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The wait is almost over – Make Your Kingdom will be out on Steam in just a couple of days!

You will be able to dive into the exciting process of creating your own kingdom starting January 20th. It’s been 4 years of hard work – and almost everything you’ll see in the game was developed by one person! The developer (yo_serjio) has done a great job of improving the game since the demo was released in the summer of 2020 - new mechanics and building models have been added to the game, and the user interface has been changed completely.

And while we wait for the release countdown to finally be over, share with us – how did you find out about the game? We would love to hear your stories!

Steam page:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/964020/Make_Your_Kingdom

Orcs may appear at any moment. So keep your swords and bows ready. But where do you find weapons in a peaceful settlement?

Forge is a place where iron is being delivered to from the smelter. Here you can make swords, shields and bows for your settlers. With such weapons, not a single orc will pass.

Welcome the most terrifying night of this terrifying year with joy! Ride a broom, make some potions, hang out with a friendly orc in your backyard :) 

Happy Halloween!

You will need a smelter in order to make iron, which is made out of stone. Use it to upgrade buildings and forge weapons.

Just like in real life, the settlers have to pay for some stuff.

The buildings in which the settlers work would start to require payment at some point. After that the tax collectors will collect gold from residential buildings and deliver it to the buildings that require payment in order for them to keep working.

Do you like cider? 

The settlers adore it, so we decided to make a cider factory for them. Cider will be brewed from red berries and water at the cider factory and then it will be sent to taverns.

Here we are with the news about updated Prologue ;) What has changed🤔:

- Added the main menu

- Added a mechanic repairing buildings

- Added player mechanics of interaction with resources

- Added manual mechanic improvement of houses

- Added the gameplay after graduation (the departure of the expedition)

- Completely redesigned gameplay prologue

- Completely redesigned interface

- Reworked color balance

- Improved game balance

- Work has been done to optimize

- Fixed save game

- Fixed search path

- Old saves don't work :(

We'll be waiting for your feedback;)

 Make Your Kingdom will participate in Steam Game Festival: Autumn edition starting October 7th  ✨

Do you like the ability to take control of the founder of the settlement to walk around the city, help to collect resources or fight orcs? 

What other actions would you like to be able to do as the settler?

The game will have defence walls that will protect your settlement from orc raids and also explode epicly 😬

What do you think about adding some grass?

The game will have a trade house and a trade airship. And yes, it will be possible to exchange resources there: 1 resource for sale and 3 for purchase. The airship will arrive with random resources 😬

If you ignore a source of danger for too long, there’s a good chance to be left with no resources and a destroyed settlement in the end 😅

Orcs, cold and hunger – not every settler can endure these trials.
Diseases can spread because of dead people and the living ones will get sick.
To prevent that, you need to build cemeteries – their workers will take care of the dead comrades.

When you’re not fond of your neighbors and there is an opportunity to create a new kingdom on another land 😂

If fires and diseases can spread across your settlement, then you also need to have doctors to heal people 😇 There will be a hospital building in the game and the potions that the healer brews will go directly there so you can take help your settlers get better ❤

Our settlers send their greetings from vacation! They are worried about the kingdom and are already asking to return back to work asap  

Magic potion helps cure settlers that got sick! Potion is brewed in the healer's hut. Potion recipe: green berries, well water. But be careful with the proportions though  

 We decided to send our settlers on their first vacation! Which country do you think they are going to?) 

Our settlers work day and night, but just like in real life, they can get sick and infect others  😬 Therefore, it is important to monitor their well-being so that the construction of the kingdom goes according to plan!

We think it’s about time to send an expedition into 2021 to check out how’s it going there

We plan to add a fire station to the game! With an addition of a fire station your citizens won't need to fear the fire anymore. But that doesn't mean it's time to relax: you would also have to monitor the fire risk indicators for every building.

Hello everyone! On behalf of the Make Your Kingdom team, we would like to thank you for participating in our little alpha test and playing the prologue. Now we are ready to show you an approximate development roadmap. As you can see, there will be many additions and changes to the game and we will share more details regarding these milestones in the future.

https://steamcommunity.com/games/1257560/announcements/detail/382744788181203441...

Hello everyone! A quick reminder: we'll be streaming Make Your Kingdom and answering your questions as a part of Steam Game Festival in about an hour! 

Watch the stream on our Steam page:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/964020/Make_Your_Kingdom/

Ask us anything in the stream chat or in our Discord: https://discord.gg/XFQkPZB

Hello everyone! June 20th at 1 PM GMT we'll be streaming Make Your Kingdom and answering your questions as a part of Steam Game Festival! 

Join the Q&A session on our Discord: https://discord.gg/XFQkPZB

Watch the stream on our Steam page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/964020/Make_Your_Kingdom/

Home, sweet home

When you develop a city builder you have to think up all kinds of different resources. The materials for the construction and food for people gotta come from somewhere. I decided to keep the resource system pretty classic. You have wood, stone, berries. meat, wool, coal, wheat, fabric etc. Production of some of the resources depends on having the other resources. For example, you can’t get coal without wood or fabric without wool, which seems pretty logical.

The game has different types of building and structures. The system is pretty standard too: the main building, a basic house, an architect house, a butcher’s house, a textile factory, a coal burner, a forester’s house, etc.

Here is an important thing: the more satisfied your people with the living conditions, the more places you have for them in the house. These conditions include: having food, water, coal, etc. It depends on the house’s surroundings - if you don’t have a well near the house, there won’t be any water. A residential building can also get a second floor if a lot of people are happy with their life there. The player can choose which buildings to destroy, but don’t get too carried away with it if you don’t want to set your whole city on fire. ;)



In the beginning was…

Make Your Kingdom: Prologue, which is an alpha demo of the game, has recently been released, and as you could notice, it has some bugs, restrictions and a lot of experimental stuff. But, I mean, what else did you expect from an alpha demo? :)

You can test all the basic mechanics in the demo: play as a head of the city and see the life of your people up close, fight orcs, try to survive the harsh winter, build all the different structures (there will be a lot more buildings in the full game though) and unlock some achievements!

Putting the free demo out on Steam was a really important step and a right one too. It let me see the game through the players’ eyes. You also helped me test the existing game mechanics, discover a lot of bugs and issues and all the reviews you left has already put an impact on the development of the full game.

The idea of releasing a prologue came to me because I always want to try out the certain game myself before actually buying it. But not every game these days has a demo. Or the demo just lets you play through the small section of the already finished game. I find this kinda boring. MYK Prologue is a different story - it’s a place for us all to experiment and I’m glad that so many people decided to be a part of it.

Per aspera ad astra

Even though Make Your Kingdom has been in development for several years already, I know that there is still a lot to do. The prologue already showed me all the things that needs to be changed or added.

Actually, I was really eager to see your feedback. Some may say that if there is no criticism or suggestions then everything about your game is perfect. But that’s not true. There is always room for improvement. If people don’t critique your game and leave no suggestions or questions, it means that barely anyone cares about your project. And when you put your heart, soul and time into something, lack of people’s interest in it is literally the worst.

When you develop a game by yourself, you just can’t find all the bugs or test every mechanic properly or optimize it to be playable on every PC. That’s why you need actual players trying it out.

So if you like games and especially good games, try to leave your feedback every now and then, it really helps the devs out. But try to keep it constructive too. Sure, you can take your frustration out in the comments or in the review without letting the developer know about the actual issues with the game, but is it really gonna help anyone? I don’t think so. That’s why I hope that you’re giving me constructive criticism and feedback. :)



Something ends, something begins

And finally I want to thank all of you for reading the first diary, I hope it was somewhat entertaining. And if you’d like to see more of these - let me know. I hope you are having fun playing the demo and don’t forget to follow Make Your Kingdom on social media if you want to see exclusive content that’s not on Steam. ;) As they say, «Keep calm and stay tuned». Bye everyone! :)



P.S. All the screenshots used in these diaries were made during the earlier stages of development.

yo_serjio

Yo_serjio is an indie game developer working on low-poly city building game with survival elements called «Make Your Kingdom». Right now you can already try a free demo of the game and leave your opinion on it.

Despite its simple and cute visuals the game can get quite hardcore and challenging - try to fight back an orc pack, survive the harsh winter or manage the needs of your people without letting the settlement get completely destroyed.

Developer Diary 1 (Part 1)

Hello, my name is Sergey Yurkin (or you may know me as yo_serjio) and I’m the main and only developer of «Make Your Kingdom» - a low-poly city building game where you have to build, expand and improve your settlement. Developing a game is a difficult process but when you have to do every bit of work by yourself it becomes a real trial. I've been working on «Make Your Kingdom» for more than two years and I'm basically used to this trial by now, but let’s start from the beginning.

How I decided to make my own kingdom. 

When I was a child I liked playing economic simulation games and city building games. I could play them all day and night really. My personal favorites were «Simcity», «Knight and Merchants», «The Settlers 2», «Pharaoh» and «Caesar». All these games have left an imprint on me and I still feel inspired by them. I liked building cities and their infrastructure, monitor the needs and the mood of the settlers and just watching them live their lives. All these aspects that I enjoyed so much as a child I tried to replicate in «Make Your Kingdom». Maybe some of the old school gamers will even feel nostalgic playing my game, at least I hope so! But the game has a lot to offer for all the new school gamers too.

Before this project I was working on the other game that I was building with MonoGame. Then one of my friends suggested to check out Unity. And since the programming language was basically the same I decided to give Unity a try. I really enjoyed working in it and got inspired to make a brand new project.

When it came to choosing the visual style of the game I tried many different effects and shaders until I found the combination of the ones that I personally found most fitting.

The main effects that create and atmosphere in the game are: volumetric light, hard shadows from light sources and the refraction of light between objects. 

I also tried various shaders for water - realistic ones and cartoony ones, but decided to go with a mix between these two styles since it fits the game style the best. 

Another influence in terms of visuals was the relatively new game «Kingdom and Castles». There was one thing about it that I didn’t like though - the vivid colours that I find too bright and unnatural. For «Make Your Kingdom» I chose more calm, pastel colors.

I like how the game looks right now and I think it already has its own unique vibe and visual aesthetic. And because of the overall simple look it’s also easily recognisable. :)

Fun fact - the first step in the development of «Make your Kingdom» was writing a script for the construction of the building - it was at the end of 2017. You can take a look at it here.

Kingdom from the inside.

Developing a game follows all the main principles of city building games - you have to go from a nondescript settlement to a huge and rich kingdom. And I’ve experienced it firsthand.

As I said earlier, I was inspired by my favorite childhood games and borrowed a few mechanics from them. For example, in «Knight and Merchants» and «The Settlers 2» I really liked the way you can track how the resources move from the moment they are made to the moment they are used or remade into another resource.

In «Pharaoh» and «Caesar» I liked the management of the city through the fulfilment of citizens' needs. All these mechanics made their way into «Make your Kingdom» in one form or another.

In addition, there are a number of mechanics that make the game unique, like being able to play as one of the settlers and see the city from the inside. This makes the player feel more immersed in the game. Playing as a settler you can help harvest food, carry the resources from one place to the other and even fight orcs!

Speaking of orcs, making sure that your people are happy and satisfied with their lives is really important. Unhappy settlers can turn into orcs and leave the city just to later attack it and take their revenge out on you for all the social injustice.

Another potential threat is a harsh winter. In the future I’d also like to add a few natural disasters and other calamities to spice things up for the players.

All new settlers come to the city on the airship, but not all of them might stay due to the lack of housing or  other unsatisfactory conditions.

This is the end of part one of this developer diary. I plan to release developer diaries quite regularly. Stay tuned for more if you’d like to know how «Make Your Kingdom» is being developed!

yo_serjio

Hi everyone! We now have a subreddit! Join us there for all the latest news about the game, unique content, discussion and many more!

https://www.reddit.com/r/MakeYourKingdom/