It’s been an exciting week! On July 16 we launched sales for “Earliest Access” to Clockwork Empires, then on July 18 we distributed the game to the public for the first time. It may not be our first time at the rodeo but it’ll always be scary to launch a game after keeping it hidden away (for over two years, in this case).

The Launch

It’s all gone really well! There were a lot of parts that we needed to test in the real world instead of sitting on private servers and this goes not only the game content itself, but our distribution and payment partners as well as our supporting websites. As Nwabudike Morgan put it, “Each interdependent piece must be materialized simultaneously and in perfect working order.” That’s pretty much what happened and we had a smooth launch; go team!

People are buying the game and are having fun with fishpeople, starvation, and building stuff. People are finding all kinds of fascinating bugs and telling us how we should make the game better. We sent out a hotfix yesterday, rev27C — changelog at the end of the post — which fixed more than a few things, and we are now fixing a bunch more stuff and putting together some new content for the next update which should be coming early next week. (We had to delay the hotfix by a day because you guys found so many Fun and Interesting bugs.) Special props go out to Dienes for telling us how we really ought to fix this or that script error before we even get a chance to look at the bug reports.

We’re also figuring out how to best communicate with fans, working out how to keep up a rapid pace of iteration, developing new features, and maintaining an active dialog about the game going in the forums.

Earliest Access

Certainly, a lot of people are skeptical of Early Access as a general concept because it’s not always been handled well. Obviously we want very much to do it right and I think it’s fair to say that it’s super important to get this right. So we’ll keep working at communicating the state of the game, informing you of updates, and responding to support requests rapidly. If we mess anything up please tell us so we can fix it and make sure it doesn’t happen again. The whole point here is to be receptive to feedback from you. Yes, you! Also that guy!

We’ve also seen people interested in Clockwork Empires holding off from Earliest Access because they believe that it may be in too early a state for them to get the enjoyment they want for their time. This is a good thing! It says that we’re doing a decent job at communicating what you get when you buy Clockwork Empires at this time. It means we’ve put enough information out there that players can make an informed choice about getting involved or not. For those who bought the game and are helping us out now: awesome! Those who want to wait a bit: also awesome!

A review of Important Links

ClockworkEmpires.com

You can buy Earliest Access to Clockwork Empires here via the Humble widget just below the featured video. The page also has screenshots of the game and a roundup of press writeups.

Portal.ClockworkEmpires.com

This site shows an overview of our twitter, forum, and blog activity. If you scroll down, there’s an FAQ and a support form to fill out if you’re having problems with the game (doing so will automatically generate a ticket to our internal tracker, it’s all quite clever).

Clockwork Empires: Development Progress

Want to read a high level overview of progress on the entire Clockwork Empires project, broken down into various sub-categories? Then this is for you.

Changelog (for 27c)

FIXED clearables should no longer produce floating job icons, will no longer accept commands if already designated for clearing

FIXED descriptions of Lingonberries and Saskatoonberries were switched

FIXED Beer icon is now consistent across all UI.

Civilians will now hit back when attacked in melee combat. Sometimes. They’re still not very good at it.

Removed a bunch of unused REDACTED (for now)

FIXED: “nullhandle message” crash in wield_tool.fsm

FIXED: put the hierarchical connected component stuff back

FIXED: removed developer hotkeys

FIXED: crash wielding a deleted tool

FIXED: crash looking at a thing that has been removed from the game

FIXED: Tinning Aurochs Beef no longer creates errors (but getting it via event does, so it’s been removed for debugging)

FIXED: standardized use of “pipes” rather than “pipe” in all jobs/commodities. Should fix errors in producing pipes.

weighted consume food jobs higher so that it will interrupt generic utility=1000 jobs before starvation alert triggers

starvation alert triggers FIXED: consume food at table was missing minimum hunger requirement

frontier justice gets unique death alert

FIXED: misnamed job in workshops.edb

FIXED: Audio settings from the launcher should now work

FIXED (possibly?): Music, SFX randomly not turning on (please inform us if this is not the case)

FIXED: job system did not correctly handle the case of aborting a job when an object was destroyed, and another job was also trying to use the object. (The “job item lost or misplaced” case.)

FIXED: broken modules now correctly register as “broken” or “not broken” again (one cause of the “pick up item, drop item, pick up item” loop)

FIXED: terrain starting as black after setting terrain quality to low, then starting a new game

FIXED: laudanum bottle missing icon

Receive Update News via Email

Are you signed up to the Gaslamp Games email list? Why, you could be receiving news of updates and developer blog posts as they happen! Sign up here.

Alrready signed up? Here’s what new: We’ve added an option called “ALL patches and fixes for Clockwork Empires” for those of you who want news of every single hotfix and test patch we release for Clockwork Empires.

If you’re already signed up, just view any email you’ve received from us and find “update subscription preferences” at the very bottom and slightly to the right. Click on that, then you should then be given the option to change the categories of emails you receive.

Bonus Fan Comic

This comic made by “caffeineLich” is amazing. We have the best fans. (Edit: If you don’t have a Gaslamp forum account, use this link instead.)