Monthly dev update covering dwarves mining rocks, placing stockpiles and getting resources working in-game.

Posted by RocketJumpTechnology on Oct 4th, 2016

A lot to cover this month! First of all, here's a little video showing some of the main progress in the last month with dwarves being assigned to mining jobs and removing rock walls, producing large stone resources in their place.

However the biggest news this month is that after last month's update covering the procedurally coloured leaves in Autumn, we were featured in article on Rock Paper Shotgun! As a huge fan of RPS, this was personally incredibly exciting (one ticked off the bucket list). Even better than that, the coverage effectively doubled awareness of the game, so here's hoping for more articles in the future :)

There was still other big news this month, in that we officially unveiled plans for our Kickstarter for King under the Mountain. The current plan is to have a playable prototype (minimal demo) of the game by the end of the year, and then focus on sharing this with the world in preparation for the Kickstarter in March. A successful campaign would mean development on King under the Mountain would speed up massively and it's our dream to make this game into everything it deserves to be. Success is going to hinge on getting the word out to as many people as possible, and if you like the look of the game so far, it would massively help us if you refer any friends that would be interested to our mailing list. Even better, you can win a free copy of the game for doing so!

As part of gearing up from a tech demo to a game proper, we've replaced the homepage with more of an introduction to the game rather than linking straight to the dev blog. Expect this to grow and evolve over the next few months, and we're also planning on neatening up the site's design a bit, so watch this space!

In terms of development progress, the first part of the last month involved a first pass at designating stockpiles through the UI, as you can see in action here:

This is where your settlers will haul resources and other items they've collected or produced, as a place to store them before going on to a more specific workshop or room. This is also laying the foundations of placing rooms and workshops themselves, where your settlers will turn these raw resources into valuable items and crafts.

Last month's update also showed setting designations in the game world, and this has progressed quite a lot in the last month - the game now keeps track of designations as jobs to assign to the relevant workers, assigns them when required, and the first of these (mining) has been implemented as you can see in the video at the top of the post. This is all still very early prototype work - the final version will have particle effects (e.g. rocks chipping away), animation (digging with pickaxes) and a better look and feel overall (better movement and alignment of the workers). Here we're really just laying the groundwork that the more complex systems and interactions are going to be added to, iterated on and polished up.

Adding these jobs has gone hand-in-hand with adding items and resources into the game engine. It deals with stacking up and showing the correct look of different resources based on the materials they've been created from as you can see here:

For next month we're aiming at getting these resources into the game properly - chopping down trees to produce logs and that kind of thing. Hopefully within the next month we'll have our second main piece of concept art to share with you - depicting the kind of scenery you can expect to find in the vast underground caverns of King under the Mountain, so stay tuned!