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