Launching a game! It’s a thing that happens – I, for one, am still recovering. (I went to the gym for the first time in three weeks today and it was awful. Please, just somebody put me out of my misery.)

For those of you who have bought the game, we thank you for your patronage and appreciate it. We are currently working our way through the usual list of bug fixes and improvements that you discover are necessary as soon as you launch a game; those of you who are sending us crash dumps or bug reports, we’re reading them all and are working our way through them as fast as we can. For those of you who have written to let us know that you’re enjoying the game, we really appreciate that too.

We pushed a hotfix last week which fixes the following issues:

FIXED: some incorrect tooltip descriptions for ingredients required for producing certain modules

FIXED: possible to get into a state where tutorial won’t advance if too much time passes before conditions for advancement are met

FIXED: removed mention of assigning overseers to stockpiles from tutorial

FIXED: gold reward bar now defaults drops at start position rather than map center

FIXED: various text typos

FIXED: a certain type of REDACTED will no longer get stuck inside buildings

Cleaned up the embark screen a bit.

FIXED: crash demolishing a house

FIXED: some achievements

This hotfix for build 1.0B was *also* labelled build 1.0B, since it didn’t break your saves. We are now moving onto things that *do* break your saves, which means that we are going to push fixes to our experimental branch on Steam instead. (For those of you who don’t know how this works, we have an experimental branch on Steam where we push code for testing and feedback; you can opt into it on Steam by right clicking on Clockwork Empires, selecting properties, and picking “experimental” on the ‘Beta’ tab.)

Things that we have fixed so far (a not-complete list):

people lugging random belongings into the wilderness to drop them off, and not stockpiles

the crash when placing windows on buildings

various OS X specific crashes

work benches suddenly being duplicated, or unable to have their priorities changed

a memory leak in the particle system code

demolishing a building will now auto-unassign its overseer

players are no longer allowed to assign a new overseer to a building that’s been ordered demolished

many uses of word “citizen” changed to “colonist” for consistency

strange display names for many combat jobs have been cleaned up

no memories were created by “blame enemy” action

stew pots are no longer left floating in the air after a kitchen job is interrupted

overseers could have their job roles removed from offices in seemingly random cases related (probably) to skill gain

We will be rolling this to the experimental build in the next couple of days. Watch this space, our Steam news page, and our forums. For those of you not on our forums, please consider making an account; we’re very nice and there’s cake.

Moving forward, the plan this month is to have another stable patch (call it version 1.1) by the end of the month. This patch will be a mixture of bug fixes, UI/UX improvements, optimization, and some new content. For my part, I have a list of crash issues that I am sorting through as fast as I can; after that is taken care of, my focus will be on optimization, fixing various issues with flattening terrain, and then finishing these fellows:

Yep, roads. It’s about time. Obviously the final product will not have those weird lines across them. I wanted to get these in very badly for 1.0 but I just didn’t have the ability to get the UI issues sorted out in time. I’m also hoping to get some love in for fences and gabions while I’m at it, so that people’s colonies may have Fences and be Colonial and Proper.

There are also two major slowdowns that we’re seeing in people’s save games with large colonies; fortunately, they are fairly low-hanging fruit. For the technically inclined, one is that we spend too much time switching render batches drawing widgets (which manifests itself when you have a lot of characters with complex labels running around); the other is that we do a lot of unnecessary work in our skeletal animation code (which manifests itself when you have a lot of characters running around.) Hopefully this will fix some of the performance issues that people have been having on lower end machines, and with higher-end colonies.

Another short-term priority is Steam Workshop support, and mod support in general. We’ve already received a bunch of smaller script fixes from Users Like You(TM), and people appear to be itching to do more.

We are also catching up on all the paperwork that didn’t get done last month. This is really not very exciting, but it’s a fact of running a company.

On an administrative note: we will probably not be doing weekly blog posts every Wednesday any more. This is due to a combination of being in a post-launch mode and not a pre-launch mode, that it’s really difficult blogging every week about bug fixes, and – frankly – we need to let the blisters on our fingers heal up after blogging every week for something like five years. We will keep you up to date in this space; it’s just that it will be intermittent moving forwards. We will continue to participate in the forums here, and as we have time elsewhere as well.

Again, thank you for your support! We hope you’re enjoying the game, and as always feel free to drop us a line if you have crashes, bug reports, suggestions, or just want to chat about The Baleful Eye.