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Boatswain posted:Have you guys heard of Space Base DF-9? We fear nothing. Nothing! (We will, however, take the best ideas and steal them for our own, as is our way.) I'm more interested in everybody else's response to DF9, though; everything is a good data point on how to make and market a sandbox game.
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# ? Oct 18, 2013 19:00 |
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# ? Jun 9, 2024 17:00 |
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nvining posted:We fear nothing. Nothing! (We will, however, take the best ideas and steal them for our own, as is our way.) I'm more interested in everybody else's response to DF9, though; everything is a good data point on how to make and market a sandbox game. How about stealing their idea about early access?
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# ? Oct 18, 2013 19:04 |
Bernardo Orel posted:How about stealing their idea about early access? Boom, suggestions over with. We look forward to seeing Clockwork Empires on Early Access within a week nvining.
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# ? Oct 18, 2013 19:10 |
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Eonwe posted:Boom, suggestions over with. We look forward to seeing Clockwork Empires on Early Access within a week nvining.
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# ? Oct 18, 2013 19:11 |
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ad infinitum.
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# ? Oct 18, 2013 19:19 |
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Daniel spilled the beans on the Bay 12 forums this morning, so what the hell:From the Gaslamp CEO posted:Well, we're releasing a "thing" (not playable) within a month, and our standing plan is to do some sort of closed alpha as soon as it "feels like a game", which we're very close to, but is probably at minimum 6 weeks away.
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# ? Oct 18, 2013 19:27 |
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nvining posted:What have we become?! Highly Anticipated.
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# ? Oct 18, 2013 19:29 |
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I'm suddenly excited. More than before, that is.
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# ? Oct 18, 2013 19:29 |
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HOLY poo poo IT WORKED vv Ahahahaha Lprsti99 fucked around with this message at 19:33 on Oct 18, 2013 |
# ? Oct 18, 2013 19:30 |
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^^^^ Hah!nvining posted:Daniel spilled the beans on the Bay 12 forums this morning, so what the hell: HOLY poo poo IT WORKED!
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# ? Oct 18, 2013 19:31 |
I know that a release of any kind will not be anywhere near complete, but releasing anything shows how close we are to getting this game in the grand scheme of things. There aren't a lot of games (or really any) I'm more excited about currently than this one.
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# ? Oct 18, 2013 19:38 |
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I'm glad to see this is coming along. After Dredmor, I have no worries about the quality of this game.
Zesty fucked around with this message at 20:01 on Oct 18, 2013 |
# ? Oct 18, 2013 19:58 |
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nvining posted:We fear nothing. Nothing! (We will, however, take the best ideas and steal them for our own, as is our way.) I'm more interested in everybody else's response to DF9, though; everything is a good data point on how to make and market a sandbox game. I have to say I think you are doing well so far, you already post regular devblog updates that not only show what features you are adding but possibly more imporantly you have a few times in writing shown what kind of narrative the game might generate. This is pretty much all you can do until you release an alpha or open pre-orders really. Also as for DF-9 I don't feel you should be scared either the scope and theme is very different from CE the only similarity being the base/colony management genre. I mean if you look at their devplan you can contrast their aims to yours. (And steal ideas you like of course )
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# ? Oct 18, 2013 20:11 |
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If you need your lawn mowed, your house painted, or your nemesis assassinated I will accept access to the closed alpha as payment. Spacebase DF9 looks pretty cool and all, but for me CEs resource line and affinity/aversion mechanics put it head and shoulders above DF9 both as a colony sim and as an emergent storytelling engine.
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# ? Oct 18, 2013 20:49 |
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You only have to worry about market saturation if you're either:
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# ? Oct 19, 2013 15:02 |
DF9 talk. Personally I've been following Maia for a while now, which is awfully similar in premise, and there's also Rimworld coming up. Add on non-space games like Prison Architect, Towns, Gnomoria and DF, and there's a lot of building games around at the moment, it seems to be the zeitgeist. But saying that, I'm still looking forward to CE as much as any of them, so you guys must be doing something right!
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# ? Oct 19, 2013 18:25 |
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Let me tell you, it's great to have a bunch of fantastic games come out in MY favourite genre for a change. Maia, Spacebase, Rimworld, Clockwork Empires, a bunch of other less-likely-to-actually-exist-but-maybe-they-will kickstarters, not to mention the ever updating Dwarf Fortress, I finally feel like I can gorge myself. More is better!
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# ? Oct 19, 2013 23:03 |
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I really think DF-9 was released a bit too early. Even another month of just adding 'things to do' would have made their release a bit stronger. While I am hanging our for CE, I also want it to be successful enough to trigger CE DLC and CE2: Elritch boogaloo. Early access is brilliant and all, but I think DF9 showed sometimes it can be a bit too early.
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# ? Oct 19, 2013 23:48 |
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Yeah, between Maia, DF9, CE, Banished, Rimworld, and the other more minor ones, it's a good time to be a fan of the genre. Better than the space 4x genre, anyway, although Star Ruler 2 will hopefully be fantastic
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# ? Oct 20, 2013 00:09 |
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0lives posted:Let me tell you, it's great to have a bunch of fantastic games come out in MY favourite genre for a change. Maia, Spacebase, Rimworld, Clockwork Empires, a bunch of other less-likely-to-actually-exist-but-maybe-they-will kickstarters, not to mention the ever updating Dwarf Fortress, I finally feel like I can gorge myself. More is better! It's a delightful mixture of the rise of the indie developer and a relatively cheap to produce genre that the big boys have neglected. After all, what big city/settlement builders have we had in the last few years? Cities XL? Anno 1404/2070? Sim City 5? All the big developers/publishers want to create a box-office movie in a game with big explosions. None of them seem to have realized that they can sit a bunch of programmers and artists in a room to create a pretty and cheap city builder game. Of course, none of the mainstream development studios would add that wonderful Dwarf Fort style twist of "This will all go wrong, it's only a matter of time", but that's just another cherry on top.
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# ? Oct 20, 2013 00:18 |
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It seems to me that Dwarf Fortress' greatest strength -- the thing that no currently-released project has replicated so far -- is the incredible depth of its emergence. It's not just that there are 200 different kinds of leather, it's that those different types sometimes matter. When the game is at its best, the whole experience takes on an almost fractal unpredictability. That extra tiny mood boost from the barrel being made of marble can prove the difference between a peaceful season and a total fortress wipe. Gnomoria, Towns, DF9 (so far)... there's just not the same level of turbulence in the experience. With that said, Dwarf Fortress has gained its status as much through Let's Plays as anything else. It generates stories. Actually, more to the point, it generates awesome stories. Like Eve, for that matter. Hideous carnage in insane micro-detail. Terrifyingly cruel moments of irony. Spots where you just have to gawp. Scripted events have real difficulty matching the sheer lunacy of emergence at its best. That's where the story comes from in Dwarf Fortress, far more so than in the arrival of the Great Doodlebug Thrangmeier. The more that CE can do to support that sense of story, both as a game experience and as a Let's Play resource, the close it will come to tapping into the 'Cult Status' vein. Ironically enough, once past the arcane control curve, the main weakness of Dwarf Fortress (IMHO, obviously) is the absence of alternate story arcs. There's one core experience: you get established, deal with basic needs, set up an industry, weather goblin attacks, weather mega-beasts, and finally survive hell. You can fall off that track to a nasty doom (or even stasis) at any point, and there'll be some strange moods and noble demands, but that's basically it. There are no circumstances where your fort becomes a plague-centre that even Goblins avoid, so that you have to forget armies and devote your energies to medical research. You can't become a huge tavern and trading post, trying to keep bandits at bay. Civil and religious wars can't sweep through the fort and split your forces into two or more rival camps. You don't get to spend all your time trying to identify the small cabal of traitors deliberately sabotaging your efforts. In other words, there's a whole heap of broad stories a writer could tell about a fixed location, and Dwarf Fortress only addresses one of them. It shines in the detail, but in the general, it's depressingly static. [Disclaimer: I love it anyway, and send Toady $5 a month, so please don't shout at me.] So, from a story point of view, it would be very nice if there was a range of different arcs for CE settlements to slide into, leading in quite firmly different directions. That's a steep challenge from a coding perspective of course, but it would definitely make the game richer, and heck, I'm an author rather than a coder. Ideas are easy.
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# ? Oct 20, 2013 00:38 |
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One part of DFs fun, that is mostly underestimated is the fun of watching your dudes work. The most famous game that was almost entirely based on this idea of doing a little building and then watching it work in that slowly grown complex system is "Die Siedler"/The Settlers. But it never got really big outside of Germany. But here the genre has even a name: Wuselspiele. At the far end it might even include games like OTTD, And Factorio, for example is another modern indie with wuselfaktor. Now DF has several things that make it great. The conceptional player freedom that inspired things like Minecraft. The incredible depth in procedual and chaotic storytelling, which nobody seems to copy. And that great "Wuselfaktor", the fun of watching the complex system that you built work; the current crop of those indies seem to try for this.
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# ? Oct 20, 2013 00:49 |
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Ghostwoods posted:You don't get to spend all your time trying to identify the small cabal of traitors deliberately sabotaging your efforts. Have you played DF within the past year or so? You pretty much just described the role of vampires (and to a lesser extent werecreatures.)
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# ? Oct 20, 2013 04:59 |
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Dwarf Fortress, EVE, and Space Station 13 seem to be the three main "story generator" games out there. I hope CE can splash in the same waters. Those kind of games provide the kind of entertainment you don't get from most other games.
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# ? Oct 20, 2013 05:51 |
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Thinking about it now, I almost feel like a megathread about the genre wouldn't be too out of line at this point, kind of like the Roguelikes thread, detailing Dwarf Fortress and the new ones coming out soon, with links to each. I'm not the one to make it (), but even more exposure for the games can't be a bad thing, and I can't be the only person who is more likely to look at a megathread about a genre than to look through all of the threads in the forum.
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# ? Oct 20, 2013 06:24 |
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:You pretty much just described the role of vampires (and to a lesser extent werecreatures.) Vampires, were-critters, and the odd necromancer kill people, but otherwise they serve as good dwarves. What they don't do is quietly unmake critical chunks of wall, or set workshops to explode, or push legendary craftsmen into open lava, or open the fortress gates at opportune moments, or &c &c. Even gremlins are just an annoyance, rather than a focused threat. Also, they are all just side-distractions from the main flow of events, rather than the focus of a challenge-path in their own right.
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# ? Oct 20, 2013 12:39 |
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A quick note to let you know that we now have in-game relationships forming: http://www.gaslampgames.com/2013/10/23/brief-frontier-simulation-update/ Apologies for the lateness of the blogpost; all shall be revealed soon.
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# ? Oct 24, 2013 03:12 |
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Distilled Pumpkins? Is that actually a thing? Also, referring to delicious laudanum as a mere ale. Why its more than just an ale its the cure for... everything really.
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# ? Oct 24, 2013 03:57 |
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Are these relationships they're forming going down the love and marriage route, or is just 'I like this person, oh dear he's been eaten by that tentacle tree, now I am upset'? I ask because in this brave new world, any game that takes a step into the world of love is going to have people smashing down their door to tell them that they must/must not include same sex relationships. Keeping it vague to the point where friends and lovers are indistinguishable from a game perspective might avoid that problem. But then I might also prance around you making chicken noises if you do that.
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# ? Oct 24, 2013 05:20 |
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BobTheJanitor posted:Are these relationships they're forming going down the love and marriage route, or is just 'I like this person, oh dear he's been eaten by that tentacle tree, now I am upset'? I ask because in this brave new world, any game that takes a step into the world of love is going to have people smashing down their door to tell them that they must/must not include same sex relationships. Keeping it vague to the point where friends and lovers are indistinguishable from a game perspective might avoid that problem. But then I might also prance around you making chicken noises if you do that. It will, eventually, include friendships. Also, horrifying chains of axe-murdering rivalries. That said, we have considered the same sex relationship situation. It's a thing that happens, about 1 in 20 people (or 5% of your population) is not straight, and nobody in the Empire thinks much of it one way or another. Which is really how it should be.
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# ? Oct 24, 2013 05:25 |
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nvining posted:It will, eventually, include friendships. Also, horrifying chains of axe-murdering rivalries. drat right! Release your game so I can force everyone I know to buy 50 copies of it, you exemplary gentleman.
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# ? Oct 24, 2013 05:33 |
nvining posted:It will, eventually, include friendships. Also, horrifying chains of axe-murdering rivalries. The Empire might be a dreadful 19th century steampunk distopia, rife with class issues and imperial abuses... but there's no need to revel in other ways societies have been awful, especially not in an exclusionary way. The Empire seems pretty egalitarian with regards to gender too, which honestly makes for a much more fun setting for this kind of game.
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# ? Oct 24, 2013 05:51 |
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nvining posted:It will, eventually, include friendships. Also, horrifying chains of axe-murdering rivalries.
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# ? Oct 24, 2013 07:04 |
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On emergent stories that can happen when someone's partner dies, is there a chance for them to go crazy and become obsessed with the occult? i.e. Lord Rathbone Rasalghue VIII loses his dear wife Ilyssa and decides to spend all of his money to research the Diggle god of death? (to either bring her back or destroy the world) Also on rivalries I hope it'll lead to something like the fossil wars, two researchers dynamiting the other's finds...
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# ? Oct 24, 2013 07:26 |
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I envision friendship, hatred, lust, love, and rivalry as separate but not entirely unrelated tracks. That way, you can have stuff like someone murdering their spouse out of hatred, then tossing themselves off a cliff because they can't live without them, or having cheating on their beloved in a purely lust-related affair, and whatnot. Also, these should be non-binary, so you can have someone be kinda bummed because their crush died, or be totally in love with someone but also kinda hate them. Why? Because this poo poo causes procedural melodrama.
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# ? Oct 24, 2013 08:07 |
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BobTheJanitor posted:Are these relationships they're forming going down the love and marriage route, or is just 'I like this person, oh dear he's been eaten by that tentacle tree, now I am upset'? Fobbin Liesmith the bard has woven the ballad "Under the Tentacle Tree". It menaces with spikes of melody and tragedy. All craftmanship is of the sorta half-assed kind. Holy poo poo, get Loden Tailor on the phone right away
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# ? Oct 24, 2013 08:12 |
nvining posted:It will, eventually, include friendships. Also, horrifying chains of axe-murdering rivalries. What's the average population expected to be? Are my poor gay/lesbian citizens doomed to often die alone when the unspeakable horror comes to consume the town. Also, I can't wait until some rear end in a top hat complains about gay people EXISTING IN MY VIDEOGAMES.
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# ? Oct 24, 2013 18:42 |
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PA Report gave us some love: http://www.penny-arcade.com/report/article/the-storytellers-clockwork-empires-and-creating-a-canvas-for-youtubers Apparently, I am pretentious.
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# ? Oct 24, 2013 21:16 |
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nvining posted:PA Report gave us some love: e: Those are the least creative tags I've seen Wiggly Wayne DDS fucked around with this message at 21:28 on Oct 24, 2013 |
# ? Oct 24, 2013 21:20 |
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# ? Jun 9, 2024 17:00 |
Don't let the fanboys get to you. They probably heard "battlefield bad, government bad" and descended to the comment box
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# ? Oct 24, 2013 21:25 |