Unusually on schedule, welcome to the January 2020 development update for King under the Mountain!

Alpha 3 Release - Mod Support

At long last, the game now fully supports user-created mods to change and add to the base content pack.

In short, everything in the "mods/base" directory forms the data-driven part of the game (compared to the code that loads and uses it), so hopefully you can go and see how this works to be able to add your own additions or modifications. For (surprisingly?) the first time, I've recorded and narrated a video to help better explain this, which ends with me implementing a simple mod to replace the game's default font with the OpenDyslexic font.

I was very keen to get this release out as soon as possible for those interested to be able to start trying out their own mods, and help me to discover what features are missing when it comes to modding. Although this is released as "Alpha 3", this isn't yet covering everything that I plan to release as part of Alpha 3 - most importantly the integration to mod.io to act as a central place for people to upload and browse mods for the game. This will be coming in the near future, but in the meantime please do join the game's Discord server and hop into the #modding channel with any questions you may have. No doubt I'll have an FAQ up before too long.

Community Translation Support

One of the "mods" that the game now comes with is the "Community Translations" mod. While King under the Mountain is in active development, the text in the game is constantly being added to. Until release, it would not be feasible to produce a complete translation into the main languages as they would quickly fall out of date with each new release of the game. The intention for this mod is that the translations will be kept up to date with contributions from the game's developer and community (as in, I'll add to it as new translation strings are added to the game, and if anyone wants to keep it up to date in a different language from time to time, that would be amazing!). You can find the Github repository here. If you'd like to contribute but don't know how to use Git or Github, you can download the .csv files, edit them in most spreadsheet software (remembering to save back as .csv) and email it to me at ross@kingunderthemounta.in

Most of the languages have had an attempt at translation using Amazon's translate service, so they're probably very poor machine translations that could do with a human touch.

Following the earlier experiment with East Asian character sets, I'm very happy to say that the game does now support translation into Japanese, Chinese and Korean!

The main menu partly translated to German and Japanese

EGX Rezzed 2020

Finally I'm happy to say I'm going back to EGX Rezzed to exhibit King under the Mountain at the end of March! I previously exhibited at Rezzed 3 years ago(!) to coincide with the launch of the original Kickstarter campaign and the first public pre-alpha. The game has come on a long way since then and it'll be great to be at an expo with more of a game than that early tech demo. If you're going to be attending Rezzed yourself, please do come and say hi! It's always an encouragement to hear from and meet part of the small following this game and dev update has. I plan to have the brewing and drinking of beer in the game in time for Rezzed so even if you won't be there, I'll be bringing forward that feature from the roadmap a little to add to the game. Also if you are attending, there'll probably some kind of King under the Mountain-branded freebies to grab, but they are still to be confirmed at this point so tune in to next month's update to find out more!