Merry Christmas to all Lords, Ladies and villeins amongst us!
In this season of giving I have decided to gift you all an early blog post! "Woah", you think, "this must be a crummy blog post if he's just going to give it away?" "Nay!" I retort, "Tis' the blog post where we take you behind the scenes of the development of Under The Yoke and discuss the future of our medieval life-sim".
In History
Under The Yoke is a medieval life-sim… I'm joking.
Regular readers will know that when discussing features we usually take you through the history behind the feature and then discuss the implementation of that future. This has been core to the entire development of Under The Yoke. The driving force behind the game has been historical accuracy/authenticity. Why do I make that distinction?
The cause of Under The Yoke has been to tell the story of common people in the medieval period, so remaining as close to History as possible is part and parcel of propelling that cause, but there are certain circumstances where that would impede on gameplay, such as child birth, which is obviously an important factor in a game simulating the life of a medieval family. Infant mortality and death during childbirth was so incredibly high that it's better if we veer from history while still representing it rather than keep a 1:1 ratio.
Development
You may be wondering a little about the development team behind the game. For coding and gameplay and ideas and research. Then there's an artist I work with for some of the artwork you've seen so far, namely the house, the map, the background of the house and various other bits. So there, the big secret is out, I do use a royal 'we' in these blog posts.
To those in the know, we're using the fantastic Godot engine to build the game, as have all precious Priory Games releases.
Future
"Shut up Priory Dev", is what you're now thinking, "I wanna hear about the future of the most historically accurate medieval life-sim". Fine, fine, fine.
Under The Yoke is frankly at a great stage. We've just hit something resembling a beta, meaning all major features are in the game so from now on development should mostly concern, polish, content, balancing and bug fixing!
Are you excited? I sure am. What does this mean for you as a player? Well, the launch date is probably still a ways away, possibly late Q1, but that's only speculation on my part. The game has an awful lot of events to write, we're going to be simulating a lot of medieval history so we need a lot of events to keep things fresh. We should be able to show off more gameplay as things progress though so keep your eyes peeled for that.
Future blog posts may also be a bit more erratic, so far these blog posts have coincided nicely with development, covering topics that I was actively researching and developing at the time but as I move to more meta-research on the period it may be harder to form cohesive long blog posts (not that it usually stops me).
I will continue to aim for a fortnightly blog post schedule though, so stay tuned by using the subscription form below!
As an extra special gift for those of you who made it to the end of the blog post, here's a little video of the garden items in Winter:
Merry Christmas!