Welcome to the September update! A bit of a short one this month because A) August was late so it's not been quite as long since the last update, and B) it's been one of those months where there isn't 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 you're 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, I'm still laying the (huge piles of) groundwork for mod support. It's 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 I've enjoyed following the progress of although I've 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 game's default font, and coming off the back of last month's 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 in King 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 there's some very good news on the horizon - I'm in a position where I'm going to be able to change from trying to fit game development around a full-time 5-days-a-week day job, and instead I'm 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 of King under the Mountain. Progress has been pretty slow for the last few months, which I'm 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!
