BETA 54 BETA 54: YES, INSPECTOR

It's up!

https://www.gaslampgames.com/2016/08/26/clockwork-empires-august-update-yes-inspector/

(No changes from 53C except for a couple of crash fixes. There are a few little issues lurking but they will be hotfixed over the weekend.)

 

Oh, actually 53C -> 54 changes:

• the end-game stats screen got hooked up to real numbers
• the Laboratory is now upgradable
• character emotes won't draw over the UI anymore
• beetle lacquer belongs to the player now
• terrain flattening is now slightly faster
• maybe fixed obscure obeliskian scriperror
• fixed standing door 5x recipe
• fixed the 5x versions of recipes showing up in command tooltips

 

Okay, well, apparently there WERE some changes. NOBODY TELLS ME ANYTHING

 

Hey, they were all in the changelog! I believe you automatically get email updates when it's changed? And Slack notifications?

 

Disclaimer: these aren't my systems. I didn't design 'em, and my implementation work is pretty scattered; I did the code for the jobs system to make the workshop and building upkeep handled by the workshop owner crew, and should really extend that to everything else. That said:

The version of upkeep in 54 is the version that shipped with 53C. We still don't have enough feedback on it to judge appropriately (and probably won't for a bit) what other work needs to be done there. Honestly, 53C is the first one where people actually do the upkeep consistently enough and bug-freely enough that we can actually look at it as a feature to see if it has the desired impact without bugs and things getting in the way (it takes a bit to get us to the point where stability is not an issue for *any* new feature) and then what adjustments, if any, need to be made. It's also worth noting that upkeep for modules already existed in previous builds, and it was just an undocumented implicit mess where modules would stop working and random commodities would get lifted and dropped off to make things happen.
The decision to switch upkeep from modules not working to modules working slowly in 53C was exactly in response to player feedback, as was the "advanced workbench". We seriously considered a proposal where we re-skin the entire thing as "taxes" but not changing any of the mechanics just to see if people were happier, but then decided that everybody would immediately want the ability to be tax cheats and to start bandit colonies and re-staging the American Revolution with Cogs - which is an interesting idea, but it's definitely something to think about in terms of event arcs and not something that is a mechanical system. We do have methods to our madness, and a lot of that has to do with "taking a player perspective into account", but a large part of the job of being a designer is to interpret what the player says they want, and then to figure out what the real problem is. Usually, if we immediately read a player suggestion and say "that sounds great, let's do that", it's a trainwreck. The real question then becomes, "what is the problem occurring that made the player suggest that?" and that's a harder problem to answer. It may take a few swings at it.

With regards to the cosmic horror: the way to think about it is that you have a sandwich. The sandwich has meat and bread in it. To make the sandwich more moist, you put mayonnaise on the sandwich. Dredmor was much the same way - it was a meat and bread game. You go around, you click monsters, you do inventory management. We then put a lot of mayo on it, in the forms of wacky humor and theming and so on and so forth, sometimes to work around the fact that the initial version of Dredmor that was publicly released also had its rough edges (which were later mostly smoothed out in, ugh, a year and a half of patches.) In this case the mayo is definitely more gameplay element related, and cosmic horror is still being added and developed, but it is mayo. You are asking for a sandwich composed entirely out of mayonnaise. ("It's Good For You!") If we did that we'd have, I don't know, Wacky Elder Gods in Space or something. Everybody thinks they want that, and many have tried, but in fact you end up with a terrible game because... there's no game there!

Previous implementations of cults and cultism definitely tried to be more "mayonnaise-heavy", but then you run into the fundamental conflict that you sort of want cults to be a bad thing with consequences. Otherwise, you can't have... well, consequences, which are fun - and then there's no point of having cults other than getting to choose whether or not your colonists wear the purple robes or not.

We can definitely put more mayonnaise on. We can even make the mayonnaise more fattening! But you still need a sandwich and things matter like the quality of the bread, in this case represented by the graphics engine, and uh, whatever the meat is.

So, uh, yeah. Have a little faith! (We had the exact same problems with the food, and everybody was convinced that the food system we currently have in place was also ruining the game, forever... about four months ago.)

 

We had a bunch of complaints of users being unable to feed everybody, having 3/4 of their colony spent on food, that sort of thing.

 

(It's still there! You just have to work for it!)

 

...

at least I think it's still there. *makes note to check*

 

(I had way more hair at the start of this project.)