Clockwork Empires

[crownjules]

I randomly came across this game which was announced back in August. Gaslamp Games is a small indie studio that is known for their successful dungeon rogue-like, Dungeons of Dredmor.

There's also a PC Gamer interview in which the devs go into detail about the vision and design of the game. And on their website, they have a couple of dev blogs detailing some design stuff as well.

Anyway, what is the game? They're saying it's a cross between Simcity and Dwarf Fortress set in a steampunk world with a dose of Lovecraftian lore to terrorize your colony. The Clockwork Empire has dispatched you to start a small colony to achieve some end. Your colonists have their own sets of dreams and desires, which you can either fulfill or ignore. And of course the game will constantly be throwing wrenches in your cogs. Much like Dwarf Fortress and Dungeons of Dredmor, failure will be an often faced end.

Here's the gameplay points highlighted in their press release:

• Dynamic, city-building, citizen-simulating action. Every imperial subject has a purpose and agenda of their own, and their interactions are rich, exciting, and often lethal!
• New “procedural extrusion” technology lets you design your colony the way you want! Buildings are procedurally generated and extruded directly from the aether to your specifications!
• Tame the uncharted continents by land, sea, and air! Set forth in mighty Zeppelins to do battle with Sky Pirates, or take to the seas in search of fortune and probably sea serpents!
• Create magnificent acts of plumbing, link together mighty gears, and build ominous Megaprojects!
• Tangle with the machinations of malevolent entities! Scry the legacy of the Invisible Geometers, fumigate the baleful moon-fungus of the Selenian Polyps, and cleanse the scuttling creepiness and poor personal and moral hygiene of your everyday, average cultist.
• Losing is still fun! When your colony fails miserably, earn medals, promotions, and titles as befits a true politician and scion of the Empire!
• Multi-player mode, with up to 4 players, lets you co-operate with your closest friends to build a glorious city… or fight a horrifying economic battle to total annihilation!
• Round-Robin mode lets you share your Clockwork Empires with friends! Take turns running a colony directly into the ground then argue for fun-filled hours about whose fault it was! (Like Monopoly but with more exploding Zeppelins!)
• Rendered in glorious GaslampVision! Thrill as the colours are brought to life by Gaslamp’s team of caffeine-addled artists labouring under the technical specifications of our elite programmers* to bring you a game that is rendered in Each of the Three Dimensions! New multi-core technology by Actual University Students lets you use every last ounce of power in your computer to run a thrilling and vivid simulation! (* We’ll see about that, Nicholas. Soon. – David)
• Featuring the new Dynamic Soundtrack Orchestra – the Soundtrack that Adjusts to Your Gameplay! (Mr. M. Steele, conductor)
• No always-online DRM requirement, unlike certain other games we don’t want to mention. You know who you are and your mothers are very disappointed.
• Comes complete with the Gaslamp Games Quality of Excellence that you know and love, and if you don’t like something you can mod it yourself in the best tradition of Empire Craftsmanship!

From what I've read and seen so far, I'm pretty excited for this. Too bad the game is so far out right now.

 

[crownjules]

Here's a couple of things I picked out from the dev interview that are of note.

DJ: We do have a really heavy Lovecraftian-style influence on the horrible things that can happen, so 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.

NV: Essentially there is a transitive madness throughout things. One of the problems you run into is that your civilization is going gently mad. Which can be held at bay with laudanum or other opiates…

You mentioned to me via email that you want to do what Dredmor did for roguelikes, which is take the core of Dwarf Fortress and make it more accessible. How are you going to make it more accessible?

DJ: Obviously 3D art is a big part of it. I think one of the reasons why Dwarf Fortress isn’t for everyone right now… There are a couple of reasons, but I think the two big reasons are the graphics and the user interface. So we’re doing things that will allow us to try to get a lot of the functionality through while making it easy enough for people to pick it up. We’re trying very hard not to outwardly or ostensibly label it as “Dwarf Fortress For Everybody.” But that’s sort of our goal at heart, to try and take that experience and make it accessible. Spending a lot of time on the user interface, making that type of game look like a type of game that people are familiar with and use the same types of tropes in terms of user interface, things that people have already learned, to get them interested in it.

NV: They were very special. They were very special. So if you give the Victorians a whole bunch of slightly unstable steampunk technology and you stick gears in everything and you send them off to colonize the rest of the world which is full of Lovecraftian horrors, that’s basically the society you get. You have clerks and incompetent bureaucrats. You have the dangers of art. You have mad scientists. You have naturalists.

NV: Some people like to build enormous structures. We have something for them. We have this procedural building technology and we have some other sorts of very traditional sandbox-type elements.

DB: Build the biggest city, build the fearsome aetherscope and look into the celestial spheres and they will look back into you… [laughter]

NV: So basically… There is a certain element of the world that really likes building things. Which we’ve seen. It’s one of the things behind the success of Minecraft or whatever, and their second-generation imitators. It’s also true of Dwarf Fortress, except you’re sort of digging, so your building is subtractive… So we wanted to put something in. But we didn’t want it to be through mining, because you’re not dwarves, you’re Victorians. So what we came up with is a procedural building generator.

It’s part of what forms some of my master’s thesis work. What you do is this. You specify a floor plan, and you specify some vague stylistic goals, like what you would want, say, the profile of the walls to look like. Are you a guy who likes flat walls, or gabled roofs, or non-gabled roofs, or whatever. It extrudes that for you and you get a building. It’s not just restricted to square buildings. You can have fairly complicated structures, you can build palaces, or large depressing mega-factories, or tiny shanties or whatever. And the game just extrudes it for you.

NV: It’s been an interesting an experience, let’s just say. It’s satisfying. It helps that I have… The engine for Clockwork Empires is based on a research engine I’ve been building for about 12 years now. It’s something I’ve been poking away at and poking away at. Now it’s more frenetic poking. But we have a bunch of fairly unique needs that don’t lend themselves well to off-the-shelf solutions. We have this procedural building stuff. We have deformable terrain with different requirements. We run in an isometric perspective. We have lots of units running around. We need a fairly advanced networking engine. The other thing that is also important to us is that you be able to use as many CPU cores as possible. If you have a machine that has eight CPUs, we will run the simulation on all eight CPUs. No other game is currently actually doing things the way that we’re intending to do things. Most games operate on a jobs-based model, where there’s a very serial line. You start doing this and then you’ll split things off into jobs to try to use some of the CPUs, but it’s mainly one process all the way down. We use everything and the kitchen sink.

 

[Kalmah]

There is something about digging out your base that has always thrilled me, and when Dwarf Fortress was mentioned I was intrigued; until I realized there will probably be no digging of any kind. There is just something about dwarf fortress, dungeon keeper and evil genius that I can't get enough of.

Anyways, this sounds like it could be really fun. It needs to be done right now though so that I can play it.

 

[HydroSqueegee]

sign me up. this sounds like its going to be fantastic. im a huge dwarf fortress fan. but after all these years its hard to play being mostly the same thing over and over again. im looking forward to some thing fresh.

 

[AyashiKaibutsu]

Very interested in this. I loved DoD, and dwarf fortress with a good UI would be instant amazing. Hopefully, it comes out looking good.

 

[crownjules]

New dev blog post on the industrial production part of the game. The dev(s) go into past industrial/city building games like Settlers, Anno, and Caesar to talk about how they handled things and tie that all in with their plans for CE. I liked them for DoD, but they're gaining more respect in my eyes with such indepth discussion of their design goals for the game.

 

[paperfist]

Thanks for the heads up, if this is any indication it looks and sounds very interesting:

 

[Newbian]

There is something about digging out your base that has always thrilled me, and when Dwarf Fortress was mentioned I was intrigued; until I realized there will probably be no digging of any kind. There is just something about dwarf fortress, dungeon keeper and evil genius that I can't get enough of.

Anyways, this sounds like it could be really fun. It needs to be done right now though so that I can play it.

Go play minecraft asap.