…of Dungeons of Dredmor fame. Surprised I beat Mr. Baumgart to the punch on this one.
Source: PCGamer.com
“Clockwork Empires: a preview of Gaslamp Games’ Lovecraft-laden steampunk city-builder”
Take SimCity and stuff it with steampunk. Take Dwarf Fortress and make it modern. Take Anno and dump H.P. Lovecraft into its oceans.
Consider yourself mildly acquainted with Clockwork Empires, the next project of Gaslamp Games. The indies behind of Dungeons of Dredmor are creating a 3D, sandboxy city-builder teeming with 19th century imperialism. It’ll be populated by street urchins, aristocrats, volcanoes, sea serpents, war zeppelins, mad scientists, and at least one foodstuff that doubles as a building material. It’ll be irreverent. It’ll have multiplayer. It’ll be moddable. Most of all, I think it has a chance to set a new standard for player-driven story generation in the genre.
SimVictoriana
Clockwork Empires casts you into the isometric eyes of an outpost founder and overseer in foreign lands. You build factories, laboratories, residences, cathedrals, barracks, pubs, and Civilization-style Megaprojects. You use 19th century technology: pipes, gears, steam, pickling, Tesla coils. And you populate the colony with upper-, middle- and lower-class citizens: clerks, poets, scientists, factory workers, soldiers, and the burdensome rich.With these goals, citizens, and resources, you’re thrust into a frontier world—albeit one exponentially more exotic and dangerous than what Victorian England actually explored. “You know those old globes that have everything poorly drawn and had monsters all over them? That’s what the Clockwork Empire is like,” says Gaslamp CEO Daniel Jacobsen. Art Director David Baumgart continues: “There was this notion of the center of the Empire being a sort of metaphysical source of order, and the further you get out, there’s more chaos and strange things and magics.”
This is Gaslamp’s big, Lovecraftian twist on the genre: making you a colony-builder amid the grand idealism of Victorian discovery and cuddling you up with horrors, madness, wild species, and volatile science. “If you’ve got a whole bunch of people researching in a building and you just sort of leave them to it and you don’t keep tabs on them, there’s a high probability that they can start doing evil things and summoning demons or something,” says Jacobsen.
A more mundane example: like any good city builder, you might have fishermen on your colony. They’ll work docks and shoreline on their own, collecting things from the sea for your colony to eat, or hunting whales (“for their delicious, clean-burning oil,” as Baumgart puts it) with a steam-driven harpoon cannon. Off-coast, though, they might have to tangle with beasts like cuttlefish-people, wandering Kraken, and predators like sea serpents as they do their job.
