Developer Gaslamp Games has released the December update for its steampunk colony management sim Clockwork Empires, and that means another round of brilliantly silly patch notes. My favourites this time include; “colonists will occasionally turn into fishpeople and run into the sea”, and “FIXED: Listening to a sermon caused colonists’ bodies to explode.”
Life is not easy for colonists in this game. The new Naturalist role for your civilians, along with the new found additions of Laboratories and Scientists you can put to work studying weird artifacts, can lead to new discoveries as well as the aforementioned fish transformations.
In slightly less amusing, but rather more useful, news you can now dismantle your modules, buildings, and zones. “These don’t feel at first glance feel like “positive” feature developments,” writes Gaslamp in its latest developer blog, “but what they do is introduce the essential element of iteration. Now a player can build a colony, tear it down, then re-build as a better, faster, more effective colony.”
Also, fishpeople; “Alongside this we wanted to introduce some fun themed gameplay elements, so we’ve fleshed out the behaviour of Naturalist characters, added the Laboratory along with Scientists and Laboratory Assistants to work in them, and sprinkled the world with Strange Artifacts to discover, study for prestige, and possibly (probably) make things go Terribly Wrong with.”
Things going ‘Terribly Wrong’ is exactly what this game does well. Clockwork Empires still has a little way to go, but it’s coming along quite nicely through Early Access. Gaslamp says that it’s largely done implementing the game’s technological infrastructure at this point, any future updates will add more gameplay content and new mechanics. “This is the exciting part!”, they promise. You can check out the full patch notes for the December update here.
