Will the 1.0 release exclude many of the initial plan's features

The question i have, is what do you get out of having a 3D game in the end compared to those game ? I have kinda the opposite opinion of unforked here.

The graphics are cute, but i wouldn't say they're particularly good. The houses still are basically cubes with a pyramid on top (no matter how long it took to get that procedural extrusion technology right). And the 3D is not exploited in gameplay as every thing is on ground level. The only feature that use another Z level in gameplay is the terrain which has to be mercilessly flattened anyway.
While a 3D rendering engine would have allowed more verticality and visually impressive constructions, it's not exploited at all by the game atm. And you decided at some point not to include any visual steampunk touches like random cogs, vents, pipes and all the visual clutter and cute steampunk animations that could have looked awesome in 3D are nowhere to be found. Sure a random cog doesn't make a steampunk universe steampunk, but it helps setting the stage.

We see what happens "inside" the buildings which is nice a nice touch, but is not actually relevant in the game, as there is no ownership system, and most of the furniture are not actually used. After all this time the colonists still eat on the stockpile for instance, instead of gathering in a canteen space (which is something every 2D game of the genre has). So while seeing your colonists in 3D is more immersive than 2D blobs, the immersion is broken when they chomp that bread loaf standing above the stockpile.
On that note, 3D animations slow the gameplay down really heavily, as colonists need to pick things up, walk etc. While in 2D games the littles guys mill around the town hovering and execute things much more quickly. Before the inclusion of x2 speed in CWE i never played more than 50 days in a game and never reached the top tier content because everything took forever to execute.

It pains me to say this but i feel CWE might actually have been a better game in 2D as the engine would have been lighter and it might have given more time for relevant simulation features and content rather than spending 40 iterations trying to fix gabions.

So basically what i'm getting at is while it's certainly unfair to compare CWE to 2D games, given the amount of work that went into the 3D engine, i'm not really sure it paid off in the end.

Of course i still love you guys and will continue to support you as long as Gaslamp exist, but i hope in the future you'll find better ways to implement those crazy concepts you showed us in the beginning rather than dismiss those as "not fun" ideas.

( btw it's hard for me to be told that conduits are dismissed as "not fun" as we've never seen anything about them since 3 years ago in the concepts arts. For me it was one of the things that would have really elevated the game above the fold )

 

I don't know for me the basic implementation of conduits would have been quite simple and allow you to extend from there.

You have a generator thingy that needs a fuel source. From the generator you have powerlines (steam tubes) going to the workshops and provide them with power. Power enable you to connect power consuming modules (that would otherwise require their own fuel to operate) and from there you can industrialize the means of production. That's it.

((Then of course, more Production allows you to grow the colony, equip a more powerful military, complete mega projects (like your very own Airship to battle those Sky Pirates) and meet the ever more demanding Production Quotas set by the Queen))



I'm sure you have Very Good reasons, but it's also hard for us since that is one of the feature that would have made the game really stand out.

You shouldn't be Rimworld or Factorio, you should be the missing link between those games. After 20h spent on a colony i shouldn't be still struggling to get hematite or native gold, i should be struggling keeping my workshops for exploding from overpressure or something.

Colonists mostly do things by hand right now which is very inefficient. After a while (too long while) you get to do bulk actions which speed things up (and that's only been implemented recently). Then Conduits should come around the corner and show you the true power of the Industrial Era.
What i'm getting at, is laying down pipes is not supposed the most fun part here. The Pipes are mostly there to set the steampunk mood. It's a premise. You need pipes to do steampunk things with steam period. If there is no steam, there is definitely no steampunk. What is fun is what you can connect with pipes. You power more efficient workshop and modules, you industrialize your town.


Also rails, with carts allowing you to move those hematite ore directly from the mine to the metalworks. Don't tell me you think Rails are not fun ? Everyone love rails. Rails are the most satisfying thing. If you ever had a model train you know what i mean.

 

I am fine with no pipes or rails due to the routing & UI complexity described. But I agree that higher industrialization should make for more efficiency *somehow*. (Other than just simply having more workshops and modules.)

Maybe we can have a robot factory that makes robot helpers? Steampunk robots that stomp around carrying stuff and doing simple jobs like stockpiling and load-hauling? Presto, 1) moar steampunkz, 2) increased efficiency, 3) little additional work beyond art (because uses the human figure system), 4) potential for interesting conflict with the humans (maybe some humans / cults really hate robots...).

This would be DLC, obviously. But I would definitely feel like things were more steampunky if there were steampunk robots doing Useful Things, except if they get too close to certain idols, in which case they start doing Not Useful At All In Fact Oh My God Why Is It Doing Those Things.

 

I kinda understand what you're getting at... it all comes down to not having enough manpower and/or time, but it's still really sad that a steampunk city builder doesn't really have any steampunk city building. At least that's what i feel. As if you were never going to make that game in the first place.

For me the features outlined earlier by Ambling Along were really key for the game success. It pains me that ever since earliest access was released, they were actually never really going to be implemented in the first place.
Probably you were hoping to implement them at some point, and hopefully you will manage to actually implement them at some point, but i wish some more damage control was made when it was clear they were not going to make the cut.
(i realize it must be difficult to manage expectations without de-hyping your game)

 

Yeah, I can live without a lot of those features; vehicles, for example, would be cool but I don't think are essential.

I guess where we differ is that if the pitch is "Steampunk meets Lovecraft," cutting the steampunk isn't so much cutting a feature as making a completely different game. I really, really want this game to succeed, and right now I'm really worried about (and somewhat expecting) a No-Man's-Sky-type reaction. Frankly, if the answer is "the steampunk/industrial stuff will be DLC," I'd expect that to make the reaction worse, not better.

At the moment, there is very little to differentiate - mechanically and to some extent aesthetically - a Clockwork Empires workshop from any other settlement builder's workshop - ditto for dormitories, kitchens, farms, etc. All of the Victorian Steampunk Horror Stuff Denoted by Capital Letters exists in the fluff and in the forums, but not in the game (except for occasional touches here and there).

Yeah, it's worth pointing out that all these features are still listed in the development roadmap. Part of the my surprise was because I had always assumed that the roadmap was at least a somewhat living document, and reflected the actual plans for the game.

 

Compare the Mechanical Brewing Vat (and its animation) to the Wooden Brewingvat.

Then look at the Advanced Workbench vs the Workbench, or the Kilns ... which look all fairly similar.

 

The scripted events can still lead to interesting simulated stories though, I don't think it's mutually exclusive. I wrote a recent steam review about a game in which a Cult Inspector set a fish person on fire (scripted - but only because a fish person was there), who wandered into the dense forest and caused a forest fire (not scripted) which woke up a group of obeliskians that terrified my colony and finally got blown up by my military, which took out my raw food supply. It goes on from there. Systems in the game can still have fun, unpredictable results. If they didn't I would have stopped playing a long time ago.

 

I also could just be bad at reading. It's been known to happen.

To be clear, though, I'm not talking about old monthly updates, I'm talking about this: https://clockworkempires.com/development.html

Again, I could just be missing the obvious, but I don't see anything suggesting that the upcoming features listed there are out of date between this statement:

"This document evolves as work on Clockwork Empires proceeds and we find better ways to communicate with players. We are committed to updating the project's status on this page for each major public release, once per month, without exception."

And this:

UPCOMING FEATURES

• more sophisticated house and property ownership
• dynamics (pipes, axles, voltaic power lines)
• module upgrading (effectively in-progress)
• fiscal responsibility
• trade

 

Pretty much everything below the cat pictures in the development report can be removed at this point, no ?

 

I gotcha.

 

Retaining data is sometimes like retaining water.

 

Gotta keep a clean shop to work effectively.

Or you know, string up clotheslines everywhere~

 

Ugh, I'm realizing I'm that commenter.

I'll stop bugging you guys for the next three weeks, and keep my fingers crossed that the final product is as exciting as everyone hopes.

 

I absolutely want to hear the effect Early Access has had on CE's development (and development in general), beyond the boilerplate that a lot of game devs put in the 'Why Early Access' box on Steam). I love the weekly Dev blog at the insights into game development and watching practicality and scheduling shape what will become the final result. I have thoughts about Clockwork Empires finally releasing, and thoughts on how it may be received, and thoughts about the long journey of development, and I will write them up when I have time.