Your biome ideas

I'm personally excited to see cultists summoning these horror's out of their own realms. I can imagine if you leave a cult alone then they might open a portal to some incomprehensible realm and all sorts of cosmic beasts emerge to rip your colony to shreds.

 

It will be interesting to see what sort of gameplay progression is implemented. There have been some great indie sandbox games this generation like mine craft, terraria, and don't starve.

If they copied terrarias content progression sceme I'd be very happy. That game does sandbox right.

To those unfamiliar it goes something like this.

1). while the game world is populated with many biomes that mean quick death, they aren't immediately accessible. Your first task is to chop some wood to build a shelter to survive the coming night.

2). From there you spend Many many hours tunneling through the earth gathering resources, uncovering artifacts, and building your settlement to progress through the basic tech tree. The deeper you go the better metals you find. From copper to iron etc.

3) once you are decked out in full gold gear and established, and keep in mind you have likely explored a very large world at this point, its time to explore the biomes and trigger Boss events to progress a whole other progression chain that fells more like metroidvania than an exploration game.

4). Then after completing all of the quest events its time to trigger hardmode and start the progression all over.

So what starts as a very wide open sandbox game turns out to have a somewhat linear progression. The end result is a game that gives you weeks of content.

 

I actually hope the gameplay progression isn't quite like that. While it's a great concept, I would like to be able to start off on the extremely hard biomes from the start (by accident or calculated choice). I want to be able to fup up my colony due to my inexperience, dumb decisions and out-of-my-league difficulty. Less "hand-hold-y", you know?

That being said, I haven't really kept up with the development logs of Clockwork Empire at all (I'd like to experience the full game as if it were completely new). So it's possible whatever I said above is either obvious, redundant or completely inapplicable. Or maybe not!

 

I agree with Gorbax on the gameplay progression. Some people do like to start playing in hell and then come to the surface instead of doing the opposite.

 

What I hope is for options, not just a difficulty option, but full on:

"Do you have a preference for your Colony location, Good Bureaucrat?"
Start me off with plenty of supplies in a nice, friendly biome!
Somewhere on the outskirts, good sirs!
DROP ME INTO HELL RIGHT NOW! *roar*
Throw the bones, I'm feelin' random

But I do seem to recall them mentioning that you will lose a lot of colonies and that they intend for that to be Fun! Perhaps they could do something along the lines of Towns, where you can "bury your colony" and the next colony has a chance of finding the ruins.

 

There are no perfect solutions though, if you design the game such that you can start in the hardest biome and possible survive there is little room for progression. Once you've maxed out your research tree and gathered all the rare resources the hardest biome would be trivialized. So you end up with very little progression. It'd be like being able to start dungeons of dreadmor on the last level.

If you design a game with progression though much of the game is unaccessible to a new player.

And to clarify my original point, you can in terra Ira dig your way down to hell at the start of the game, or build your house in a jungle biome. You will just die before accomplishing anything.

 

So perhaps something like Don't Starve where you have more character options based on your rank, and your rank goes up the longer you can survive?

I like that idea. A brand new, freshly "trained" Bureaucrat has limited options of where he can start out his Colony because The Empire doesn't want to waste too many resources. Once you've killed a few settlements off and risen in rank, areas farther out from the Empire are now available for you to try your hand at conquering. The better you do the more Colony start biomes you have access to, the more rewards you get, etc.

 

It can be meta-progression, then. Being able to start only in "normal" areas when you just started playing, but being able to start in "hell" once your colonies fulfilled a few objectives and thus it's certain you know how to play at least somewhat.

 

That's exactly what I meant, though. If there was an option for me to start at the deeper dungeon levels, I'd definitely try it. I would be trading the progression for the challenge. The fact that I'd die without accomplishing anything 999 times out of 1000 is kind of the point, I think. It's the trying, you know?

Anyway, it's not like it absolutely has to be like that. I was just thinking out loud

EDIT:

Have you ever played Crackdown? The progression-game is taking out all the key figures in the kingpins' entourages to weaken the kingpins themselves, before taking them on. But you can perfectly go straight to a kingpin's hide-out, ignore the 99.9% failure estimate and get your ass blown to bits in an avalanche of overpowered henchmen. But it's freaking fun having to plan your every step, taking down guards at the right time and generally being an incredible underdog. That's the challenge-game I hope will not be completely ignored from the developers of a rogue-like game that balanced challenge and reason pretty well.

 

Hey This is kinda replying to that massive stream of conversation above.

The way I see it being is that clockwork empires is like dwarf fortress in the sense that you don't really feel like you've done everything there is to do once you construct a flourishing colony in the hardest environment, its about the stories that arise from that. Clockwork Empires isn't a game about following linear progression, its about the stories that get created from progressing linearly and non linearly to the doom of your colony. Sure you can build a thriving colony in some biome with insane difficulty but its not just about conquering the land, sea, and air, its about how your colony went from having everything to being destroyed. You can have you colony completely wrecked in that biome, and then go right back to it and have an entirely different experience, so you never really feel like you've done everything because its not the kind of game that you beat in the traditional sense.

 

Can't say I like the notion of locked content in a sandbox title, if an inexperienced player wants to build a colony on the crater of an active volcano surrounded by bloated zombie whales that soar majestically through the air with just wooden structures, let him. The fun is in building where you want, not where the game tells you to, if it does happen then it'll be one of the first things to be modified away. (along with a certain other aspect which plagues TES)

 

I guess I thought of the game as more progressive in nature. You begin with a humble encampment tasked with surviving the coming winter. As the years pass your settlement expands into a bustling center of commerce, scientific progress, political influence, and/or military might. To reach this point you must explore/extract/dominate increasingly hostile/perilious/remote biomes. And as you progress through each of the hopefully many stages of the game the environment will attempt to purge you from the landscape. Until finally the gameworld purges you from the land in an apocalyptic event say war with the empire, releasing the elder gods into this dimension, a war of independence against you the loyal colonist, or if you go the capitalist route a revolt from the hoi polloi French revolution style with guillotine and all.

Also have you guys not played terraria? If so you are doing yourselves a disservice. If you like indie sandbox games it doesn't get much better than that.

 

I'm not entirely certain what balance they are planning to strike between progression and sandbox. I imagine, for instance, that each colony you make is situated within a single, or perhaps a small range, of biomes. I don't think a single colony can spread out to cover all of the biomes.

But then again I could be completely wrong about that. /shrug

 

I think don't stave does the same thing though I haven't played it. Each game world is generated with an instance of every biome which needs to be explored and exploited for various rewards.

 

From what I know, it might progressive, when it comes to meta-gameplay. It is doubtful that any of your colonies will survive until the apocalypse in question, so why not begin some of our later colonies in "hell" only to perish in a blaze of... well, more likely sulphur rather than glory since it's "hell", but you get the point.

 

Lots of great ideas here - I can't seem to come up with more ideas for useable asthetics! I'll just add that I think dark and cold pine forest are an absolute necessity in the biome selection...

And it will be interesting to see how the start-biome and the surrounding ones influence your strategies - biomes like "Norwegian fjord" or "tropical atoll" would seem to restrict, say, farming (due to there simply not beeing much areable land around) while various dense forests would allow agriculture once the accursed trees are cleared. (in the name of Progress!) Will buildings use different building material depending on what is available? Do the different areas have variation in Strange Happenings, requiring different strategies to safeguard the Empire against their Unormality, etc. More diversity might be best to reserve for expansions or updates?

 

I have a couple biome ideas. Also I demand to see in phrase non-euclidean geometry used frequently in game.

1) the hollows, a dead an decaying biome that spreads through a Forrest biome at a rate determined by the level of madness. Full of fallen rotted trees and shrouded by a dense darkness that blocks out all but the midday sun. The only thing that grows within are lumniscent fungal growths. Dog size vermin have been said to creep within but rumors suggest that beneath their jet black mangy fur is a beast that isn't quite alive. And then there are the shapes, sentientiant shapes, seen moving within the fungal groves chanting something foul in a language long dead.

2) the larval carverns (in honor of a forum typo). An underground biome of pulsating walls of flesh through which run streams of jet black blood. At the center is said to be a beating mass of writhing larva. But few who venture within ever return for the atmosphere is most foul and all manor of beast and men who touch the walls of flesh are assimilated, their twisted visages forever etched in a final moment of otherworldly bliss. Perhaps equipped with a clockwork suit and rebreather a small team could explore the secrets within. Something must be done for the carvens appear to be spreading cancerously beneath the land. There are wispers the mass sings in ones dreams drawing them to the caverns. A few have already gone missing.

 

I like this idea.

 

Anyway, I hope that biomes are not just something static but something dynamic. Whose appearance can be triggered and whose growth represents an exisistential threat to your colony. Something that must be stopped at all costs. Or say a Forrest biome that provides for the colony and whose growth can be outpaced by progress. A biome that must be protected and conserved.

Instead of just being passive backdrops that serve as a difficulty setting where choosing to build in the tiaga is hardmode, biomes can be living things that serve as central antagonists. Things that grow and consume and things that launch undead armies at your town.

 

It would be nice if you could, once you get a higher position in the empire, be able to lead an expedition of those "exorcists" (how were they called again?) that were mentioned in that storylike newsblog. Create an outpost for the elite to investigate what caused the land to turn evil. Sorta like the recon-corps from Attack on Titan.