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[SalmonGod]

PTW

[Zsinj]

The name King Under the Mountain could get you into trouble with the Tolkien legates sueing you. I'd recommend changing it.
I believe Tome4 dev had to change the name from troubles of Middle earth to tales of Maj' Ejal for that same reason. It seems the (great-?) grandchildren of Tolkien aren't very nice folks when it comes to protecting their legacy.

http://lotr.wikia.com/wiki/King_under_the_Mountain
http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/King_under_the_Mountain

For the rest: Even though I've grown very skeptical of df light clones, I must say your art looks nice. Try to focus not on resembling DF as much as you can, but try to create your own unique game. Play evil, dungeon keeper style is a good theme though. Perhaps make that the game's main focus rather than orcs and dwarves?

Appreciate the advice although I've decided to stick with the name - unlike "Middle Earth" there's a lot of prior art of "King under the Mountain" or "King in the Mountain" as a scandinavian folklore tale, much in the same way as we get our basic concepts of dwarves from. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_in_the_mountain I am aware of how litigious the Tolkein estate is but this isn't a term Tolkein came up with.

[Zsinj]

Is there any possibility of a built-in 3D renderer? I find that building forts is always more satisfying when I can visualize them in all their 3D glory!

I'd doubt it, adding extra features will almost certainly come before doing this - although Prison Architect eventually added one so never say never

[Zsinj]

Another place you could go with the DF-like is a game that tries to capture the full 3d glory of huge halls and sprawling caverns that we see in Moria and the Lonely Mountain in the LOTR films. Dwarf Fortress's underground features don't quite lend themselves to massive scale interior scupting yet, and most other games don't have multiple z-levels or require you to dig everything out.

Although I won't be going into full 3D or Z-levels, I've written the map generator to have a tendency to create huge underground caverns within the mountain, ready for extra fun stuff to be added and discovered

You can try out an earlier version in your browser at http://mapgen.kingunderthemounta.in/ (it will struggle on a mobile though)

[Zsinj]

Less to show off a bit recently as I've been rejigging how the engine subsystems communicate with each other.

There has been more work done with the designating orders as you can see in this video:



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3BXkNV6Xlc

[sprinkled chariot]

Good luck, dude c:

[Mephansteras]

Cool. I'm always open to more ideas like this, since every once in a while a gem like RimWorld shows up.

[Flying Dice]

I am hesitant about the trees, though. The perspective is way off from everything else and they really obscure a lot of the game world.

[Zsinj]

Yeah I'm wondering if the should at least become transparent near the cursor. Once more of it is in place I'll be reviewing it and setting what needs changing, everything could be counted as placeholder for now. Thanks for the feedback! 

[Flying Dice]

I mean, there are basically two standards. One's to just have them seen from directly above (while being impassable) as you see in DF &c. so that you can clearly distinguish everything; the other is the ToME style, having them be side-on like that but also making the sprites block movement on their tiles with maybe a tiny bit of overlap. In the case of the latter, pretty much everything is slanted at the same angle, though, which doesn't really mesh well with the top-down view that games like this tend to require if they're not going to be utter headaches to eyeball distances in.

There are some games like Elona+ where trees do work like you have them, but those are generally tick-based and cede direct control of the character to the player so there's not really that same degree of "goddamn it where's my guy" when you can just tap right or left a couple times. More importantly, pretty much every game that has that (at least for me) ends up with the sole memorable type of tree-related interaction or thought being "oh hell, which tree am I behind?" rather than anything positive.

I mean, it can work, but I'd suggest something like finding/making/altering tree sprites so that they're a bit more limited in their coverage of background tiles. I can say right now that if I were to play that I'd just start straight off by deforesting the map, both so that I didn't have to hunt down my dudes and to make an open kill-zone that enemies couldn't wander through half-invisibly. They don't have to be to scale to convey what they need to, as Rimworld showed--those trees are, what a tile of trunk and a tile and a half of concealing foliage?

[Zsinj]

I've actually been intending to have every type of a tree's trunk block movement but haven't got around to updating the pathfinding yet.

Thanks, that all helps, I've been thinking the same that if anything was hiding in the forest I'd be planning to deforest it too. They've definitely ended up covering more tiles than I wanted them to so it's all up for review

[Damiac]

Looks pretty good, better than I was expecting from the topic title.

And to be honest, I'd change the title if I were you.  You don't even call if a DF-like, you literally call if a graphical dwarf fortress, which it obviously isn't (Thank goodness for that).  We're on the DF boards, king under the mountain is already pretty evocative, yet your topic title is just name dropping two different games. 

[Zsinj]

Looks pretty good, better than I was expecting from the topic title.

And to be honest, I'd change the title if I were you.  You don't even call if a DF-like, you literally call if a graphical dwarf fortress, which it obviously isn't (Thank goodness for that).  We're on the DF boards, king under the mountain is already pretty evocative, yet your topic title is just name dropping two different games.

Thanks for the feedback! I realise I've probably gone too far with describing the game as so similar to DF, it's aiming to be a mix of multiple games with some special ingredients added too of course. I'll see what I can come up with, though I'm open to suggestions.

[Aklyon]

Sounds better than I was thinking from the title.

[SalmonGod]

I'm open to suggestions.

Your game is doomed to irrelevancy if you don't ride the VR wave!  And you should include a rhythm game element for extra innovation points.  Who would have ever thought to combine these genres?!  But Zsinj makes it work like it was meant to be!