Overview / Usage

About This Game

• Build an epic kingdom inside a mountain and become the King of the Dwarves in this underground city builder!
• Mine in every direction
• Manage hundreds of dwarfs
• Protect your kingdom

Key features:

• Explore and inhabit a procedurally generated mountain.
• Mine and build in every direction.
• Manage hundreds of dwarves – Warriors, Builders, Miners, Researchers, Smiths and more!
• Gather resources, forge weapons and build a thriving economy.
• Tame lava rivers and waterfalls for your advantage.
• Protect your kingdom from orcs, goblins and other enemies.
• Make diplomatic decisions and establish trade routes to strengthen alliances.
• Research new weapons and technology to advance your kingdom.
• Survive world events like earthquakes, floods or famine.

Innovation

The gameplay design of King of the Dwarves is highly innovative, because it extends on the concept of digging a single-layer dungeon and adds the possibility to dig a 3D world, meaning that you can extend your kingdom up and down. There aren't many games that have tackled 3D world building before, but this one is even more challenging and interesting, because instead of building a world on top of an empty world, you actually dig a mountain and create cavities in it. The user experience, world navigation, visibility of the aforementioned cavities and performance need to be solved. And on top of that, we allow for thousands of dwarves to live in this underground kingdom for the user to control. This concept provides a framework to make a really engaging game, but is also rather difficult technologically and from the game design perspective – an incredibly exciting challenge to pursue.

Methodology / Approach

The concept of digging a 3D world introduces various game design, as well as technological challenges.

We are using data oriented approaches to efficiently use the cache, as well as GPU compute and instancing to be able to process and render hundreds of thousands of environment blocks and thousands of moving characters.

We are writing custom shaders, optimizing rendering code, applying technologies, such as XeSS, to provide the user with the best possible gaming experience in a huge 3D world that they can build in King of the Dwarves.

Technologies Used

Unity.

Other links

• Steam