14 DAY TRIAL // Gaslamp Games has just announced that its upcoming city-building game, Clockwork Empires, has been delayed from the original schedule and will become available on Steam Early Access sometime this summer.
The announcement came from Gaslamp Games CEO Daniel Jacobsen, who explained the scheduling change on Gaslamp's website. Gaslamp is known in the gaming world of its roguelike game Dungeons of Dredmor.
Their upcoming project, Clockwork Empires, is a much more ambitious enterprise, placing players in the role of a junior bureaucrat seeking fame and wealth, feeding natural resources to the hungry maw of industry.
Jacobsen mentioned that the game's alpha will be delayed by a short amount of time, pointing out that almost everyone who has played the current version of Clockwork Empires can see the potential that the game has.
"The message that we keep hearing is 'don't force this game out the door until it's ready, because it will be really special when it is,' and we want it to be there when you play it. In the spirit of transparency, starting Early Access this spring would not allow us to give you that — close, but not quite hitting the mark yet," Jacobsen wrote.
As the development efforts continue, the developer will keep recruiting pre-alpha testers, and fix compatibility issues and other such annoyances, in addition to streamlining the user interface and adding more content to Clockwork Empires.
"We have spent an intense few weeks considering our plans for the next few months, and as a result, we've decided to push back early access of Clockwork Empires to the summer. It's a short delay from our original release window for early access, but a delay nonetheless," Jacobsen pointed out on the blog.
The game offers an original and interesting setting, with colonists trying to survive on the edge of the frontier, which of course is populated by Lovecraftian apparitions and other such menaces.
In its final version, the game will support up to four players in online multiplayer, in either cooperative or competitive scenarios, along with a turn-based successive multiplayer system to enable it.
As the game's trailer shows, the visual direction of the colony management game has seen quite a big leap from the days of pixelated underground dwellings pictured in Dungeons of Dredmor.
Clockwork Empires will be available for Windows PC, Mac and Linux, as a playable alpha on Steam's Early Access program, later this summer.
