Clockwork Rebuilt: A Full Visual Overhaul

If you saw Clockwork the last time I posted here, you may not recognise it. Over the past weeks I've taken the game apart visually and put it back together — the battle screen, the cards, the menus, the workshop, and the whole mobile experience. Same game underneath, same economy, same NFTs. But it finally looks the way I always pictured it.

Here's what changed.

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The battle board

The old battle screen was a stack of dark panels floating over an animated background. It worked, but it never felt like a place.

Now every fight happens on a single framed board: dark wood set inside a brass frame of pipes, gears and rivets, with a lantern burning on each side. The whole screen is the scene — no page around it, no scrolling. Everything fits in one view on desktop, and the cards size themselves to your screen so three ranks always sit comfortably on the table.

I also stripped out everything left over from the old layout — the boxes around each rank, the divider lines, the empty-slot outlines. On a wooden board those read as clutter, so the ranks are now separated by spacing alone.

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One card, everywhere

Previously a card looked different depending on where you saw it. Inventory, team selection and battle each had their own version.

Now there's one design, and it's the same everywhere:

• Metal nameplate with a faction sigil
• Faction strip — Clockwork, Wild, Outsiders, Mercenaries, Atlantis — each with its own metal finish
• Rarity seal in the corner, carrying the card's level
• Four stat plaques in a single row: attack, speed, armour, health
• Ability row along the bottom

The battle card is a true scale copy of the one in your collection. What you pick in the forge is exactly what fights.

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New stat icons

The old stats used emoji, which looked different on every phone and browser and never quite matched the art style.

They're replaced with a custom set of line-drawn glyphs — one each for melee, ranged, magic, speed, armour and health — colour-coded so you can read a card at a glance. They now appear consistently across the battle screen, team selection and the Upgrade Workshop.

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Combat that reads

A lot of work went into making fights readable, not just pretty:

• Melee attacks wind up and snap into the target instead of gliding
• Each attack type has its own impact — crossed slashes for melee, a sharp burst and ring for ranged, double rings for magic
• Area damage shoves every card it hits, rather than shaking the whole screen
• Status effects — poison, bleed, curse, stun and the rest — each have their own colour wash, with a small badge that stays on the card while they last
• Deaths are now a proper topple: the unit flares, staggers, and falls out of frame draining to grey
• Damage numbers arc and separate, so several hits on one card don't stack into a blur

The round announcement is now a struck brass title plate, and victory and defeat each have their own entrance.

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Quality of life

• Battle log on demand — hidden by default, one tap to open it over the board
• 2× speed that keeps every animation in sync, not just the timers
• New battles start at the top of the screen instead of wherever you left the last one
• Artifact mana costs now show in the equipment picker for every item

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Mobile got its own board

Phones get a dedicated tall version of the board, built for portrait screens, so the frame's gears stay round and the lanterns aren't stretched. Cards run three across with their names shown.

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What's next

A few things I'm looking at for the next visual pass:

• Health bars on cards, so you can read the state of a fight at a glance
• Living lanterns that flicker on the board
• Smoother rank changes when a unit falls

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Come and play

Clockwork is a steampunk auto-battler on Immutable zkEVM. Build a team, forge your cards up through the levels, and trade on the Bazaar player-to-player marketplace. You can pay with Immutable Passport, Phantom, or Hive Keychain.

▶️ Play here: https://web3gaminghut.com/clockwork/

I'd genuinely like to hear what you think of the new look — especially on mobile. Drop a comment with anything that looks off or anything you'd like to see next.

See you on the board. ⚙️