About Exiled Kingdoms development

[DavidBVal]

Welcome everyone to this forum. Here's a little info on development of the game, for those who are curious.

I wanted to make my own computer RPG since I was a kid and played the great pen-and-paper RPGs back in the 80s and 90s. Roleplaying games have always been my passion, both in tabletop and computer; I grew up playing the Gold Box D&D games, and the early Might and Magic and Wizardry titles. Those were the days!

I tried to make this dream come true at several points of my life, but of course I failed miserably; it's not easy to find thousands of hours to spare on a project like this when you have a family and a job. However on each new attempt, I learned, and my "childish dream" lived on, unscathed.

I started developing Exiled Kingdoms in the spring of 2014, nearly 4 years ago. In December 2015 I had an "early access" commercial beta released on Android Play Store; the big success that it experienced allowed me to dedicate full time to develop the game. Which I do with enthusiasm, and with a feeling of gratitude to all the players who supported the game.

Since then, the game has been updated over 40 times[www.exiledkingdoms.com] with all kinds of improvements. Content has tripled in size, new classes were added, gameplay refined. An iOS release in September 2016 was equally succesful, and finally the PC release will make the game reach even more fans of old-school roleplaying.

So while this is a "new" release, this game has been "alive" for 2 years already. The thousands of script lines in the numerous quests and dialogues have been tested thoroughly by a large testing team, and then by a live playerbase of one million people. Balance has been (and still is) constantly evaluated and adjusted. Of course some things are new in the PC release, like the controls and part of the UI, but overall I expect the game to be bug-free and greatly enjoyable for PC players.

Certainly, I've learned much with the development of my first game, and I'm already designing the basis of my next game. But for now I hope you enjoy EK as much as I did creating it!

Credits and thanks

I did all the development and writing, as well as world design and game mechanics. But I received some important help with the art assets that needs a special mention. About half the game assets (especially the ones used early on) come from open licenses, like Public Domain or Creative Commons. You can find a full list of those assets here[www.exiledkingdoms.com] and even download them. The early release would have been impossible without such resources available for free, back when the project was starting.

Finally, there's a huge community that has helped me improve the game with their constant feedback. But they went beyond: the volunteer translation team worked for endless hours and translated the whole game to several languages. Portuguese is complete, Russian and German are over 90% already and other languages are progressing as well. If you want more information about the community and the translation check our forums.

[DavidBVal]

Brief heads up on development progress. I am still working on next update, which got a bit delayed due to various reasons but is already about 50% done. I don't dare to make more estimates, but it is definitely progressing at a good rate now.

Besides the extra content, it will include the few missing translated dialogues in german, and full italian translation. Czech translation will now be around 80% and other may improve as well.

A small note regarding translation: the new content will be initially appear in english and spanish only, the translators will need some time to work on all the new dialogues and descriptions.

[DavidBVal]

I've been working on improving keyboard and controller support this weekend. Right now you can, in addition to the usual fighting and looting, navigate through dialogues using a controller. You can also select item slots in your inventory/equipment/containers/shops and interact with them, either taking, dropping, selling, using, etc.

Still, dozens of different windows and menus in this game were originally designed without controllers and keyboard in mind, so it's no easy to implement now. But at least these functions I mentioned will be added, covering most of the actual playing time.

Next test update will also add many new translated files thanks to the volunteers that work every day on them.