Dear friends,
For sure you’ve registered that the development is not going as scheduled especially with the promised combat. We are fully aware of the commitments we have to you, as our supporters, our customers. That is why it should be fair to inform you our faithful community about such important things.
We started the project full of enthusiasm and engagement, and this state remains. Still 2 devs are working more than full time on this project. Some time ago we realized, that this game needs to deliver gameplay as soon as possible. And our original combat concept has one big flaw. The gameplay is possible only when combat is flawless and highly detailed as you see enemies from a very close distance. Which brings a lot of unexpected issues and in the level of highest details. Also combat without destroying castles would not be as catchy and would not make sense, why should we build castles, when they cannot be besieged for a long time. So making such realistic combat with all that features, which makes World of Castles a game that would take way longer time than expected with our small team. We do not want to release combat for all at the cost of an unfinished state when we know, it is not pleasant to fight yet.
We would like to go into waters of village management strategy. At the start, you will get a few settlers and two houses for them. You will have to manage their roles, setting who will be woodcutters, who hunter, who will work on the field etc. Your villagers will harvest resources. Resources will be consumed by villagers (food, wood as fuel) or will be used to build more houses or a mighty castle. Firstly we want to implement bare mechanics, which will be quite limited, on harvesting only wood and food, and limited villagers free time activities (just to sleep). We plan to deliver this in September and later we will improve and expand this by more roles, events - which will also fluently entering the combat with thieves attacks. Which will be seen from first person and then you will see all the details but will not be the only and main feature, we believe even the current state should be at the more acceptable level, than just duels.
We do it in our good conviction in the name of this game, that this is the right way we have to go right now. We are really afraid, that this project would face existential issues if we would continue with this huge chunk of work without a safe budget and without adequate manpower. And if there is an option to deliver not-less interesting gameplay within our current strengths, we will not risk your money and trust. This does not mean, we will never make combat we promised, we for sure still see it interesting as you, but we want to deliver something, we will not be shamed for. Just noticing that also this mode could one day have an event of type siege of your village/castle 😉 So it goes hand in hand with our original ideas.
Hope you understand us and our changes. And will look forward to the new direction we would like to go. Feel free to ask on anything, or express yourself to these changes. We all want to have this game to improve, so your feedback is valuable to us.
P.S. we will keep an option to build freely without any limitation or need of caring for your villagers as you have it right now