November 2018 Update - Full Steam Ahead
over 5 years ago – Mon, Nov 19, 2018 at 12:15:24 AM

Welcome to the monthly King under the Mountain update for November! This month marks the start of dedicating myself full-time to game development thanks to the funding brought in from the Kickstarter campaign, so thank you so much to those of you who pledged (or have pre-ordered the game), it really is a dream come true! First up, the headline feature currently in development is that your settlers now need to eat food, so here's a video showing how a cauldron of soup is shared among the population:

This marks the start of really needing to care for the well-being of your settlers - although they currently sleep, they don't get unhappy from sleeping rough (that's coming very soon). While they can't quite die yet (that's coming soon too!) I think this will mark the beginning of King under the Mountain switching from something of a tech demo to an actual playable game.

In other updates this month, there's now an options menu in the game(!). It really shouldn't have taken so long, but now you can set the game's starting resolution and if it should be windowed or not on launch, as well as some other settings. The main one is that we've added automatic crash reporting to the game, so any time the game crashes for a player who has opted in to it, we'll receive a report on what went wrong and be able to track it down and fix the problem. Due to privacy laws, this needs to be opted into rather than on by default, so the first time you start the game now you'll be presented with this message:

Also until now, your settlers have only a single profession assigned at a time, i.e. they're always just a miner, a farmer, a carpenter, etc. The interface has received something of an upgrade to both display the current needs of the settler as well as an option to add or change professions:

Those buttons showing the profession can be clicked to bring up the change profession window:

All of the implemented professions (technically fishing and hunting isn't really implemented yet) can currently be freely switched between, but in the future it will depend on the background of the settler and other unlocks based on progression in the game. Also, having experience in a profession (different skill levels) will be very important, but this is coming later in the early alphas roadmap.

The eagle-eyed among you will have noticed there's "30 rockbread rations" among this settlers' possessions. Your starting population bring their own rations to start out with, but it'll be up to you to plant enough crops to keep them fed through the winter and the following year!

Finally there's been several bugs tidied up with the help of the community (get involved on our Discord server) and something of a bugbear for players has been fixed - Until now if you queued up the construction of some walls they would all share available resources equally, leading to usually none of them being completed and it being a pain to sort out. Now, they much more sensibly assign resources so as many as possible are completed and the remaining constructions wait until more resources are available before deciding what they should be built out of. Here's a video to explain:

The rest of the month will see me finishing off adding the need to eat food, including the option of baking bread instead of having to cook soup all the time. Looking a little further ahead, I'll be finishing off the other key features to mean you really do need to look after your settlers now - they'll need to drink as well as eat, be kept happy, or else they'll die!

That's all for this month - despite now working full time on King under the Mountain it's only been a single week, so I hope to have much more progress to share next month. See you then!

October 2018 Update - Ironman
over 5 years ago – Sun, Oct 14, 2018 at 02:27:11 AM

Welcome back to the King under the Mountain development updates! 

The past month (and more really) has had me hard at work on a surprisingly thorny problem for a game of this complexity - saving and loading the game! I'm very happy to say that - while it's not perfect and I'm certain there's some bugs still to be ironed out - there's a new build of the game publicly available to help test this big new feature! As always, you can grab it from https://rocketjumptechnology.itch.io/king-under-the-mountain-prototype 

Unfortunately it doesn't contain any new gameplay features as all of the recent dev effort has gone into making saving and loading work. However, now when you quit the game, your settlement and everything in it is saved so you can continue next time you load the game. If you'd like experiment, you can press F5 to perform a quicksave, and F8 to load the most recent saved game. As with most things in the pre-alpha, the UI is not as fully featured as it is intended to be - right now you can only maintain a single save file (starting a new game and saving will overwrite it), although the intention is there will soon be a UI to let you manage multiple save files across multiple settlements.

If you do experience any crashes and would like to help get them fixed, please email me at [email protected] (or message me on the usual platforms) with a link to your save file which should be found in the "King under the Mountain" directory in your user area (I'd recommend dropbox or Google Drive to store it as its a large file) and a description of what you were doing at the time and the specs of your computer (Operating system, amount of memory/RAM, and graphics card are the key ones). Alternatively jump into the discord server at https://discord.gg/M57GrFp and I'll be around at some point to help out!

So what's next? Well I've still some bugs to squash and there's the UI around saving and loading to be added, but past that I can now finally focus on the feature set of Alpha 1 described in http://kingunderthemounta.in/roadmap/ which I'm very excited to get started on to really flesh out the basics of gameplay.

Past that you may have noticed a new entry on the roadmap - Alpha 2. The current intention is that after the first major Alpha release (slated for February), the second big release will be to open up modding on the game properly. Supporting mods as strongly as possible has always been one of the central pillars of King under the Mountain so I want to get this kicked off as soon as possible so that the community can help shape the tools and support that is available for modding. In the meantime however, a few enterprising community members have already started messing around in the game files to make changes. At it's simplest, King under the Mountain has its game assets (sprites, sounds, data files) laid out in the /mods directory (with the intention being that each mod lives in a separate directory within there) and these are combined and compiled into the /assets directory. 

Until today you had to modify the compiled data files in /assets and there was no good way of modifying images and sprites. Along with the new release (Pre-alpha 7) there's a secret command if you do want to start messing around with mods early. You'll need Java 8 or later installed, and then you can run:

java -jar undermount-desktop.jar --repackage 

to repackage the files in /mods to /assets. This lets you play around with the current set of base data files, although this still won't support additional mods (outside of the "base" directory) just yet - watch out for Alpha 2 for a whole new world on modding!

Finally I want to help share and promote another great-looking indie game currently getting to the end of their campaign on Kickstarter: 

Between the Stars

Here's a short blurb from the developer: Between the Stars is a space action video game with traces of RPG, management and roguelike elements. In it, we’ll live our adventure advancing in the universe and upgrading our ship, Captain and crew in order to be able to withstand the space war that is currently being fought.

And most importantly, you can check out their campaign at https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1393754749/between-the-stars?ref=685ber

See you next month!
Ross

September 2018 Update - Post-Kickstarter Party
over 5 years ago – Thu, Sep 13, 2018 at 05:53:03 PM

Hello and welcome to the return of the regular monthly dev update for King under the Mountain! The last one was put out in June, because the Kickstarter ran over July and August. That feels like a lifetime ago now with how much work and energy went into promoting and managing the campaign, but it turns out it was all worth it because it was a great success!

I've said it many times before but thank you so much to each and every one of you who have backed the game in some way! It's a dream come true for me to be able to bring in funding to focus on the game's development and get it to release that much quicker!

The planning for, running of, and post-campaign management for a Kickstarter campaign takes up a lot of time, which unfortunately meant that game development was put on hold for the duration. The great news is that the funds brought in will enable me to increase the artwork, music and sound budget as well as dedicate a lot more of my time to game development, in fact I'll be taking a 3 month sabbatical from the day job to focus 100% on King under the Mountain which really should kick-start development straight up to the Alpha 1 release in February!

If you're a backer of the Kickstarter campaign and/or a backer of the Patreon, you should now have received an email inviting you to BackerKit to claim your rewards. Any and all contributions made to the Patreon (in USD) were converted to GBP at a rate of 1 USD = 0.777189 GBP as this was the exchange rate on the day the Patreon contributions were added to BackerKit. There's quite a bit of info to run through regarding the BackerKit so here's a Q&A:

• I didn't receive or have lost my BackerKit email: You can retrieve it from https://kingunderthemountain.backerkit.com/ If that doesn't work for you either, please message me through Kickstarter or Patreon. if you have received your survey, please complete it ASAP (you can change it later) so I can spend less time chasing down those people who don't fill them in.
• When will the BackerKit survey be locked out to changes / when will my card be charged? BackerKit prefer project creators to charge cards less than 30 days before rewards are sent out, so any refunds over disputes can be processed in that 30 day window. The main part of rewards from the campaign will be the sending of the Alpha 1 game keys, which is due for mid-February. Due to this date, card details in BackerKit won't be charged until mid-to-late January. If you'd prefer your card to be charged now instead, that's fine and can be done, just email me at [email protected] and I'll get it processed. As cards won't be charged until early next year, I'll be leaving the BackerKit surveys open to modification until the end of 2018. 
• My card was declined on Kickstarter, what should I do? You will still receive the BackerKit email, you'll be prompted to fill in card details on BackerKit to make up for the funds missing from your Kickstarter pledge. You can also change your pledge to a lower or higher pledge amount, if you wish. 
• When will I receive or be asked about the other rewards i.e. content design rewards? These will be in several phases throughout development of the project, after Alpha 1 has been released. I'll be back with more details in the future. 

And with that out of the way I can get onto the actual development update!

By far the most-requested feature for the playable prototype was the ability to save and load the game, which admittedly is a super important feature you'd just expect to be there in a game of this type. So that's what I've been working on since the Kickstarter finished (well, other than some small quality of life improvements). It's a very big feature in terms of development effort and not at all interesting or visual to be able to show any progress. Really just to say I'm beavering away at saving/loading games and hopefully next month it'll be done and I'll be able to tell you what I've gone on to then!

In the meantime, now is a perfect opportunity to throw any questions you may have into the comments. Also if you've not already, you can join in to the community Discord server at https://discord.gg/M57GrFp to chat with other backers of the game or throw any questions my way as I'm usually online if I'm awake :)

End of campaign wrap-up and thanks!
over 5 years ago – Thu, Aug 16, 2018 at 10:10:23 PM

Well we're finally at the end of the campaign and it nearly broke £22,000! That's an amazing result as it looked like it was going to be lucky to hit £20k for most of the campaign, there's been a real surge in the last few days so thank you to those of you who've just joined the adventure, and of course to each and every one of you for backing the game!

What happens next?

• Until end of August - The very next thing is that Kickstarter will be processing pledges and charging your cards. If your card is declined please sort it out as soon as you can, as that sets things back for everyone. I'll be adding a few quality of life improvements to the game which have been requested by players during the Kickstarter campaign and that haven't already been implemented in one of the updates to Pre-Alpha 6.
• Mid-September - Once the funds have been released by Kickstarter I'll be sending out the BackerKit pledge manager for you to confirm your pledge and any add-ons you'd like to select (you don't need to do anything until you receive an email asking you to claim your rewards from the campaign). You'll also have the opportunity to switch to a different pledge level if you wish while the pledge manager is still open. I'll be working on the first of the Alpha 1 features - saving and loading games! Most likely the monthly dev updates will start up again here too (you can read the previous ones here) and they'll be sent out as Kickstarter updates.

• Rest of 2018 - Thanks to the funds brought in from this Kickstarter I'll be able to devote much, much more time to development of King under the Mountain than I have so far, which really is a dream come true, thank you so much for your support! I'll be working on the features that make up the Alpha 1 release detailed on the roadmap. The BackerKit pledge manager will stay open for modifications by you during this time, most likely until the end of December.
• January 2019 - Any extras you've selected in BackerKit beyond what you pledged in the Kickstarter will be charged to your card. This will be done in January because BackerKit prefer project creators to charge cards no more than a month before rewards are due to be shipped out (there's something of an assumption that Kickstarter rewards will be physical) so that if someone wants a refund it can be processed within 30 days of the charge. I'll be beavering away to get everything ready for...
• February 2019 - Alpha 1 release! If everything goes to plan you'll receive an itch.io key for your all-new paid-for digital download for the first alpha version of King under the Mountain. From here the plan is to release monthly or bi-monthly updates following the development roadmap, all the way up to version 1.0. One of the first major updates following Alpha 1 is to open up modding support so you can start adding to the game yourselves (if you so wish!)

Why itch.io? Why not Steam or GOG or...?

First of all, King under the Mountain won't be going to Steam Early Access until at least halfway through the development cycle of Alpha 1 to full release. Despite the "Early Access" moniker, the Steam audience isn't very forgiving for rough and early versions of games that launch on the platform. I'm certain that if Alpha 1 went straight to Steam Early Access, it'd be bombarded with negative reviews for being very incomplete and nowhere near the fun game it has the potential to be. This would be absolutely disastrous to the income potential of the game, and by extension the development budget, so don't expect to see a Steam version until the game is much more polished and final than it will be upon the Alpha 1 release. This is the approach taken by some incredibly successful indie games, even ones well-suited to Early Access like Factorio, Kerbal Space Program, Prison Architect and Rimworld - they all spent a significant amount of time available to purchase and play in an early form before moving to Steam when they were more developed, and the resulting Steam reviews and sales figures show this approach to be a winning strategy.

So now that Steam is initially ruled out, why itch.io? In short it has all the features I could want for hosting and managing the game's downloads - there's command line tools and a build plugin to automatically upload new builds to their site, and even an API for the game itself to check for new updates to let you know if the game has an update available and you're not using their download manager (so you don't have to use their app - knows as itch - if you don't want to, but it's recommended). Once the game does progress to Steam Early Access, you'll receive a steam key for each itch.io key you received.

What about content design rewards e.g. design a settler?

Please note that despite the "estimated delivery date" being February 2019, this doesn't apply to all the content design rewards, which covers almost every extra reward other than the game itself. This is because in some cases (design a settler) I'd rather have more content in place (such as more variety in hairstyles and beards) or even that the content won't exist for a while (new races of orcs and humans). Stay tuned for details on how you'll be able to manage and design these rewards, but for now I can say that you'll be able to change any choices you make in the design of your settlers, so if you make a dwarven settler for now, you can change it to an orc or human when those races are released and your settler in the game will be updated appropriately.

Paying it forward

And finally, if you're already feeling withdrawal symptoms due to not following a live Kickstarter campaign and are interested in something similar to King under the Mountain, check out Kubifaktorium by Dr. Mirko Seithe. It's a colony builder with a strong focus on automation and transport systems, partly inspired by Factorio which is another favourite of mine. Similarly they have a free demo available from Itch.io so you can see the game already exists and is well into development.

The developer has previously released Boss Constructor which also looks great (it's on my wishlist but I seem to spend all my free time developing a certain game), so at least you know they've already successfully developed and released a game previously unlike other Kickstarter games (like ours!) which come from an unknown developer. 

Please let me know if you've any questions in the comments. If you want to get involved in the King under the Mountain community, either jump in to our Discord server or start posting in the r/KingUnderTheMountain subreddit. Otherwise I'll see you in the next update!

- Ross

Final 48 hours!
over 5 years ago – Wed, Aug 15, 2018 at 12:00:52 AM

Hi everyone,

It's the exciting last 48 hours of the campaign and time to give it that final push! I've already messaged the great majority of you individually, but just to ask kindly again - if you're part of any gaming communities or news sites that you think might be interested in King under the Mountain, please do let them know and let's get the word out in the last two days!

I'll be putting out a bigger update when the campaign finishes to explain what's next, but for now, thank you so much again for backing King under the Mountain, it really means a huge amount to me and the rest of the team that there's so many people (over 1000!) bought into the vision of the game already, and the overwhelmingly positive feedback has been fantastic :)

- Ross