FROM THE BLOG

WAR Mode, Full KAG and the fairly immediate future

What a mouthful.

People have been asking exactly what War mode is going to consist of as well as when this next update is coming out, asking for things like fire and boats. You’ll be getting fire and boats but you’ll also be getting a lot more.

Here’s an overview of what a War Mode map will look like, at this point.

Apologies for my handwriting 🙂

As you can see, the map is quite a bit more structured than the CTF maps are at the moment, with resources spread around the map in a more deliberate manner. The point of war is to help structure the game into something compatible with the playing style of most people.

War mode will contain:

• Home port for buying/selling materials
• No coins out of thin air (so the economy actually makes sense)
• Simple class progression (need to contribute to building to be able to swap early game)
• Farming for food -> spawns (means minecrafting is acceptable and benefits the team)
• Boats (allows water assaults and passing deep water)
• Fire (for burninating the peasants/countryside/flaxroofcottages)
• Tech Research (so you can’t just rush at the start of the game with all this new stuff)
• More Siege Engines (ballista, battering ram, canopy)
• No 10 minutes of spawning into enemy fire (home port dies, game over)

We won’t have time to polish the other modes to work with the new code, so we’re trying to make it encompass the majority of KAG as it stands, with a little more structure. There will still be TDM and a CTF without flags on spawn, but they might not be as complete as we’d like upon release.

We’ve been splitting all of the engine functionality up into nice, manageable components and ripping out all the hardcoded logic for the past month. This means that there’s no flag by default, the engine doesn’t know what bombs are at compile time, and movement code is all external.

As such, the whole game is basically being recoded, with some things left out or reworked, and a lot of entirely new things going in. It’s really an entirely new game.

Here’s a screenshot of how a knight standing in the trees now looks: NOTE THAT THE TREES THEMSELVES ARE A WORK IN PROGRESS art-wise.

We’re actually on the fence as to whether we call this next release “King Arthur’s Gold” since it’s so far removed from the classic game. We’ll definitely be splitting the game into Classic and Full Version though, and everyone who’s paid for the game will obviously retain access to the game. We just feel that there may be some confused people coming back to the game, but I guess that’s life.

There are two more pieces of good news behind all of this rework:

1. I get to eliminate all of the old, very strange bugs by starting with fresh code 🙂
2. You get to use the same tools we do to make fully networked mods.

Yes, this does mean you can make bisoncopters. I don’t think many people will be holding that against us though.

More info and screenshots as we have them 🙂

Discussion here

Max/Geti