Welcome to a late King under the Mountain monthly dev update in what is now a grand tradition of being a bit late!

Begin the tutorial!

The main body of work achieved this month was finally adding a tutorial to the game.

Actually, what's been added is support for a set of "hints" that can pop up when the player performs an action, such as placing a specific piece of furniture for the first time, or another event, in this case starting a new game.

The hints are very configurable - they can have multiple buttons to perform different actions, such as showing another hint (which in this case is used to actually start the tutorial from the "new game started" hint) or disabling hints entirely (which can be re-enabled from the options menu).

Rather than having a simple "dimiss" button, hints can also have a set of progress indicators, which is the primary way that the tutorial works. The game explains a mechanic or concept, which initially is placing farm plots, and tracks how many farm plots have been placed and how many tiles of farm plots have been placed. When both of these progress indicators are complete, the hint's first (and only) action is triggered, which in the case of the tutorial is to show the subsequent tutorial prompt in a series of them.

As with almost everything in King under the Mountain, the hints are defined in simple JSON files, with the hope being that modders will look at these and expand upon them when adding new gameplay via mods. Perhaps a mod adds a new type of room or furniture which performs a special task - now a hint can be shown to the player the first time they go to place this room or furniture.

Of course, this is in addition to the tooltips that have been implemented for most items and other things in the game. King under the Mountain is now a much more user-friendly experience than it was previously! One of the design goals was to allow for deeply simulated and interesting gameplay, but in a way that is very accessible to new players to the genre. The tutorial is released today with Alpha 3.5!

EGX Rezzed

As mentioned in last month's update, the plan is to exhibit King under the Mountain at EGX Rezzed in London from 26th March (less than 3 weeks!). Personally I'm expecting it to be cancelled following Coronavirus fears and an increasing number of cases in the UK (and the rest of the world), I can't see an event where thousands of people are touching the same keyboards and joypads as being allowed to go ahead.

Still, if it does go ahead, I'll be there exhibiting the game, so please drop by and say hello if you're a reader of this dev update! You can bag some fairly exclusive King under the Mountain pin badges too:

Dwarf character badges for EGX Rezzed!

 That's all for this month. I'm hoping to have the long awaited brewing of beer implemented in time for Rezzed, I suppose we'll find out how that went in the next monthly update!