KLords of XP

[kyonides]

KLords of XP

by Kyonides Arkanthes

Introduction

It is loosely based on the Lords of the Realm II videogame. Here you can simulate a feudal system, manage some counties and battle other lords till one of them becomes the next king or queen.

The opponents will be controlled, in the far future, by the computer in this case.

The original game heavily depended on mouse clicks to interact with the game screen, my game does not implement any mouse system as of yet. Thus you still need to use your keyboard or your gamepad to change the current view, select any shire, etc.

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Screenshots

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Basic Knowledge

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The game is divided in two sections, land management and battles. Just like in real life the game has four seasons a year and it always begin with the winter. Every lord has been given some custom serfs, a few cows or some grain. The county (every land) might include either a quarry, some ore mine or some woods as a secondary source of resources and crowns, the game's official currency. Your main source of income is taxes. It is upon you to decide if you let your people starve or grow fatty or squeeze their purses till the bitter end.

To defeat other lords you need to siege their castles first. The only exception would be that any lord had conquered an independent shire and had no chance to build a castle there. You may choose any of its 5 kinds of structures, namely the wooden pallisade, the motte and bailey, the Norman keep, the stone castle and finally the royal castle. The bigger the structure the longer it takes to build it and it will also require you to dispatch more and more builders every single time you start its construction process.

At the beginning of winter your villagers will harvest all of the available grain while farmers will be reporting the birth of calves or the deaths of their cattle every single season. Every time a season ends, your lumberjacks will report how many tons of wood they have cut. Your miners how many tons of iron ore they have extracted this time. Something similar happens to the quarry workers.

There are shires that seem to attract most of the lords' attention like England's royal counties or France's Berry county. It also sports some advance features like advanced farming or army foraging. In my humble opinion they are not impressive at all but a mere nuisance. Battles outcomes could be autocalculated by the game's IA.

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Curious Facts

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Aluxes might become the lord representing the player by means of a script call.
You may set the in game calendar at any given time.

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What has been implemented so far?

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• Data Structures
  
• A Simple Name Menu
  
• The Barebones of the KLords Menu
  
• Parsing Text Template Files
  
• Locating the Shire's Town by centering the screen accordingly
  
• Displaying the Player's Stats
  
• Showing the Shire's Stats or a Warning telling you that it is an independent territory or is under the rule of some megalomaniac AI.
  
• Lots of Script Calls to change settings in game
  
• A few graphical resources, mainly icons
  
• The game's basic menu bar
  

Download Demo

[kyonides]

A Few Lieges Are Waiting for a Chance to Conquer Their Neighbors

There is a new version of this game project already available, guys!

My latest upload includes a few graphical improvements like vaguely recreating the original game's top menu.
 Take in consideration that RMXP has no mouse support by default so you will be in need of using the arrows on your keyboard or your gamepad to change the current view or map section aka shire.

I have added a few screenshots of the game's GUI to the main post of this thread. Feel free to check them out! 

WARNING!

The File menu is partially implemented in the current alpha release of KLords of XP.
The Help menu has not been implement as of yet!
I have altered the text template files so the old ones will not be parsed correctly anymore and throw horrible error messages while testing the game.

[kyonides]

The Third Alpha Release Has Come!

This time I have come back to let you know that I have uploaded an improved demo recently. It will actually allow you to explore the whole map. A simple cursor will let you perform this task with ease.

I did not implement lots of features like I have done before because I was busy editing  the KLords WorldMap tileset to make the terrain look more "natural" than ever before, if ever possible. Later on I also included flags to identify the local lord currently governing the place. Yeah, even independent shires do have one of their own.

Now you can press SHIFT key to change the current map view, namely the free exploration and the shire list.

There are two ways to exit the game. I made sure you would not close it by accident unless you are rather clumsy.

[kyonides]

The Deadly Fourth Release
That Had Been Lurking Around the Forum
Has Finally Arrived! 

 Fine! I admit it, this release will not kill you at all.

What it actually does is surprising you with new features like some brand new load and save menus!
 I'm afraid they aren't finished but they do allow you to load the first saved game or let you pick its name before saving all data.


By the way, I've uploaded some screenshots so I've edited the main post to better reflect its current development stage.
I was busy  rewriting some code and copy pasting some default code with minor modifications to allow me to fully separate the KLords specific features from the $game_system dataset. Since my game will be a Role Play - Strategy hybrid game, I needed to make sure changes in the world map wouldn't affect what you might have done in the common town maps. You see, in a not so near future you might need to fight monsters or enemy armies on your own.

Meanwhile you can swiftly shift to another main menu list of options by pressing the left or right arrow.

As a sidenote I might tell you that I've added a few on screen help sections in the shape of disabled buttons or simple black boxes as a way to help you understand what buttons are currently enabled besides the obvious Cancel and OK buttons.

So what are you waiting for, matey?

Don't you wanna try your luck?

[kyonides]

A Dire Warning!?

Code:

if Input.trigger?(Input::C)
 # If player hit the OK button...
  # Make some sprite display some strange warning regarding visiting Kustom Town...
end

Here's the "proof of concept!"

As you may have noticed by now, the Map button has been erased to make it look similar to the original game menu. If you're on the map, hit Cancel button to open the File menu. Use the Up and Down arrow buttons to select an option or hit Left or Right buttons to immediatly jump to the next menu.

By the way, you can hit the OK button while on the Shire Stats screen to end the current turn. So far only the Visit Shire and End Turn buttons work as expected.

[kyonides]

Six Rounds and Things Are Pretty Much the Same 

My game KLords of XP Alpha Release 6 has been published tonight!

This new iteration of my project brings you a bug fix and a new sprite asking you to confirm that you really want to overwrite an existing saved game file.

By the way, two new shires have been added. Now you will end up facing an independent shire, Knight Loch, Baron Masters and the Fallen Priest Banks almost at the same time. Just by hitting the OK button on top of some of those town centers you might learn a bit more about their current rulers or the shire's (sad) background.

For my fellow developers (basically scripters in this case) I might tell you that I tried to simplify the text acquiring process, usually known as data retrieval and parsing, to reduce the number of times you would make calls to a given event. This obviously means it will have no need to repeat a few steps of this process every single time it will try to retrieve the strings to be displayed on screen. So do not come back telling me I crafted expensive methods to deal with such basic issues.

 Don't you get bored of the need to make your scripts extremely modular?

Sometimes I do!

[kyonides]

KLords Now Has Several Custom Menus!

Forget about the horrible name menu that the default game has to offer. Get used to eye catching menus instead!
Since the seventh alpha release of my current game project, you can enjoy entering text on screen!
If you don't care about hitting the arrows quite often, of course.

By the way, the current character limit for any name is 14 characters.

You don't need to enter any more characters, right?

Right, I almost forgot to tell you that you can now send a spy  to any given county.

Next season you should be able to get that shire's stats displayed on screen. That will last for a single season for the time being.

Beware!  Your spy might also embezzle  your investment funds!

EDIT

I (re)implemented the feature that allowed you to jump from the character set table on the name menu to the button set on the right hand side by just hitting the right arrow button till you have reached the last column.

Now it should be easier to deal with said buttons and save the name in no time. 

[kyonides]

Custom Menus & New Seasonal Alert System

Of course, the spies  have reputations to preserve...

If they ever care about that.

What do you think about my custom gamepad like buttons?

[kyonides]

Spies Are Available Guys!

Now there is a nice way to pick your favorite or shady or cheap  spy, my fellow lords!

Another interesting feature is that this list of available spies changes depending on the destination or their availability.

You won't find more than 3 spies at any given time.

They do earn or lose reputation points after each mission.

And yes, they can stay there stealing as much information as possible for up to 12 months or 3 years!

 They would grow tired of their environment if they had remained there for any longer.

Now you can't say you don't know how to navigate through the menu for it has got a help section of its own.

By the way, I also rewrote lots of code that are not even GUI related.

[kyonides]

The Time Has Finally Come to Raise an Army!

Since version 0.7.0 you can open the Army Recruitment scene.

There you can choose from any of the 8 troop types currently available, namely the peasant, the maceman, the swordsman, the lancer, the axeman, the bowman (archer) and the mage.

 Yeah, I know. Lords of the Realm never had any mages, but  who cares? This is an SRPG hybrid after all.

After hitting the OK button, you will see a new brand new soldier standing right in front of the given town.

This time Wulfo helped me take the screenshot as it was the only way I wouldn't end up rebooting my PC to open another OS.