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King under the Mountain released as open-source, Mountaincore dev on hold

2023 was a tumultuous year for Mountaincore - we were made to keep the community in the dark by a publisher which ultimately backed out, scrambled to release the game according to the plan that had been put in place, and ultimately it suffered as a commercial failure. The Mountaincore launch was way below what was required to keep even a single dev employed working on the game, so eventually all staff were laid off and it was forced to revert to being a free-time hobby project. This hasn't really worked out and the game hasn't seen any updates since that launch period, and I deeply apologise for that. In addition, the company (Rocket Jump Technology) has had to be declared insolvent as the small amount of revenue from Mountaincore was not enough to cover even the small debts the company owed (themselves just a tiny fraction of the publisher-funded development budget). This means that Rocket Jump Technology is no more, and with it, there's very little chance of Mountaincore continuing to receive focused development. That said, it is not entirely bad news. While the legal ownership of Mountaincore itself is still unclear due to the significant investment by the publisher, Rocket Jump Technology still owned all the rights to its preceding form, King under the Mountain, and this has now been made freely available as an (MIT-licensed) open-source project at https://github.com/rossturner/king-under-the-mountain The MIT license is extremely permissive, essentially allowing you to do whatever you like with the contents, including using it for commercial purposes. The hope is that perhaps people will choose to continue developing the game as a community project, or failing that perhaps it will be useful to other developers (aspiring or not) to build something out of into another game. Again I can only apologise for ending up in this situation, I didn't want this to happen as much as any of you. I've been working on King under the Mountain and Mountaincore since 2015, making it the most significant project I'll probably ever get to work on. Generally the community and response has been absolutely fantastic and I couldn't have hoped for that. Hopefully this isn't the end of Mountaincore entirely, but I don't foresee any updates in the near future, so it was important to set this expectation. Maybe I'll see you in the king-under-the-moutain github repo!


[ 2024-01-12 13:17:57 CET ] [ Original post ]

Mountaincore Early Access Release!

Dear King under the Mountain players! If you've missed the updates recently, King under the Mountain has been massively reworked and re-released as Mountaincore! As an owner of King under the Mountain you should now have Mountaincore automatically in your steam library. This is a huge update compared to the most recent version of KutM so I highly recommend that you check it out - doing so will be a boost to the game's success as well if we can hit a good player count on launch day! With this update, King under the Mountain is fully retired and all future news and updates will be on the Mountaincore page. Thank you so much for joining us on the journey so far, and now onto the next big step!


[ 2023-05-31 10:00:17 CET ] [ Original post ]

Mountaincore granted to all King under the Mountain owners

Hi everyone, thank you for your patience while we got this resolved with Steam support - all King under the Mountain owners should now have Mountaincore in their library! If you haven't already, I recommend joining the Discord server to get involved with the community. We're very actively resolving bugs and taking in feedback. We'll shortly be releasing the Roadmap for Mountaincore, though it probably won't look too different to what you were expecting for King under the Mountain. As ever, thank you for your support and joining us on the journey with this game!


[ 2023-05-23 18:51:35 CET ] [ Original post ]

What's Next for King under the Mountain

Hi everyone! Its finally time to talk about whats going on with us (Rocket Jump Technology) and King under the Mountain. As you might have seen in our previous updates, nearly a year ago we started working alongside a publisher on King under the Mountain. This allowed the game to move from a solo-dev hobby project to one being worked on with a small team full-time. Fantastic! The plan was to work on the game for a 9 month period, adding features and updates that both parties felt were missing in the initial Early Access release, and then re-release this as a new title under the publishers brand. Unfortunately, just as we got to the end of this 9 month development period, the publisher decided not to release the game as part of their portfolio. They were worried that a number of similar games that have released in the time between would cause it to struggle to stand out. Fortunately, however, weve signed a new agreement to allow Rocket Jump Technology to release the game independently, making use of the code and assets that were produced as part of the publisher-funded development. While this was initially disappointing, its still a very good outcome for everyone involved. We were left with essentially two choices: release everything weve done as a big update for King under the Mountain, or proceed with the original plan of a relaunch under a new title. Weve decided to go with the latter as its been so long since we were able to talk about King under the Mountain publicly that it will simply be much more likely to succeed with the update coming as part of a proper relaunch. A successful launch will mean well be able to keep that small team working full-time on the game, whereas an update to King under the Mountain, however large, would almost certainly fail to generate enough revenue to keep even one developer employed. It is with great pleasure that I can now announce the game is now known as Mountaincore. Its still the same game you might know and love, but this is the game I wanted to launch into Early Access, rather than being forced to do so early due to the circumstances of 2021. Mountaincore was chosen to be a mix of what some people see as quite a hardcore game (though its intended to be much more approachable than most in the genre) but also a game with a pleasant and relaxing aesthetic somewhat akin to cottagecore but with a dwarven mountainous focus, hence, Mountaincore. The most obvious change is that the game has a completely revamped UI, and weve added key features such as skill levels, combat, monsters, invasions, trading and more! This has been a fast moving situation as we only found out about the publishers decision in the final week of March, so were still putting things in place to relaunch the game as Mountaincore for example the games new logo is in progress but isnt ready to share yet. There will be a new Steam store page hopefully approved in the coming days with a placeholder logo and we are planning to launch Mountaincore on May 11th, just over a month from now. Only once the game is live will we be able to automatically grant access to all owners of King under the Mountain on Steam a copy of Mountaincore in their library. Theres good news though, as weve been promising this update for quite some time, we can also provide pre-launch keys to owners of King under the Mountain immediately. If youre happy to wait a bit longer, Mountaincore should appear automatically in your Steam library on May 11th. If you want to dig into the game straight away though, simply head to https://kutm-upgrade.herokuapp.com/ and sign in with your Steam account. We can use this to verify ownership of King under the Mountain, and if you own it, you will be assigned a pre-release Steam key for Mountaincore and can play straight away! Either way, the best way to stay up-to-date will be via our Discord Server. If you do claim your pre-release Mountaincore access, please do join in and let us know what you like or dont like about the big changes (or anything else youd like to see in the game!)

Whats Next?


Of course our immediate focus will be building up some hype for this re-release, along with fixing any bugs and making improvements before the official launch date. As mentioned above, this is what we envisioned as the real Early Access launch we were hoping to do, but it is still Early Access with lots more still to come. In the medium term the focus will be on adding progression systems to the game to give you reasons and challenges to keep playing for longer. Longer term we will be adding the off-map dungeon-crawl-style adventures which weve always seen as a key aspect of the game. Weve not forgotten any of the promises made in the Kickstarter and still have a number of rewards to deliver the most important being the Design a settler reward which well be aiming to fulfil in the short-to-medium term. For now though the goal will be on giving Mountaincore a successful launch which will determine just how quickly we can get future updates out to you. Most importantly, thank you all for your patience throughout what was a very long period with no public updates. It was just as frustrating for us as it was for you! We can and will be returning to the monthly dev update blog posts, you can expect the first of these at the end of this month, and Im very happy to be going back to an open and transparent dev cycle.


[ 2023-04-04 09:55:43 CET ] [ Original post ]

Huge news on the future of King under the Mountain

Hi everyone, Sorry it's been so quiet for so long with no news about what's happening with King under the Mountain. It's been brewing for a long time, but I'm absolutely delighted to announce that I'm now working with a publisher - one of the very best - to bring together a full-time dev team and be able to give this the attention and development budget it deserves. Having not just myself but a small development team on the game full-time is going to make a world of difference compared to the effectively part-time hobby project it has been so far, and I can't wait to be able to share with you all what that looks like when the time comes. The bad news is this means we have to "go dark" again for a while until the team and I are ready to unveil major progress. Thank you so much for your continued patience and support.


[ 2022-06-16 16:31:00 CET ] [ Original post ]

Troublshooting patch

This update adds some troubleshooting instructions to help players who are not able to launch the game


[ 2022-02-13 15:44:07 CET ] [ Original post ]

Alpha 8.1.20 patch

This patch upgrades the Java runtime bundled with the game from Java 11 to Java 17. No gameplay changes unfortunately, but this should hopefully fix some issues people have been encountering with the game failing to start.


[ 2022-02-12 15:33:39 CET ] [ Original post ]

Alpha 8.1.19 Hotfix

This is a fix for the Java internals problem introduced with the last hotfix


[ 2022-02-12 13:59:40 CET ] [ Original post ]

Alpha 8.1.18 Hotfix

  • Fix for a crash when a fire does not have a location


[ 2022-02-09 13:45:22 CET ] [ Original post ]

Alpha 8.1.17 patch

  • Fix for a crash when comparing very similar yet differently constructed item


[ 2022-01-17 14:49:25 CET ] [ Original post ]

Alpha 8.1.16 update

  • Added weaver profession for weaving crafting type (instead of farmers)
  • Fishing jobs no longer created where bridges exist
  • Exhausted mushroom logs now re
  • queue themselves to be constructed again
  • Crafting stations will now remove items which are not used as part of the current crafting assignment
  • Harvesting jobs now default to HIGHER priority if the farm plot is set to NORMAL priority
  • Fix for an issue with extending stockpiles picking up the most recently placed stockpile group setting
  • Fix for a crash when creating fishing jobs
  • Fix for a crash when attempting to create a bridge construction job but no items are currently placed
  • Japanese and Russian translations updated


[ 2022-01-15 13:53:45 CET ] [ Original post ]

Alpha 8.1.15 Update

  • Added Add and Remove tiles buttons to room selected view
  • Corrected numbering of stockpile zones
  • Harvestable crops will now be harvested even if all tiles in the farm plot are not yet tilled
  • Added small random offset to furniture position so adjacent looms do not flicker
  • Cancelling outstanding jobs when items are displaced by digging an irrigation channel
  • Added missing translations for cloth materials that could be generated with sleeping spots
  • Fix for pathfinding related to fishing jobs near a bridge
  • Added Chinese (simplified) translation, translated by Howard Huang
  • Updated Italian and Japanese translations, thanks to AndyD and SPQR
  • Better handling of unexpected errors while processing mods


[ 2021-12-08 14:11:36 CET ] [ Original post ]

Alpha 8.1.14 update

  • Decreased the speed at which food and drink needs decay (i.e. food and drink keeps a dwarf satisfied for longer)
  • Increased the length of time a dwarf can survive while very hungry or thirsty
  • Fix for corrupted save files that could occur when closing the game immediately after manually saving
  • Dwarves sleeping in beds should now correctly show only their head (was a problem with save files)
  • Dwarves now fall out of bed when they die (as they used to)
  • Fix for a weird interaction when adding and removing walls on top of grass.
  • PLEASE NOTE this fix means that newly mined tiles on existing saves will show a dark (actuall granite) floor rather than the correct material.
  • Unfortunately, you'll need to start a new game to fix this unintended side effect of the bugfix
  • Changed item production defaults so tools and items used in furniture are mostly fixed amount rather than per settler
  • A death notification for a broken dwarf now tells the player they had given up on life rather than dying to hunger or thirst
  • Death reason in notification is now in lowercase
  • The camera now stops panning as a notification is shown
  • Increased length of time that most items are held in inventory for, so tools shouldn't be returned each morning
  • Fix for an issue where trees would grow into farm plots and block other jobs
  • Separated pathfinding timeout from game speed multiplier
  • Disabled particle effects at maximum camera zoom
  • Fixed some issues stopping mushroom shock tanks from working
  • Improved liquid flow so large irrigation systems will fill up correctly
  • Extended crash reporting and logging to include Error types as well as Exception types


[ 2021-12-06 16:32:30 CET ] [ Original post ]

Japanese language update

Updates to Japanese translation


[ 2021-12-03 21:45:48 CET ] [ Original post ]

Alpha 8.1.13 patch

  • Quick fix for length of seasons


[ 2021-12-03 17:35:44 CET ] [ Original post ]

Alpha 8.1.12 Update

  • Attempting to shutdown more gracefully when a crash happens so Steam is not left with files open
  • Increased starting cauldrons from 1 to 2
  • Fully grown bushes are now harvestable, with a small chance of yielding a crop seed


[ 2021-12-03 16:08:22 CET ] [ Original post ]

Alpha 8.1.11 patch

  • Added elephant meat to list of valid ingredients for soup
  • Added Japanese translation, thanks for SPQR
  • Reduced length of time hemp requires to grow
  • Fix for a crash regarding roofing near the edge of the map
  • Fix for a crash when other jobs are on top of a grave location
  • Fix for a crash packaging mods with replaced colour swatches


[ 2021-12-03 11:35:45 CET ] [ Original post ]

Alpha 8.1.10 patch

  • Fix for a problem where a dwarf requiring multiple items for different jobs would get stuck if the first was not available (thanks CptEric)
  • Iron and steel take a bit longer to transition to rusted when left out in the rain
  • Added hint about right-clicking to tutorial
  • Correctly showing translated strings for material selection while placing furniture
  • Re-placement of furniture after being picked up (e.g. kitchen cauldron) is now set to priority HIGHER


[ 2021-11-26 14:31:19 CET ] [ Original post ]

Alpha 8.1.9 update

  • Fixed the game being stretched too large on Windows machines which have "Scale and layout" display setting set higher than 100%
  • Stockpiles now use the group they were placed with as part of their room name
  • By popular demand, you can now build furniture in stockpiles and farm plots, try not to put stuff that blocks tiles in there!
  • Improved construction description to only mention missing requirements when an item can't be found
  • Disabled Japanese, Chinese and Korean translations as these were machine generated and not fit for purpose (a Chinese translation is in development)
  • Updated Spanish translation


[ 2021-11-26 11:44:37 CET ] [ Original post ]

Alpha 8.1.8 patch

  • Wild animals can no longer move through doors, sorry to the civilized elephants
  • Fix for a crash when a creature died in a stockpile but wasn't supposed to be in that stockpile (how inconsiderate of them)
  • Fix for a crash when having a tantrum against a piece of furniture you're standing on top of
  • Fix for a crash when trying to describe crafting that is happening at a piece of furniture that has been deleted
  • Allowed for special characters in settlement names to work with save files
  • Fix for a crash with empty liquid zones
  • Fix for a crash when wild animals get extremely tired (someone has an over-zealous hunter I think)
  • Fix for a crash when an item is somehow created with no material for its main type


[ 2021-11-25 20:42:06 CET ] [ Original post ]

Alpha 8.1.7 patch

  • Fix for a crash when processing modified translation files
  • Completing the tutorial now disables the tutorial in future games, so you can choose where to place your settlement


[ 2021-11-24 22:24:23 CET ] [ Original post ]

Alpha 8.1.6 patch (translation update)

  • Updated Spanish translation provided by Harlmorl
  • Updated German translation provided by Mario Rder


[ 2021-11-24 15:54:58 CET ] [ Original post ]

Alpha 8.1.4 patch

  • Fix for a crash when launching the game which may be on Windows 11 only, in an error trying to find the user directory


[ 2021-11-24 14:23:46 CET ] [ Original post ]

Alpha 8.1.3 patch

  • Fix for a rare problem where mining could cause a pathfinding check to spiral out of control and eat all available memory


[ 2021-11-24 12:44:05 CET ] [ Original post ]

Alpha 8.1.2 Release

  • Elephants now yield a lot of meat when butchered (it was 0 before by accident)
  • Fix for a crash with death notification when death reason is unknown


[ 2021-11-23 23:03:12 CET ] [ Original post ]

Alpha 8.1.1 Release

  • Fixed an issue where dwarves would not die from status effects like starvation and dehydration!
  • Fix for a crash when loading the game with a displayed hint that can no longer be found


[ 2021-11-22 10:46:14 CET ] [ Original post ]

Alpha 8.1 Release

  • Added elephants as a wild animal (beware their great strength!)
  • The player's first settlement (before they're asked about the tutorial) will now auto-select a start location
  • Settlers can now free themselves from being stuck under furniture while in a corner
  • Creatures now wake up when attacked
  • Mushrooms no longer say that they care about being watered
  • Graves can now be dug when it has snowed
  • Added settler name to tantrum notification
  • Pause for notifications is now on by default
  • Corrected the way demolition works on tiles with both furniture and a constructed floor
  • Fix for a crash when a corpse is off the edge of the map somehow


[ 2021-11-20 14:57:23 CET ] [ Original post ]

Alpha 8.0.2 release

  • Added an option to re-enable the tutorial
  • Fix for a crash when clicking on the broken shield notification
  • Fix for a crash that could happen while having a tantrum near the map edge
  • Fix for a crash when a dwarf is sleeping and has somehow been pushed out of the edge of the map


[ 2021-11-18 16:37:17 CET ] [ Original post ]

Alpha 8 Release

Excited to announce that Alpha 8 is now live - expect a little more content (maybe more weapons) and more bugfixes and quality of life improvements in the next few days, but I wanted to get this out now so people can play with it sooner. Here's the changelog

  • Reworked HUMANOID entities into more generic CREATURE entity type
  • Settlers at very low happiness will now have several tantrums (attacking a nearby creature or furniture) before breaking and giving up on life
  • Added "Race" type for creatures containing new data
  • Definitions of body structure and organs for different races
  • Dwarven body shape (fat/average/strong) is now based on a strength stat, determined by a strength distribution described as part of the race
  • Added non-settler creature behaviour, to represent wild animals at this stage
  • Added the following wild animals:
  • Deer
  • Fox
  • Wild boar
  • Added Armory zone for crafting of weapons (and later armour), alongside weapons stockpile type
  • Settler can now have a type of weapon assigned for them to keep hold of for combat
  • (Re-)added the hunter profession, along with a hunting order and designation on entities (as opposed to a static location)
  • Added a simple form of combat for hunting
  • Ability for stockpile groups to hold corpses, only enabled for "Food" group currently
  • Changed fish from items to creatures for butchery station to work consistently
  • Corrected label on unpowered crafting stations (e.g. ore crusher) to show they are slowed but not disabled
  • Improved job selection so same-priority profession-required jobs are selected before closer jobs of the same priority not requiring a profession
  • Fix for crafting stations to use material selections from crafting management screen


[ 2021-11-09 17:08:51 CET ] [ Original post ]

October 2021 Update - Steam launch in less than 4 weeks!

Welcome to the monthly dev update forKing under the Mountain and possibly the biggest news the game will ever have King under the Mountain is launching to Steam Early Access on November 24th! In an earlier update I mentioned that I was working with a publisher, well that ended up not panning out, so instead this is me entirely self-publishing and this has necessitated moving the release dateforward from around February to what is now less than a months time. This does mean the planned content has been cut back a bit instead of launching with Alpha 10 completed, the game will be launched up to Alpha 8 instead. Primarily this means that combat and content based around combat wont be in at launch, but will be coming shortly after launch, and there will still be a simplified combat in the form of hunting coming in the next update. I was hoping to have Alpha 8 released in time for this post but it needs a few more days yet. So while you wait just a little, heres what Ive been working on over the last month, which unsurprisingly is whats coming in Alpha 8! First of all there are now other creatures in the world in addition to dwarves at this stage only covering a few animals that can be found in the wild. This included reworking what was classed as a humanoid type of entity into a more generalised creature to cover these cases.
Im extremely happy with how the animal sprites have turned out. Theyre the work of artist Katie-Beth Tutt who has produced a whole heap of excellent animals to be added to the game now and in the coming months, and shes also produced the in-game graphics for the other races (orcs and elves) which are also being added before too long. The animals make use of the same colouring tricks used with plants in the game where the (moddable) game files define a range of colours to be used to add subtle variety to the range of creatures that you encounter.
The main feature of Alpha 8 is that these animals will exist in the world, and you will be able to hunt (or in some cases just want to keep away from) them. But hunting essentially requires combat, and combat requires tracking the health of creatures, which has led to this latest update being very large under the hood despite not adding a lot for the player at this stage. The largest part of this is that each creature is part of a race which defines many things:

  • A range of values for a strength attribute. You can think of this attribute as being similar to the one for a character in a tabletop RPG where 10 represents an average human strength, 15 is very strong, and 20 is superhuman. For now creatures only have this single attribute but I wouldnt be surprised if I end up adding more when combat becomes more fleshed out. Dwarves have a strength anywhere from a value of 7 to 19.
  • A reference to a body structure which Ill go into more detail on below.
  • A list of body shapes for the race. So far dwarves have had visually distinct fat, average and strong body shapes, as reflected in the sprite artwork. These bodyshapes are now selected based on the attribute(s) of the creature (strength in this case), so now a dwarf with a strong body shape will be because they actually are strong in the game (which has an associated melee combat damage bonus) which is quite pleasing.
  • A set of colours to apply to the character artwork. These can be a swatch (a 2-dimensional range) of colours to select between as with the fox fur colour you see above, a palette/colour chart which is what is used for dwarven skin and hair colours, or a specific single colour. Until now these colour ranges were not moddable, so it is nice to continue to open these things up to a future modding community.
  • A behaviour section which defines which needs (food, drink, sleep) apply to the race and a reference to the actual AI implementation to use (which is between settler and wild animals currently).
  • A section for gender distribution and likelihood of hair (which is used for antlers on male deer).
  • A section for physical features such as the different materials for skin, bones and meat, damage reduction that the skin applies (if any) and surely more to come.
Perhaps the most important of these (and another large part of this update) is the body structure which is a separate mod file which defines the different parts of the body and any critical organs they contain. Each body part can have further body parts linked to it, for example on a humanoid the torso is the root body part, linked to the head, arms and abdomen, with the abdomen linked to the legs, and the legs to the feet and so on. Each body part specifies how large it is in relation to the overall creature, and each organ defines how large it is within that body part. Heres a visual representation (not to scale) of the humanoid body structure as currently defined (if you can excuse the programmer art):
So destroying an arm or leg would also destroy the relevant hand or foot, or destroying a body part which contains critical organs would destroy those as well. I decided early on that I wanted to go down such a detailedDwarf Fortress-like simulation of the body for calculating health and injuries rather than going to the other extreme of something like a number of health points like simpler combat systems might use. I always describeKing under the Mountain as simulation-based and modelling things to such a detailed level (hopefully) introduces interesting emergent interactions and gameplay from these systems working together. All of this is done so that in combat, rather than just losing a number of hit points, each attack lands on a certain part of the body, perhaps piercing through to a vital organ, and the effects of the damage on this body part or organ are then reflected in-game. Anything but the lightest damage to the brain will kill a creature, whereas losing a single kidney or lung would be survivable. Losing one or both eyes impairs vision which will have its own effects. I felt that all of this was necessary for combat in the game, and so by extension was necessary for hunting of wild animals too which is essentially combat as well. So there will be a limited form and amount of combat in the game at Steam launch, but fully fleshing this out with a wider variety of weapons, armour and actual control over your military will come a little later.
With this in place I was finally able to implement hunting, including a new section on the UI for selecting which weapon a dwarf should have equipped. Expect this to be expanded upon shortly. So that essentially covers Alpha 8 which should be releasing soon! Its a lot of groundwork, as many of these early alpha releases are, to allow for the more important upcoming content. As always though, therell also be a bunch of bugfixes and quality of life improvements thanks to the feedback from the community on Alpha 7 absolutely invaluable stuff which is helping shape the game to be much better than it would otherwise. On that note Ive created a bug/issue tracker which you can view, though Ive not been particularly focused on this for the last couple of weeks as Ive been stuck deep into figuring out all the health/combat/body structure stuff above.
November will see me focus almost exclusively on bugs and improvements rather than new content as we move towards the release date on the development side, as Ill also be having to don my marketing hat to get word of the game and its release out into the wider world. If you want to get involved with the community, or have something youd love to get onto the issue tracker, best to join the Discord server and get in touch that way. If not, or either way, see you next month for the Steam release of the game!


[ 2021-10-28 15:10:23 CET ] [ Original post ]

King under the Mountain - Developer Livestream and Q&A

Come and join the developer as I play and discuss King under the Mountain as part of the Steam Next Fest! This is your chance to throw any questions my way as we come up to the Early Access launch!


[ 2021-09-30 11:17:41 CET ] [ Original post ]

Alpha 7.0.4 patch

  • Furniture placements on top of irrigation channels no longer show as valid
  • Fix for an issue with liquid transfers affecting save files fro Alpha 7.0.2 and below being used in Alpha 7.0.3
  • Made liquid containers with a very small amount of liquid count as empty


[ 2021-09-28 21:29:40 CET ] [ Original post ]

September 2021 Update

Welcome to the monthlyKing under the Mountain dev update! This month sees Alpha 7 released (as of yesterday) which is the single largest update of the game so far! The main part of development for this alpha was extending the calculation and rendering of water flow into channels and pipes that can be dug by the player. You may have noticed that the river flows in a realistic direction in each tile. During map generation, this is calculated by flowing water from one end of the river to the other really a rough approximation using a similar method to Dwarf Fortress and keeping track of which direction water flows in an out of. Heres a very early video showing that in action: [previewyoutube=FWnl00s4MDU;full][/previewyoutube] The red lines are a vector used as the direction of flow in each tile, which is then averaged out to the vertices (corners of the tiles), and this is whats used in the water flow shader. The main problem in extending this to channels dug by the player is I needed to combine all the rendering techniques the game currently uses not just the flowing water shader, but also only showing this in part of the tile (the irrigation channel) and also the way that flooring overlaps with each other i.e. rather than having straight edges between every tile, different floor types overlap onto their neighbours. Heres another extremely early video of that: [previewyoutube=g7S2dmbzur8;full][/previewyoutube] Also the irrigation channels make use of the way walls are rendered out of separate quadrants. So in the end I had to combine all the rendering techniques Id come up with so far the flowing water shader, the splitting of a tile into quadrants to make use of many different layouts from just 5 sprites, and the overlaps between floors also making use of these quadrants. It was messy and difficult, but we got there in the end! Heres a look at water flowing between irrigation channels in the game this is slowed down a bit from whats ended up in the released version, and you should be able to spot the same method used as the original flowing water video: [previewyoutube=0p34oV9c5mc;full][/previewyoutube] So why would you want to dig all these channels for water to flow into? Well, theyre certainly cheaper than laying pipes underground (which is a related new feature), but your settlers cant walk across the channels (though you can build a bridge over them) so for the most part, pipes would be much more effective. What theydo provide is constant access to water for nearby plants, particularly your crops which is why youll want to dig these channels and set up irrigation. Plants now require access to water to grow quickly, otherwise their growth is stunted if they dont have access to water for a while, and stopped completely if they cant receive any water for many days! Access to water for the most part will be covered by the fairly common rain in the game, though now the summer season is a bit drier overall. The goal is that players will be able to get by relying on the weather for watering crops (theres no watering cans or jobs here!) but they will want to turn to irrigation to optimise things (or at least avoid the chance of having a summer drought). But how do you get water into these channels and pipes? This release sees the first animated furniture inKing under the Mountain (courtesy of artist Rizal Zulkifli who produced most of the art assets in this release, and a lot before that too, all the way back to the original pre-alpha releases). Youll need to build a water pump connecting the river to a pipe system:
But to actually make use of the water pump, this release also introduces the concept of powered furniture. Not electricity, but good old mechanical power provided by a waterwheel or windmill.
Theres a lot of small touches that get put into the game which I dont know if anyone will notice. One is that the waterwheel actually rotates in the correct direction, thanks to having the water flow information described at the start of this post! While the waterwheel has to be placed adjacent to the river, the windmill will work anywhere outside, however the windmill requires linen sails which Ill get to later. Now there are power-producing and power-consuming pieces of furniture (the ore crusher now requires power or else it takes a very long time to use), they need joining together in some way. As this is mechanical power, this is performed through a series of gears and wooden shafts which are placed below the ground level:
Now that your dwarves are able to move water from the river through pipes and channels, that creates an option of no longer having to trek all the way to the river for the many times a settler needs some water for a job or just to drink. You can now build wells which are automatically filled by your pipe system, so you can build these deep into your settlement, connected to working pipes, and greatly reduce the amount of travelling for water needed!
This release sees the first Kickstarter-backer-nominated crop added to the game Hemp! While were not adding any Tolkein-esque pipe-weed just yet, its a possibility for the future. What hemp does do for you now is introduce a new weaving crafting type where hemp is processed to hemp fibre through a process called retting (in King under the Mountain, this is mechanically the same as the mushroom log shock tank where the hemp bundles are submerged in water for about a day), and the hemp fibre can be woven into rope or linen. The well above clearly needs a rope to function, and as mentioned earlier, the windmill requires linen for its sails to function. Most importantly though, beds now need linen to be constructed as well as wood for the frame, making comfortable beds that little bit more expensive to craft. To balance this, theres now a sleeping spot which can be placed in bedrooms as a location for your settlers to sleep on the floor, so at least you can control where they sleep before you can furnish your settlement with a full complement of beds. Look out for other backer-nominated crops still to be added in the future! Long-time players may remember the fishing profession that was in early versions of the game (which didnt do anything), or more recently you may have noticed that your dwarves produce fishing poles without making any use of them. Well that is no longer the case! The fishing profession is now fully implemented, so particularly unusual dwarves may be happy to go and stand next to the river, fishing pole in hand, to bring back fish for your settlement to eat. Mechanically this is an alternative to growing crops for food, without the setup of tilled earth or the requirement of seeds, but it is more labour intensive as the settler has to actually fish for a long period rather than leaving crops to go. That said, fishing is probably an easier way of acquiring food, so theres also a limit on how many fish can be caught each year which should be around enough to support a population of up to 20 settlers from fishing alone. Currently the game includes Pike, Perch and (of course) Carp, with the artwork produced by Kaitlynn Peavler.
Right now the fish you catch only produce meat to be added to your food supplies, but it wont be long before bone is added as an important crafting resource too, with small bones from fish making up a large part of this. The door assets saw a visual update this release (again thanks to Rizal Zulkifli) which was necessitated by the fact that the old door sprites only had connecting caps on walls for the rough stone wall type. The doors now align and blend in properly to any of the types of walls found in the game, as you can see by this before and after screenshot:
As usual, this major release came with a bunch of bugfixes and quality of life improvements one of the standout QoL improvements being that when a stockpiles settings are altered, it now cancels any outstanding jobs to haul items to that stockpile which would not be valid with the updated settings. Theres also a big startup-time performance improvement as I noticed all the sprites for the game were being loaded many times over on launch due, which has now been fixed, so Im hoping players see a noticable improvement in the time the game to takes to initially load up (show the main menu) compared to before. And that just about covers this month and Alpha 7! If youre reading this and you have yet to actually playKing under the Mountain, good news Theres now a playable demo available (accessed via the Steam store page) as part of the upcoming Steam Next Fest!
This is a time-limited demo (you can play the first year of the game without restriction) based on the Alpha 6 version (so it wont include any of the content mentioned in this post). The demo will only be available while the Next Fest is ongoing, so make use of it while you can! Thats it for this month, now were going on to adding all kinds of animals to the game which I cant wait to share with you, as well as detailed injuries and health as a key component before combat is added shortly. As always, drop by the King under the Mountain discord server as the best way to get involved with the community and help improve development through player feedback (or just to ask for help). Finally I want to pay it forward a little and throw a spotlight on another upcoming game featuring dwarves digging their way into the depths Below the Stone currently on Kickstarter! [previewyoutube=AZEI_GibNoY;full][/previewyoutube] Ive been followingBelow the Stone for a while and theyve gone through exactly what I did withKing under the Mountain an initial Kickstarter that didnt meet its goal (it is ridiculously hard to do well on Kickstarter as an unknown indie compared to the golden age of around 2013 to 2015), so they kept working hard, improved things, learned lessons from the KS campaign and came back and theyve nailed it. Ill leave the description to them: Below The Stoneis a procedurally generated spelunking roguelite with completely destructible grid-based levels resembling that of many loved titles such as Terraria, Enter The Gungeon, Nuclear Throne, and Dwarf Fortress. You play as an apprentice dwarf yearning to make your mark in the dwarven empire through the time honored labor of mining and exploration. On your adventure, you can complete jobs for your guild masters for a choice of rewards, and have the opportunity to collect precious metals for yourself to upgrade your armor, tools, and weapons. As you dig deeper, you encounter motherloads of riches and surpass all of your peers expectations. But be careful, there are many monsters and hazards that await around every corner, looking to monch your beard off. And if you die, there is no running back for your items. If that sounds like your kind of thing (and Im assuming theres at least some amount of Dwarf-appreciation from people reading this) then theres just a few days left on the Kickstarter campaign and theyve already blown past the funding target in the first few days, so please help them reach those exciting stretch goals!


[ 2021-09-28 12:02:20 CET ] [ Original post ]

Alpha 7.0.3 patch

  • Settlers will now collect water from wells to transfer to other containers (such as a water barrel)
  • Corrected labelling of soup with 3 ingredients
  • Added missing translation labels
  • Fix for a crash when trying to get into a bed which has been removed


[ 2021-09-28 09:45:52 CET ] [ Original post ]

Alpha 7.0.2 patch

  • Fix for a crash related to late-growing Hemp
  • Fix for a crash when sleeping in bed but the bed no longer exists
  • Increased opacity of sleeping spot
  • Fix for a crash when cancelling unneeded jobs


[ 2021-09-26 09:26:17 CET ] [ Original post ]

Alpha 7 Released!

Alpha 7 has just been released! This is the single biggest update to the game ever! Just one part of it was adding flowing water to irrigation channels that your settlers can dig, and that required combining the way walls split into quadrants work, the way different floors overlap to each other, and the way the water rendering works, all into one rendering pipeline. Yikes. Anyway, here's the full changelist:

  • Added channels and piping for liquid flow between tiles
  • Added water pump furniture to extract liquid from river and pump into pipes
  • Added well furniture for usage of pumped water
  • Added power generating furniture
  • windmill and water wheel
  • Added mechanical power grid system for transfer of power between producers and consumers (such as windmill and water pump)
  • Plants now require water to grow, which can be provided by rain or nearby irrigation channels containing water
  • Ore crusher now requires power to operate, or else it will take significantly longer
  • Added hemp crop, which requires processing in a retting station and then it can be crafted into rope or linen
  • Note that weaving is currently done by farmers, before a dedicated weaving profession will probably be added later
  • Beds now require linen to be constructed
  • Added sleeping spot to bedrooms to make up for more difficult bed requirements
  • Added fishing mechanic/jobs and re
  • implemented the fisher profession
  • Fish can be caught, prepared, and used in cooking soup
  • Fixed particle effects on furniture in use like Ore Crusher
  • Made settlers eat rations before other edible items in inventory
  • Made lightning very unlikely to strike plants other than trees
  • Moved map seed to options menu with copy to clipboard button
  • Updated single door assets and lighting information
  • Updated dirt floor texture
  • Can now press enter in the rename dialog to submit the rename text (you would not believe how awkward this is to do)
  • Changing stockpile settings now removes any *pending* hauling jobs which would be invalid with the new settings
  • Improved startup time by fixing a performance issue where sprite assets were loaded many times


[ 2021-09-25 15:50:26 CET ] [ Original post ]

August 2021 Update

Lots to get through this month thanks to developingKing under the Mountain full time now! In the last dev update I had just started on Alpha 6 and the first feature added for this was fire(!), as a reminder, heres a look at it: [previewyoutube=0_orFiGSNAE;full][/previewyoutube] There was one very large reason fire was only added as part of this Alpha, and the reason is that it also brought with it weather into the game perhaps most importantly rain to extinguish those pesky fires outside. Dwarves, quite understandably, get a little upset at walking or working in the rain, but theyre particularly upset about being forced to sleep in the rain (wouldnt you be?). Heres a look at the visuals of rain in the game: [previewyoutube=YI1nxu9vWbY;full][/previewyoutube] The rain effect is done entirely using the particle effect system added in the more recent dev updates. I was worried that this many particles in use at once may have some performance impacts but it would seem that the similarity of the particles allows the graphics pipeline to render a large number of them at little cost. Rain also pushes the player to finally have a reason to build their settlement either underground/within the mountain, or at the very least in rooms with a roof constructed overhead. There is the happiness malus mentioned above, but more importantly than this it introduces a new system calledoxidisation, which is perhaps most important for things made of iron rusting. Prolonged exposure to rain for an item made of iron or steel will now eventually turn into rusted iron, turning a reddish-brown colour, and eventually this too will degrade further and completely destroy the item or furniture! Fortunately this only applies to items or furniture where iron is the primary material a wooden barrel with iron hoops will not be destroyed, though the hoops themselves will eventually turn to the rusted iron colour. Much more so than the unhappiness at being outside, Im pleased to introduce a realistic mechanic which forces the player to seek shelter in the long term. In addition to iron turning to rust, copper also oxidises, but not in the destructive way that iron does. Instead, copper forms a turquoise/green patina on its surface which also acts as a barrier to further oxidisation (unlike rust which permeates through the metal). Heres an example of the different colours of these in the game:
Iron and copper axes on the left, rusted iron and copper patina on the right Theres a more extreme version of rain in the form of thunderstorms, which in addition to rain also have a chance for lightning to strike somewhat regularly. A lightning strike will be attracted to trees, or failing that other entities in the game world rather than open spaces. A lightning strike has a high chance to start a fire! For the most part these fires will immediately be extinguished by the falling rain, though in some rare situations the rain may stop before the fire is extinguished, or even rarer in summer you may come across a dry thunderstorm which has no rain but also rarely still causes lightning strikes one to be on guard for! The other major weather system is snow, which works for the most part similar to rain, though I wanted a more striking visual effect in the game. In addition to the falling snow using a similar particle effect to the rain, theres two other additions: a replacement for the ground texture where the ground gets covered in snow rather than showing grass or dirt or similar, and a shader effect to give an impression of snow that has fallen onto entities. As every entity in the game also has a matching set of normal map sprites, defining the direction each part of the surface is pointing (mostly for lighting information), I made use of this to write another shader which considers a global amount of snowfall, and uses this to render a white snow effect on the upper parts of the sprites, increasing in amount as the snowfall increases. Look out for that in this demonstration of the overall snow effect: [previewyoutube=KmD5x32TFgw;full][/previewyoutube] Along with less visually striking weather effects (cloudy weather and winds mostly), the different weather types are now defined (and moddable like everything else), where in addition to being able to define the actual weather types, theres an extra level of configuration where theres a concept of daily weather defining which weather types you may encounter on any given day (think of it like the forecast for that day mostly sun, mostly cloudy, some rain etc.) and these daily weather forecasts are defined by season. To those of you not aware, Im from northern England, somewhat infamous for always being wet and grey, so unfortunately for everyone else thats the kind of weather thats reflected in the game! Put another way, the current and only biome in the game is supposed to reflect a kind of northern European climate, leaning in to Norse culture for the history of dwarves in fantasy literature. When the game introduces other biomes, no doubt they will have their own climate with different weather, but for now youll have to put up with the kind of weather Im used to seeing! For the longest time, Ive wanted winter to be much more of a challenge in the game than it currently is. For now the snow is still mostly visual rather than being particularly punishing (though there is one big thing to look out for if youve not built beds indoors by the time winter comes around, your dwarves might freeze to death from sleeping outside!). The next step would be to have the river freeze over in winter, but right now that would be far too punishing as the player isnt able to secure a sizable water supply that would not freeze very easily. Thats changing soon though, as a big part of alpha 7 is bringing the ability to move water around through pipes and irrigation channels, pumped in by a water pump, which should give the player the tools needed to be able to survive the river freezing over in particularly cold days during winter. Fire and weather effects were the main part of alpha 6, so it was released this month and a few bugfixes for it have gone out too. Thats not all that was added though one of the best features is that upon starting a game, the player is now able to select exactly where on the map they would like their settlement to begin no more rerolling the map for that ideal start location! Beyond this were some smaller bug fixes, a tidyup of the sprites for male dwarves eyebrows (they were a slightly different colour to their hair previously) and also the addition of new hair and beard styles for the dwarves (slowly building towards the long-awaited design a settler backer reward) so look out for those too.
And with that, alpha 6 was completed, so its on to alpha 7! The initial major part of alpha 7 brings together mechanisms, pipes, channels and a rework to allow liquids to flow dynamically in the game world so Ill surely be bringing full details of that in next months update. Thats not all though, Im hoping Ill finally be able to share some of the Add a farmable crop kickstarter rewards which will be part of the next release, and especially the wide range of natural wildlife which are due to be added to the game (themselves containing a number of addition thanks to kickstarter backer rewards). So Ill see you then, and in the meantime the best place to get involved with games community is the King under the Mountain discord server!


[ 2021-08-30 14:46:19 CET ] [ Original post ]

Huge news for King under the Mountain (July 2021 Update)

Hi everyone, its been far too long since the last dev update forKing under the Mountain. Well, there were a lot of factors that fed into that, but rather than go through them, I just want to share the big news with you all King under the Mountain has a publishing deal! Theres many great parts to this announcement, but perhaps most important is that as of 3 weeks ago, Im no longer trying (and failing) to fit gamedev around a full time day job and family life, instead thanks to publisher funding Im now working full time on developing the game! The roadmap is in place, most of the artwork required for it has been created, so now Im just powering forward to bring the game to Steam Early Access as soon as possible. Were aiming at a January 2022 early access launch which is just 6 months away almost no time at all compared to the time the game has been in development so far! You might even be wondering why its taken this long for me to sign up with a publisher or why I have at all with how relatively close the early access launch is. Well on the first point, this is the first time Ive spoken to a publisher who really understands the vision for the game. Ive spoken to others who wanted the game completely done and dusted in 18 months time, but I see games in this genre as really benefitting from a long early access period just look at the growth in gameplay and success of games like Prison ArchitectandRimworld. Some publishers werent willing or able to invest the amount required to allow me to quit my day job, so that was a non-starter. As to why would I sign up with a publisher when Ive already got the game so far along the road to the early access launch? Well, as you can see from the increasingly sporadic dev updates, I just havent been able to find the time needed around everything else to progress the game it would have still taken a crazy long time to get the game to Steam from where it was. In addition, any publisher worth their salt brings with them some great marketing clout instead of this now being a hobby project with one guy working on it, theres a whole team pushing the game forward, with multiple people dedicated to marketing so many more people should hear about the game, rather than the small niche its in currently. So who is this mysterious benefactor? A fairly new publisher called Boombox, which is a partnership between Philippe Erwin who brings many, many years of experience in production and business development in games from senior positions at big names like Activision and Warner Bros, and Alexander Poysky of Poysky Productions, who producedRegions of Ruin,Between the StarsandTravellers Rest (among others). Ive actually been in touch with Alexander for over 2 years already, specifically around publishingKing under the Mountain, and everything just lined up on both sides recently that we were able to come up with an arrangement that works for both of us. Im very excited to be working with them and their wider team! So now that Im working full time on the game, I was able to wrap up development on Alpha 5 in just a few days. You might remember from the previous update that I was due to go onto constructing roofing and flooring. Well Im pleased to say thats done now! Heres a little look at constructing roofing in the game (with a bit of a preview of rain as well): [previewyoutube=u0NKYfd9rno;full][/previewyoutube] Roofing isnt super important yet but it will be once weather effects are added (which is the current development goal!). It does change up the happiness bonuses a little though dwarves now get a happiness bonus from working in a zone completely enclosed with walls or doors and a roof. Of course, any mined out areas come with a roof already so perhaps this will encourage players to dig into the mountainside? You may have noticed in the video that the Quad option for building walls has been replace by Room which also fills in roofing in-between the walls. Finally you can also put your own constructed flooring down. Along with this, flooring now provides different movement speeds depending on the type of flooring. You will find that gravel is quite slow to walk on, but any flooring constructed by dwarves speeds up movement considerably, so it can be worth laying down paths between high traffic areas. Of course, the AI pathfinding now takes the floor speed into account, so it will plan out paths based on the flooring available. This might mean if you do build quicker paths between areas, you might need to widen them to account for the higher traffic passing by! Having wrapped up Alpha 5, it was released as Alpha 5.3 to the Itch page. Now that were fully focusing on the Steam Early Access release, the game is not currently available for new purchases on Itch.io. Current owners will still be able to download any and all future updates, and it also shouldnt be too long before we start pushing updates to Steam as well. At that point, well make Steam keys available to anyone who currently has a copy on Itch (i.e. anyone who backed the Kickstarter or has purchased the game since) so look out for that news in the near future. Next it came time to make a start on Alpha 6. Looking into it, I was still waiting on a few of the art assets which were being produced which made Alpha 6 all work together. To avoid any waiting around (though those assets have since been completed), I ended up swapping the contents of Alphas 6 and 7 with each other, so now Alpha 6 covers fire and weather effects. On that note then, I started with fire, and as a good indication of how much more progress is being made with me focusing fulltime on gamedev, the entire fire feature has been completed as well! Heres a look at it: [previewyoutube=0_orFiGSNAE;full][/previewyoutube] The games now getting to a point where the different systems really start to get to interact with each other. Fire spreads to nearby things depending on if theyre flammable, which itself is determined by the materials that form each item/entity in the game. Unfortunately for your dwarves, they count as flammable too, but at least a dwarf will roll around or seek out water (when not running around in a panic) in an attempt to put themselves out. Everything else will require the use of a new order to extinguish flames, which involves filling a container with water and dumping it over the fire to put it out. Failing that, fires will either spread to nearby entities or else eventually consume and destroy the thing on fire. Heres a tip dont build things around the blacksmiths forge out of wood! Theres good news for your flaming dwarves though, with fire done Im now working on adding all kinds of weather to the game, first of all rain which you can see a little of in the roofing video above. Rain has a good chance of extinguishing fires, but only if they are outdoors! Rain will make your dwarves a bit upset at walking or working in it, but especially upset at having to sleep in the rain (wouldnt you be?) so youll want to dig those bedrooms out fairly quickly. Rain will tie into the more advanced modelling of farming crops which is now part of alpha 7, and perhaps most awkwardly of all, introduce the system of oxidisation to certain metals (i.e. iron and steel items will eventually rust and become useless if left outside). And that is just the first type of weather! Look forward to snow and cold in winter which will be harder to survive, thunderstorms with fire-causing lightning strikes, and more, all to be released as Alpha 6 in the next couple of weeks. And thats where were up to! I am very sorry this update is such a long time since the last, but now with the publishing deal in place, I cant imagine missing another one until the not-too-long-in-the-future Steam release and beyond! See you next month, or if you want to keep more up to date, join the King under the Mountain Discord server.


[ 2021-07-31 13:21:30 CET ] [ Original post ]

April 2021 Update

Its the April 2021 dev update for King under the Mountain! I am truly sorry to have missed a couple of monthly updates. Until the Steam Early Access launch, the game is basically a hobby project and real life has endless ways of getting in the way of that. Im happy to say its fully back on track though and weve had some great progress this month! The major milestone achieved was the addition of the initial list of particle effects that have been added to the game thanks to the particle effect system. In fact this month I had enough time that I was able to stream some real time game development on Twitch, and below you can watch me go through the steps needed to create and add a new particle effect to the game (from 12:24): [previewyoutube=9TBq5-CX26s;full][/previewyoutube] So theres been a whole bunch of new visual effects added to the game using particles. One Im particularly happy to get added is leaves falling from trees in autumn, which was promised all the way back in 2016 with one of the very first looks at the game! [previewyoutube=I4rqlesB6dg;full][/previewyoutube] While its not exactly a particle effect, setting up that system also allowed me to add a much needed quality of life feature progress bars when working on jobs! No longer do dwarves just stare at a blank wall or piece of furniture until it happens, now particle effects and a progress bar all appear to really tie everything together. Here you can see mining incorporating chips flying off the rock wall being mined, a cloud of dust as the wall is removed, and the progress bar thats displayed. [previewyoutube=m68pI0bYKEM;full][/previewyoutube] Rather than list them all here, you can try them out for yourself with the latest version (Alpha 5.2) from the usual Itch.io page. And thats not all either perhaps the single most requested display feature has finally been implemented you can now run the game in borderless fullscreen mode! The new setting should be set by default if you were using the old exclusive fullscreen display mode, and the exclusive fullscreen option is still included for those that prefer it (mostly for older hardware that might struggle with games not running exclusively). As ever, theres some bugfixes included, mostly thanks to the help of the community and member SirRockstar in particular whos been invaluable in providing reproducible problems with larger settlements. There was an issue with soup getting mixed up with water in a kitchen and buckets ended up full of soup and stuck! In fact theres now an in-game option to get a dwarf to empty the contents of an unused container as a workaround for similar problems in the future, though primarily I want to stop them from happening in the first place. Also a big thank you to community member Lyserg who has translated the game into Turkish. The latest update includes his translation as part of the community translations mod, and perhaps just as importantly also includes the Turkish flag to display alongside it. Looking ahead, the roadmap has been updated and the only part remaining for Alpha 5 is constructing roofing and flooring to have proper rooms and buildings in the game. Ive been toying with the idea of roofing not needing any input from the dwarves, just being a kind of UI setting which has an effect in-game, but that doesnt really go with the simulated world Im aiming for inKing under the Mountain so I suppose that means placing roofing will need a dwarf to get the right resources and do the work after all! Following that, Im very excited to get stuck into Alpha 6 as itll be the first time in a long time weve had new art assets added to the game, things that have been ready and waiting to go on the artwork side but waiting for the implementation to catch up! Thats all for this month. Again, sorry for the lack of communication for a while but were back on top of things now. Please drop by the games Discord server if you havent already, its the only true community hangout at the moment, and see you next month!


[ 2021-04-21 16:04:21 CET ] [ Original post ]

January 2021 Update

Welcome to the firstKing under the Mountain dev update for 2021! This month has been entirely focused on implementing a particle effect system into the game. But that might lead you to ask

What are particle effects?


Particle effects are a graphics technique where lots of small and usually simple images or models are rendered and often animated to produce a single complex effect. Heres an example from the official Unity tutorial (the particle effect is the pink glow and sparks):
In the above example, a simple coloured sprite is being used lots of times for each of the particles flying off the main large effect on the karts wheel. If you look closely youll notice theyre also decreasing in size as well as moving in an arc until they disappear entirely. Simply put, a particle effect is created by applying several effects on lots of instances of small particles like this. Particle effects are used extensively in games, for explosions, spell casting visuals, impact effects, almost any visual effect you can think of is often done using particles, though in other cases techniques such as using shaders give a better result. As an aside, a shader is a program that runs on the graphics card to adjust the geometry of models/shapes, or the colour of individual pixels sort of which can have some incredibly powerful effects, see shadertoy.com for some good examples to play around with. The dynamic lighting and flowing water in King under the Mountain are both achieved using a shader.

Particle Effects in LibGDX


King under the Mountain is written using LibGDX, which is a game development framework, which is a bit different to a game engine an engine is a bit more prescriptive of what kind of asset formats you have to use, how levels/maps are handled and that kind of thing, whereas LibGDX is at a lower level than an engine, giving you access to underlying graphics and audio programming interfaces (OpenGL and OpenAL) with a good amount of helper code on top for common game development tasks. That said theres much, much less that you get out of the box for using LibGDX compared to a standard engine, for example I had to implement something as seemingly basic as multi-line text in LibGDX! One of those utilities that LibGDX does provide, is a good particle effect implementation and GUI editor for defining your own effects:
You can see some of the many parameters that can be applied to a set of particles in an effect (you can have different sets of particles each with their own emitter), such as the angle of emission from the starting point and the range of velocity they have. The blue-line-graphs are used to adjust these values over the life of the particle. There are more parameters which have not been used in this example such as rotation, gravity and wind that can be applied (all with the ability to have a different amount over different times). When you load up the particle effect editor, it starts with an example particle effect of lots of semi-transparent red circles (up to 200) used to create a flame effect:
The first particle I decided to implement myself was a simple but important one for a game about dwarves digging into a mountainside chipping away bits of rock while mining!
Unlike the example flame effect, this uses much less particles at once, but also makes use of rotation and gravity to give the effect of something a chip flying away from a point.

But what about lighting?


In most games the above would be great and all youd probably need to look at with particle effects in a game built using LibGDX. In the case ofKing under the Mountain however, things are made a bit more difficult by the dynamic lighting system. If youve ever looked at the data files forKing under the Mountain, youll likely have seen that almost every sprite in the game has a matching NORMALS version, like with the following:
The _NORMALS file is a visual normal map (or bump map) that uses the red, green and blue colour channels to describe which direction each part of the surface is pointing in 3 dimensions. This information is combined with light sources each light source is casting light from a certain point, and this is combined with the normal map to figure out how much light will be hitting any given point. At least, thats my attempt at explaining normal mapping without getting too technical into vector maths! Its much more commonly used in 3D games rather than 2D ones, but one of the very first things I wanted to implement inKing under the Mountain was a truly dynamic lighting system so that a dwarf carrying a lantern around tunnels and halls would be suitably evocative, and help distinguish the game from its peers. It helps to see everything combined in-game:
In the above screenshot, the top left is the game world rendered without lighting, using the sprites as they exist in the data files, also known as the diffuse sprites/layer. Top-right is the same scene but using all the _NORMALS versions of the same sprites to build a normal map of the entire scene. Note that the sack in the lower-right does not have a normals-sprite for the label on the sack, so this is not rendered in the normal map scene, meaning it will be lit the same as the layer below (the sack itself in this case). Bottom-left is the lighting information, which is made by running a shader over the normal-map version and data from point lights in the scene (a white light from the cursor in the upper left, a yellow light from the miners helmet in the lower right, and a small amount of global lighting so unlit areas are not pitch black). The lower-right is the combined final result that you see in-game, which is made by simply combining the two images on the left hand side. Thats a very quick run-through of the lighting system, but I bring it up because it occurred to me that I wanted the lighting system to work with the particle effect system, at least for some particle effects that want to be in the game world compared to ones which should not be affected by the lighting and would be more like UI information (for example, thought bubbles above settlers heads). The nave approach would be to have two sets of my rock chipping particle effect running at the same time in the same place, one with the diffuse (standard colour) rocks and one with the normal map (even though normal maps dont really work when rotated this is an issue Im going to live with for now). Unfortunately, theres a lot of randomness in a particle effect but theres no way to set a seed (an initial value used to make a random number generator give the same sequence of results multiple times like the map seed when starting a new game) in the LibGDX particle effect library, and in fact the randomness is buried quite deep within the workings of the library so there wasnt a simple option of just replacing all the random number generation with random number generation using a supplied seed. Instead I had no option but to take a copy of the main part of the LibGDX particle effect codebase and modify a lot of it, I ended up making it be aware of an optional extra set of sprites for the normal maps, and any randomness would apply to both sets of particles that were created at the same time. It doesnt seem like much but it took a lot of effort to have a particle effect which could spit out diffuse and normal-map versions of the particle in the same way at the same time!

And a little extra on top


There was just one main hurdle remaining the particle effect shows chips or rock flying away to the right, but what if the miner is facing a wall from the left, or above, or below? But also where should the particle be positioned relative to the entity in game that is creating it (if its even attached to an entity at all?). The LibGDX particle editor saves and loads in its own file format, named by convention as a .p file. It would be a bad idea for me to add or make changes in this file as then I wouldnt be able to load the .p files in the visual editor in the future, so each particle effect inKing under the Mountain is defined with a type in JSON (like almost every type of thing in the game files) that looks like the following: { "name": "Chipping rock", "particleFile": "rockparticle.p", "scale": 0.4, "usingParentOrientation": "LEFT", "isLooping": true, "isAffectedByLighting": true, "usesTargetMaterialAsTintColor": true, "distanceFromParentEntityOrientation": 0.8, "offsetFromParentEntity": { "x": 0, "y": 0.3 }, "attachedToParent": false } The key to the direction problem is the usingParentOrientation property with a value of LEFT I then added some code which readjusts some parts of the particle effect, like the initial angle of emission based on this property for use with other orientations. attachedToParent with a value of false means the particles wont move (once created) when the parent entity moves this would be true for things like speech and thought bubbles which would also have isAffectedByLighting as false so they appear above everything else and are not affected by the lighting system. Putting it all together, we can now have rocks chipping away with any mining direction!

Whats Next?


All the particle effects! Or at least, a good set of effects for where the game is now, focused around different job types and crafting types. Its always been a long-held ambition to have leaves falling from trees in autumn according to the changing colour of deciduous trees during autumn, and this finally makes that possible (or rather, fairly easy instead of some long-winded and complex way of achieving it with a different approach). However many particle effects I come up with at this point, Im sure therell be lots more that could be added to the game as it is just looking at the animation above, when a wall block is removed it could really do with a burst of clouds of dust type of effect, things like that. Id absolutely love for the player community to suggest more that theyd like to see now that the particle system is in place it should be fairly straightforward to add more effects so get involved via the Discord server. Its a bit of a shame that after the initially swift progress of Alpha 5 that Ive had to spent the entire month adding this single feature, though it is quite a big one which will add a lot in the future, and was a bit of hurdle to get over but were there now! The intention was always that this can also be used for the Visible job progress item on the roadmap but theres also lots more that could be included now or later. Hopefully, particle effects are wrapped up soon, then constructing flooring, roofing and rooms is the next step to complete Alpha 5. See you next month!


[ 2021-01-26 15:18:05 CET ] [ Original post ]

December 2020 Update - Alpha 5 initial release

Another month, another year even, and so its another dev update forKing under the Mountain! There was another fantastic burst of progress this month culminating in the first release of Alpha 5, covering half of the items from the Alpha 5 roadmap already so Ill jump straight in to the new developments!
First of all there is now a (very bare-bones) embark screen (i.e. Start new game screen). This allows you to set a name for your settlement (or let the game randomly generate one) as well as set the seed the number used to initialise the random generation before starting the game proper. You can enter text into the map seed field if you like, though the game will turn it into a long number as shown. This means if you discover a map you particularly like, you can use the same seed again in the future to recreate it, or better yet, share map seeds with other players. In the future this screen will contain a lot of options to customise your starting settlers, items, even the map itself before starting a new game, but its nice to have even this in the meantime.
Speaking of customising settlers, you can now rename them in-game. Perhaps not too exciting by itself but it leads on to
Twitch integration! While playing the game on Twitch, you can now connect your account using the games options menu, and this will reveal the options shown above to have settlers in-game automatically have names based on current Twitch viewers, with an extra option to prioritise Twitch subscribers before other viewers. While this feature has been tested and works well as far as I can tell, I dont believe anyone has tried this feature out properly on a Twitch stream yet, so please let me know if youre going to give it a try!
Thanks to one of the several very talented artists Im working with, there are now new visual assets for the way floors overlap onto each other. On the left in the picture above is my old programmer art wavy-edge type of flooring overlaps, and on the right something looking much much better for different types of floors (see if you can spot how the dirt onto stone looks different, its subtle!). Also the grass flooring itself has had an overhaul to look better too. Theres a lot of artwork in progress and also already completed for features to be added in the not too distant future, but Id prefer to keep the reveal of those for when the features are actually implemented properly.
So you can name your settlement now, but why does that matter? To help you identify different saved games! Above is the load game screen thats just been added to the main menu (though Im sure most of the time players will just hit Continue game to continue their current save). This means youre not limited to a single saved game at a time anymore! Long overdue like most of the features in the pre-Steam Alpha roadmap and Im very happy to see it added. The save files themselves have been overhauled so that they use compression, so in previous versions a save file would be 30 to 50 megabytes, now one is generally around 2 and a half megabytes!
Speaking of long-overdue Alpha features, stockpiles have been reworked (they are not quite so fixed in what they can store anymore) and stockpile management/filtering has been added. Click on a stockpile and click on the Settings button to get the view above, that lets you customise which item groups a stockpile stores, down to the level of the items under those, and even which materials of those items if you wish. Since the above screenshot was taken, a priority control has also been added to stockpile management, so you can set which stockpiles should be filled first or last, or somewhere in between.
Finally theres a few small improvements to the settler management screen following player feedback. Theres a display of number of beds at the top of the screen, clicking on (i.e. filtering to) a profession keeps the other settler in view but greyed out, and theres some sort options at the top to view the settlers by name or decreasing unhappiness (which was the old default). Currently Im working on a particle effect system the small, short-lived visual effects you see in most games. This will (hopefully) be things like sparks flying off a blacksmiths forge, pieces of stone chipping away when mining or crafting, water droplets splashing when filling a barrel, little visual touches like that which really start to bring the game together. As always itll be fully extendable / easily moddable, but it is quite a chunky feature which will take some time, so I thought it best to release an initial version of Alpha 5 before getting stuck into it which is all of the other new additions you see above! Once that is done (and it also includes showing the progress of a job being worked on) its on to constructing flooring and roofing having an area be outside or inside will start to become important. Especially a little later when weather is introduced which will really shake up the current gameplay! The goal is for there to be a slight punishment to things being left outside which I think should change the dynamics of building a settlement quite a bit. Until then though, as ever, the best way to get involved is joining the King under the Mountain Discord where Im usually on hand and always very happy to hear any feedback or issues players are experiencing. See you in 2021!


[ 2020-12-24 11:40:57 CET ] [ Original post ]

Alpha 5 Release

Alpha 5 release - Added a very basic embark screen for entry of settlement name and map seed - You can now manage multiple saved games via the UI, also overhauled save file format to use compression - Improved detection of user home directory, this will cause a loss of preferences on Windows machines where My Documents has been moved from C:\Users\... - Hard-coded "Item groups" have been entirely replaced by moddable "Stockpile groups" which determine how stockpiles and the resources management screens work - Stockpiles now support filtering by stockpile group, item type and item material, and can also have a priority set - Twitch integration - twitch streamers can connect their account to have their viewers automatically show up in game! - You can now rename settlers! - Floors now overlap underneath walls, so the transparency at the edge of wall tiles makes sense rather than showing a grey border - Overhauled how floors overlap onto other tiles, requiring far less sprites to be created (similar to walls) - Replaced grass floors and all floor overlap sprites - Pressing escape in a management screen will now go back to the main game (you can also right-click in the grey areas) - Changed settler management to show non-selected professions as greyed-out, not removed - Settler management can now be sorted by name (new default), or unhappiness (old default) - Added a short term memory for settlers to remember if they recently tried to place an item from inventory to a stockpile but failed, so they won't try again, to avoid getting stuck trying to use an inaccessible stockpile


[ 2020-12-19 21:57:32 CET ] [ Original post ]

November 2020 Update - Alpha 4 Complete!

Welcome to the amazingly-ahead-of-schedule November dev update forKing under the Mountain! Very good news this month in that everything on the roadmap for Alpha 4 has now been delivered, and a little extra to boot! So without further ado, heres a run-through of whats been changed or added. The biggest addition is that there is now a full job prioritisation system! A new top level menu, Priority has been added which gives you the following new options:
Job priority menu As you can see in the screenshot, when this menu is open the priorities are shown in-game. Previously settlers would pick whichever the nearest job to them was, in order of the professions that they had activated. Now the same still happens, but respecting the priority assigned to a job first so all the Highest priority jobs will be assigned first, then Higher and so on. Finally youll be able to instruct your dwarves what it is you want completing next! As well as being able to set the priority of jobs waiting to be assigned, such as orders like mining and logging, furniture which creates jobs, like a crafting station, can also have a priority assigned which gets passed on to the jobs it creates. This goes even further in that some rooms like the kitchen and farm plot generate jobs without being specific to any furniture, so those rooms can also have a priority assigned (when interacting with the room/zone) which gets passed on to any furniture that already exists or is set to be constructed. So theres a lot more going on than you might think! Id love to get some feedback on the way this has been represented in-game, both from the choice of colours which Im not very sure about, and the use of arrows to represent the priorities too. Oxygen Not Included by Klei (a fantastic game) has a similar system, but uses numbers from 1 (lowest) to 9 (highest) to represent priority. Do you think that would be better here? Theres another equally huge (at least in terms of quality of life for the player) addition in the form of an entirely new management screen to go alongside the existing Resources and Settlers screens crafting management!
The crafting management screen This screen first lists each type of crafting, along with any furniture that crafting can be performed at, and the rooms that furniture can be placed into. Right now, every type of crafting is only performed at a single crafting station which is found only in a single type of room, but the game allows for more complex setups and they could be modded in right now. Clicking on a type of crafting shows the set of different items or liquids that are produced by that crafting type. These rows allow you to set a total number of items to maintain in the settlement, that is, have a total number of items which may or may not be in use. This can be set as a single figure for the whole settlement or scale based on the population as shown. Items are consumed or effectively removed when they are used in furniture construction (such as tools on a workbench) so once this has happened, more will be created. Barrels and cauldrons feel like a special case because once they are placed as furniture, they no longer count as an item, though they appear identical visually, so Im interested to see if people find this confusing and end up with more barrels and cauldrons than they expect. This row also gives you a total count of how many are currently in your settlement a more detailed breakdown can be found in the Resources screen. Clicking on one of these item or liquid product rows shows the different crafting recipes that produce the desired output. A crafting recipe is a set of input items or liquids, which get converted into a set of output items or liquids, though currently every crafting recipe only produces a single type of output, but this doesnt have to be the case. Most crafted outputs are produced only by a single recipe, a good example of an exception are wooden planks which can be crafted out of wooden logs or mushroom logs, which are counted and tracked separately, or metal blooms which have specific crafting recipes for specific materials. Any input items which dont use a specific type of material, allow the player to now pick a material to always use in that crafting. Theres also a mini set of priority options for the crafted items and liquids, setting this will set the priority of which crafting recipe is selected next recipes of the same priority are chosen from randomly, at least for all of the recipes that have their input requirements available. Each crafting station also has a new Crafting button to launch this screen filtered to showing everything already expanded for the crafting type it uses. The crafting types, furniture, crafting recipes and default amounts to produce are all easily moddable, and this screen is a good representation of the mapping from the data files to how they are represented in-game. Between the addition of crafting management and the priority system, players should now have the tools they need to manage settlements that were getting a bit too complex without them. Being able to manage and prioritise the production of beer in particular should be of great use, as the previous release probably led to an over-abundance of barrels being crafted for most players! While those two are the main additions (and what was listed on the roadmap), thats not all for Alpha 4! Theres even more quality of life improvements in the form of new Cancel and Demolish options in the build menu.
Build menu with new Cancel and Demolish options The cancel option works much like its counterpart in the Orders menu it is used to mass-cancel any queued up constructions (furniture, bridges, doors and walls). Deconstruct is used to set constructed furniture, bridges, doors and walls to be removed. No longer do you have to click on each thing individually and set it to be torn down! Along with this work on managing constructions, the game now keeps better track of which material was specified to be used by the player in the construction. An earlier update (one that automatically resets material selection when none of that material is available) had broken this functionality, so now that improvement still works alongside the game again correctly respecting any choices by the player. In other words, set a wooden piece of furniture to be constructed with Any material and the game will handle it as best it can, potentially even resetting what it has selected initially, but if the player manually chooses a material to use, it will always stick to that selection. Although theres not much interest in modding yet, Ive added a placeholder sprite as a fallback (literally a square with the text placeholder on it) which the game will now use if any sprites are unavailable for some reason. This shouldnt happen in the base game, but when attempting to mod something, a modder can easily forget that a change in one place may mean new sprites are required. Until now the game would have rendered nothing or even crashed if these werent available, but now the placeholder graphic should make it clear where these are needed. Although Im making this game as a one-man team for the design and development side of things, it wouldnt be possible without a bunch of very talented freelancers working on the art and music. Theres currently a lot going on in the artwork side of things, to get everything produced forKing under the Mountain to press on towards the Steam Early Access release. Theres even quite a lot that has already been produced which hasnt been revealed yet that Im very much looking forward to sharing in future updates. This Alpha 4 release does contain one artwork improvement though the constructed stone and wooden walls:
Old walls on the left, new on the right These constructed walls, the stone version in particular, were actually my own programmer art of attempting to copy the Prison Architect style for how walls work (although being able to handle a thickness of more than one tile). In fact the very very first code written forKing under the Mountain was figuring out these walls and how to render them, as you can see from my channels very first video from all the way back in 2015. Theres a lot more to come, including overhauling quite a bit of how the environment looks in the game, so look forward to that! Finally, in the process of writing this update a community member was having issues running the game. After a bit of investigation we figured out that the laptop used no longer had enough memory to start a new game or load an existing one. The additions are adding up! To help with this a little though, a secret feature has been added to let players modify the size of the map when starting a new game. This is done by editing the seed.txt file alongside the game launcher. Previously this was a text file with the number 0 in it only. You can change this to a different number to set the map seed for the random generation, in other words setting it to a number other than 0 will cause the game to generate the same map each time, much like seeds used for random generation in games likeMinecraft. This file now contains a second line, which reads 400300. This corresponds to a map size of 400 tiles wide by 300 tiles tall. You can change this text, and as long as the format is the same (i.e. XXXxYYY) the game will use that size for the map instead. This was added to let computers without enough memory to generate the current map size still run the game with a smaller map, but you may want to try a larger map too. A word of warning the minimap does not currently scale properly, the size of the minimap in pixels is the size of the map in tiles, so a very large map will cause the minimap to obscure the whole game. This will be improved in a future release, I just wanted to get something added quickly for the players affected to still be able to run the game. Picking the map size and random generation seed will be built into the UI properly at some point. At some point Ill have to think about optimising the memory use, though ideally the longer I can put that off, the smoother things will be. There is a potentially fun side effect from being able to control the map size, you can now create a tiny pocket world as a challenge of playing the game with very limited space and resources.
A small pocket world And thats it for this month and Alpha 4! Alpha 5 should see the remaining very-clearly-missing quality of life improvements in the form of stockpile management and support for multiple saved games/settlements, and then goes on to the lay the remaining groundwork systems a particle effect system and constructed roofs and flooring to support the big content additions of alphas 6 through 10. Thank you to all of you sticking with the development of the game! If you havent done so already, you can wishlist the game on Steam at store.steampowered.com/app/930230/King_under_the_Mountain/ though if you already have access via Kickstarter or Itch.io you will be receiving a Steam key for free!


[ 2020-11-24 11:45:49 CET ] [ Original post ]

October 2020 Update - Alpha 4 Release

Hello and welcome to the resumed King under the Mountain dev update! Im happy to announce that the remaining pieces of work for the brewing beer update were completed, so this has formed the initial Alpha 4 release. In a slightly different format I thought Id explain the process (for the players point of view) to making use of this new and perhaps crucial feature. First of all, rather than being somewhat random, each new settlement now starts with a fixed number of a fixed group of seeds for planting, as shown here:
In the not too distant future, starting resources will be customisable by the player upon starting a new settlement (the embark screen!), but while this feature is not yet implemented, this is the stopgap solution. Expect some seeds like wheat to be more valuable than others, as wheat tends to go a bit further to feeding your population due to the bread baking production chain (at the cost of more time, labour and furniture). A new settlement will probably want to spend its first spring focused on planting all of these seeds so they can be harvested in autumn to provide food for the settlement past the initial supply of rations, and now also produce beer! With most features inKing under the Mountain, I put a fair amount of research into understanding how the production chains in question work in real life, using this as the basis to have a grounding in reality, before removing or simplifying some parts so the game isnt too grindy with small details. Take the opening line of the wikipedia page on beer Beer is one of the oldest and most widely consumed alcoholic drinks in the world, and the third most popular drink overall after water and tea. Beer is brewed from cereal grainsmost commonly from malted barley, though wheat, maize (corn), and rice are also used. During the brewing process, fermentation of the starch sugars in the wort produces ethanol and carbonation in the resulting beer. Most modern beer is brewed with hops, which add bitterness and other flavours and act as a natural preservative and stabilizing agent. As malted barley is the most common ingredient, right now that is the only way to produce beer in the game, though I intend to add other methods and other alcoholic beverages over time (or perhaps the modding community will step in before I get there!) So in reality beer is produced from water, barley (or another cereal grain), hops for flavouring, and yeast for fermenting. I decided not to model the yeast aspect of fermentation explicitly, instead you can assume your brewer dwarves keep a small supply with them to be added where needed. That leaves water, barley and hops. Water is clearly an already very important part of gameplay (there are not many quicker ways to killing off a settlement than removing its water supply) although moving it around currently leaves a bit to be desired (look forward to piping and aqueducts in the future!) Long time players may remember that both hops and barley were already implemented along with the current batch of crops, though they were removed for a while as there was no use for them in game. Clearly that has changed so youll now want to start farming barley and hops to produce beer!
Once your settlements most pressing needs are seen to, you can now start to think about the construction of your first brewery. The beer production chain makes use of a new item a metal barrel called a tank. One of the many additions to the games codebase for this feature was to allow for liquids as both inputs and outputs in a crafting process, which beer production is a big part of. To support construction of your brewery youll need a decent metal production chain fuelled by either charcoal from lumber or coke from coal.
This allows for the production of metal plates and barrel hoops, both of which are the input materials for the new metal tank item. Setting up a brewery is a much more resource-intensive venture than anything else in the game currently! The first step in beer production from the raw materials is to turn the barley from your farm into malt, using a malting station at the new brewery zone. Theres also a new profession required (the brewer) and your settlement is not guaranteed to start with any active brewers, so look out for this as a potential problem with your first brewery!
The malting station, with included water tank and mini-kiln, takes your freshly harvested barley and turns it into sacks of malt. In reality, there are several steps to producing malt, but I felt it worth simplifying those steps to a single piece of furniture which combines all of them behind the scenes to a single crafting process in King under the Mountain. The player does not get away with it too easily however, as after producing the malt it also needs milling (producing milled malt) which currently takes place at the hand-operated gristmill located in a kitchen. I thought it might be interesting to have the production process need to change locations between a brewery and another zone, but I may end up adding the gristmill to the brewery. In either case, Im also planning to add easier, more traditional milling methods (a literal windmill or water-wheel powered mill) in the future. Once you have your milled malt, its on to the mash tun where it is combined with water to produce wort.
As part of overhauling the liquid-management system in the game, water can now be transferred in other containers than just buckets. Fortunately this means the 6 units of water required by this crafting recipe can be delivered in one go by a dwarf hauling a barrel to the river, filling it, and dumping the whole barrelful in one go! As an aside, the game also tracks liquids in containers better than before, so soup left over in a discarded cauldron can now be used correctly rather than being thrown away as it would in the past. Flavouring (i.e. the hops) are added in a brew kettle (also known as a copper, although it does not need to be made out of copper *yet*) to produce hopped wort, which is the final step before fermentation.
Finally, the hopped wort is moved to a fermentation tank for, no surprise, fermentation, which produces the final beer. Fortunately for your now metal-deprived dwarves, these can be constructed either automatically by placing a metal liquid tank, or crafted by a stonemason out of stone blocks.
Once the beer has had enough time to ferment, it can be decanted back into a barrel, ready for consumption as glorious dwarven beer! All thats left is to build the most important piece of furniture of all the beer tapper in (of course) the feasting hall for your dwarves to enjoy!
And thats the beer production chain! It almost goes without saying that dwarves much prefer drinking deliciously brewed beer rather than water from a barrel, and will be much happier in your settlement after a good drink. Beware though, as if a dwarf drinks nothing but alcoholic beverages for several days in a row, they will become dependent upon it to get through the working day. While this applies, theyll still have the same happiness bonus from drinking beer as before, but if it runs out, expect a disastrous hit to happiness while they go through the withdrawal effects of going sober! The management of tracking if a dwarf is drunk and/or dependent on alcohol is using a status effect system which I dont think Ive detailed in a dev update yet. Its the same system that makes the progression of hungry > starving > dead (and the counterpart for being thirsty) work in the game. Perhaps this will be worth detailing in a future dev update? Constructing a functioning brewery requires a surprising amount of metal ores, ingots and fuel to get going, and with this update you may find more than ever that you want your dwarves to produce certain quantities of items in a certain order, or more likely not produce other items that they currently are doing. This really necessitates the ability for the player to control what is crafted, AKA production management, so thats the next feature which is being worked on for Alpha 4! In a similar vein, being able to prioritise which jobs you want doing urgently rounds off the roadmap for Alpha 4 and probably what is most necessary at this stage. Finally, a note of thanks to community member gammalget / falkowich who offered some help in diagnosing and fixing the issue thats been plaguing the Linux version of the game since the Java update. Im happy to say this has now been resolved so Linux players should be able to use the executable provided rather than need their own installation of Java to run the game. If you find any issues with this or any version ofKing under the Mountain, the best option is to drop a message in the official King under the Mountain Discord server in a relevant-looking channel. Im also on hand to answer questions directly there, if youre interested. On that note, thanks as always for sticking with development of the game (or at least this update) and see you next month!


[ 2020-10-25 23:20:38 CET ] [ Original post ]

The "Game's Not Dead" sorry for the delay Update

Hello followers of King under the Mountain development! This is the much-needed huge apology for the radio silence for the last couple of months, it's always been a great motivator to have the monthly dev updates out somewhat on time, but there hasn't been anything posted from the end of June until now. Well, the main message is not to worry, development isn't dead, I'm always going to stick to finishing this game until it's finished, or else I wouldn't be able to create anything afterwards! I'd have liked to have put an actual new version release out alongside this post, but it's been so long since the last update I figured it was better to post this first and then aim to (finally!) release the brewing beer update. Following that will be manual selection of crafting by the player (quite a big change from the current automated process! Perhaps players would prefer a mix of the two?) and then it's on to more content on the road to Steam Early Access. It's not been all-stop for the last couple of months either, I've been working with an artist to produce a lot of the new assets that are going to be required between now and the Steam release, primarily this has been a lot of different animal species to be added to the game, including backer-specified rewards, and of course, elephants. Still, I wanted to post this really brief update rather than put things off even longer to a proper update with more details. Perhaps I'll finally release that brewing beer with the next monthly update? Again though, more than anything I want to apologise for the lack of communication and I'll be doing my very best that it doesn't happen again.


[ 2020-10-16 12:35:02 CET ] [ Original post ]

June 2020 Update

Welcome to the monthlyKing under the Mountain dev update! Very happy to say that development is back on track now after all the disruption from covid-19 and other sources the past few months. That said, I was expecting to have more gamedev time than I have had this past month after my day job changed to 3 days a week, turns out they cant make do without me so Ive been asked to work most of those extra days! Will see how that pans out. It must be months now that Ive been promising brewing beer is just around the corner for these forcefully sober dwarves, and Im afraid to say thats still the case I spent what time I had in the last month polishing the edges of alpha 3 and then investing quite a lot of effort in making crafting stations require tools during their construction. Previously, crafting stations just required a few stone blocks or wooden planks for them to be constructed, and they would magic into existence a few relevant tools to be used as decoration (dwarves would need to equip the relevant tool from their inventory to work at the station), which was more of a holdover from the initial prototype days rather than any conscious decision. One of the main design goals withKing under the Mountain is a reasonable level of realism in the simulation of the game world, so I never really liked these tools just appearing out of nowhere as decoration (you can look forward to beds needing cloth materials to construct them as well). Now, instead, constructing the crafting station requires the tools that would previously have been freely created as decorations to be actual requirements in the construction. This means your supply of tools will mostly get baked in to the construction of furniture (until it is removed at least), but the upside is that dwarves no longer need that tool in their inventory, instead they walk over and equip the item directly from the top of the crafting station, work as normal, then place it back after (undoubtedly a bug has been introduced if a dwarf drops dead while having this tool equipped as it goes to their corpse for the moment thats one to sort out in the future, right now dwarves probably wont be working if theyre knowingly close to death, perhaps a cave-in could do it). The main benefit of this is that as a player youre not relying on the few dwarves with the right tool equipped to be able to work on the crafting jobs, instead any dwarf with the correct profession can come and do the crafting work (though youll want more control over this in the future when crafting quality is introduced). Heres a video of it in action with a woodcutters bench now requiring a saw and axe to be created, but the saw is used as part of crafting a log into planks. [previewyoutube=jO1_mj0zTMc;full][/previewyoutube] Astute players will be wondering What if I build so many of these I dont have any axes left to chop down trees? Well, this has led to the implementation of the first non-tutorial hints the game now gives you a (currently one-time) message if you use up all your axes, chisels, planes and so on with a note to either craft more or deconstruct one of the pieces of furniture to get them back. Soon players will be able to specify what should be crafted rather than the current automatic system. The whole feature looks pretty simple but there was quite a bit of work in getting the AI to either equip a tool from their inventory or wait and pick it up from the crafting station as appropriate! This does bring something of a requirement for more tools at the start of the game previously every dwarf would spawn into the game with one of each of the tools for their assigned profession. Instead each settlement now starts with a set number of specific tools. They are currently randomly spread between the dwarves but when more work has been done with container furniture such as chests and crates, I expect these items will start in a crate or similar ready to be picked up and used. As things currently stand, the player now needs to designate a tools stockpile for the dwarves to place them down so they can get into the right hands. The increased tools at game start has been balanced out a bit by the fact that immigrants in the 2nd year and onwards no longer bring extra tools or seeds, youll need to craft or farm these yourself! They do at least still bring a big stack of rockbread rations, so they shouldnt starve for some time, but I expect the progression of population size is a bit trickier to manage now (Id love to get some feedback on how people are finding this). As another nice tidy-up type of task, its been requested a few times if something could be done about all the dwarves clumping up together and getting stuck in queues once the population gets a bit bigger dwarves that are colliding with another dwarf go at half speed. A slight improvement has been added to the AI pathfinding so that a dwarf will every so often slow down a bit more if it notices that other dwarves in front of it are heading in the right direction. You can see this in the following video where lines denote the direction and speed dwarves are attempting to move in white means they are unimpeded, red if they are colliding with another dwarf and going slow, or blue if they have decided to slow down even more to let those in front escape: [previewyoutube=BkqL4Z6yE6E;full][/previewyoutube] Its not perfect as a particularly large pile up of dwarves at a bottleneck like the one above will still cause a traffic jam, but then Id rather leave that to the players to design their settlements to be more efficient and avoid these chokepoints. In a more technical change, the version of Java that the game is built upon has been upgraded from Java 8 to Java 11 now using the OpenJDK libraries rather than Oracles JDK. Oracle decided to make the license more restrictive after Java 8 and businesses either needed to start paying a fairly expensive license (too expensive for a game which doesnt make a profit yet!) or switch to the OpenJDK implementations for any future updates which is what prompted the change, rather than any requirement from my side. Everything *should* still be working as it was, though if you were running the game straight from the .jar file (perhaps more for the Linux players out there) youll also need to be running Java 11 or later now. Mostly Im interested in if this causes new issues that Ive not run into while testing yet everything seems to work the same now but Im nervous with such a large underlying change that it might affect players on different systems. Ive recently replaced my development PC with a hefty upgrade, which had the nice side-effect of exposing an issue that was stopping the multi-language fonts from working correctly for some people that I was never able to reproduce on my old machine. Fixed now, and also the Japanese translation has had a lot of work put in by the Japanese community so thats close to being quite usable for Japanese-speakers which Im very happy to see. In fact on that note the latest version with all of the above is now live on Itch.io at the usual place rocketjumptechnology.itch.io/king-under-the-mountain Barring any crash-fixing releases, this means Im now done with development for Alpha 3, and onto Alpha 4 at long last, which I hope wont take anywhere near as long as the last couple, not least because the tutorial feature was already pulled forward from alpha 4 and implemented. Heres what there is to look forward to for the immediate future:

  • Brewing and Taverns a particularly hefty feature as it not only involves the fairly detailed, fairly realistic approximation of the process of brewing beer and serving it out, but also the short and long term effects that can have on your populace!
  • Production Management finally the player will be in control of what is produced and where. Im undecided yet on if this should entirely replace the current completely automated model, or keep some parts of it for the relaxed hands off approach the game offers currently (thoughts and feedback much appreciated!)
  • Job Prioritisation This should at least cover a work on this thing as top priority button, but possibly also a mechanism for defining which types of jobs are in which priority order for the whole settlement something like the approach used by Rimworld currently job priority is using the skill level a dwarf has in a particularly profession (which isnt really a feature yet) and then distance to the nearest job of that profession.
As mentioned, the tutorial was brought forward out of Alpha 4 so theres really not much left in it, just the above! It feels like after getting the initial mod support in place and deferring the rest of it until after the Steam launch (and the recent general tidy up of smaller tasks), development has climbed over a hump it was stuck on for a while and the upcoming roadmap looks much smoother than the first couple of alphas. In fact most of the alpha milestones are much smaller than they were now, at least until alphas 8, 9 and 10 mostly due to the introduction of combat and the many things that entails, but once the game gets to that point it isnt far from the Steam launch! Onwards and upwards then, and see you next time!


[ 2020-06-29 16:25:56 CET ] [ Original post ]

May 2020 Update

Hello and welcome to a massively delayedKing under the Mountaindev update! I am truly sorry for missing the last 2 monthly dev updates - it was a point of pride that one was always released while development has been ongoing, even if not always on time! As with most small businesses and in fact people around the world, COVID-19 has had a hugely disruptive impact which is the main reason for the radio silence for the last couple of months. While it's not been all stop on the game development front, it has been extremely disrupted but I'm happy to say that quite the opposite is going to happen for June - due to the economic recession of the virus, my day job is changing from 5 days a week to 3 days a week, so the good news is that (for a while at least) I'll have two working days to commit to gamedev and get the project back on track! While I don't have any new gameplay features to show off this month, I am very happy to announce a new music track by Jordan Chin to add to the game's soundtrack. "Dawn" is another track to accompany the peaceful expansion of your settlement, and it captures the essence of its namesake perfectly - have a listen! https://soundcloud.com/jordanchin/dawn Those of you following the dev updates previously will know I planned to attend and exhibit at EGX Rezzed. No surprise now that the event has been cancelled and even a postponement looks unlikely, so perhaps next year instead. I'm progressing with a number of small improvement and tidy-up tasks from Alpha 3, which should include an interesting change to gameplay that I'll go into more detail on next month. The period of relative quiet has allowed me to consider the roadmap as a whole. Seeing as the demand or size of the community isn't quite there yet to be creating mods for the game (and the game itself still being in relatively early stages where more features need adding before mods become more interesting), I've decided to push back the central mod repository and code modding features until after the Steam Early Access release. That means more gameplay features sooner to get the project on track for a release on Steam, with the expanded mod support to follow sometime after. I can't give any specific timelines at this point, but let's see how things go now that I should have more time to dedicate to development! And with that, it's onwards for more focus on gamedev and gameplay features in general. Maybe next month will even have the release of the long-awaited dwarven beer brewing? See you then!


[ 2020-05-30 17:59:24 CET ] [ Original post ]

February 2020 Update

Welcome to a late King under the Mountain monthly dev update in what is now a grand tradition of being a bit late!

Begin the tutorial!


The main body of work achieved this month was finally adding a tutorial to the game. [previewyoutube=AM0TiYcn6o0;full][/previewyoutube] Actually, what's been added is support for a set of "hints" that can pop up when the player performs an action, such as placing a specific piece of furniture for the first time, or another event, in this case starting a new game. The hints are very configurable - they can have multiple buttons to perform different actions, such as showing another hint (which in this case is used to actually start the tutorial from the "new game started" hint) or disabling hints entirely (which can be re-enabled from the options menu). Rather than having a simple "dimiss" button, hints can also have a set of progress indicators, which is the primary way that the tutorial works. The game explains a mechanic or concept, which initially is placing farm plots, and tracks how many farm plots have been placed and how many tiles of farm plots have been placed. When both of these progress indicators are complete, the hint's first (and only) action is triggered, which in the case of the tutorial is to show the subsequent tutorial prompt in a series of them. As with almost everything inKing under the Mountain, the hints are defined in simple JSON files, with the hope being that modders will look at these and expand upon them when adding new gameplay via mods. Perhaps a mod adds a new type of room or furniture which performs a special task - now a hint can be shown to the player the first time they go to place this room or furniture. Of course, this is in addition to the tooltips that have been implemented for most items and other things in the game. King under the Mountain is now a much more user-friendly experience than it was previously! One of the design goals was to allow for deeply simulated and interesting gameplay, but in a way that is very accessible to new players to the genre. The tutorial is released today with Alpha 3.5!

EGX Rezzed


As mentioned in last month's update, the plan is to exhibitKing under the Mountain at EGX Rezzed in London from 26th March (less than 3 weeks!). Personally I'm expecting it to be cancelled following Coronavirus fears and an increasing number of cases in the UK (and the rest of the world), I can't see an event where thousands of people are touching the same keyboards and joypads as being allowed to go ahead. Still, if it does go ahead, I'll be there exhibiting the game, so please drop by and say hello if you're a reader of this dev update! You can bag some fairly exclusive King under the Mountain pin badges too. That's all for this month. I'm hoping to have the long awaited brewing of beer implemented in time for Rezzed, I suppose we'll find out how that went in the next monthly update!


[ 2020-03-08 12:04:30 CET ] [ Original post ]

January 2020 Update

Unusually on schedule, welcome to the January 2020 development update for King under the Mountain!

Alpha 3 Release Mod Support


At long last, the game now fully supports user-created mods to change and add to the base content pack. In short, everything in the mods/base directory forms the data-driven part of the game (compared to the code that loads and uses it), so hopefully you can go and see how this works to be able to add your own additions or modifications. For (surprisingly?) the first time, Ive recorded and narrated a video to help better explain this, which ends with me implementing a simple mod to replace the games default font with the OpenDyslexic font. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXFPEd0dlI4 I was very keen to get this release out as soon as possible for those interested to be able to start trying out their own mods, and help me to discover what features are missing when it comes to modding. Although this is released as Alpha 3, this isnt yet covering everything that I plan to release as part of Alpha 3 most importantly the integration to mod.io to act as a central place for people to upload and browse mods for the game. This will be coming in the near future, but in the meantime please do join the games Discord server and hop into the #modding channel with any questions you may have. No doubt Ill have an FAQ up before too long.

Community Translation Support


One of the mods that the game now comes with is the Community Translations mod. WhileKing under the Mountain is in active development, the text in the game is constantly being added to. Until release, it would not be feasible to produce a complete translation into the main languages as they would quickly fall out of date with each new release of the game.The intention for this mod is that the translations will be kept up to date with contributions from the games developer and community (as in, Ill add to it as new translation strings are added to the game, and if anyone wants to keep it up to date in a different language from time to time, that would be amazing!). You can find the Github repository here. If youd like to contribute but dont know how to use Git or Github, you can download the .csv files, edit them in most spreadsheet software (remembering to save back as .csv) and email it to me at ross@kingunderthemounta.in Most of the languages have had an attempt at translation using Amazons translate service, so theyre probably very poor machine translations that could do with a human touch. Following the earlier experiment with East Asian character sets, Im very happy to say that the game does now support translation into Japanese, Chinese and Korean!
The main menu partly translated to German and Japanese

EGX Rezzed 2020


Finally Im happy to say Im going back to EGX Rezzed to exhibitKing under the Mountain at the end of March! I previously exhibited at Rezzed 3 years ago(!) to coincide with the launch of the original Kickstarter campaign and the first public pre-alpha. The game has come on a long way since then and itll be great to be at an expo with more of a game than that early tech demo. If youre going to be attending Rezzed yourself, please do come and say hi! Its always an encouragement to hear from and meet part of the small following this game and dev update has. I plan to have the brewing and drinking of beer in the game in time for Rezzed so even if you wont be there, Ill be bringing forward that feature from the roadmap a little to add to the game. Also if you are attending, therell probably some kind of King under the Mountain-branded freebies to grab, but they are still to be confirmed at this point so tune in to next months update to find out more!


[ 2020-01-26 09:43:06 CET ] [ Original post ]

December 2019 Update

Welcome to theKing under the Mountainmonthly update! A little late (again) though I hope you'll forgive me what with it being the Christmas holidays. At the end of last month's update I was all set on finally moving on to mod support, or at least initially different translations. After the update, on 19th November, Alpha 2.8 was released which introduced the new Kickstarter-backer-specified resources. This brought a reasonable amount of traffic from players old and new, including highlighting several bugs and other problems, most of which had been around a while but I hadn't been able to recreate myself. In the end, I spent late November and most of December rewriting the item allocations system. That is, whenever something needs to be crafted, or some furniture constructed, or a settler needs a tool, or basically for any use of an item, the game has to keep track of which items/resources are available and which are free to be used. Up to this point, each item entity had a simple pair of integer counters, one for the quantity of the item and one to say how many of that quantity are currently allocated to be in use somewhere. Say a piece of furniture requires 10 stone blocks to be created. It'll ask for stone blocks to be assigned, and perhaps there are two piles of 6 stone blocks that are available. All of the first and 4 of the second would become "assigned", leaving 2 of 6 stone blocks available in the second pile. Something might then go "wrong" though, the stone blocks could be being carried by a settler just as a cave-in happens overhead crushing the settler and the items, or the player might decide to cancel the construction. This should then de-allocate the items assigned to the construction, setting the allocated amount for both piles back to 0 (specifically, decrementing the first by 6 and the second by 4). In almost all situations this worked fine, but there was a very hard to track down problem where sometimes items were not de-allocated properly, leaving them stuck as allocated forever even though the original use for the allocation had since been cancelled or completed. The above was a very tricky problem to recreate - I could never quite figure out under what circumstances this happened, and when helpful members of the community sent me save files that included occurences of the issue, it had already happened in the past and I had no information to look at to see what had led to this point, just a number saying a certain quantity of some items was allocated somewhere and I had no idea where. I ended up biting the bullet and spending a lot of time rewriting this system, so that instead of a simple number, each item allocation is now a small group of data detailing the purpose of the allocation (such as for hauling, being used in inventory, etc.), who requested it, the intended destination and so on. I couldn't otherwise figure out the root cause of the problem so at least changing all the item allocations over to this new system would give me enough information to look deeper into the problem and narrow down where it was coming from. As is often the case with massive changes to a system, having to touch many parts of the codebase led me to discover and fix some existing issues (hopefully including the one that caused me to do this large piece of work in the first place), and of course, inevitably, introduce new problems :) Still, I think the item allocation overhaul has been a big success and was very much worth doing, just a shame it's delayed the implementation of the modding system for another month or so. It wasn't just item allocations that were rewritten either, the way stockpiles manage and keep track of their contents was also overhauled, having been one of the earliest parts of the codebase and something else that wasn't really fit for purpose any longer. Additionally, I ended up also changing over how liquid allocations work, as that was also a bit of a hack previously. Until now, units of liquids like water and soup were also stored as integers (whole numbers). A barrel can hold 6 units, a bucket moves 2 units of liquid, and so on. This didn't really work for drinking barrels, as I wanted a single bucket of water (2 units) brought to a barrel to suffice for many settlers to drink from. If the 2-unit bucket of water only supplied enough for 2 drinks, the settlements would spend even longer moving water around than they currently do! The original solution was that instead of removing 1 unit when a settler had a drink from a barrel, there was a random dice roll which determined if a unit of water was removed (I think it was a 15% chance). This way, a bucket of water would last several drinks, it would vary in amounts quite a bit, but overall on average it would balance out. Not a great solution but it did work. However there was also an assignment problem with water barrels. There would be an issue if dozens of dwarves went to drink from the same barrel with only a small amount of water in (say 1 unit). The first dwarf on the scene might end up emptying the barrel, then all the others would get there, get slightly annoyed the barrel was empty, and have to go in search of another, probably all going in a big horde to the next barrel that would probably get emptied to. To avoid this, each 1 unit of water in a barrel was reserved (allocated) by a dwarf wanting to drink there, and unreserved/deallocated when they finished drinking (if they did not end up randomly using up that unit of water). Much like the item allocations, there was also a bug here that I could never quite track down, where some of these allocations would also get stuck and live forever, resulting in the water barrels eventually becoming unusable as their entire contents were incorrectly allocated (a number of people had encountered this one). So as well as the item allocation overhaul, I finally did the obvious thing and move liquids to using floating point (decimal) numbers for their quantities and allocations. Now a settler reserves 0.15 units of a barrel, and always removes 0.15 units when drinking. A bucket still brings 2.0 units of water to the barrel so each bucket provides enough for 13 and a bit drinks. There's still a lot of legwork for the dwarves to do to get drinks available in water barrels, but do not fear, water pipes and pumps are coming in the future to automate this! In the same way that overhauling item allocations seemed to fix the problem I was looking for, I believe the new liquid allocations (which get tracked with more info in the same way as item allocations now do) do not have the problem I was looking to solve anymore. Good news! Helpful members of the community (especially SirRockstar who's been a fantastic help with detailing problems) have been sending me details and savegames for issues in the current versions so there's also been quite a lot of bugfixing going on. A nice one to finally figure out was that bridges didn't always get constructed (I think it depended which side they were "dragged" from by the player) so that's now sorted, and a major quality of life improvement in that constructions now use the nearest available resources rather than what was effectively any (random) available resources. Sorry it's been a very plain, media-free update this time around. I said it last time but now I will be going on to the first part of modding with language support so look out for that! There's also some semi-exciting news to share but I'll leave it until next month when I have more details nailed down, so see you then!


[ 2020-01-04 22:35:49 CET ] [ Original post ]

October November 2019 Update

Hello! Sorry for the big delay on this months dev update. In fact its been so long that Ive decided to bundle up both the late October update and the upcoming November recap into one bumper issue! Since the last update Ive been exclusively working on adding natural resources to King under the Mountain chosen by Kickstarter backers as part of their rewards. At least, thats what Ive been doing in terms of gamedev, its been another super busy month otherwise! As Steam's news update tools are absolutely terrible and there's a lot of media and formatting in this month's update, I suggest you read it on the main site at kingunderthemounta.in/october-november-2019-update/


[ 2019-11-22 11:48:24 CET ] [ Original post ]

September 2019 Update

Welcome to the September update! A bit of a short one this month because A) August was late so its not been quite as long since the last update, and B) its been one of those months where there isnt any particularly visual or even interesting progress! So what has been happening? The main body of work has been adding new resources to the game those chosen by Kickstarter backers as part of their rewards. Although there was an email survey sent out several months ago, only around 50% of backers eligible for this reward have responded, so if youre in the other half who have not got back to me yet, search your email inbox for Claim your pick a resource reward for King under the Mountain and get that response in soon to avoid missing out! Past that, Im still laying the (huge piles of) groundwork for mod support. Its the kind of task that requires lot of fairly dull legwork until the big bang at the end when everything comes together. In other news, this month saw the release of Overland (at least on consoles) which is a game Ive enjoyed following the progress of although Ive not yet found the time to play the thing. I mention this because there were several news stories around the fact that it includes the OpenDyslexic font as an option to replace the games default font, and coming off the back of last months update all about fonts it really stood out to me. Until these news articles appeared I had no idea that there was such a thing as a font that can be more legible to people who suffer with dyslexia and it quite rightly garnered some praise. Having just swapped out the font inKing under the Mountain, it occurred to me that this will make a perfect test case for an example mod that could come supplied with the base game.
So when mod support does finally drop, you can look forward to this as an example of a simple mod coming bundled with the game, with the bonus of including the OpenDyslexic font for those who prefer it! Finally theres some very good news on the horizon Im in a position where Im going to be able to change from trying to fit game development around a full-time 5-days-a-week day job, and instead Im going to move to a 4-day working week, simply cutting down on the contract work that keeps the lights on to be able to dedicate a full day a week to development ofKing under the Mountain. Progress has been pretty slow for the last few months, which Im deeply sorry for and is a source of much personal frustration. Fortunately, you can expect to see things kick up a notch in the near future and bring us closer to release! See you next month!


[ 2019-09-30 16:05:53 CET ] [ Original post ]

August 2019 Update

Welcome to the (late) August update forKing under the Mountain! Apologies for the lateness of this, August was a crazily busy month personally, but I thought it still worth putting out a delayed dev update rather than nothing at all until the end of September. The good news is that tooltips for nearly everything in the game have now all been implemented (thousands of words in total!) and theres a new alpha build (Alpha 2.6) available on the Itch.io page for all current and future owners to get hold of with these tooltips in. As well as providing some super useful information to the player (especially to explain what a pillar actually does), this is also the start of background lore in the world of King under the Mountain with references to the magic system and the world at large. Now that theres larger sections of text in the game, it really started to highlight the issues with the font currently in use.King under the Mountain is built using LibGDX, a gamedev application framework that works as a fairly high level API over graphics (OpenGL) and sound (OpenAL) and other things such as input devices, but it is not a full game engine like Unity or Unreal. Instead, for example, it gives you commands to load images from a file as a texture, or draw those textures to the screen, or play a sound from an audio file. Everything on top of that is written by game developers so you dont see as much similarity as you do with some games using Unity not that thats a good or bad thing! Slay the Spireis an amazing game also written in LibGDX, and it plays very differently toKing under the Mountain! When it comes to text drawn on screen, LibGDX works with glyphs in a sprite sheet that it then renders to the screen, in exactly the same way other images are drawn to the screen from spritesheets. If you dont supply your own font image, you get the LibGDX default which is Arial in 15 point and looks like this:
Early on I decided I didnt want the absolute default to at least differentiate the game from other basic LibGDX projects, so I decided to use Googles Roboto font, mostly because its designed to be clear and readable, but more importantly that it was also released under a permissive license most fonts have restrictions around their licensing. However, armed with the Roboto font file, it needed turning into a spritesheet of glyphs similar to the above. One of the several tools LibGDX provides is a tool called Hiero which performs this task. Running that with the Roboto font file produces the following (actually done for several different font sizes):
Note the greatly expanded set of characters to the above, this is to include cyrllic characters to support languages such as Russian. That was all fine for a while, but it became apparent that the spacing around some letters (the kerning) was a bit off, leading to weird gaps in some blocks of text as you can see here:
Its subtle, but the letter e tends to not have enough space around it, while the a has too much space in most cases. This has really bothered me for a long time and makes the game feel lower quality in my opinion. I put this down to a quirk of either the Heiro tool and/or the Roboto font and decided Id replace it at some point in the future, because there was another problem I wanted to tackle Creating a spritesheet of glyphs is fine for the number of characters shown above, but as someone who knows a little Japanese, I really wanted to be able to include the main East Asian languages Japanese, Korean and Chinese. The Korean language with only 24 characters in Hangul would be fine to add, but Chinese with potentially thousands of characters, and Japanese also using these alongside hiragana and katakana would potentially be too much to include depending on the size of the font and the max texture size allowed on any given graphics card.As an aside, games in 2019 and onwards can probably safely rely on a max texture size of 4096px in both dimensions or even 8192px, depending on how old the hardware that a game wants to support is, so this may be a non-issue by the time of release. This problem of supporting East Asian languages in LibGDX is often discussed with several possible solutions. Most rely on the fact that there is an extension to LibGDX (gdx-freetype) that generates font bitmaps on the fly from font files, rather than the developer providing a pre-generated bitmap image like the above. From there you can either just generate the snippets of text that you need at any given time, or perhaps generate a spritesheet with all the characters your game is ever going to use but crucially not the entire set of Chinese characters that exist. While I was improving the tooltips from what you can see in last months video (for example, improving the way they break over multiple lines and tidying up whitespace around them), I thought it was a good time to finally try to improve the games font too, now that there were larger sections of text which was really highlighting the kerning problem. Coupled with the desire to get East Asian fonts working, I switched from Googles Roboto font to Googles Noto font family as the latter aims to cover all unicode characters. Having added quite a large body of text to the games translation files, I figured I could calculate all the unique characters across every language and generate a font bitmap from these using the gdx-freetype extension to get closer to using the actual font rather than the pre-generated bitmap from Hiero. In something of a happy accident, this led to a much clearer looking font with massively improved kerning:
Look how smooth the kerning and font itself is in dwarven woodcutter now! The light blue also denotes that you can hover over it for a tooltip, actually separate tooltips for dwarven and woodcutter. It doesnt look like much has changed in the UI but adding tooltips was actually a massive change to the way all text is handled in the game, and the main reason this took so long to get done alongside the large amount of words that needed adding. Instead of simple strings of characters, every section of text is now broken into sections which can have their own independent tooltips, which is what we see here for the dwarfs description text. Those tooltips themselves draw more of this text which can have further tooltips, and so on from there. It also handles and inserts line breaks which is an incredibly basic feature of displaying text but something that I had to build on top of what LibGDX already does! Im quite proud that the tooltip is neatly tied into different classes of each word that can be translated and replaced into other text, for example the noun, adjective and plural of dwarf, dwarven and dwarves would all share the same tooltip, and this tooltip would be applied to any text where this single word has been replaced. This also means that with a slight swap of the default Noto font to one of the Noto font files that includes Chinese and Japanese, I was able to prove that, finally, these languages can work in the game (despite LibGDX making it slightly difficult)!
Now that all of this is accomplished, and the tooltips are in place, the game is in a good place to be opened up to supporting other languages. Alpha 3 is all about modding practically everything in the game, but Im going to focus on translation support initially as theres been quite a bit of interest and offers of help from the community with translations. This month marks one year since the Kickstarter campaign was completed successfully, and while Im sometimes frustrated by what feels like slow progress month-to-month, the game has developed massively since the pre-alpha that was available alongside the Kickstarter, right through to being released in Early Access on Itch.io and now heading towards a more polished, fully-featured Steam Early Access release! On that front, Ive recently updated the Steam store page to be marked as coming soon in 2020 rather than 2019. Im very sorry to push back any dates that have already been written down like this. The roadmap still has quite a way to go before I think the game is ready for the Steam audience, but Im fully committed to getting it there in 2020 rather than any further delays! And with that Ill leave for a few more weeks until the September update, where Ill get into more detail on how translations are actually going to work, and if you want to, how you can get involved and help out with them!


[ 2019-09-12 13:52:49 CET ] [ Original post ]

July 2019 Update

Welcome to the monthly update! With Alpha 2 effectively out of the way (though as always there's some small bugs still to look into), the focus now is on Alpha 3, which means mod support! As a precursor to this though, I've been working on a tooltip system. I think this is going to really improve the new player experience by explaining how things work which is a bit of a sticking point without a tutorial (I'd rather add a tutorial later in development when more of the base gameplay is in place). It's also the first time we're getting some background fluff added to the game! You can see it in action here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfsaA9z8hv8 A tutorial is often requested as the game is not as easy to understand as it could be. I'm hoping tooltips on practically everything will work as a bit of a sticking plaster until there actually is a tutorial. I decided to get the tooltip system done now as it is massively increasing the amount of text in the game which leads into... multi-language support (AKA internationalisation). The first big feature I want to enable through modding is to add translations to the game. WhileKing under the Mountain is in development, it doesn't make sense to get a translation company to translate all the text in the game as it is constantly being added to - as soon as a set of translations was finished it would be incomplete in the next update and not usable by any players who don't read English. I think the best approach, for now at least, is to support and encourage translation mods while the game is in development, and potentially pull these and/or "professional" translations into the base game (not as a mod) once it hits version 1.0 (i.e. after beta). The game can even warn you if a translation is incomplete for the version you are playing - it's a problem that needs addressing if not solving while development is active. To this end, I'm going to be creating tools to help the community with translation mods - probably a small command line executable which initialises or updates a spreadsheet to be filled in with translated text, even including computer-generated translation text as a start pointing. Translations provided by a computer are often poor because they're missing enough context to know exactly how something should be translated, but having them as a base to work on top of should make things easier. I'm also looking at swapping out the font currently used in the game (Google's Roboto), or perhaps even the entire UI skin, as the kerning (the spacing between letters) is terrible with the current font sprites that have been generated. As with everything else, this will be open to modders to change and improve, so I'm hoping that one day someone comes up with a usable font and set of UI widgets that blows everything else out of the water! Part of the problem is that fonts often have restrictive licensing considerations so it's not quite as simple as deciding "that font looks good, lets use that one", as well as generating a spritesheet for the font which is what LibGDX uses rather than rendering text directly from font files. If you'd like to help out the early community with translation support into practically any language (I'm aiming to support languages with a large number of characters like Japanese, Chinese and Korean, but I will probably not be able to support right-to-left languages like Arabic) then please head on over to the discord server and the newly created #translations channel where I'll be organising things in the not too distant future!


[ 2019-08-02 08:02:19 CET ] [ Original post ]

June 2019 Update - Alpha 2.2 Released

An ever-so-slightly late update this month (oh no it's July already!), and we're celebrating that Alpha 2.2 has been released. The main feature in this version is that you can now discover giant mushrooms (they're rare, they prefer to hang out in the larger caverns that you can discover in the middle of the mountainous regions) and harvest them as an alternative to lumber/logs from trees. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFzjUG9NC3A For now this is mostly just an unusual colour alternative to the kinds of wood you're used to, but in the future as the economy is added, giant mushrooms are very rare and much-prized by the dwarven community, so this will be a particularly valuable resource to export or craft with. Also, different materials will have different properties - perhaps giant mushrooms are softer/springier than normal wood and you might be able to find a use for this (a better material for a bow, perhaps?). Alpha 2.2 also includes quite a number of small bug fixes and quality of life improvements. Bugs in systems-driven games like this tend to be darkly amusing and one that I quite liked is that previously, dwarves would jump up out of bed the moment they're starving or critically dehydrated. A change in Alpha 2.1 allows dwarves to sleep at least for a while with a life-threatening unmet need like this. The unintended consequence of this was that dwarves could now die while asleep in bed which they wouldn't do before. As this wasn't noticed during development, it's been possible for dwarves to die while in bed and quite literally stay in that bed forever, decaying away to a skeleton as each dwarf is responsible for getting itself out of bed (i.e. there's no job to go and pull a dead body out of a bed). Instead of the grisly task of removing bodies from beds like that, dwarves now fall out of bed when they die as shown in this dev mode video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FW-dNtVYW8c The main changes in Alpha 2.2 are those behind the scenes - I've implemented the artifact-based mod loading and parsing as described in last month's dev update. This massively speeds up the time to add and process new assets that make up the base mod, as well as being a future improvement for modders to make use of. The other main improvement is that until now, when adding sprites to the game I would manually trim the PNG images down to eliminate unneccessary padding/whitespace from the edges and calculate how this would affect the offset of the sprite being rendered in-game. That was an extremely laborious, time-consuming process which I'm sorry to say I spent quite so long on sometimes. Now that I have a good understanding of that process, I've been able to write a simple automated tool which performs the same job, but taking milliseconds rather than minutes of manual effort! This will also form part of a suite of tools modders will be able to use to make it easier to add assets to the game. The next milestone, Alpha 3, is the modding release. First I'll be tidying up the existing data structures and mod files so there's better (or at least some) consistency in the data files for modders to expect, as well as a general cleanup of unused or incomplete asset files and data. Part of this includes adding the Kickstarter-backer-specified natural resources to the game! I've only received about half of the possible responses to the email for that reward so please do get in touch if you haven't already and you were a Kickstarter or Backerkit backer who had "Add a natural resource" as one of your rewards. Otherwise, see you next month and thanks for reading this update!


[ 2019-07-02 05:28:24 CET ] [ Original post ]

May 2019 Update - How Modding Works

Welcome to the update! I had been hoping to show you giant mushrooms (which can be used as an alternate source of lumber) in this update, but its still not quite ready, though I dont think it can be far away now.
A giant mushroom in the current mod tools but how big is it? Most of the work accomplished this month has been preparing the way for mod support, which is due to make up almost the entirety of Alpha 3. For this monthly dev update, Im going to go into some detail on what mods inKing under the Mountain actually are and how I expect them to work.

The Basics


One of the design goals ofKing under the Mountainis that it isdata-driven, which is that most of the stuff in the game (i.e. items, terrain, jobs, professions, even some AI decision-making) are not hard-coded into the game engine but instead loaded in from data files. That could mean binary data like .wav sound effects, .png sprites for characters, items and furniture or, in most cases, a machine-readable text file which provides data to the game but is also easily understoo-editable by humans. In our case we use JSON as its a bit shorter and more readable then XML, although you lose the safety net of having a strict structure that you get with XML. If you want to take a look in the /assets directory wherever King under the Mountainis installed, this is where all the games data files (except player-specific data like saved games) are stored and loaded when the game is launched. Youll find a large selection of .json files containing all sorts of data for the game, music and sound effects, and perhaps most importantly, spritesheets in the tilesets directory. The largest and most important is diffuse-entities.png and heres how it looks as of today:
Theres a few points of interest in this image. Diffuse refers to the fact theres a matching normal-entities.png with the normal-mapped versions of the same set of sprites. You can think of the diffuse images as the colour version, and the normal is alternatively called bump-mapping to make the lighting system work. Entities is the term Im using for things in the game, currently categorised into items, furniture, humanoids and plants (with animals likely to also be part of this list). You can see that some (mostly the different outfits currently in the game) are coloured, while the rest are in greyscale. This is because a lot of the entities are coloured in on the fly by the game engine, usually depending on which material theyre made out of the different materials and which colours they are drawn as is specified in the JSON files. 2D games use spritesheets like this, which are all the images in a single image/texture, so that it can be loaded into the memory of the graphics card once and then accessed many, many times to draw different regions to different parts of the screen. Separately loading each sprite as a new texture, drawing it, unloading it from the graphics card and repeating the whole process would just be too slow in most cases. The above hopefully explains what the assets used by King under the Mountain are. Most computer games ship with assets exactly like this, and a lot of the time theyre compressed and/or obfuscated, meaning theyre difficult to modify by the player. Usually this is to prevent cheating (particularly for multiplayer games where the integrity of the games files will be checked by an anti-cheat tool) or just to help protect the developers artwork and media from those who would copy and distribute it illegally. Still, that usually doesnt deter some fans, who modified (or modded) game files to change how a game looks or plays, and its out of this that the modding scene was born.

Processing Assets


Most games now embrace modding and provide guides, tools and engine support for mods, andKing under the Mountain will be no exception! Armed with the above knowledge, you could go into the /assets directory and change things to modify the game, and this would indeed work. Modifying the spritesheets would be awkward but possible, while the JSON files are relatively easy to manipulate. One or two members of the community have already done this in fact. To share their mods with others though, they need to keep and distribute the changes in the assets directory with others. This works relatively well for when a single person has modded the game, but what if you wanted to add several mods to the game from different sources? Youd have to keep track of which files each mod changes, and attempt to put them all together without causing any conflicts mods might want to change the same file, say one of the spritesheets, and at that point youd have to pick one or the other to apply and lose some of the changes from the other, which might have poor or even disastrous results. This is where mod support comes in. Alongside the /assets directory, theres also a /mods directory in the game location. Currently this will only contain a single directory, base, which is effectively the source files for what gets processed into /assets. Looking in the entities directory, youll see JSON files defining what types of entities there are, several .png sprites for each of them, and asset descriptors (more JSON files) which describe how the entity sprites should be used.
The sprites for metal plates alongside their JSON descriptor The different item types and other entity types are processed, and the image files are combined into the relevant spritesheet coloured sprites into the diffuse spritesheet and the _NORMALS versions into the normals spritesheet. Similar processing happens for everything else in this base mod directory to produce the contents of the assets directory.
Example of the different file structures The important point here is that the games data files, everything under /mods/base is treated as a mod itself. The upcoming work is to then allow for other mods to live alongside this which can be layered on top of the base mod to add new assets and behaviour, change existing assets or adjust settings and constant variables used by the game. This also solves the problem that would come from directly modifying the assets directory multiple mods can be used at once and the mod system defines how they interact with each other either additively providing more content or replacing the settings of previous mods.

Mod Artifacts


Until recently, every time a change was made to the games base mod that is, whenever Ive been adding more assets to the game the entire /assets directory was deleted and re-created. It was a quick and dirty solution that was perfectly good enough throughout the early stages of development. Now that the entities spritesheet is getting quite large (see above) and complex, this has been taking more and more time, eventually becoming a bit of a drain on gamedev time, just waiting for the assets to be processed between minor changes. The main progress this month has been designing and implementing a much better solution mod artifacts. Simply put, an artifact is a single file or group of related files in the assets directory. Each set of entity type descriptors is one artifact, the entity spritesheets are another artifact, the terrain spritesheets yet another artifact and so on. Now, instead of deleting and recreating the entire assets directory, the mod processor checks for any changes in the source files (the files in the mods directory which feed in to each particular artifact) and only recreates the artifact if any changes are detected (by running a quick checksum on the contents of all the input files and checking them against what was last processed.
Diagram of single artifact processing This also extends perfectly into layering mods on top of each other. As new mods are added to an installation of the game, a mod may only be made up of certain artifacts rather than all of them. The mod processor then knows it only needs to process these artifacts, massively speeding up the process of swapping mods in and out of the game. Heres an example of how a mod which only changes the entity and terrain sprites would be applied:
Example of mod layering And thats how mods work inKing under the Mountain! As I continue development of mod support, Ill go into detail on how the mods will be packaged and distributed from modders to the larger playerbase. Of course there will also be much more in-depth guides and documentation covering how to add and change game assets. Most likely a wiki site will be launched soon. Ill also be covering the current plans for code mods, in addition to data files as described above, which will allow for all-new in-game functionality. If modding isnt your thing, then dont worry! Theres still a fairly big update coming as part of Alpha 2, wrapping up a lot of player-requested features and some new content additions. Id hoped to have this released in May but as always, its been a very busy month! Finally, if youre interested in modding the game or just want to get involved with the community, the best thing to do would be to join the Discord server. See you next month!


[ 2019-05-31 08:23:28 CET ] [ Original post ]

April 2019 Update

Alpha 2 is upon us! The main feature is that the placeholder production of metal (which was simply and easily turning raw ore into metal ingots) has been replaced by a more in-depth production chain. Raw, mined metallic ore needs crushing down to remove the useless stone and get to the usable ore. This is then smelted at a bloomery furnace into a "bloom", following how iron was historically produced before modern mass-production. The bloom is then hammered by a smith into usable metal, which can be worked into its final form. This update also introduces fuel in the form of coke (refined from coal) and charcoal (produced at a charcoal clamp using wooden logs). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIEXVNwSXV0 Alpha 2 also includes the most-requested feature by players - a screen to view and manage all of your dwarves! This was teased in last month's update but it has now been released, head on over torocketjumptechnology.itch.io/king-under-the-mountain to download Alpha 2 if you already have a copy of the game, or purchase it if not! It's still early days for the user interface (I'm treating the whole thing as a placeholder) but this work solved some of the problems of dealing with the UI (most importantly a way to draw entities like the settlers as interface components) so expect more to follow - perhaps most importantly a screen to manually organise crafting and production so that the player has direct control of what is being created! Following the "add a natural resource" reward emails which were sent out previously (please do get back to me if you've received one and not responded yet, or if you think you should receive one and don't remember seeing anything), more recently emails have been sent out for the "Add an animal species" and "Design a farmable crop" rewards. In the end there were only 8 of the former and 4 of the latter, with two super-backers covering both! Unlike the "add a natural resource" these will all require custom artwork to be created so I look forward to sharing these in the future. As it had been so long since the Alpha 1 release, Alpha 2 was actually released early while there was still more content intended for part of this release milestone. First of all, metal plates are to be added as a new intermediate product so that constructing furniture out of metal is a bit more sensible - rather than hammering a few metal ingots together to form an elaborate construction, instead plates will be forged by a blacksmith which are then put together along with other mechanisms to produce some of the machines used by the dwarves (such as the ore crushing station). Expect this to feature more heavily when brewing is added due to the number of metal tanks needed as part of the brewing production chain. Also on the topic of working with metal - dwarves inKing under the Mountain are the only race to know the secrets of producing steel, superior in strength and quality to iron which will be important when different materials have different in-game effects, particularly in combat! Central to this is thecrucible furnace, which will be the largest piece of furniture in the game so far, used to convert iron to steel in sizeable quantities. Long-rumoured to the world ofKing under the Mountain are giant mushrooms - mushrooms so large, tall and tough that they can be used as an equivalent to trees! A later update will see a visual rework of the game's funghi, but I wanted to have using-giant-mushrooms-as-trees in one of the earlier updates. With those features added the next major milestone (Alpha 3) will be all about mod support. Modding is an absolutely central pillar to the design of the game and I can't want to see what people are able to come up with once the ability to mod the game is thrown wide open. It's these early days of modding which will shape exactly how mods work and what they look like, so if this is something you're interested in, please get involved (ideally via the Discord server) and help me to add what it is you want to be able to support mods.


[ 2019-04-30 21:34:01 CET ] [ Original post ]

March 2019 Update - (Not) Reading from a script

It's not released quite yet, but here's a sneak peek at the much-requested Settler Management screen/feature coming in Alpha 2 of King under the Mountain: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ff8XZuMqMNw Alpha 2 is on the horizon now, potentially including a resource management screen as well as this settler management one. It's taken a lot longer than I'd have liked to be able to go from Alpha 1 to 2 but there's some good news there - I've secured several days in April for development ofKing under the Mountain and I'm sure we'll see a big jump in progress, and with a pinch of luck, some form of Alpha 2 being released in April. I forgot to mention that last month saw the start of gathering information for Kickstarter rewards (other than copies of the game), specifically emailing those backers who had one or more natural resources to add to the game. If you think you should have a "pick a natural resource" Kickstarter (or BackerKit pre-order) reward, you should have received an email asking you for the details of this. Try searching for the subject "Claim your pick a resource reward for King under the Mountain" in your inbox or spam folder. It's now over a month since these were sent out but only 47 resources out of a total 169 have been received so far, so please get in touch with me at ross@kingunderthemounta.in if you think you should have this and can't find it. After Alpha 2 is released, the big focus for Alpha 3 will be to enable modding in King under the Mountain. Since the early days of the project, making as much of the game data-driven has been a key goal. This means that things like items, plants, resources and so on are all defined in (JSON format) data files that are loaded and used by the game. The majority of these reference .PNG image files which are also loaded and used to make up what you see when you play the game, or .wav or .ogg audio files for sound effects. Most games combine these "assets" into compressed or obfuscated packages to make the download size of the game smaller but also so they can't be easily modified by users. Instead,King under the Mountainplainly exposes its assets (take a look in /mods/base in the game directory if you're curious) so modders can see how things work to add their own. This works for adding new things to the game with different values and assets, but doesn't cover adding newfunctionality to the game, which require the game code to be modified in some way. This month I spent some time investigating this. Initially I was planning to add some kind of scripting engine using a language like Python or Javascript, which would open up the game to small scripts of code to be run. I was worried about the performance of this (although there's quite good options for running snippets of these languages in Java) but also how it would expose the classes and functions used in the core engine for these scripts to make use of. In the end I settled on a different approach, very similar to the one used byRimworld, where small libraries of additional Java code (the language the game is written in) can be loaded and used by the main game. The main benefit of this is that modders will be able to write code mods that make use of the entire codebase ofKing under the Mountain,albeit in a controlled manner where certain new classes can be added, rather than just letting a mod change any code within the game. The way the AI works is heavily inspired by this post by the Starmancer devs, where I have a system of Goals made up of Actions. The Goals are JSON files (look in /mods/base/ai/goals) which are made up of a set of selectors to determine when a settler chooses to select the goal to complete, and a set of Actions which are Java classes used to fulfil a certain, well, action, with a success or failure state. Until now it would only have been possible to add mods implementing new Goals using only the existing Actions. As a test case I had the game load in a new Action from a mod and use this instead, which proved modders will be able to add their own AI steps to the game as well as overall goals. The same can be implemented for basically anything that has a range of differentimplementations rather than just data values, such as different job types and their effect on the world, and hopefully going as far as new UI screens and views possible in mods. I'm really excited to see what people will be able to come up with in mods and I'll have a lot more to say on this (and guides!) in the near future. I'm sure it'll be an evolving process as some things that I've not really considered might not be possible to mod yet, but I'd be able to open it up as the modding community makes requests. So it's another relatively short update for the month. Again, I'm very sorry at the lack of tangible progress since Alpha 1 was released but I'm fully committed to breaking through that wall and getting the next major build to you guys soon. If you're already playing the game and haven't joined already, we have a friendly discord server atdiscord.gg/M57GrFp and if you're just discovering this game for the first time now, you should head on over to rocketjumptechnology.itch.io/king-under-the-mountain and grab a copy of the game while its still in earliest access! Itch purchases will include a Steam key when the game is ready to move on to Steam.


[ 2019-03-30 15:24:10 CET ] [ Original post ]

King under the Mountain
Rocket Jump Technology Developer
Rocket Jump Technology Publisher
2021-11-24 Release
Game News Posts: 58
🎹🖱️Keyboard + Mouse
Mixed (129 reviews)
Public Linux Depots:
  • King under the Mountain Linux [712.99 M]
King under the Mountain is a simulation-based settlement-building strategy game set in a fantasy world.

The game is based around these central pillars:
  • 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).

MINIMAL SETUP
  • Processor: Intel Core2 Duo 2.4Ghz or HigherMemory: 4 GB RAM
  • Memory: 4 GB RAM
  • Graphics: Intel HD Graphics 3000
  • Storage: 500 MB available space
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14.4$ (64%)
9.37$ (63%)
3.2$ (80%)
14.99$ (50%)
2.93$ (77%)
2.5$ (50%)
4.56$ (89%)
4.35$ (78%)
25.0$ (50%)
5.0$ (75%)
20.99$ (40%)
8.0$ (80%)
12.59$ (37%)
9.99$ (50%)
2.55$ (83%)
5.0$ (80%)
2.0$ (80%)
8.69$ (57%)
10.79$ (10%)
9.0$ (70%)

FANATICAL BUNDLES

Time left:

4 days, 6 hours, 29 minutes


Time left:

0 days, 6 hours, 29 minutes


Time left:

21 days, 6 hours, 29 minutes


Time left:

356445 days, 22 hours, 29 minutes


Time left:

3 days, 6 hours, 29 minutes


Time left:

32 days, 6 hours, 29 minutes


Time left:

18 days, 6 hours, 29 minutes


Time left:

28 days, 6 hours, 29 minutes


Time left:

27 days, 6 hours, 29 minutes


Time left:

34 days, 6 hours, 29 minutes


HUMBLE BUNDLES
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