We've just launched on Kickstarter! Here's the new trailer that goes with the launch:
If you've not been following development so far, King under the Mountain is a simulation-based settlement-building strategy/management game for PC, Mac and Linux. It's inspired by Dwarf Fortress, The Settlers, Dungeon Keeper, Prison Architect and Rimworld (amongst others), though the plans are to put our own unique spin on things to create a special game that the team has always wanted to play!
Development so far has been a little slow as it is a hobby project developed in what little spare time we have available. The goal with the Kickstarter is to split the working week between contract work and further game development (unless the campaign is so wildly successful it can fund a lot of development time).
Following the campaign, the target release date for "Alpha 1" is February 2019 to a platform like Itch.io, followed by a long development cycle of feature updates before transitiong to Steam Early Access most likely in late 2020. Development will continue from there, so it's a long roadmap, but this genre is uniquely qualified to benefit from a long early access period, layering new features and systems on top of each other while taking on player feedback.
We hope you'll consider backing our Kickstarter campaign and making the game a success!
Hey, seen this one pop up on Rimworld Discord, good luck with your project! I just wanted to ask, how do you intend to differentiate it from other similar building and management games? What is going to be truly unique for those already satisfied with, say, Rimworld?
It is a good question. Firstly it's on a much bigger scale, rather than the few survivors of a Rimworld colony, you're managing a functioning economy and settlement of up to a few hundred settlers, ensuring supply chains work (think of The Settlers but if the settlers had their own personalities and lives). It loses some of the intimacy Rimworld but hopefully makes up for it with an interesting simulation.
The biggest feature is that you'll be able to go off-map with a group of adventurers on a randomly generated dungeon crawl, or explore/fight through a copy of another player's settlement. I guess Rimworld does now let you explore more of the world but this is going to be a big focus. You'll hunt giant monsters for special crafting materials. You can attack your neighbours before they raid you to make sure that doesn't happen. That kind of thing :)
Then there's all the small touches, which admittedly aren't much different to Rimworld right now, but as the game is developed I'm sure you'll see more and more to differentiate it.
If you will really manage to optimise the game to run well with such a vast amount of characters, that's indeed going to be loads of fun! Same with dungeon crawl.
There's an (old) stress test on my Twitter of 40,000 dwarves on the same map at once. The bottleneck was rendering them (because they're made up of about a dozen layers) but if they're not all on-screen at once it ran fine. The pathfinding is multithreaded and AI is in very small steps per frame so it's very performant :)
Whoops wasn't signed in, below guest comment (re: 40,000 dwarves at once) is me
Just backed the project!
Awesome, thank you!!