Kings Shire Demo

Kings Shire is a city-building simulation game in which you'll take on the role of a king. But to become a proper king, you'll need a castle from which you'll be able to manage your kingdom. To build and defend your castle, you'll need a lot of people who follow you, and for that you'll need a thriving economy, to provide all the goods they need and all the materials you need to build your dream castle.

I'm currently running a Kickstarter for the game to fund another year of development, as I've worked full time on Kings Shire for a year and would like to continue that, but I don't have the funds for another year.

You can find further and more detailed information on the Kickstarter page.

Main Features

Build

Buildings are the heart of your economy. From lumberjacks and mines to forges and breweries, each building provides vital resources for your kingdom.  With simple and complex production chains to produce various goods needed to build, recruit and meet the needs of those follow your lead. 

Currently, there are already over 20 buildings in the game, with many more to be added over the next year. 

Design your Castle

Building castles is similar to building new production buildings, but with more freedom that allows you to customize the castle to your liking. 

Instead of a more traditional approach where castle parts have fixed sizes, I have developed a unique system that allows you to change the size of the castle pieces within certain limits. An archway is just an archway until the player decides to add a gate, portcullis, and/or drawbridge to it. It is entirely up to the player you how to combine the available parts according to your taste.

To give even more freedom, I decided against a check and a mechanic that says castle pieces have to be supported in a certain way in order to be placed. This can lead to unrealistic castles, theoretically even flying castles, but that should be a decision you make.

Needs

To achieve full productivity of your workers, you need to provide them with certain goods. The more advanced and handcrafted the goods produced are, the more demanding the workers needs are.

Resupply Army

As long as your troops are within the castle's borders, they will receive their supplies directly from the castle's warehouse. This is the only situation where goods are not actually transported, as this causes major problems for the defense of the kingdom. This may change in the future if I can find a good way to implement this without disrupting your defensiv capabilitys.

However, if you send them out to meet an enemy before they reach the castle, they will need to be supplied with supplies somehow. This is where the supply wagon comes in. 

The supply wagon works similarly to units, the player can command it like any other unit. Once on the scene, it supplies all units within its range with the goods and supplies they need to continue the fight against the enemy.  Once the supplies are depleted, the supply wagon automatically returns to the castle to replenish new supplies and then returns to its starting point. 

Each unit has enough supplies to last a while without a supply cart. The idea is that every good you produce is important. Either by improving the lives of the workers (productivity) or the morale and commitment of your army.

Defending the Castle

You've built your castle that you're proud of, but it won't go unnoticed. From small groups of bandits trying to rob you and your citizens to entire enemy armies trying to take your castle for themselves, you'll be challenged to test your defenses against them. 

Destruction

Be on your guard when the enemies bring siege weapons, because they can do a lot of damage to your castle walls and bring them down quickly. 

Take matter into your own hands

If you want to be even closer to the action, there is one more thing. You, as the player, have a representation in the game world, and since you are the de facto king anyway, your representation is the king. You can take control of him whenever you want, walk around your kingdom or join the troops at the front to get an extra morale boost when you fight side by side with them.

Current State

Currently there are 32 different resources and goods that you can collect, harvest, mine and produce in over 20 different buildings. There are 5 different units that need to be trained/built.

8 different types of castle parts in different sizes and variants, which already add up to over 100 different parts. These include some basic walls and stairs, but also more complex parts like portcullis and gates.

Your workers and troops have needs that must be satisfied, otherwise production will slow down and your troops may even look for someone who cares more about them. Currently, their needs are limited to simple goods, as more complex goods are either not yet in the game or will only be needed after a future upgrade of the production building. 

Enemies will invade your kingdom from time to time and get stronger and stronger depending on your defensive strength.  I didn't want the enemies to be something you have to stress about to much as the game should be a relaxing experience. This isn't a tower defense game after all.

The AI for the fighting is in need of an overhaul, but does its job for now. There is a reason for this, there is currently a new massively improved AI system in development with Unreal Engine 5 that will allow for many more AI agents (workers, troops, enemies) to be simulated. However, this system will require me to build up the AI system from the ground up again and wasn't quite ready when I needed it. For this reason, I did not spend to much time on the combat AI system, as it would have meant a lot of work that would have been wiped out later. Now, the UE developers have already made improvements to this new AI system that will be included in Unreal Engine 5.1. I expect to start converting to the new AI system after the Kickstarter campaign is over.

Otherwise, most of the mechanisms needed for the game are already finished. Some of them are already quite polished, others still need to be revised before they can be considered final.

One of the biggest things that isn't even close to being finished right now is getting the right assets for all the buildings that are already in the game. The 3D artist I'm working with is working hard to create amazing models for each building. Until then, most of the buildings are currently placeholders, as creating over 20 detailed models takes much more time than for me to implement the base for them in the game.

Right now the lumberjack, forester, sawmill and the well are final models plus on the Castle part side the Gates and Portcullis have recived a major upgrade from my poor atempts at modeling them.

Sawmill

Also even though you can already take control of the king the whole mechanic is still in a really early stage. Combat feels cumbersome and getting around is quite slow. This system will get developt into a proper first person experience with proper combat, different weapons and a mount. 

The Composer I'm working with has already created some beautiful tracks for the game including the one you can hear in the trailer. Currently there are 4 finished tracks in game with more to come over the rest of the development period. There will be a complete custom made Soundtrack in the end and you can already listen to the first track on all major music streaming sites.

Demo

The content of the Demo is mostly what you see in the Trailer.

As mentioned before, most of the buildings are still placeholders, although I'm working with a 3D artist now, it takes time to create the models we need. So far we have a finished lumberjack, a forester, sawmill and a well. He also reworked my flawed attempts at the gates and portcullis (these are also included as final models in the demo) and made some other minor improvements to the castle parts.

Lumberjack

The performance can also get pretty bad if you grow your kingdom big enough, which is mainly due to the current AI system - one more reason to get the new system up and running soon. 

• most buildings are placeholders                                
• the only final buildings are the lumberjack, forester, sawmill and the well
• some animations are missing and are temporarily replaced with others
• 1 map
• 3 Units
• 3 Enemy types
• destruction
• Building system with                 
•          nearly a 100 different castle parts with different sizes/scaling, variants and destruction
•         23 buildings
• dynamic paths
• 3 music tracks
• bugs
  

In general, the demo is still what I would call a very early build / alpha. You will most likely find a lot of bugs. Even though most of the features are in the game, there is still a lot of room for improvement, some more obvious than others. I appreciate any feedback or bugs, no matter how small, that you report in Discord. This will help me a lot in fixing bugs and improving the game.