I've come to you to offer my passion project, Kingmaker, for criticism. I'm open to suggestions as to where I should take this. (I feel like I wrote a lot, you can skip all of this if you want. The links are at the bottom.)
Now, I feel like I should start by admitting that I wouldn't describe myself as neither an artist, nor a writer, nor a coder. All of those things I can only do at a rudimentary level. But this is the type of game that I always dreamed of playing, so I just had to try and make it. And I do want to increase the quality! Get someone that is better than the chicken scratch I call drawings, or someone to fix my dumb mistakes when writing, but right now I can only afford me, hahahaha.
Synopsys
In this game you will play as the prince of a petty kingdom, whose road to the throne is less than certain. His lands are ravaged by war, scheming lords, debt, factionalism, among other things. But he will have to rise to the occasion nonetheless, secure his line, and prove that he truly is a great king... or die trying.
About the game
You will play the first day of each week, which is meant to set the example of what your character does the rest of that week. I found this made more sense than a day to day game for the logic of how fast skills increase, how quickly relationships develop, and the time between game events, etc.
That first day will then be divided in four stages. Morning, Noon, Evening and Night.
During the morning you will hold court. That is the time when subjects of the kingdom will bring you petitions for you to give your judgement.
Your choices will affect how the kingdom sees you as a ruler. With this in mind it will be near impossible to please all the factions, and they might rebel or scheme if their support reaches zero. Having a good relationship with them on the other hand might unlock different things that are more pleasant.
Your skill level (More on that in a bit) might also unlock different solutions for the problems brought to the court. These options are usually better.
After holding court, the noon and evening times you will spend them in the map menu. There you can decide which skills you will develop during the week.
Map
1. The training icons: You can hover different parts of the castle to train multiple skills at the same time!
2. Tooltip: This will tell you which skills they increase when you hover over them. (There's also the color scheme. All dark blue are diplomacy skills, all red are martial and so on).
3. Court: This menu will show you the people present at your court. You will be able to interact with them this way, which will not spend your time (Although when you get potential lovers some options might make it clear that it will.)
4.Basic info: This will simply tell you the time, the gold you currently have and the week you are in.
5.Upper menu: This will take you to the other menus in the game.
Skill tab
The skills are all divided into categories, and I plan to use all of them in one way or another. Although not all of them are final. Languages although cool is too specific, and production I have no idea what to do with it for example. Because of that I sometimes wonder if I overdid it with the number of skills. Clearly some are more useful than others, but I think I would have rather eat my right hand than making a category with less than three skills.
Another way these skills are used are during game events. If a specific skill is high enough it might open paths to additional information or a different solution (for better or worse) to solve a situation. And this works much like Fallout NV, in which it will show you the locked/unlocked options.
Support
The third screen shows you how the kingdom sees you. On the left you find your personal reputation. How famous and what kind of ruler you are. These two are meant to affect how characters see you, and if high enough even use them to solve problems.
On the right you find your reputation among the different factions of the kingdom. These are important because right now the only way to lose the game is to lose the trust of a faction completely. You can also check which variables affect the passive gain if you hover over the numbers.
Reforms
The purpose for this tab is to alter things like taxes, kingdom-wide reforms, infrastructure upgrades, law changes and stuff like that. All of these will give you passive bonuses to your fame, standing with the factions, and also your gold of course.
Taxes
Taxes are important cause they'll be your initial source of revenue. You can choose how much each faction pays but they might not like having to pay high taxes.
Infrastructure
Here you can upgrade your kingdom infrastructure. This will help you grow your military or get more money in your coffers. Although not all of the buildings are available if your skills aren't high enough.
Edicts
Passing laws is the perfect way to alter how the kingdom works. Who pays what to who, who gets rights and who gets duties, etc. Passing laws is not that simple however, since it costs faction support (Or it can increase depending on the law).
World map
Here is where you can administer or even travel to the different regions of your realm. And you can upgrade the infrastructure there too!
But not only that, but you can also raise the pops living there as military companies to defend your borders. And each military company has their own experience, culture, type, etc.
Treasury
I feel this is pretty straightforward. What I don't think is clear enough is how variables affect this. Your sources of income are tied to the how much the factions support you (I guess that represents how well they're doing or how little they're stealing). Not all of them are equal, some give more than others. The expenses on the other hand can as well be affected by your level of Administration or Logistics.
Every four weeks you will receive the amount of gold from your income sources minus your expenses and debt payments.
But if you lack coin you can always unlock and negotiate loans.
Thank you
With that I finish my ted talk. I hope you give the game a try. I'm open for criticisms.
If you believe in this project and want to support it, you can do it here with one dollar a month.
https://subscribestar.adult/kingmakervn
https://www.patreon.com/user?u=52526748
It would mean the world to me, truly.
For download links and web release you can go here too.
https://kingmakervn.itch.io/kingmaker (Browser version is a bit janky and of lower quality so I still recommend downloading the game normally.)
Thank you for reading!