Kingdom Come: Deliverance - Home Sweet Home

Warhorse Studios has posted the next update for Kingdom Come: Deliverance with a status update on the new office, and talk about the development of the game.

Home Sweet Home

When we founded Warhorse we could watch from the windows of our new offices the demolition of an old factory, which gradually turned into a huge hole in the ground, from which a new building started to emerge. Every day we could follow the erection of this mega office building, in the bowels of which there was also to be a massive concert hall one day. It was surprising how few laborers there were working on the construction. At the time there were only nine of us. There were certainly more of them and we used to joke "Let's see who gets the job done first - us building our virtual world, or them building a real world edifice!"

Agile Development

And what else is new here apart from the move? It seems we have finally reworked the plan as we decided last month and began applying agile development and combined teams of people from various areas, who are working on one thing at the same time. The first major task was the implementation of an alchemistic "mini game", which isn't mini at all, but a relatively massive game in its own right. One of our new designers, Jakub, is in charge of it. When we were dealing together with the alchemy on paper, we came across a whole range of problems, as well as the fact that he didn't know which of our ideas were feasible and which weren't. 

Now he has at hand two programmers, an animator and several graphic designers and they deal with the whole thing as a team. They were a little surprised at the outset that no one was strictly dictating to them how it was supposed to be and, on the contrary, that they should sort out the issues together and figure out what was possible, but it seems they are starting to get the hang of it. It’s something of a trial by fire. In the course of it, Jakub discovered much more quickly what was possible and what was not, and in a week they should be delivering a functioning alpha version of the mini game. To be honest, I am very curious whether it will be good and this approach proves itself, or whether it will be not so good and we will have to go back to the drawing board.

Alcoholism!

Just as in almost all RPGs, we too will have the option of drinking alcohol in the game, and since it will be there, we want it to lead somewhere. So it will influence the stats of the player’s character in some way. That’s normal too. Only we said to ourselves that we didn't want it just to add a bit of health and then have a fuzzy picture. We want the lightened mood to raise charisma, speech and stats, allowing the player, for example, to persuade an NPC more easily. We want it to raise his self-confidence, while advanced drunkenness would, on the contrary, lower his stats. 

That's all still easy enough, only we also want differences between various types of alcohol - for bad quality booze to make the character more ill than quality booze, which would show in a longer lasting hangover, and maybe that bad beer would make him throw up sooner (there will be puking, of course). 

Well, then, we add to that a quality that most items have anyway. Only what will be the difference between beer, wine and spirits, when they are all of the same quality? Well, a person has to drink a lot more beer than spirits to get drunk and it fills him up a lot more. So, since we have overeating, the beer will behave like food and it will be possible to get overfull before one gets drunk, or get poisoned if it’s bad booze, and then we might easily have a number of different beers of various quality and other parameters. But, since moderate indulgence in alcohol increases the player's positive stats, he could exploit it by maintaining a permanent state of tipsiness and we have to somehow pre-empt that.