I am a family physician and have been an avid gamer for most of my life. I have been funding production of this project since August of 2019. When I was younger I played Warcraft 2, Warcraft 3, Lords of the Realm, Minecraft, Chivalry, Everquest, Dark Age of Camelot and as I got older I became more competitive in which I played starcraft 2 and World of Warcraft to high rankings. I finished med school and residency and set out to produce a game. Generally I was looking to build a game that avoided the repetitiveness/stress of build timings, allowed for creativity and sieges with a medieval fantasy setting that combined a real time strategy/city building element with first/third person combat.
In total there are 3-5 contract programmers working on the project and myself. I have hired a professional programmer part-time who has focused on the networking and helping to direct the other programmers. Initially, for the first year it was only the professional programmer and myself. Since gaining capital through my work I have been able to contract more programmers.
Generally much of the environment and many of the game objects were created by altering unity assets to generate and optimize the world you see. The environment prefabs can be replaced in the future to make a custom world environment if we have the funds to hire artists. The custom environment prefabs can be easily swapped into the world generator to replace the asset store prefabs. At this time the funds have been directed to the programmers to complete the first/third person system and integrate things such as guilds, auctions, wars, etc. Once this is completed we will continue work on introducing the RTS(kingship) component to the game. We may need to host the RTS zone (Norfel Grasslands) on a separate server and adaptions to the overall concept/networking may need to occur in order to accommodate an addition of an RTS gamemode. However, many of the buildings, construction stages, production effects and units are already completed, but it will take some time to make sure that unit formations, RTS abilities and other concepts are implemented correctly while making sure performance is unaffected. If more funds are available we will hire more programmers then hire artists to customize the user interface/create environment prefabs, such as trees and bushes. Long term, I would love to see the addition of more races such as dwarves and elves including their buildings and soldiers, but these additions would come after finishing the first person game-mode, after optimization, and then finally after completion of the human RTS system.
This game may be a niche and the primary game type may not be everyone's "cup of tea" however we plan to give private servers many options so that they can customize the play-style to their enjoyment. I have invested and will continue to invest my time and money into this project until it is completed. If you would like to help me hire more programmers you can support the project through Patreon on the website store page. A temporary beta key will likely be purchasable in the future if the full game development is prolonged and we will likely allow the first/third person knighthood game mode to be playable prior to full release of the game.
The Game Development Document is 350 pages and is split into 34 sections, and as of writing this (10/28/21) we are on section 20.
