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MOOMANiBE
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unearthed history

back in 2015, Gaslamp Games was about to have a layoff and I didn't know it.

We were in the middle of a development pivot. Early access was out and it wasn't selling great. The artists on the team needed to start finding other tasks to do, because we simply had more art in the game than we could use but a huge coder bottleneck.

The office was scheduled for cleaning for the day and we all had to get out. The art director sent the three artists - myself, the animator, our character modeler, and our environment modeler - home for the day with LUA instruction booklets. Our task: Install Love2d, follow the first few chapters in the book, and on monday we would turn in the compiled software we had made.

What I didn't know was that this was also a test. Gaslamp couldn't retain a team of 4 artists. Who got to stay was going to depend on who showed themselves most capable of pivoting into a non-art role.

I threw myself into it with my usual gusto. I can't resist a good challenge. When we came back on monday, unfortunately, both of the other artists had run into trouble and weren't able to get their basic projects to compile.

I turned something in. And today I found the files for it, fully intact on my drive. So please: enjoy. The below is what I handed over to my boss at the beginning of the next workweek.

And that's how I ended up doing game design, event scripting, and writing the entire tutorial for Clockwork Empires.

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in reply to @MOOMANiBE's post:

egotists-club
@egotists-club

For the record, from one of the directors: the decision to lay off the folks who did get laid off at that time, at least how I remember it, was made entirely independently of this; the logic was that "we have content that needs animation if we can get it in; we don't need much more in the way of world or character assets, since we already have a pile of them we can't get into the game at the time." You would have to ask David what the logic was behind giving everybody Lua books, although I vaguely recall this push came a couple of months before we hit EA and felt like it wasn't going well/had to lay people off (and the directorate went without salary for a LOT of that time period). I was sort of opposed to it because I felt like many of our problems were not a lack of scripting, but a lack of engineering resources on the C/C++ side of the world to flesh out actual systems and stuff that I didn't think was well-suited to being scripted, and especially not to other people. David's take was that rather than actually address more Dwarf Fortress-esque systems to flesh out all the simulation aspects in the toybox, we should just dump events on it and call it a day.

In hindsight, the problem with CE was neither of those things. It's that we should have realized that nobody wanted to be running a small town and contending with cultists; everybody wanted to be the cultist. The game would have been much more interesting if the objective had been to have a cult in secret. One day I'll sort out where the hell the rights are to CE with respect to the Canada Media Fund...

Anyhow, glad you learned valuable Lua and game design/event scripting skills out of the whole mess :/

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MOOMANiBE
@MOOMANiBE

I mean, I only know what I was told re: the layoff decisionmaking! (also the issue of "what would have fixed the game" is a whole other rabbit hole i feel like no two people who worked on the game would have the same answer to, haha)

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