Firstly... Thank You!

If you are reading this I truly appreciate you taking the time to do so. I hope that this project excites you as much as it does me.

At long last project Kingdomonium is revealed! I decided that 2021 is the year to take the plunge and make it public and start working on it seriously. I have been kicking around the basic idea of the game in my head for the past couple of years now and came to the realisation that if I don't get started on sharing it with the community and commit it will probably never see the light of day.

Let me introduce myself. My name is Ash and I have been working in the software development industry for over a decade now. The game dev bug bit me a long time ago but I could never find the time to dedicate myself to a project... until now :) Growing up in the 90s (I'm old, I know) I became a fan of 2 games in particular. That being Age Of Empires and Quake. Polar opposites in terms of gameplay but oh so enjoyable in their own unique way. The classic real time strategy games in particular such as Starcraft, Warcraft, Command & Conquer and Age Of Empires dished up hours of unbridled entertainment in my teens.

I lost touch with games in the early 2000s but later rekindled the romance shortly after Minecraft and Terraria were released. Terraria in particular impressed me with the sheer depth and scale of the moldable sandbox world you get to play in. Around this time the basic idea of Kingdomonium was born. I thought to myself that it would make for some very intriguing gameplay to have a game that combined the strategic click and command aspects of a real time strategy game (e.g. Age Of Empires) with the depth, exploration and moldability of a 2D open world survival game (e.g. Terraria).

So what has been done so far?

Short answer - a whole lot! There were so many aspects (mostly behind the code stuff) that required a considerable amount of thought and planning which mostly involved me bashing my head against a wall a hundred times before finally finding a solution. I listed the bigger tasks that I worked on below which range from being close to complete to a work in progress.

Procedural Terrain Generation

Working on this went reasonably well. At the end of it I had a system setup that could randomly alter the height of the terrain based on sine-wave perlin noise generation. This article does a good job explaining an implementation of it.

Lighting

This turned out to be more involved than anticipated. I basically used a flood fill algorithm to handle how much light should be applied to each surrounding block from an eminating light source. That wasn't too bad in itself. However performance issues arose when lights were added and removed dynamically slowing down the game. A substantial amount of hacking and optimization was needed here.

Path Finding

This one was a bit frustrating. I worked on A* path finding algorithms before for top down games but this one being a platformer had an extra layer of complexity in having to be able to deal with jumping mechanics

Digging

I enjoyed getting this implemented. Keep in mind that the graphics and animations are far from complete and I will definitely be relooking at them at a later stage. For now I am concentrating on the core mechanics


I will elaborate further on a few of these aspects above and others in the coming weeks so please stay tuned! If this project at all intrigues you please be so kind as to add the game to your steam wishlist and follow me on twitter. It only takes but a few seconds of your time and doesn't cost anything. If you would like to help further please pre-order the game and support me on Patreon. The links can be found below. Thanks once again for reading.