Live progress #38 – Catching up with LP

“Live Progress” posts were meant to come out every 1-2 weeks. Progress is slower these weeks because of real-life changes I’m going through, so now I’m trying to catch up with the schedule. To the facts!

I’ve been refactoring menus to allow for simpler management and layout changes, including background images. Thanks to Natalie’s talents, we now have our first sexy menu background:

2015_06_17 titleIt is still a sketch, but it improves the feel of the game in the menus tenfold!

House building supplies are now rendered on the building sites:

2015_06_17 supplies

Supplies layout is the same for all the houses, but each house can have them positioned differently. The neat thing, is that the game reuses same wares models for all occasions – house supplies/production in houses, serfs carrying, building supply.

Jery is working on in-game objectives display. Those are handy short notes on the side that tell you what needs to be done to win the mission. Kind of like RPG quests – main and additional. This should make winning conditions much more clear:

2015_06_17 objectives wip

Still work in progress, the graphics and layout will surely change later on. Objectives display is purely GUI thing and should be updated from the dynamic script. The script will be responsible for objectives logic. For multiplayer and mapmakers who do not want to dive into scripting – standard goals will create standard objectives as well.

Finally, Alpha plans are likely to slip on to the next month, due to me being so very busy with real-life stuff.

Posted in Live progress | 14 Comments

Alpha plans

As planned and mentioned before – Alpha is due to be released early this summer. Hopefully around June or so (however schedule tends to slip). Let’s talk about it.

Alpha version of the product is like a proof of concept – showcasing the various ideas that are mean tot be in the final version. There can be several Alphas focused on different ideas. Basing on feedback, some ideas might change, some get dropped. Alpha generally should be quite unstable and could cause crashes or even data loss.

Knights Province Alpha 1 is going to be very raw and have a limited scope. It will be very far from the goal we aim at in all aspects (gameplay, design, graphics, features and etc).

What there will be (for those who are lucky to avoid bugs and crashes):

  • the game is somewhat playable. Meaning that you can build a town, train troops and defeat the enemy.
  • functional built-in Map Editor. You can create a map and play it.

What will be missing:

  • many game mechanics (including unit navigation, fighting and many others)
  • maps
  • balance
  • graphics

Content will also be very limited:

  • there are just a few house models (with not a single one complete) and
  • a single unit model used as a template
  • terrain has only a few objects on it (yet with a couple of growing trees)
  • there is no music and sound effects
  • many in-game menus are missing and/or incomplete and non-functional
  • only English translation

Keeping all of that in mind, is there anything special that you would like to see in Alpha 1?

Posted in Feedback, News | 19 Comments

Live progress #37 – School GUI

Working on the school GUI:

  • Revised unit icons once again
  • Added 3 more unit icons
  • A new tooltip element that pops up on mouse over. Intended for detailed unit description in the school gui
2015-05-16 school gui

School GUI wip

Rows in description are fake ones, intended to show an example of what might be in the tooltip.

Posted in Live progress | 12 Comments

Live Progress #36 – 3D models in GUI

Made 3D models to render as GUI elements – this feature is much required for MapEd map objects palette. Crude so far, but working:

2015-05-11 3d models over gui

Posted in Live progress | 6 Comments

Strange Attractor

Developing an RTS game is not only the code and art. Game design is a big thing too. I’m subscribed to a lot of newsfeeds from many game related sites and blogs. RTS games are quite rare today. Reading I have stumbled upon a new interesting term, which inspired me to write an article.

The term in question is – “Strange Attractor” (SA for short). Quoting Terry Rossio (blog), he describes the SA as follows:

Put ‘strange’ (meaning ‘unique’) and ‘attractor’ (from ‘attractive’, meaning ‘compelling’) together and you get ‘strange attractor’, or ‘something unique that is also compelling’.

There must be some aspect that is compelling, enticing, and intriguing.

You could call it a hook, or a gimmick, or a twist. Hollywood sometimes calls it a ‘high concept’ — an idea for a movie that can be stated in one or two sentences.

In other words, SA concept says that many interesting movies are born from two parents – Strange and Attractive. We take something familiar and attractive to us and add something strange and unique. The form could be simplified down to one sentence actually – “The game like A, but with B”.

Classic examples would be:

  • The game like Dune II, but with orcs vs. humans – Warcraft.
  • The game like Warcraft II but in space – Starcraft.
  • The game like GTA but about mafia – Mafia.
  • The game like SimCity but made the way it is meant to be – Cities: Skylines.
  • The game like Diablo but based on ancient history – Titans Quest.
  • The game like Warcraft III but with a single map – DOTA.
  • The game like Wolfenstein 3D but against demons on Mars – Doom.

There are more examples from around Settlers-like games too. I use the term Settlers-like to describe an RTS game mainly focused on town-building with variety of resources and production chains (those are often called German-school RTS). Let’s list some:

The Settlers-like game:

  • .. but about pirates – Tropico
  • .. but with trading – Anno
  • .. but about defending a castle – Stronghold
  • .. but suited for offline play – Settlers Online
  • .. but with proper army control – Knights and Merchants

Now here’s a thought – what can SA bring to KP? One can argue 3D is enough of a change, but today 3D is “Attractive”, not “Strange”. Here are my thought on the matter. The game like classic German-school RTS:

  • .. but against undead. There could be a new undead race competing with humans. As big as like orcs in Warcraft.
  • .. but fast-paced. How about cutting the typical match from 75 min down to 30?
  • .. but turn-based. Crazy thought.
  • .. but MMO. Not our scale sadly.
  • .. but up to modern GUI standards. Meaning 3D and user interface interaction.
  • .. but casual. No roads, no deliveries, just production and army. I don’t like this idea.
  • .. but filled with gore and evil. Something alike Diablo 1 atmosphere. Meh..
  • .. but with ..
Posted in Ideas | 17 Comments

Live Progress #35 – Unit icons

Another day and another small advancement. Today I felt like doing some drawing. Did a bunch of on unit icons to be used in statistics, house info and map editor menus:

2015-05-04 unit iconsAs you can see before that it was quite impossible to distinguish between units. Now at least half of them have icons. Test – can you guess who is who? 😉

The icons are made in vector and downscaled (much alike described in this article). Hopefully those icons won’t stay like so for too long and will become much better.

Posted in Artwork, Live progress | 21 Comments

Live Progress #34 – House animations

Been working on several things this week:

  • refactoring maps scanner to allow to delete maps from the main menu. With the amount of test maps and builds, they quickly get outdated and need to be cleaned up once every while;
  • rigging RecastNavigation tester to allow to edit more of the agents parameters on-the-fly and clocking test cases. To my disappointment RN is still very raw;
  • workplans editor form, so far in preview mode, to allow to view all the workplans in the game and the time they take in game ticks. Will be very helpful later on when balancing production chains;
  • as usual – more refactorig, bugfixes and planning;
  • and finally, made the house animations proof of concept. Here’s the first house animation – Windmill blades at 5 rpm (in game they do):

2015-05-04 mill blades

Posted in Live progress | Leave a comment

Knights Province new home

Thanks to help from Lewin and Tom, Knights Province has a new home at:

www.knightsprovince.com

Along with that KP also got an official e-mail address:

contact@knightsprovince.com

Update your bookmarks 😉

Posted in News, Site | 3 Comments

FAQ expansion

Thanks Anon for asking, I have expanded the FAQ page with more questions and answers!

  • What kind of license this project will have, will it be open-source?
  • What systems do you plan to release KP on?
  • When is it going to be ready/released?
  • What is KP connection with KaM Remake?
Posted in Sidenotes, Site | Leave a comment

Houses sketches

These are sketches of Knights Province houses.

Houses

This sheet is composed of many (but not all) wip houses. Many houses are still missing. You may note that several houses are made by different artists, even more, some are duplicate because the design was not fit for the game. It takes time, trial and error to arrive to the final design. Almost all houses will change along the development and conversion to 3D. You can read more about the process of creation of individual sketch in this article.

Posted in Artwork, Live progress | 17 Comments