Clockwork Empires (from Gaslamp Games)

Games
41

JESUS CHRIST I LOVE THESE GUYS

DJ: There are also a few characters who we’ve basically been…sort of stream-of-consciousness fleshing out, including the prime minister, who is attempting to pretend that all of this…

NV: Everything is fine!

DJ: All of the badness that exists doesn’t exist. And the queen, who is probably under the influence of some elder horror, but it’s not directly referenced until…

NV: She actually attacks. [laughter] Which, I mean, if you picture Queen Victoria with tentacles coming out of every conceivable part of that enormous dress that she wears in all the photos… It’s sort of Terry Gilliam. And on top of that you have a number of highly dubious innovations. They’re very big on pickling.

DB: They’ve suddenly discovered that they can put food in cans.

NV: Pickling, pickling is huge. The application of leeches, laudanum, mercury tinctures…

DB: It’s a new wave of science, but it’s not particularly well-developed or especially safe. We’re also, speaking of characters, doing a lot of vague riffs on historical figures and situations from the 19th century. We’ll have the equivalent of Queen Victoria, and who’s the prime minister, Nicholas?

NV: He’s just the prime minister. He’s basically D’Israeli, but now he’s a very panicked D’Israeli, because he’s desperately trying to keep all the plates spinning in the air. “If we could only just start one more colony, if we keep the stiff upper lip and smile, show enough teeth, we’ll get more gold money, what, aetheric crystals or phlogiston, maybe, just maybe, we’ll last to the end of the month, but we must stick to the Empire, gentlemen, mustn’t we? Very good! As you were.”

We also have Lord Palmerstoke. So in the late Victorian era, there was a Lord Kelvin. Lord Kelvin was the great scientific man of his age. Lord Kelvin got absolutely everything wrong in every conceivable way when making predictions about science and history. Man will never fly, the X-ray is a fake. Lord Palmerstoke is the great scientific thinker of his time, whose opinions are widely valued because he’s basically wrong about everything.

DJ: But he’s very opinionated, and that’s how you rise to power.

DB: And well-connected.

NV: We have the Empire Times, the great newspaper. We have the Church of the Holy Cog. “Blessed are the many revolutions of the Holy Cog, for it keeps the clockwork of the indefatigable movement of the celestial heavens in motion.” We have the Cog Pope, who is pretty problematic. So you do have all these people, but we don’t plot out having you meet these people. They are largely there, fleshed out, for background filler.

DJ: It’s also sort of like Alpha Centauri, where you know that these people exist by the quotes that you get when you research things or something like that.

42

This interview had me at “Charles Dickens on Acid”.

43

This new blog post has me so excited for the game if they can successfully pull off everything they’re talking about without technical issues getting in the way.

44

Our ultimate goal is to give players a set of tools that they can put together in ways we never imagined to make ridiculously complex systems that explode gloriously.

45

I was lukewarm on the style of dreadmore, but damn if I don’t love the direction they are going with clockwork.

http://www.gaslampgames.com/2012/11/07/putting-people-together/

46

I don’t know how I missed this thread, but this looks great. So far, I’m totally sold, and I look forward to seeing more.

I do wonder what the Chick parabola will look like, though.

47

Overused, probably.

48

They’re still bloggin’ up a storm over there.

We also need to consider things like vehicles and special equipment. Specifically steam-armor, artillery pieces, perhaps some sort of mechanized steam transport, et cetera. Having to equip these to individual soldiers would muddy the interface like crazy. Every character will have equipment, but if you could actually optimize loadout for a military of 25 or so guys – that might just throw their musket in a ravine anyway because they’re mostly autonomous and/or mad – would be an infuriating optimization problem.

So, you ask, how do we give out that lovely steam-armor?

Our current solution is to give every squad it’s own “inventory”, of sorts, which consists of just one slot. You can choose one special piece of equipment they can use, be it a Gatling gun or a steam-armor suit, and they figure out how the squad is going to use it best. This collapses a problem of potentially hundreds of inventory slots to maybe 10 at most, while giving your military the ability to specialize squad roles.

Sounds better and better and BETTER AND BETTER AND <<<OMGSPOOGE>>>

49

New trailer up at the site: http://clockworkempires.com/

50

That was pretty cool!

51

I’m excited to begin my career as a junior bureaucrat!

52

Definitely looks like fun (and pain!). I’m also not sure how I missed this thread last year!

53

There’s another dev blog post up from Gaslamp Games, about video card compatibility. These guys do good blogs - it was an interesting read (for me at least) despite the not-related-to-gameplay subject matter.

The common culprit here is that all of these machines use an integrated graphics card, the Intel HD3000 and Intel HD4000 respectively. Supporting integrated graphics cards is the bane of every rendering programmer’s existence. On paper, these cards support all the features we need to render CE; in practice… not so much. Fortunately, we have an Intel HD4000 in the office, in the form of the laptops that we took to PAX 2012 last year. Unfortunately, we actually need to support this card, as it’s the single most popular card on the Steam Hardware Survey (and also ships standard on a lot of OS X machines, including most Macbook Pros)

I had no idea those integrated chipsets were used so much. Other than a work laptop, I can’t think of any computer I’ve owned in the last decade that used one of those.

54

Other than top of the line “gaming systems”, just about every computer sold in big box stores comes with HD graphics.

55

Yup. They’re very common, inexpensive, and awful for gaming. But there you go.

56

I was all like, why aren’t the pictures loading, then I was all like, oh I see.

57

Yeah, LOL, I fell for that to. I even tried a different browser, until I noticed the filename was “black.png” and then I just read the damn article. Good stuff!

59

Until I put a real graphic card in last month I was getting by with HD 3000 graphics. Remarkably I was able to play games I shouldn’t have, like Total War Rome II. It looked like crap,but I was getting frame rates in the 20’s and it was playable

60

If you haven’t been reading the dev blog for this game, you really should go catch up. New post up today.

61

I have NOT been, but this is a game I was determined to keep an eye on. I missed the dev blog though, thanks for linking it. In fact, skimming through this thread, I somehow missed quite a LOT of new info! Time to get reading. :)