Day-To-Day Work Logs and Woot! Engine Stuff!

You know, looking at the images near the bottom of this, it reminds me of “Towns” a bit ... only with the control over the settlement taking some lessons from “Tropico” and with the game proper actually having a chance to be finished instead of ending in Limbo.

I mean ... it looks nice. And that's just it, because after spending a week resurrecting my laptop after a certain someone tried to assassinate it, I am not really good at commenting well.

 

I'm excited and very much looking forward to join the effort of trying to break your building rendering code... err I mean playing your game. Looking forward to seeing the content and related systems slowly layered on top of what already appears to be a awesome base.

 

Well apparently CE will make you play one of the most famous indie games of all time for its endings, so I suppose it's positive praise.

 

Should I be graced with some Access which is Early, my first plan is to see exactly how rapidly I can drive an entire colony insane. I know it is not well tuned right now and that creeping madness is inevitable, but why wait? Efficiency even in madness, I say! Will be very interesting to find the tipping points.

 

Positive, Sir Nicholas. Definitely positive; it does look nice, and I did say my commenting skills were not up to par when I wrote that previous message.

The thing with Towns is, it is a game that had potential, but the developer pretty much decided to stop caring and abandoned it, leaving it in a state where “a mess” is a rather fitting way to describe it. Sure, it is playable, but it could have been better had some things been changed. I haven't played whatever version it is that you are testing now, but the screens do show that those changes are either already in or something that will be in, and you don't seem to be the sort of people who would abandon their own game on a whim and send it to Limbo. Thus, as far as Clockwork Empires is concerned I am ... hopeful, yes, that is a good word.

So yes, the feedback is positive. Cautious because I only have screenshots and text rather than personal experience, but positive; as time passes I am still eagerly waiting for CE to come to life.

 

Here's a question. Let's say I buy the game, day one. I create a colony that doesn't starve to death or get torn apart by fishpeople, but has a small (read: ubiquitous) cultist problem. What happens when whatever obleskian gates to the Other Realms finally DO open? Will I have to start a new colony to experience madness in HD? Or will the cultists learn to read their obscene tomes once the game is patched?

 

I suspect Republique saboteurs have infiltrated the testers and are attempting to undermine Nicholas by way of broken geometry.

 

That's a good question that I would also like an answer to, but having a lot of experience with alphas and betas, I can guess that it will involve a new colony. A lot of changes in this stage of game are incompatible between save states, but that depends entirely on how colony information is saved. I would imagine, however, that we are going to be making a LOT of new colonies in Early Access; probably even more so than when game goes Gold.

I could be completely wrong, of course, which is why I'd like to hear an answer. Personally, I plan on making a whole crap load of colonies just for fun.

 

Well, I say it depends on whether one can get back to the earlier colonies later or not. If yes, then it might be worth doing something about it (adding a boolean value that marks the colony as not-really-dead-but-for-now-unplayable instead of getting rid of it, for example); if not, then it's a non-issue because the colony is lost anyway for the purposes of the game-play.

And as far as the saves go, I figure that if having multiple colonies (not necessarily all active at once), rather than only being able to create a new one after the last one got blown to smithereens, was a thing then it would probably be better to store the save data in more than one file, with each governor/player having their own sub-folder and main save file and every colony having its own save file too.

 

I'm of two minds about the issue. Let's say that the patch that makes cults into problems is save compatible. Then all the obleskian sentiment will burst open like a be-tentacled boil, freshly lanced and draining madness on your colony. This promises to be Most Amusing, as sudden transformations from pit-stop for traders to pit-stop for obleskian horrors make for good stories.

On the other hand, sudden-onset tentacle invasions can be alarming and often frustrating for new players, particularly if they missed the patch notes. Furthermore, we could start new colonies after the patch with a unique sense of Creeping Dread above and beyond the average bureaucrat's Creeping Dread.

 

Uh, I don't want to see the sort of gibs you get from that.

 

I lied. I do want to see what sort of gibs you get from that. /Spends monies.

 

Its happening!

 

I did my part and purchased the game, now I need you to do your part and hit me with a large hammer just enough so that I am unconscious for 2 days.

 

Hallelujah! ....now what to do until Friday??

 

Prepare for more new people on the forum