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KickStarter King under the Mountain - sim-based fantasy city builder

Zsinj

Novice
Joined
Jan 19, 2017
Messages
10


King under the Mountain is a game about designing and managing a settlement in a fantasy world.

Now live on Kickstarter!

Gameplay is based around high-level management of your settlers to harvest resources, build rooms and furniture, craft items and manage your economy. Your settlers are deeply simulated characters with their own wants, needs, thoughts and emotions who will go about their daily lives carrying out your instructions as well as looking after themselves.

gameplay1.gif


Once you have a working base of operations, you can take a small party of your best and brightest characters on "adventures" - tactical combat-driven dungeon crawls to randomly generated locations or even the settlements of other players!

Playable prototype available on IndieDB

To break it down a bit more, the game is based around these central goals:

  • A simulated world – The game world is built on a series of interlocking systems which combine together to simulate a living, breathing world. As night changes to day, trees and plants will grow (or not) based on sunlight and rainfall. The local environment and changing seasons have effects on the native flora and fauna. Your settlers and other characters have their own personal social and physical needs that you’ll have to fulfil to keep them happy (or at least stop them from breaking and going insane!)
  • Procedural generation – Every map is randomly generated from an initial seed (a large number) so that no two maps will ever be the same – unless you choose to use the same seed! The art assets for the game have been created in such a way that they can be drawn by the game engine for near limitless variation in colour – so every tree, plant and character will have their own unique combination of colours and appearance.
  • Peaceful expansion – It’s an important design goal that it’s possible to play the entire game without getting into armed conflict with other factions (if you choose to). Although weapons and combat can be significant parts of gameplay, we wanted to make sure you can peacefully build up a fully-functioning town to have the satisfaction of sitting back and watching your settlers go about their business in an “art farm” style of play.
  • Multiple ways to play – As well as different ways to build and grow your settlement (do you focus on mining? farming? crafting? buying and selling goods?), in King under the Mountain you can play as several different races and factions each with their own unique gameplay elements. You could build a dwarven fortress dug deep into the side of a mountain, a town of humans at an important river crossing, or a tribe of orcs hunting and raiding others. More than just different races to play as, we want to introduce completely new play styles as unusual factions – perhaps a lone wizard building their secret lair with golems they have constructed, an evil necromancer raising an army of the dead, a dragon amassing a hoard of gold in a giant cave system, or even an invasion of demons attacking the material world.
  • Player-driven content – Have you ever spent hours in a creative game building something, only for it to sit hidden away on your computer? In King under the Mountain, players can opt-in to automatically upload their settlements for other players to visit. This drives the basis of the adventure mode – you put together a party of champions from your settlement’s population, and go off on an adventure to explore another player’s creation. This mode will involve turn-based tactical combat as you explore and battle through another player’s fortress, claiming rare resources that may be difficult or impossible to acquire otherwise. It’s important to note that nothing will be lost by either player in this encounter – you don’t actually “attack” the other player, only a copy of their settlement, and there are benefits to be gained by both parties.
  • Mod friendly engine – Another big design goal is that everything you see or read in the game (and the variables behind them) are fully open to modification. In fact, the base game is built as an engine with one base mod applied to it (which modders can look at to see how things work). As the game nears release, expect more articles explaining how to create and edit mods. For now, you can read about the basics of the system in this post.
We've just launched on Kickstarter after over a year of development and planning. It's still very early in development as you can see from the pre-alpha prototype we've released, but we're hoping it comes across as a good proof of concept for what the game is and where we're going with it. Love to answer any questions you may have!
 
Last edited:

Zsinj

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Jan 19, 2017
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Good question! The flagpole feature is the ability to upload your settlements for other players to explore and loot - and do the same yourself with the creations of other players via turn-based tactical battles in a dungeon crawl style adventure. You'll be able to go on adventures to these and randomly generated maps as something like a mix of XCOM and Dwarf Fortress adventure mode, but using the best of your settlement's characters.

The game runs very close to Dwarf Fortress with a lot of its features which is where Rimworld had its own inspiration from too, before now ending up as its own unique gem of gaming, and I'm planning to do the same. We'll also have a lot more of a focus on the economy and production chains (akin to The Settlers games), so rather than just directly mining steel out of walls a la Rimworld, there'll be a long and involved chain of production to produce it from base materials. That's not very exciting by itself, but I'm hoping to capture some of the peaceful magic of the early Settlers games in this way.

I think both by having the differing races/factions with their unique gameplay and mechanics, as well as the ability to go on adventures into the locations of these other races, there should evolve almost a meta-game of interesting dungeon-crawl adventures born out of the "base" game of building up a settlement.
 

Jack Dandy

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Divinity: Original Sin 2
Sorry, but it really does look like a fantasy version of Rimworld..

And the extra stuff you mentioned just don't really get me too excited.
 

Norfleet

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Jun 3, 2005
Messages
12,250
I call vaporware. Everyone remembers what happened LAST time, right? Are people still believers in this? What happened to "Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me"?
 

Alienman

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Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy Codex Year of the Donut Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Think it looks fun. Going to be interesting to explore all those penis-shaped fortresses from other players :)
 
Joined
Mar 16, 2016
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Pretty much sure 99% of user made maps will be something what gives maximum resources for minimal effort. At least this is always been the case in other games with user-made maps.
REALLY need something else, not covered by Dwarf fortress/Rimworld/KeeperRL, etc. There is plenty similar games already.
 

adrix89

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Why are there so many of my country here?
I hate rimworld and this is even worse.

Although weapons and combat can be significant parts of gameplay, we wanted to make sure you can peacefully build up a fully-functioning town to have the satisfaction of sitting back and watching your settlers go about their business in an “art farm” style of play.

A dead game from the start.
Do you idiots realize that was barely the gameplay in this type of games? They aren't even cloning the basics anymore.
Do you know how Dwarf Fortress works? Because everything wants to kill you and everything will go wrong.
For how much I hate Rimworld at least they know what they are about, they have a drama engines and raiders and robots and shit is going down all the time.
 

Zsinj

Novice
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Jan 19, 2017
Messages
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Sorry I should perhaps have been more clear with the option of "peacefully" building up - "peaceful mode" is just one option for the players that want it. For the rest of us there'll be plenty of things going horribly wrong to keep things interesting. The main point to having the playable prototype freely available is to try and disprove the "vaporware" thing - it's already a game you can download and play and we're going to keep working on it from here.

The user-made maps won't be exactly as supplied by users to try and tackle the "put all the loot at the front door" problem - the game will take a copy of your map/settlement layout but potentially scale up/down and redistribute your guard stations and patrols as well as where the useful loot is located.

Had a fantastic response at EGX Rezzed last week! Was amazed by how much people were enjoying the prototype even with how early it is in development, quite a few came back to play multiple times!

Here's a typically busy shot of our stand :)

IMG_20170401_104525-cropped.jpg
 

kris

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Lulea, Sweden
some questions

- Will the different races mean any real difference in playstyle?
- What is the timescale?
- will you get new pawns from outside the map or by pawns multiplying?
- How autonomous will pawns be?
 

Haba

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Codex 2012 MCA Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2
Looks more like "king in the mountain"

Z-levels should be a basic requirement. Not 300 of them like that certain other autistic heap of trash, but still.
 

Agesilaus

Antiquity Studio
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Grab the Codex by the pussy Codex USB, 2014 Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
What happened to Towns, anyway? I remember liking that game years go, but I stopped following it before it was released/abandoned.
 

Hellraiser

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I wonder why none of these games implemented thin walls.
Or roguelikes for that matter.

Basically it is too much of hassle even to have just the visual side implemented from my own experience. Then you get to stuff like LOS or Pathfinding and you realize it is far less problematic if the whole damn tile is solid.
 

Space Satan

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I have serious doubts about it. Tynan have serious problems dealing with RimWorld in terms of making things and AI work and balancing treat leverls for colonies. And RimWorld is not aspiring to be as complex as this one. Lots of thing promised but would it proceed to somthing beyond basic simulation?
Dwarf Fortress still have no working economy, but Toady is autist.
 

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