King under the Mountain is a simulation-based strategy/management game where you design, build and run a settlement in a fantasy world. Then, once you're up and running, you can send out groups of adventurers to explore and loot other players' creations, playing out through turn-based tactical combat.
Now in very early Alpha access on Itch.io!
Gameplay is based around high-level management of your settlers to harvest resources, build rooms and furniture, craft items and manage your economy. Your settlers are deeply simulated characters with their own wants, needs, thoughts and emotions who will go about their daily lives carrying out your instructions as well as looking after themselves.
Concept art of a dwarven settlement
You start a game on a randomly-generated area map with a few settlers, tools and other provisions, and slowly grow into a self-sustaining village, town, or eventually, a city. You play as one of several fantasy races each with their own unique gameplay mechanics, though for the first main part of development this is limited to (predictably) Dwarves only.
InspirationThe main gameplay themes are primarily inspired by
Dungeon Keeper, other Bullfrog titles, and particularly
Dwarf Fortress (although I'm not going to be recreating anything like the depth of DF). The visuals are in the same style as
Prison Architect and
Rimworld as these use a simple, no-animation style for characters to let me get up and running quickly (and I'm no artist). Industry and economy has a strong focus, where I'll be using a lot of elements of
The Settlers, mostly the first and second
Settlers games. Finally, and like a lot of people these days, I'll be drawing from the boardgame-derived turn-based combat of
XCOM (the reboot, though I'm a huge fan of the original games too) mixed with
Bloodbowl and classic pen and paper RPGs.
GameplayThe majority of the gameplay runs in realtime as the player designates orders for their settlers to carry out tasks and construct buildings, dig tunnels and so on (very much like the gameplay of
Prison Architect and
Rimworld). I'm currently favouring not having any direct control of settlers but this is going to take some gameplay testing and prototyping to decide on.
My biggest issue as a player of these games (and other games which allow quite a bit of creativity from the player) has been that I can spend a lot of time designing and creating something, only for it to sit languishing on my computer for nobody else to ever see. I plan to turn this on its head by having a central server that keeps mostly up-to-date copies of settlements other players have created, and using these as a place for the player to explore with a group of adventurers. These adventures allow players to attain resources and other items they may be able to acquire otherwise. Most importantly, players will never lose anything from having their settlement "looted" (as it is only really a copy), but I'm planning for their to be gameplay bonuses to having other players explore, and perhaps vote on, the creations of others that they've particularly enjoyed. I'm aware this is quite a large and complicated feature to add, but I've many years of experience in enterprise web development and believe it's quite feasible.
ModdingOne of the key goals of development is that every asset and variable is moddable and its progressing well so far. This poses some difficulties as to sharing and uploading game "levels" for adventures, so the plan is to also build a community-managed mod sharing and distribution system alongside the rest of the game (update: almost certainly built on top of mod.io).
Development so farI'm a sole developer working on the project in my spare time around a day job and family life, like a lot of indie games, so progress is very slow compared to what it would be with a lot more dedicated time. Inching towards that Steam release which hopefully brings in enough funding to really get things moving!
- 2016 - Initial concept and design
- 2017 - Pre-alpha prototype developed and exhibited at EGX Rezzed, which was alongside a Kickstarter that failed to meet its funding goal
- 2018 - Relaunched Kickstarter found success, allowing for full time development for a few months and outsourcing work for graphical assets and sound/music
- 2019 - First alpha launched on Itch.io with updates throughout the year
- 2020 - Now progressing towards Alpha 10 which has been chosen as the Steam Early Access launch milestone
Technical StuffThe game is being written in Java using LibGDX, aimed at desktops, so Windows, Linux and Mac. I'm the sole developer/programmer though I'm outsourcing practically all the artwork, sound and music. Development is a little slow while this is done in my small amount of spare time (like a lot of indie projects!) though the dream is to get it to a playable state and be able to raise enough funds so I can switch over to working on it full time and really get things going! Hope you like it
http://kingunderthemounta.in/https://twitter.com/RocketJumpTech