Welcome to the January Edition of the Kingdoms and Castles dev log. It’s been a busy month, our fig crowdfunding wrapped up at over 700% funded. We are so thrilled and grateful for all your support.

Now that the campaign is over, it’s time to get back to making the game. Here’s what we’ve been up to since the last update:

Pete:

Redid the ui to feature a cleaner more refined look, here’s a quick little before and after:

Added three new buildings that for now, auto upgrade your keep. The throne room, great hall, and chamber of war.

Added a better arrow attacking effect that appropriately aims at enemy vikings using way more ballistics math than I first thought it needed. The arrows also stick into the ground.

Added advisers to let you know how things are going in the kingdom and advise you on how keep people fed, happy, and safe. The adviser portraits are actually modeled after real world people famous for each specialty.

Took another pass on the sky and fog tech. Added a skybox and using keijiro’s kino fog as a reference, made the fog fade out to the sky color. Now the world looks more seamless and you can see the gradient of the sky.

Michael:

This month, as a way to help show what area is available for road and building placement, I created a new territory effect that creates a thick line at the territory border and slightly dims out the unplaceable area.

In addition to the new territory effect, I created a matching building radius selection effect that comes in handy for showing the applicable range for many of our buildings. For example, here’s the windmill showing its area of effect.

Added a little polish to tower demolition.

The water needed a little loving. I added a post terrain generation step that uses some perlin noise and distance from shore to create a dynamic shoreline and fake depth with shades of blue.

A lot of time has been put into saving all the little minute details that can happen in our complex kingdom simulation.

With Steve Green’s help we’ve got a lot of new sound effects in the game as well. Thanks Steve!

And both the both of us polished up and fixed a truckload of bugs to launch the alpha to our backers!

...only to discover many more bugs that we’re fixing now!

Overall we’re very happy with the reception for the alpha and we’re excited to improve it. Thanks to all our alpha players for the bug reports and great feedback!

-Pete & Michael