Balancing those two things is really important for us.”įailure will also leave its marks on the game world, even when you wipe a colony completely. Those battles are what's interesting, between the destructiveness and the creation. “Dwarf Fortress approached that in a really sophisticated way: it constantly is sort of knocking down your Legos, and you are constantly having to try and one-up your design to make it a little bit better, a little more robust. “When you were a kid and you built with Legos, eventually you build something up and you knock it down because there's nothing else to do,” says Jacobsen. And although it'll be implemented differently, Dwarf Fortress is a model for their approach. When you fail, “It should be a sort of narrative success,” says Baumgart. Gaslamp values loss as a way of creating interesting stories for players. “Everyone could die if you accidentally create some super version of a bull and it, like, stampedes and kills everyone because it was highly unstable,” says Jacobsen. Death can come in conventional and absurd forms. Instead, it'll be more about prospering (scientifically, economically, or whatever goal rings true to you) as your civilization is beset by a long list of things that can kill it: disease, mining accidents, berzerk factory workers, laboratory explosions, an angry Elder God summoned by one of your citizens, or foolishly exploring a lost temple that you should've skipped, for example. As a sandbox game, Clockwork won't have a true victory condition. More fundamentally, it folds into Clockwork's continuation of a key concept from Dungeons of Dredmor: making failure fun. The thought of inescapable danger and fantastic accidents being commingled with 19th century colonialism is hilarious. If you've ever played Poseidon by throwing hurricanes at your metropolis in SimCity, Cthulhu's shadow over Clockwork should tingle your imagination.
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