Monthly dev update for King under the Mountain - a simulation-based strategy game inspired by Dwarf Fortress, The Settlers and Prison Architect.

Posted by RocketJumpTechnology on Jul 5th, 2018

First of all, apologies that this monthly update is a little late, things have been a bit full-on to get ready for the Kickstarter campaign - launching July 17th (that's less than 2 weeks away!). It came with a tough decision of having to cut a feature from the prototype I really wanted to get done in time, which is getting the dwarves to eat food (and needing to eat food). As it is, you can now build kitchens which will be stocked with water barrels (filled with water from buckets - for now!), worktops (where raw ingredients harvested from crops are stored) and cauldrons. A chef will come along and add ingredients and water to a cauldron before cooking it into a delicious soup. The actual kind of soup produced is procedurally generated based on the ingredients, so just adding carrots will produce "Carrot soup" while potatoes and corn will make "Potato and sweetcorn soup".

The tricky part with this is making sure that it works well (or at least well enough) in other languages. On that note, there's now translations in place for English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Russian, Polish and Portuguese (both European and Brazilian). If your native/favourite language isn't there, I'm planning to add an easy way for players to add more language translations to the game in the not too distant future, but not until after the Kickstarter has finished. Languages with a large number of characters (Japanese, Chinese) or those that read right-to-left (such as Arabic) are particularly difficult to implement in the framework King under the Mountain is built in (LibGDX), so while I can't promise support for those languages yet, I do really want to be able to support them in the future.

It's a little too soon to show off the new trailer (and Kickstarter video) yet, but as part of the production I'm super excited to be able to share the new track by Jordan Chin titled "King under the Mountain" as it is intended as the main theme of the game!

Perhaps most importantly, ahead of the Kickstarter the latest build of the game is now public and available to download! Ahead of the Kickstarter launching, I'd love to get any thoughts and feedback on this build. Be sure to drop by /r/KingUnderTheMountain to create a general thread or please raise a new issue for any bugs or problems at King-under-the-Mountain-Issue-Tracking/issues.





Which means that's probably it for dev updates until the Kickstarter campaign. Depending on how the campaign goes I might switch up the current monthly dev update to something else, or at least there won't be the normal monthly dev update here as all the upcoming updates will be via Kickstarter, at least while the campaign is running.

As always, thank you so much to those of you following these updates and being excited for the game making progress. It's a huge motivator to know there's people out there who want this game to be made (other than just me!) and a successful Kickstarter campaign really should, er, kick-start development up to another level. When the campaign does kick off, please share it wherever you think most appropriate to get the word out, as it is that word of mouth that makes all the difference between success and failure.