A Post Release Assessment From Afar - for gaslamp

Discussion in 'Clockwork Empires General' started by jim darnaby, Nov 6, 2016.

  1. jim darnaby

    jim darnaby Member

    So I have been keeping up with the forum, reading reviews, checking steam reviews, just kinda paying attention. I have not played too much lately (but I have nearly 180 hours if I recall correctly logged in this game) I have played about 30-40 days on the 1.0 or newer, and it was cleaned up a bit and the ui is nice.

    But that's not what this post is about, this post is basically for Gaslamp employees, Nicholas dbaum and all the guys who build the game who are not involved with the forum.

    What I have noticed, people are playing the game. The reviews have not been great, but if you look at steam they all seem to have 15-20 hours bare minimum before deciding they wanna leave a negative. People are fighting the somewhat buggy nature of the game to play it, and are just running out of content. More content would extend the game play, and the bugs will get fixed, and are not that bad. Given, games are so well polished these days when you go buy console games from major companies that you are kind of put on that standard. I know that implementing new things creates new bugs yada yada.

    The game is close fellas, I felt like it was premature to release it, I don't work with yall I don't know motives I do not know what goes into making a game I don't even want to pretend I do. I know it is hard work, takes lots of hours and is easy to get down on yourselves I would imagine when it wasn't a home run on release. But this game is close, idk how close in terms of hours or days months years of man power doing the programming etc etc, but this game is not far from being really really good.

    Just needs more depth, more events, more purpose. Whether or not it will get there, idk, but I would ASSUME it would be worth pursuing, because even though people are not going all positive on this game with their reviews, people are not buying it loading it up playing 90 minutes and saying "man this game sucks" they are putting solid hours in then deciding, it is just not there.

    I hope some of the ideas from the past get worked into it. There has been lots of good ideas to add more events and depth to the game. I know people are wanting the steam punk stuff, and I am not even 100% sure what that entails, steam punk didn't draw me to this game, I just watched the trailer and said that looks pretty neat.

    It is close though, and I am not sure if it would be profitable to invest the hours to making the game get where it needs to get to, as I do not have a clue about how sales are influenced by post release not going over as well as it could, whether getting it where it needs to go will be able to rebound because for one it never goes under the new games on steam again, and number two a lot of people who hear a less than positive thing about something usually wont give anything another chance. I really don't know what the outcome would be if this game got that extra MMMMMPH put into it where you got to day 50-75 and had 50 colonists and you said to yourself " I need more" that is what this game has been lacking to me the whole time I have played it. Building a 50 day colony then going ok ill build another one rather than continuing that one.

    Basically, this post is to just say you guys are close. This game is not far off, and I hope it gets where it needs to be, because no matter what the reviews say, people are playing the game for solid numbers of hours, and that is something to be said about how close the game is to being one of the best games people have played. I would be hard pressed to find steam games with similar reviews (pos to neg) where people are playing as many hours before leaving the negative, I didn't see one negative from a 90 minute or 4 hour or anything under 10 even. 14 was the lowest I remember seeing.

    ITS CLOSE! GL with it, I hope the game is polished, and some stuff is added to make the late game more purposeful, I think that is what everyone is feeling when playing this game. Yall definitely have some unique intellects that did some pretty creative stuff building this game, so surely yall have had some ideas that could be introduced fairly easy just to give the game more longevity.

    My words of encouragement to you guys, not sure how encouraging it reads. I hope you guys have seen it the same way I have, and have a bit more knowledge to know it is worth pursuing hopefully. I know the 1.0 stuff on here kind of stated that while it will have stuff added still, it just will not get to where it once was hoped to get to, and it doesn't have to get that far imo, it just has to get some late game content no matter how simple it is or cheesy it is. I am not going to check what I wrote and I am tired going to bed as I type this, but I can ramble on a keyboard with my eyes half closed pretty darn good!
     
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  2. Nicholas

    Nicholas Technology Director Staff Member

    This is definitely where David and Chris are pushing this month: more content. Daniel is ... well, Daniel is actually catching up on six months of overdue bookkeeping, and I'm on bugs. But we're definitely aware of the deficiencies and are working to address them.
     
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  3. Unforked

    Unforked Member

    Well now I'm intruiged. Content is my favorite thing, right after bookkeeping.
     
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  4. jim darnaby

    jim darnaby Member

    Well I didn't want to be negative, I just wanted to give you the positives of what I see and I think there is plenty of positives. It is a good game that just needs polished and a bit of depth and then it will be a great game, the kind of game where people will play for 100 plus hours and THEN leave a negative review like people love to do on steam (for some reason when I see a reviewer leave a negative when they have hundreds of hours in a game, I feel the need to attack that person. I am becoming a troll I suppose, though only in that specific instance do I ever troll, but jesus who the hell plays something for 150 hours then decides its a game worthy of a negative review! WHO THE FK DOES THAT?????? A moron that endures 150 hours of a game he doesn't like apparently.

    Anyways, eagerly waiting to see the end product down the line, its on the right track for sure.
     
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  5. Jonta

    Jonta Member

    Just something small, (I do love this game a lot already very happy as it is!)

    But talking about motivation i think it could help the game with some kind of reward when you do "quit due to disaster"

    It would be cool it you could see the best result (max pop ?) and the mission was "solved with a V" at day 50 or later, with 50 pop or more (or something) on the World View, also to make it worth sloving the entire map (every mission).

    If something like this already exists, sorry, im not that far yet.
     
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  6. Mad_Ludvig

    Mad_Ludvig Member

    What the game really needs is more content based around bookkeeping. Bureaucrats for the Cog god!!!
     
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  7. Mochan

    Mochan Member

    Personally, I don't think the game needs more polish or more content.

    What the game needs is a serious re-design of its economic systems and interface. That's just my opinion, but I don't think the game's worker AI is smart enough to really get things done without excessive babying and micromanagement. The design is intrinsically flawed and needs to be reworked before more content and polish can be applied.

    Adding content is useless when the tedium of getting things done in this game just distracts you from actually playing it. If the content, story, events, and other emergent gameplay are what you think the game is lacking, you'll never appreciate them because you're too busy mired in the tedium of running your colony to ever get to experience it properly.

    People who are playing 15-20 hours before giving up on the game and giving it a thumbs down are just dedicated players who know all about the grind of playing colony management games and city builders, but even they cannot overlook the obvious problems of this game.

    I am not going to sugar coat it. This game needs a ton of work before it can become great. The sooner the developers realize this, the better it will be for all of us.
     
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  8. jim darnaby

    jim darnaby Member

    I have no problem with the "micro management" I actually prefer to always be putting orders in, I don't want everything completely automated. Doing the micro management IS playing it in this game since you have no control over any individuals. So if you could automate things, you would be able to play the game while sitting on your hands. The tedium is what you pay for in the game. Given I agree the UI isn't the best UI in the world (or anywhere close to the best) and could use some work, but I feel quite a bit different than you Mochan. I think this game is not a normal colony/city builder.

    I don't think the game is as buggy as people think still, I just think people get to despair so easy that it really does take near perfect efficiency in new games to avoid that slow down that despair causes.

    Difficulty settings would be nice for this game, I feel like as it is, it is set on hard mode, there is no humanly way to get a chemical works and church built by day 15 usually. (there is but you would be majorly sacrificing important things) and day 20 is approx. where cults start popping up, which if you get a church on day 20, toooooo late, but you need iron cogs too, well shit.... I guess I can build a public house and have booze, but wait, that involves a fairly advanced metal works, or I could just make one beer at a time, IF I am in the right biome and have access to a beer making ingredient... Well shit again..

    So the game is just extremely difficult as it is, which is fine, I would much much much much prefer it to be too difficult than too easy when there are no difficulty settings available. I don't think difficulty settings would be hard to implement, a few multipliers on how fast people get to despair, how much damage bandits do, how much damage fish people do, and that's about it.

    It is extremely hard to have done anything with bric a brac by day 20. I used to be able to g et a lot of stuff done by day 20 in this game, but I feel like I have a much harder time doing so in recent builds. Maybe people are going into despair faster and I am osing efficiency, that is what I feel like is happening. I notice much more despair in my newer files in earlier days of the game.
     
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  9. Naffarin

    Naffarin Bureaucrat-Inspector Exemplar of The Empire

    Actually it is really easy :) my last colony already built about 25 cupboards by day 17...you just have to build a mine with a single mineshaft as the sixth building of your first overseer workforce. The sand from the mine can be used for glass and that for bric a brac without impacting your colony growth.
    Who says a mine needs an ore repository ;)
     
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  10. ironbear

    ironbear Member

    Question please. I was told earlier that a single mine shaft is only allow 1 worker to go in. So if I got more than 1 workers in the group, shouldn't I need more mine shaft?
     
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  11. Naffarin

    Naffarin Bureaucrat-Inspector Exemplar of The Empire

    In the current 1.0X release it is possible to have more than one worker in the mineshaft...my experience shows that the overseers seems to need an extra mineshaft once in a while.
    But this behaviour is considered as a bug so it will likely change in the 1.1+ revisions.
     
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  12. ironbear

    ironbear Member

    Yup that's what I was told too. But well, I am hoping that they will make allowing of several miners per mine shaft.
     
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