Alpha 5

Alpha 5 is ready!

2016-01-08 guards

Guardians of supplies

New features:

  • Campfires – provide allied troops with food. Any group standing within campfire area of effect does not get hungry. This is helpful for small groups of enemies placed on map to guard passages and ambushes.
  • Wagons improved. Now they change sides on contact, drive into camp/store/barracks, depending on if they have suitable ware in them.
  • New map (Treasures) to test both campfires and wagons.
  • Two new music tracks by Andre Sklenar (Farm, Sheep)
  • Hand color on unit models. Now units have players color on them. Troops also have banners.
  • New unit models – farmer, recruit, fisher, militia, swordsman. Yet without animations.

Smaller features are:

  • List of maps in main menu, for quickplay
  • Separate neutral player for animals and neutral units/houses. Now there’s special neutral player that owns all the animals and unclaimed assets, which might be useful for scripting.
  • Dynamic scripts wiki (https://github.com/Kromster80/knights_province/wiki)
  • There’s a map edge now rendered below the terrain
  • Snow terrain type, which goes nice on to mountains
  • Oak tree model
  • Dozen more icons and cursors
  • Dozen of bugfixes

Hotfix has been applied. Download Alpha 5.1: [Download not found]

Posted in Downloads, News | 13 Comments

Summing up 2015

2015 is near its end. This year was quite busy for Knights Province and its creator (me). Gains include:

  • Public Alpha release! (in fact 4 major public alphas!)
  • Thousands of downloads and gameplays
  • New game mechanics (wagons, campfires, objectives)
  • Lots of artwork by 3rd party
  • Professional unit models and animations by 3rd party
  • 3 new music tracks! (to be included in Alpha 5) by Andre Sklenar
  • New fog of war techniques
  • Successfully tried streaming development on Twitch
  • Recorded videos with voice-over (yep, for the first time)
  • Got much deeper understanding of gameplay mechanics
  • Got a lot more experience with 3rd-party contractors
  • And last but not least – lot’s of positive feedback and offers of help from you guys!

On the downside however:

  • Wasted a lot of time on unit navigation (which is not working out so great after all)
  • Contractor work revealed to be really expensive for the game of such scale
  • I realized that I have to learn a lot more about gamedev (which is doubtfully a bad thing)
  • Anything else I forgot to include in pros or cons

All-in-all 2015 was a good year and I’m looking forward to what 2016 brings. Thank you all for support and interest in my humble ambiguous project – share if you like! 😀

2015-12-31-all-units

Knights Province crew walks/floats into 2016

Wish you Happy New Year everyone!!!

Bonus poll: What single feature would you like to see the most in Knights Province next year?

Posted in News | 10 Comments

Streaming again

Streaming again at: https://www.twitch.tv/kromstern80

Posted in Video | Leave a comment

Player colors

Support for player colors on units has been added:

2015-12-29-player-colors

This and many other changes are to come in Alpha 5, which hopefully gets released in a week or so.

Posted in Live progress, Sidenotes | 2 Comments

Two new things

Two new things to show for today’s progress:

2015-12-19 terrains edge

Oak trees and edge-of-the-map. Oak trees I like more (although they are gonna change in the future, with proper texturing and such). Map edge is certainly to get much prettier too.

Posted in Live progress, Sidenotes | 2 Comments

Guardians of treasures

When you want to put a treasure on the map, how do you plan to keep the guards fed?

Posted in Feedback, Sidenotes | 6 Comments

Cotton to replace Sheep

As some of you noticed in-game and on site plans – Sheep farm was planned to be in the game to produce yarn from which cloth would be made to hire citizens.

Major drawback is consistency, sheep would have to grow without food and could not be slaughtered for food (otherwise cloths would be too hard to make).

An alternative was found – cotton farms.

Process of making cotton is rather simple. It’s planted, it grows, farmer picks it and processes into yarn. No extra complications 🙂

So that is the plan for next or one-after-the-next Alpha – Cotton Farms! 🙂

Posted in Ideas | 5 Comments

Rev 3000

Just have committed revision 3000 into Knighs Province SVN.

Yay!

Posted in Sidenotes | Leave a comment

Continued planning on Control Points

The game needs something to lure players out of their towns into the wild

Posted in Ideas, Sidenotes | 10 Comments

Collecting and fixing bugs

Thanks everyone for testing and reporting bugs!

bugcrop

So far these are fixed:

  • After restart / models reload, serfs have wrong texture
  • Overlapping ware rows in MapEd house page
  • Crash when registering mission victory to Records

Known, but not fixed:

  • Woodcutter and many other units float without animations

I’m thinking about releasing Alpha 4.01 next weekend with more bugfixes.

Posted in Feedback | 4 Comments