October is a special month in Knights Province history - the game was conceived almost exactly 10 years ago back in October of 2013.
It has been three years since the last big release of Alpha 11. There was a lot of work done to make the game look and play better than ever. Here are the major improvements and features:
- 4-way buildings placement - buildings can be placed facing each of 4 main directions. This makes town planning more interesting and strategic.
- New water rendering engine with waterfalls and water levels for better looks.
- PBR and Screen-space reflections, normal maps and parallax maps - these are new rendering techniques that allow for a nicer picture, especially for metallic surfaces (like armored units warfare and water bodies), buildings roofs and roads.
- Lots of new house models, textures and improved unit animations
- Brand new in-house work animations - covered in detail in previous post. They make the towns look more lively.
- Sheepyards, Sheep, Wool, Gambesons - new production chain with new buildings and wares, that is more historically accurate and more challenging and interesting to manage.
- Reworking HUD UI/UX - new and better GUI items and a whole new reworked minimap supporting the free in-game camera.
- Reworked object picking UI/UX for more accurate control over the town and combat.
- Improved terrain render, roads and building footprints - terrain got better lighting and nice decals for house and roads.
- Launcher will help to keep the game up to date.
- Improved AI city building and army training.
- New campaign "The True King of D" by Kinghts Dzapan (first 9 missions) featuring lots of new dynamic script features (such as popup dialogs, trading, etc.).
- New text localizations (Brazilian Portuguese, French, German, Spanish, Polish, Turkish).
There are many more smaller changes and improvements, they all can be seen in the lengthy game changelog (available on game start and from Options menu).
There are still several areas where the game needs more research and development which will be addressed in following Alpha 13, before it can go into the Beta stage:
- Horses and farm animals breeding, should it be handled in the same way as sheep?
- Walls
- Siege machines
- Trade (market, wagons)
- Multiplayer
- Assets and content (building models, unit models, animations, etc.)
The game is free to play yet, but if you like it please consider supporting its creation on Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/knights_province. Add to your wishlist here. Main community hub for discussion, support and ideas is on Discord - https://discord.gg/ZGrgC6G. Feedback and word of mouth would also be greatly appreciated.
Download links can be found on Discord and official website - https://www.knightsprovince.com