s economy. So let’s solve all these problems at once!

The gameplay model for an “office” tied to the economy already existed, in fact, in the form of the Public House. This building had already been set up to require being “charged up” with booze supplies to distribute to patrons to make them happy. The model prototyped there simply had to be extended to the rest of the office-class buildings.

So we made offices require supplies to operate. Provide the office with supplies, and it does its work. Some offices should work whether you can afford them or not, so we made the positive reward for providing supply a matter of degree of success: supply the Barracks with high-grade ammunition and it’ll let you use your fancy carbines. Fail to do that, and the soldiers will default to weak pistols.

In contrast with artificial-feeling intermediary commodities, these office supply commodities feel like they reinforce narrative logic: Of course soldiers need bullets. Of course diplomats need lots of paper to write letters on, of course the barber needs medical supplies to heal injured colonists, and the mine needs trusses to support mineshafts.

We rolled this new system out and the reception has been very positive. The concept of “paying a tax” reworked into “spending what you had created” – an immensely positive feeling that ties the entire game together in a much stronger way.

A happy little barracks filled with ammunition.

That’s how we made them pay.

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

So… what in the world causes this mess?

Part of shipping a game is dealing with all of your long standing issues that you have always decided to put off until later. Well, later is now. A week or so ago, I was able to finally find a replay of the game where this consistently happened, and decided…. okay, today’s the day I fix it. So… start the game up, see everything float into the corner of the map as it is sucked into the black hole of THE VOID… all without animating. Hmm. Okay.

Uh.

A cheerful examination of the console revealed that the STUCK messages were going off. Recall, from Many Blogs Ago, that characters take great pains to not get stuck in trees and things. Specifically, if a character is trapped in a space (defined as “a connected component that is isolated from the main map and smaller than a certain size”) the game pops them into the next component over by a random displacement of their position. This size is large enough that you can get unstuck if, say, we drop a tree on you; but small enough that you can still brick somebody in a house. (DESIGN GOALS.) So… clearly, the game thought everybody was stuck.

We have SVG code to dump the “spatial dictionary” (the data structure that holds all the collision information; it’s been engineered and reengineered to death so many times now that the original use of the word “dictionary” is misleading but the data structure kept its names); it writes out a SVG file of vectors that you can put into, say, Adobe Illustrator. I learned the trick of writing to SVG files directly when working on an academic paper a few years ago, and it’s saved my bacon. Anyhow, what the SVG files revealed was… no, there’s absolutely nothing to get stuck on here. At all. So… why does it think things are stuck?

Cue headscratching.

Cue more headscratching.

Finally, I get cranky and break open the debugger, figuring “Alright, I’ll check the stuck test to walk through it and see what component it thinks it’s in.” Some poking around and it thinks it’s in component 0. In fact, it… thinks the entire map is component 0. Well, that makes sense if there’s absolutely no stuck regions that everything is the same component. Do we just assume that component 0, the first thing you would place on the map, is always an obstructed component? Well, that seems likely… except that, after more digging, component 0 is always used as a scratch variable. The first component ID should be component 1024. So for some reason, if a map contains no obstructions in it, it… just doesn’t initialize the components.

And that’s when I realized: when obstructions are added to the map, we set a flag that requires you to rebuild the connected components for the navigation layer and stuck code. If you don’t have any obstructions placed during the map generation, then there’s nothing to trigger that flag… and we don’t rebuild the connected components for the first time. Hence, the component IDs everywhere are set to whatever we initialized the array with (0, a good number for initializing an array with) it thinks everything’s in a “stuck” component, and so…

oops.

Once connected components were forced to rebuild themselves after every game start and load, the VOID was sent back into the void from whence it came… after something like four hours of painstaking archaeology.

Clockwork Empires is a huge, huge game. There’s big chunks of stuff that was written years ago that has lain dormant, happily… except when it causes problems like this. The disappearing modules, which I fixed yesterday, are another example of this; ancient code from before the dawn of time was found, discovered to be triggering when you modified terrain too close to a building, and then resetting the heights of any module nearby – incorrectly. Archaeology!