Regarding my note in the Putting People Together post from last month, Joseph’s been busy painting up a variety of skin tones for Clockwork Empires people.

We feel it’s important to have people of all colours in the game, basically. I’m not going to get into the exceedingly grim history of 19th century colonialism here, but I assure you we’ve had a lot of internal discussions about how we can possibly approach making a game vaguely based on the Victorian era without being ridiculously offensive. Happily, we’re not making a historical game. (Hi Paradox folk! The Aztec Invasion of Europe DLC is brilliant.)

From an artistic perspective, you can’t just shift the tone of a skin texture one way or the other and have it look at all correct. The highlights, midtones, and shadows of cool dark brown vs medium warm brown skin are very different, so to do this justice Joseph has been using shifted textures as a base layer then doing a hand-painting pass to get things looking right. We’re happy with how it’s coming along.

In Other News, An Interview

I stumbled into the office clutching my coffee as though it were my only connection to a sane and sensible world one morning to discover that we’d lined up an interview with Mr. Christopher Floyd over at videogamewriters.com — well, Daniel did and I kinda crashed it. We proceeded to have a lovely time talking with Christopher about all sorts of things relating to indie game development, from Dungeons of Dredmor to Clockwork Empires. Go have a look.

Sunday Sidebar: Meet Daniel Jacobsen and David Baumgart from Gaslamp Games.

In other news, the Evening Of Indie Game Development Anecdotes And Smooth Jazz Jam Session With Nicholas Vining has been indefinitely delayed due to a series of rapidly escalating misunderstandings surrounding the use of ghost pirates.