Castle Story

[deadguy]

Looks like a Minecraft-esque RTS-ish constructioning thing. I am intrigued, and want more.

[Black]

I am tempted to not watch the video, because the initial shot intrigues me so much already and I want to retain the mystique.

[Misiok]

The game has potential to be like Minecraft and Dwar Fortress mixed together if the devs get the hint.

[Codex]

Castle Story? Sounds like a Mario spinoff. Or Braid.

[Open Blue]

Something else to add to the "potentially awesome" pile.

[Mantaray]

i want this. so much.
i had hoped we could get a minecraft mod that did soemthing like this. and with tale of kingdoms we got quite close.
but THIS.
also the physics are pretty epic.. after seeing how long the building took i feel bad for those cleanup guys

[DoomKnights]

Some links, website and photos would be great. Never even heard of this.

A little more info from the OP on what it all means would be great.

*goes google searching*

[Copernicus]

Website here. There aren't that many screenshots yet, probably about 6.

[Nurizeko]

Sounds promising, probably need a bit more to it than building though.

[Carl]

They stated at the start your supposed to defend it after you finish building nuri. Is tottally awsome, i want i want, i want .

[Carl]

Since no one else hase mentioned it. They released a new dev blog filling in whats happened and where things are going. I'll link it in a moment. But in short they've been very suprised by the response volume, very busy dealing with that plus getting their site up and running, and taking on idea's from the commmunity. They've used the last of tose two to put together a game plan for the next littile while. Their will be an initial release plus alpha in the future, but they want a playable vershion ready first. So they expect somthing in a littile over a month from now, but they will be releasing weekly dev blogs detailing more features of the game and generally providing updates.

Linky

[Shoota Fodder]

Reminds me Of Stronghold actually

[Carl]

New video out, not much new but still intresting to wahtch, especially the speeded up castle build. Way things look to be progressing we might get an early beta soon, (which is what the promised).

http://<a href="http://youtu.be/PPAM...PAMXCCEgkA</a>

Also, am i the only person who's recently re-whatched doctor who and can't help but think the finial enemy will be a metaltron ?

[Carl]

New video showing off a number of features. It's starting to look really good now.

Not only have they got combat and LOD's in the game, but the basic construction is drasticlly easier and stockpiles can now be built from in game materials. It dosen't look like a lot, but this brins the game a LOT closer to being releasable from what i can see as most of the major features are now working.

[Malva]

It looks like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.I want to share some games ,there are Toy Attack,
Social Wars,
Sunny Town,
Mystery Manor and
World Mysteries

[Mantaray]

im not sure how they've structured it. but so long as it's been made with the net code in mind i seriously think we'll see some kind of release this summer

[SpitfireMK461]

Looked interesting at the start, then I saw the physics. I'm excited to try this out.

[Carl]

@Manta: They where expecting an early beta/late alpha kickstarter around now TBH, but looks like a few things, (including the overwhelming response), have slowed them down a touch. Still it should be intresting to see how it goes .

[Carl]

Okay, i've let this sit for a month or so. There's now been 5 new dev diarys and a Q&A session. They've got some new brick types in and got much of the pathfinding, optomisation, and other similar code done. They've also got ballistics, which means they're nearly ready to put catapults and bows in, and the first enemy is apparentlly being modeled.

Here's there blog link, (again):

http://www.sauropodstudio.com/blog/

[Open Blue]

The creators have been making serious in-roads to this game and it's starting to look rather good!
Just a reminder that the Kick-starter project is coming up soon, so if you haven't checked it out yet, or you've simply forgotten about Castle Story, now's a great time to go look at the dev diaries and their progress!

[Carl]

Hehe, I was gonna link them all when the kickstarter came.

Been keeping a faithful eye on things. They've had some issues since they started development with getting the kickstarter ready, mostly legal, though the "big video" has also given them a few issues, hence the delay, but they’re nearly there now that they’ve got the legal paperwork finally kicked into touch and the video is done, they’re just squashing a couple of bugs that all their work in the meantime has created. I’d say next 2 weeks we’ll have the kickstarter.


Dev diary number five : Redesigning the Bricktron character


Dev diary number six : Walk cycles and wood blocks


Dev diary number seven : Bricktron behavior patterns


Dev diary number eight : Ballistics and projectiles


Dev diary number nine : Skybox shmybox


Dev diary number ten : Ragdolls & Catapults


Dev diary number eleven : Cake story


Dev diary number twelve : Bug reports


Dev diary number thirteen : GWRD


Dev diary number fourteen : Screenshot Saturday


Dev diary number fifteen : AI basics


Dev diary number sixteen : Saturday night at the movies


Dev diary number seventeen : Bitwise Tilemapping


Dev diary number eighteen : Drawing Lessons


Dev diary number nineteen : Short & sweet

[Colonel]

Been watching this since week 1, the production has slowed greatly since they started the kickstarter. Almost feel like kickstarter application wastes your time in some respects.

Still this actually looks like a good casual game.

[overmind2000]

Kickstarter clearly requires a dedication of resources to maintain and promote properly. For a small team I'm not surprised that it could sap their development time upon the primary product. The bonus should be that once its completed they should have the additional funds needed to push development through a lot lot faster than otherwise. Further it should help build up an advertising base for them to help market their product ready for launch

[typhoonoftempest]

Do Want! I hope they release beta soon (I'd pay for this too)

[Carl]

Hi Typhoon, not seen you in ages. Since we used to do minecraft together... Oh god that brings bac memmories .

Maybe we can build more castles and ludicruslly large railway tunnels in this one ?

[typhoonoftempest]

already building a massive castle in single player of minecraft, and I would most certainly like to build much more glorious castles in castle story!

[Carl]

. Sorry for dropping out of minecraft on you like that btw, IRL has been whacking me repetadly since that christmas, i'm still pulling stuff back together tbh and i'm not sure things are stable yet. But i'm not hiding away for the moment .

[MagosMechanicus]

So according to the latest dev diary, the formalities with the banks, Amazon and Kickstarter finally look to be cleared away, the trailer is pretty much done and they hope to launch the Kickstarter this Monday. I'm already sold on this, so the question for me is for how much.

[Carl]

That las screenshot. Just wow, impressive . (here it is below )

[MagosMechanicus]

A bit delayed from what I said last time, the Kickstarter is now finally live.
Already passed 10% funding in the first handful of minutes. I'm in there already for at least the prototype pledge. Thinking about upping, but will take some time to think about whether the shirts are worth it.

[Rook]

Ladies and Bricktrons, The Kickstarter has arrived.

edit - Damn ninja Magos!

[deadguy]

Going well so far:

[A7K]

Im going to be tossing 25 at these fellas on monday.. I was sold with the early video and everything after that has convinced me that this is worth backing. Viva La Crowdfunding!

[Carl]

Anyone else having issues getting the video to play?

[Rook]

Seems like this game has really struck a chord with gamers, we are now 30,000 above target and its not even been 7 hours since launch.

[MagosMechanicus]

Yeah, it seems to me that the market for "management-y" games has been real healthy recently, with Prison Architect, A Game of Dwarves,Castle Story, fellow Kickstarter alumnus Nekro and the just-announced Impire all coming pretty close to one another. Guess it's kind of a zeitgeist thing, where multiple people take some inspiration from similar sources. Considering it's one of my favourite niches in all of gaming, I'm very much enjoying it.

[deadguy]

23 hours after Kickstarter launch:


Notch noticed last night too:


Poor guys have only raised about $20,000 today (in the wee hours):

[Carl]

New video, we get a full blown combat demonstration at the end. I Want, I Want, I Want .

Seriously some very intresting things shown off. Very looking forward to this. Allready thinking of what the most efficent castle designs will be for fending of enemies.

Sadly no catapult demo . But i can't blame them for that, based on what they said about the big boy i'm guessing the catapult is equally unfinished and thus they both need scripting to fnction.

Wonder whats with the glowing lights on deah though, cna we use them in some way i wonder?

p.s. kickstarter is at >0.5 million.

[Afoxi]

[DoomKnights]

Yea they are on my "not happy list" they place small words for the prototype being late Sep and Oct. GIVE us what you have now dang it. What I see is fine by me. I want a prototype, not a beta type (which is odd as they have a working system right now...)

[Carl]

@DoomKnights: If you'd read some of the early dev diaries you'd be aware a lopt of what we see in videioes is currentlly a result of scripting. They've also got MAJOR performance issues. AFAIK they still need what is bassiclly a server to run it, anyone without an absolute top end PC wouldn't be able to make it work even if all the commands where avalibile outside the developer mode.

[MagosMechanicus]

So the prototype is out over the Humble Store. I'm having fun exploring the options for castle building, but feel the interface is maybe a little less explained than I'd like. In particular, once you enter construction mode and start placing ghost blocks I have no idea how to clear that mode and get my normal cursor back so that I can reassign workers between groups. At least I've discovered that shift-click cancels a ghost block. Perspective can play odd tricks here.
Also kind of annoying how I get a constant dull screech of sound for as long as the prototype is running, so I've had to mute it.

[Carl]

Nice, gonna go have a look now.

[Open Blue]

I figured out the best way to get your cursor back from the build option was to hold the right mouse button for a short time until the radial menu pops up, then just mouse over "back" and release. Didn't know about the shift-click. I sorta wish they'd have a text file which contained all the functions (ie. how to deselect blocks). Currently it's so far in prototype it hurts, but I can see the basic idea behind things.

[SpitfireMK461]

A forum thread with a list of controls.

I went in with a friend on the kickstarter two-pack, so I'm waiting for them to get home from work so I can get my access to the game. I'll put some time into it tonight and tomorrow and see what I make of it. I've seen some pretty nice builds on the forums already.

[Carl]

Also if you need to get ruid of an unused lumber/mine on the bottom bar, look under where your bricktrons are listed, there's a red x, hit that then the green tick to the right.

[Open Blue]

Saves are buggered. I build a giant staircase with a catapult on top, saved it, went to sleep, came back and all the terrain refuses to load.
EDIT: Also, catapults are fun. So are exploding barrels.

[Carl]

Wish i could see it, byut it crashes after about an hour or so, and it takes that long minimum to even get started .

[Open Blue]

Alright! So since the saves are bugged, I put together this small lets-play style post in about half an hour! Without further ado, lets get into it.


So this is the first thing you're greeted with when you fire up a new game. It's not much, location-wise, so lets go scout out a better spot.


This looks good! A large mountain to perch atop, a decent number of trees to play with and a spot we can start digging.


This is where we'll have the quarry, not too deep though! Don't want to fall out the bottom eh?


Miners and wood cutters are working away nicely, notice the stock-piles filling up. I've got 2 set to only stone, 1 to only wood and the rest will be "overflow" spots.


Another thing I'm doing is putting a barrel next to the starting crystal. "Why" might you ask?


Because during the night, if you bring a barrel full of crystal next to the big crystal, you'll spawn another bricktron! It's a good way to get more people, but there's a few issues with this at the moment. Firstly, I don't know how to move full barrels, so I've just built one next to the crystal. Secondly, if you're clumsy and double-click a barrel that's full, it'll explode, which I haven't tested out what happens when you break the starting crystal. Finally, since this barrel is the go-to place for any crystal left lying around, you'll always be spawning more bricktons when you start finding crystal, because barrels, as far as I know, can't be removed like logs, planks or stone.


Let's get a small fort started for the time being. It's in a good spot with it's back to the hill, so it's easily defensible, but more importantly, I'm building a catapult.


Let's test this baby out. Just aim it, load it and shoot. You can load either barrels or rocks, but since rocks don't make cool explosions, let's forgo that option for the moment.


Kaboom!


Leaves a decent sized hole too. These squares of dirt floating around the place can actually now be used as stone bricks (they turn into stone bricks once your bricktrons pick them up) and can be picked up in the same way you would pick up logs.


See? You might have to build some stairs out, as your bricktrons will just jump on in, regardless of a way out, but you've got enough building material that it doesn't matter.


And that's the start of the fort finished! There would be another keep on the hill up top, but since saves are screwy, I'll just leave it at that for today.

[SpitfireMK461]

Great pictures. Have you figured out how to explicitly tell bricktrons to pick up debris, or do you micromanage them through the mess?