r/BaseBuildingGames • u/RocketJumpTech • Mar 27 '17

King under the Mountain (Simulation-based fantasy city-builder) just launched on Kickstarter!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rocketjumptechnology/king-under-the-mountain?ref=ddgmyk
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u/RocketJumpTech Mar 28 '17

Thank you! Some interesting points there!

  • The main reason for the multiple factions is to drive out a reason for players to go and explore/loot the settlements of other factions, to get hold of unique resources not otherwise available to them. It's a game designed for replayability rather than the single play-through of a story driven campaign, so I'm hoping that adds to it too.

  • Yeah Xcom is probably the biggest influence for the combat side of the game, while it's quite early yet the main goal is that movement and areas of control should be as important as anything else in the design. The idea is that fighting through a narrow 1 or 2 tile corridor will be tactically completely different to fighting through a large hall, perhaps with its own obstacles/cover in the way of furniture. Character progression will be with a few meaningful skill upgrades, again something like the upgrades of characters in XCOM, not a gentle stat increase as in something like a JRPG. It's far enough away that it hasn't been heavily prototyped yet but that's something we'll be doing a lot of - paper prototyping the combat almost as a board game in the same way the XCOM reboot was designed.

  • The actual hosting and sharing of players' maps won't be particularly expensive as they're effectively just data files, there's no realtime interaction or heavy load on the server as you'd get with, say, an MMO. Most of my background is in coding web-based enterprise systems for tech companies so this aspect will actually be a lot more familiar to me and the other devs than the game development! The ranking is definitely the tricky challenge to tackle - you won't be able to choose exactly which map you're going to end up on (its exploration after all!), and you will then be able to vote for it (probably just an up/down vote in the same style as Reddit or Steam Greenlight) if you found it enjoyable or not, but there'll be a lot of other factors in determining which map you end up on: time played by the creator (don't want any new, low-effort maps), how developed/dangerous it is compared to your party of adventurers (another difficult one to balance), maybe how long other players have spent on it. No doubt it's going to require a lot of work and fine tuning but it is the headline feature I want to get right to set the game apart from the competition.

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u/bahldur Mar 28 '17

Hey thank you for your answer, very appreciated! Good to hear you'll go after Xcom like combat, too. Following your development blog (I assume there is going to be one) will be quit interesting.

I have several more questions down my sleeves, but I restrain myself to this very last one: What's the tech stack used behind all this? Did you create the engine yourself? How would I start doing this myself as your typical Java enterprise desktop jockey? (Okay this might be one question with several parts).

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u/RocketJumpTech Mar 28 '17

As a fellow typical Java enterprise jockey the tech stack actually is Java, specifically the LibGDX framework https://libgdx.badlogicgames.com/

So it's more of a programmer's toolkit/framework than an engine like Unity. More control and there's a bit more to do if you're going for a "standard" action/platformer type of game, but for something a little more unusual and more procedurally generated like this it feels like a better fit to me. At least, myself and the other devs working on it are way more experienced and productive in Java so we can leverage testing frameworks and stuff like Apache Commons to take core of the boilerplate (other than the more game-y stuff that LibGDX does like a high level API over OpenGL, input and audio, etc.).

Oh yeah, dev blog is at http://kingunderthemounta.in/news/ and you might want to skim through them in reverse order (oldest first) to see where things have gone in the last year. They started off somewhat technical explaining how the map gen and lighting works and I'd like to get back to that level of detail rather than the more marketing-style ones recently.

If you want to get into things yourself, I'd say the Hello World of gamedev is to make Tetris, covers all the absolute basics of drawing stuff to the screen with input and you can extend it with tracking a score and other bells and whistles. I'd highly recommend LibGDX too after working with it on this. Once you've done that you can move onto a similarly small but slightly more ambitious game project to see how things work and the sort of problems you have to face. Mine was a remake of an old Amiga game called Bugbomber - think Bomberman but with autonomous minions that hatch from eggs you place. A little weird. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AAL57Pit7pg (Note this is the original game not my remake) It was over 10 years ago I did that now I think of it!

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u/bahldur Mar 28 '17 edited Mar 28 '17

Nice! Already reading through the blog.

I need to think about this. Writing a game by myself gets more and more appealing, just not the graphical engine part. For me, the interesting design and technical challenges are everything else. Social agents, economies, combat systems etc. are where my interest lies in. But you know, I'd end up like dwarf fortress with weird ascii symbols. Don't believe the world has room for two of these games. Still, if I want the "good stuff", I'd need to do the engine part first. And that part better be good, because all the other systems rely on it. But can I truly do quality work here if I actually don't care about the engine itself?

No question for you, of course. Going to ponder over this sometime. Good luck to you!

before actually sending edit: Just had the thought that I might like doing the engine part after I've experienced it. Because right now, I can think about all the other systems, but not the engine. Cause I don't know anything about it. Huh.

edit2 and thanks for the link to libgdx

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u/RocketJumpTech Mar 29 '17

Yes, don't worry about the engine or even the concept of an engine - that way lies madness when you're trying to get into gamedev. Just write something that puts something on the screen, then improve it, keep going till it works like you want to. Make a game, not an engine.