FROM THE BLOG

KAG’s Direction.

I got asked about this on the forums recently and decided I’d have a short ramble here as a break from a coding assignment.

Note that nothing here is final and we’re still playing around with feature ideas and a roadmap, but it seems some of you have different ideas about where KAG’s going than we do.

In the short term, we want to get the basic, free version of KAG together and more or less finalised. That means:

• Some more structures (Rock pots, stockpiles, hall buildings, bomb and siege workshops)
• Bug Fixes everywhere oh god so many bugs.
• Making the HUD more presentable.
• GUI overhaul + Server lobby.
• Bison + Normal cows.
• Game modes: WAR, CTF, INF (as in soldat), TDM (first team to x kills wins), BLD (creative only servers, inf resources). ZOMBIES if halloween falls within that time period.
• Tutorials
• Maybe farming
• Maybe customisation

At that point, free KAG will be “done”. We’ll update it from time to time but that’ll be the point where we start working on a more in-depth game. As it is, KAG is fairly simple. We’ll make it as easy to get “into” as we can, with tutorials and maybe a button to turn on a more advanced HUD showing up later with all the complicated bits turned off.

Gold servers will exist throughout so you can still play safe from the stingy griefers out there 🙂

Once we’ve done that, with the assumption that free KAG will be played as a demo, paid KAG will get a lot more content. It won’t get too much more complicated (we still like the idea of simple, fun elements put together into something with emergent complexity, rather than elements that are complex in their own right) but there’ll be more stuff to do and a wider set of roles (which may or may not mean more classes). We’ll worry less about making the game idiot-proof as well.

We’re keen to explore:

• Mechanisms. I love the idea of hooking up a pressure plate to spike traps, or pulling a lever to open doors. Conveyor belts and lever-activated-crossbows and manually detonated explosives and water towers!
• Non-vanishing dirt (ie digging out dirt makes a pile of dirt that you have to deal with) for more realistic mining logistics.
• Moving castles/siege towers.
• Fluids in general (can you say Island Fort? Water tower? Magma-Dam?)
• Bots to give the boring tasks to. (Don’t feel like mining? Pay Urist to do it for you!)
• Population based play (ie permadeath per-unit)
• Unit progression and upgrades
• Religious buildings (area of effect buffs and nerfs eg. Shrine to Epona = all nearby team units get a speed boost)
• Flora and Fauna – being able to get food from picking fruit and hunting bison is a start, but fireflies, cave monsters and stinging plants could be fun too.
• …This list is getting long. Suffice to say we’ve got more than enough ideas for now and a long road ahead 🙂

As for large scale direction, we’re aiming for a sort of fortress mode being the main way to play KAG, with elements of dwarf fortress in there but designed to be much more accessible than ASCII only and from a side-scrolling perspective.

In other words, at the moment we’re thinking Free KAG = Demo, Paid KAG = Dream game. We’ll be actively encouraging people to play the free game because that’s where new players are most likely to go, and for those wondering we will almost certainly allow paid users to access free to play servers from the paid program.

So, that’s where we’re thinking of going. The list will likely be reordered and changed over time, but we want more fortress creation and proper warfare, and less spamming suicide bombers and knights digging with swords. Figured we may as well give you some insight into where we’re going.

Sorry for the lack of accompanying art, I’m not at home at the moment so can’t draw.

Geti