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Author Topic: Clockwork Empires - 1.0 release October 26th  (Read 255344 times)

Citizen Daniel

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Re: Clockwork Empires - **Earliest access! Testing Details linked in OP **
« Reply #1470 on: December 18, 2014, 04:59:31 pm »

Thanks folks :)

Spatial priorities need some work. Our map of where "civilized" parts of the map are and aren't needs some more work, as it SHOULD keep them from wandering too far from the base.

Also fish people are weird.
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Girlinhat

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Re: Clockwork Empires - **Earliest access! Testing Details linked in OP **
« Reply #1471 on: July 23, 2015, 06:40:23 pm »

Bada-BUMP!  I was excited for this when I heard about it, and just now thought to look it up.  Watched the current trailers and whatnot.  It... doesn't look anything like what many of the old promises were about.  Procedural buildings and workshop setup and actual cities.  It looks like a remake of Towns or any of the other dozen like it...  Am I mistaken?

forsaken1111

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Re: Clockwork Empires - **Earliest access! Testing Details linked in OP **
« Reply #1472 on: July 23, 2015, 06:51:50 pm »

Bada-BUMP!  I was excited for this when I heard about it, and just now thought to look it up.  Watched the current trailers and whatnot.  It... doesn't look anything like what many of the old promises were about.  Procedural buildings and workshop setup and actual cities.  It looks like a remake of Towns or any of the other dozen like it...  Am I mistaken?
It's... well honestly I can't make myself sit down and play through the game right now. Its so so rough... the whole game just feels really awkward. They have some cool ideas but the art style is hideous and it's difficult to understand exactly what is going on. It's still early access of course, so they may tie it all together at some point.
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Citizen Daniel

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Re: Clockwork Empires - **Earliest access! Testing Details linked in OP **
« Reply #1473 on: July 23, 2015, 07:54:53 pm »

There are a few things causing the problems that you're talking about, and we're doing our best to fix them. I appreciate the feedback btw; we've been seeing a lot of similar posts and it's been informing a lot of our choices lately. The game isn't done, and we're not satisfied, but we will be.

One of the big problems is not so much a setting issue as a gameplay/UI issue: "progression" wasn't clear, easy, or rewarding. There is a build order, to be sure, but we're not giving players enough motivation to build the later buildings, and they're often incredibly expensive. However, even if you do want to build the later buildings, we're not providing enough UI support to make it clear how to get there. This part of the game we focused on a lot over the last few weeks. Chris has been working hard on rebalancing what is necessary to make sure there's not a huge glut of resources or things don't take forever to build, and I finally bit the bullet and rewrote a bunch of ancient UI code that was standing between us and actually conveying this information easily to players, so I'm hoping/expecting that significant improvements will be made to this problem over the next few weeks.

The other issue is that there's not really a lot of variance to the challenges presented by the game yet, and this was because we didn't have a particularly useful model for them.

One of the sources for challenges is character-simulation-driven, but we had to neuter the character simulation temporarily because they were getting REALLY emotional about things the player couldn't control, and that led to really dire things happening which felt terrible because the player was frequently being punished for random mood swings. So we had to temporarily reduce the character's ability to rage out for things that aren't the player's fault, and we had to reduce the effects of them being upset.

I have a pretty effective model for this problem finally, and we'll be ramping it up slowly. In the mean time the game feels easy and the characters seem a little boring, but we decided that was more acceptable in the short term than the alternative, which was just too punishing.

Another source for challenges is the creeping madness of the settlement. This gameplay mechanic has been hammered out and actually feels pretty good, but again we've had to reduce its importance while we give players ways to deal with it. We finally have alcohol removing character memories the right way, so this will probably be going back in once the UI makes it feel like giving the characters beer is effective.

This isn't the glamorous part, and it'll start to click, i think, in 4 to 6 weeks when character behavior starts to matter, starts having clear causes, and the player is given clear options for dealing with the problems. If we had made some side scrolling platformer instead, or we were committed to just making a solveable single player city building optimization puzzle, the game would be done by now, but where's the fun in that?

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Aklyon

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Re: Clockwork Empires - **Earliest access! Testing Details linked in OP **
« Reply #1474 on: July 23, 2015, 08:02:45 pm »

So we're in the part where the game parts are there, but the game isn't quite there yet?
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Trapezohedron

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Re: Clockwork Empires - **Earliest access! Testing Details linked in OP **
« Reply #1475 on: July 23, 2015, 08:07:34 pm »

PTW with glorious expectations.
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Thank you for all the fish. It was a good run.

Citizen Daniel

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Re: Clockwork Empires - **Earliest access! Testing Details linked in OP **
« Reply #1476 on: July 23, 2015, 08:43:52 pm »

So we're in the part where the game parts are there, but the game isn't quite there yet?

In short, yeah, definitely.

I stopped posting our dev blog regularly until I feel like we are there, but for people watching, we've been hammering on this with regular updates for a year now and we're not planning on stopping until it's done. If you're interested in playing a game as is worked on that's awesome, but if not I'll let you know when it's ready.
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Darkmere

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Re: Clockwork Empires - **Earliest access! Testing Details linked in OP **
« Reply #1477 on: July 23, 2015, 09:12:10 pm »

I haven't played for a while to avoid some spoilers but I've been following the dev logs off and on. There's been pretty good progress but it's not the kind of flashy hype-based progress that looks good on a TPS report.
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And then, they will be weaponized. Like everything in this game, from kittens to babies, everything is a potential device of murder.
So if baseless speculation is all we have, we might as well treat it like fact.

lordcooper

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Re: Clockwork Empires - **Earliest access! Testing Details linked in OP **
« Reply #1478 on: July 24, 2015, 10:25:08 am »

I'm starting to wonder a bit about some of the features you mentioned the game possibly having earlier.  Are things like conveyor belts, an abundance of pipes and being able to define the extrusion of buildings still planned?  I feel like there's the base of a game here now, I'm just not sure if it's the one originally described.  Maybe CE isn't as far along in development as I'm assuming it is.

the art style is hideous

Personally, I adore the art style.
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forsaken1111

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Re: Clockwork Empires - **Earliest access! Testing Details linked in OP **
« Reply #1479 on: July 24, 2015, 10:53:01 am »


the art style is hideous

Personally, I adore the art style.
Maybe hideous is too strong. The animations are stilted and feel disconnected. Again, I fully understand that this is early access and probably a lot of stuff is unfinished. I love the idea of the game but so far its just not too much fun.

One annoyance i had, I was off planning a building. When I scrolled back down I found that my soldier was dead. No notice, no message, Apparently he died to a fishperson. We havent' seen a single fishperson, and I wasn't looking away for long so I don't see how a fishperson could have moved in to kill him and then left without anyone else dying or me not seeing it. The guy had a rifle as well,   I wouldn't think an unarmed fishdude would be much of a threat. Oh well.
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Puzzlemaker

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Re: Clockwork Empires - **Earliest access! Testing Details linked in OP **
« Reply #1480 on: July 24, 2015, 11:16:18 am »

I'm starting to wonder a bit about some of the features you mentioned the game possibly having earlier.  Are things like conveyor belts, an abundance of pipes and being able to define the extrusion of buildings still planned?  I feel like there's the base of a game here now, I'm just not sure if it's the one originally described.  Maybe CE isn't as far along in development as I'm assuming it is.

the art style is hideous

Personally, I adore the art style.

It's not, they release pretty detailed reports about what still needs to get done.  Read it here:

http://clockworkempires.com/development.html

In terms of gameplay, they have managed to get most of the start to mid gameplay in, but none of the end stuff (Like factories and conveyor belts).  Scroll down to economy and logistics to see what I mean.

So yeah, there are a whole lot of things not nearly close to being done, but every month it gets better and better.  Looking forward to the full product, for sure!
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Citizen Daniel

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Re: Clockwork Empires - **Earliest access! Testing Details linked in OP **
« Reply #1481 on: July 24, 2015, 01:05:35 pm »

Tried to write a response to this while having coffee this morning but swiftkey kept doing really weird stuff.

Basically yes, these are still plans.

I don't know about the extrusions anymore, but it's not a technical hurdle, more that we want to put our efforts where they'll have the most overall impact, and most people seem to just play the game in the walls-down mode so much that it currently doesn't have much value. This very much could change, and it's still on the list, it's just way down that list since there are other things we can spend our time on that have way more impact.

Pipes: yes. Conveyor belts... probably not. Conveyor belts specifically are expensive for us to do well, and they seriously disrupt the economic balance of the game, since they drastically lower the value of manpower, and such a big focus of the game is on character interactions. I'm hopeful that with just the fluid lines we'll get hit that "tone". These took a backseat to character-driven work because the character-driven stuff is more complicated and more fundamental.

There are definitely ways to do this stuff, but as I said before my sights are set on a general balance of the economics to make the typical gameplay loop feel responsive and rewarding, and starting to weave in problems with solutions that the player can meaningfully implement. More specifically I *really* want to get more cosmic horror going on, since we've seriously neglected that tone for too long, and the systems are starting to be ready for it.
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genmac

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Re: Clockwork Empires - **Earliest access! Testing Details linked in OP **
« Reply #1482 on: July 24, 2015, 03:55:44 pm »

This game is one I bought in early access based on what I realize mostly now was speculation in the thread and the premise, but I haven't messed with it more than a few hours.  Do gates to unknown worlds ever open up or big monstrous creatures appear?  The few hours so far have just been cabbage and fish people and I'm hoping some cooler stuff comes along later down the road. 
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inteuniso

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Re: Clockwork Empires - **Earliest access! Testing Details linked in OP **
« Reply #1483 on: August 14, 2015, 12:03:30 am »

Started up a new game in Alpha 42 with Dauntless Dare start. Like the new agriculture mechanics, definitely prevented immediate death. Also I'm interested to see if there's an end event to these complaints about the fishpeople.
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Oneir

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Re: Clockwork Empires - **Earliest access! Testing Details linked in OP **
« Reply #1484 on: August 14, 2015, 06:33:57 am »

"...no, intenuniso, you are the fishpeople"
And then intenuniso was a cultist.
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