Alpha 1 is finally here.
After several hours of unexpected bugs popping up and emergency bugfixing the game has stabilized at Alpha version 1.04. Please try the updated package:
Download link: Knights Province Alpha 1
For a change I was playtesting the Knights Province Alpha tonight. Here are some actual screens from the game:
View on the town center
Woodcutters district
Food production
Training more people for new houses
Birds-eye view
Still lake
Uploading new video with progress report over the past 2 weeks:
Small anniversary for the Knights Province repository – 2001 commits!
Took me less than 2 years to make, which is quite fast.
2001 commit is nothing spectacular though:
The test map mentioned above:
Sunday is a great day – here’s another video showing off stone deposits placement and mining:
As always – comments and critics are welcome!
This is the first Knights Province video and it is about one neat Map Editor feature called Map Resize.
This has been asked several times now and the answer is a bit too lengthy for the FAQ page (though I can link from it). So let’s unroll that question!
Firstly, “finished” is a vague term when it comes to our development process. It can take several years of Alphas and Betas, progressively improving and polishing the game, steadily bringing it to the playable state before it meets our internal standard for being “finished”. Also, unlike big studios, we don’t have a pool of game developers that can be distributed among the projects, speeding up or slowing them down, to meet the deadlines – hence we don’t have them by design. And unlike any size studios we don’t have a solid 40h/week development timetable for anyone, so the development can be really slow at times. Since Knights Province development is a hobby project, that means that any kind of real-life issues can delay it (and sadly they do).
So we’ve established, that “finished” is rather vague term. Now let’s see about the rest of the question! Game localization itself is complex process, consisting of many interconnected parts:
From my previous experience, preparing a localized version usually takes around 2-3 weeks of full concentration if everything goes smooth (which it rarely does), and more than a few months in unlucky cases (if for example translator goes missing). Some locales are still incomplete as far as I remember. On the other hand, Knights Province is still in pre-Alpha stage, which means everything changes a lot, many text strings are being added and removed during a week. Translating those will be a waste of resources and significant slowdown the games development (if we to spend weeks/months just to keep the translations up to date with changes).
So for now many texts are simply hardcoded into the game in English, which is easiest and simplest for the development. Localization sub-engine is in place and supports Unicode and left-to-right writing, which means that majority of worlds languages can be implemented rather easily. When they will be implemented? – probably we will add them gradually after the game goes through several Alpha versions and takes a more solid shape.
TL;DR: Can’t say for sure.
“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:
It 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:
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:
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.
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):
What will be missing:
Content will also be very limited:
Keeping all of that in mind, is there anything special that you would like to see in Alpha 1?
Working on the school GUI:
School GUI wip
Rows in description are fake ones, intended to show an example of what might be in the tooltip.
