The Bureau of Steam Engineering
Steam-Powered Mechs in an Alternate History
In Bureau of Steam Engineering, you play as an American steam engineer at the beginning of an alternate civil war who must design and duel steam powered mechs to defend the Union!
A few notes about the game:
- After completing a level, your progress is saved so long as your Flash “cookies” aren’t deleted. However, your designs are never saved when leaving the workshop to return to the mission select screen.
- It’s easy to find yourself in a situation where your steam design isn’t working as you’d like. It’s good practice to use gauges to ensure that pressures are building as you expect; things that potentially vent to the outside, such as weapons and control mechanisms. If you’re really stuck, you can always post to the comments with your question.
- All the music is from jamendo.com, a really great creative commons music site. The song at the title screen is “En retard!” by Evan, while the rest of the music is by Celestial Aeon Project.
- For the curious: the pressure algorithm works by iterating over all paired connectors, each with a volume estimate and a pressure, and exchanging a “steam amount” (representing n in the equation PV = nRT) to neutralize the pressure between the two components. This is repeated until the pressures between each pair of connectors are neutralized to an acceptable degree (I believe I used a value of around 0.15 PSI). After neutralizing the entire pressure circuit, we advance the simulation by the time delta to flush “steam” from things that “leak”, trigger pressure dependent valves, and advance other time-dependent components.
Requires: Flash
33 Comments
a lot of people on kongregate wan’t a sequel, are you planning to make one?
sorry, i should have said want
i love this game, its realism strikes me in such a way that i want to keep playing it and discovering more efficiant wasy for it to work
When is part 2 going to come back
What part 2? There was never a part 2 of BoSE. There’s a Ruckingenur 2. Maybe you’re thinking of that?
When you finish it, it sort of leaves off on a cliff hanger and I think it even says “End of part 1″
Oops, I ment come out in my above, above comment
How do you use the repeating rifle?
It’s right in the description for the rifle:
Pressurize one valve (don’t remember which one) to fire, then depressurize it and pressurize the other one to reload. Depressurize the reload valve and repeat to fire again.
pressure on the bottom valve fires, pressurizing the top valve reloads.
when will the next one come out?
The valves don’t work properly in this game
They should open only when the input side is above a certain pressure, not when either one is.
This game is awesome, can’t wait for the sequel (If you are making one, if not, too bad…)
i only used the repeating rifle (or two of them) to win, would have liked a bigger challenge. I want a sequel!
Man, what happened to the sequel?!
This game is awesome man, why did you give up on it… I would love to see a sequel with the ability to jump as well as a larger play area.
C’mon man, I’ve been playing these same 4 levels forever. The game ends so quick and then it sets you up for a sequel that aparrently didn’t gain enough support.
I wanna play more games like this!
Im so addicted I made a dual operation rifle robot
i love this game with a passion, it’s a work of art
Lolz. An instruction thingy would be nice. I have no idea what the hell I am doing. Ah well. Its fun to randomly have my mech crouch.
Much as I love this game there are a few things that I found frustrating. Firstly how short it was.
However, most frustrating amongst these was components not working in the way that their description suggests or, indeed, as common sense would imply. (Most notably here the alternating fuses.)
In addition it would be nice to have more than one control stick. It would be far more enjoyable to be able to control the firing, walking back and forwards and the crouching of the mech rather than just one of the four options above.
I’ve still yet to work out a good way of using some of the weapons because of these shortcomings.
Still playing this in 2011…
Anyone else?
@J yes!
Also, Mr. Zach, can you give me the actual lowdown of what you did here?
I kinda wanna use it as part of a 3D game :D
You may wanna E-mail me, because I don’t check here often.
For anyone who wants it:
My Optimal Mech Build
Up on the lever to reload and crouch, down on the lever to fire and stand up (because your bullets miss when you’re crouching, and because the crouch mechanism starts leaking at some pressure amount lower than 50psi.)
Granted, this one doesn’t work optimally on the last boss, so if you Email me at onewinner2000 [at] gmail {dot} com, I’ll post an optimal build for the last stage.
@ThatTreeOverThere
My all-beating-solution was almost like that and IS able to beat the final boss.
I have no fuse valve on the crouch pipe, but I do have one in front of a steam vent, so you can stand up quicker.
After you figure what the perfect timing is on the lever, you can defeat the boss.
Please Mr. Zach;
I think there are many people who would play the sequel to this game if you made it.
Nothing that would take too much coding probably, if you kept it in the same format and just added levels and new pipes/mechanisms…
If you’re actually reading this, please think on it. I know Spacechem made you a bunch of money, so there probably isn’t a whole lot of motivation to make us a free game but cmon;
That was the biggest cliffhanger ever on the last level, and it seems that the second to last mech should be the boss, because the last one(flying) isn’t hard at all.
searched the net over and over looking for a similar game and am unable to find one…
Really wish this game was more popular, then someone might hack it and maybe add some new levels/pipes/functions…
I play again and again, trying to come up with new functions out of different combinations of pipes and valves, but after a certain number of games it’s basically just the same things again and again…
Please consider adding some new stuff to this game if making a whole new one would take too much time/effort…
Ok; off to build a bot… I think I’m gonna try to kill that hard boss with the saw…
Zach;
Pretty bummed you don’t answer posts related to this(and others) games any more… I do envy you for possessing the knowhow to code and create awesome games(the bulk of which were free, awesome and available to the public), but lately have become a bit disappointed to see advertisement after advertisement for “spacechem” with not even a reply to the posts on some of these threads(going years back)…
Bummed.
Wanted to see the continuance of the Steam Engineer sequel.
I don’t check my email; It’s only for signing up for things, and it tends to fill up with ridiculous amounts of spam… I do however check back to this message board regularly, while playing this game.
Would love to hear back from you and see if there is any chance at a sequel; Even if it only made 10′s of dollars on “Kongregate”.
P.S. I don’t have a lot of money, so I am still running the same system I was 12 years ago(windows ME)… I can’t listen to your “podcast” due to my outdated plugins, and I can’t play any games on sites that regularly require updating to the newest version of flash…
I stuck with what I have for now, as I have been for the last 12 years. Just looking for a response is all.
@Jason: Sorry that I’ve bummed you out!
We’re not planning on releasing any new Flash games. Instead, you’ll see more titles like SpaceChem, with way more content and polish than any of my older games.
You sound like someone who hasn’t played SpaceChem yet. If you loved BSE there’s a really good chance you’ll love SpaceChem! That said, I have no idea if it runs on Windows ME…
Ouch, an auto-response huh?
Lame…
I came here just now to play one of my old favorite games, but thought I might check the message board for a response.
What I get instead, is some unrelated comment about spacechem(which is nothing like BSE), telling me that only the first sentence was typed as a reply and the rest is just mindless filler.
Bummed. Guess I should have played before reading the comments, because I don’t much feel like playing now.
Good luck with your more profitable enterprises; They sound important.
Hope they all make you loads more than this game, which truly had potential… That’s cool, let someone grab it from you like they did infiniminer.
P.S. Back when I originally saw people talking about “spacechem” I downloaded a version with a cracked password to see what the big fuss was about…
Wow, a different looking codex of alch eng! Cool… For a fee? Seriously…
I played like a quarter of the way through the game and then deleted the whole folder from my hard drive.
I totally love this game, I remember playing it for about a week some years ago, making all the possible combinations of weapons and making up challenges for myself to complete.
I will miss ye olden games greatly (specifically this one and the rusky engineer one), but dont worry fellow basement dwellers! I will become a great programmorer myself and create a game similiar to this and I will add lasers, so all will be well.
A way to beat all of the levels except level 2 is to use 2 repeating rifles. also, when is the 2nd part going to come out?
Ironclad Tactics has been announced for 2013. As far as I can tell it is a sort of spiritual successor, as SpaceChem is to the Codex of Alchemical Engineering. Find out more at ironcladtactics.com.
Bob, hoping Zach does one of these for Infinitron.
it saddens me to see this crevice of the internet, it seems to be grief ridden about the same thing i’ve been for a long time. i love the aesthetics of Ironclad Tactics. but i truly think a TRUE sequel would’ve been much better. if i ever do excel with coding as i one day dream too, i’ll always source this simplistic yet amazing game as the source of my inspiration.
Hei kan jeg starte her…!?
4 Trackbacks
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