MCV/DEVELOP News, events, research and jobs from the games industry
Unsigned is MCV/DEVELOP’s monthly initiative to bring the best upcoming indie titles to broader industry awareness. We aim to help them find the support and partners they need to reach the best and biggest possible audience.
Kingdom Builders is a colony sim with the party mechanics of an action RPG. The gameplay alternates between gathering resources to build your castle and fighting monsters in the dungeons.
Developer: ebb & flow games
Location: Berlin, Germany
Team size: 5
Progress: In early access
Contact details: mail@ebb-and-flow-games.com, www.kingdom-builders-game.com/roadmap
Tell us about your game and why you decided to develop it?
Kingdom Builders offers a unique experience in that players can build up a colony on a kingdom scale while controlling a single player avatar. This means that players are working together with individual villagers who they have to manage, train and satisfy. Meanwhile, players will also need to defend their kingdom and defeat monsters in the dungeons to progress through the game.
Who do you think the audience is?
The game is aimed at players who enjoy colony-sim and management games that focus a lot on individual characters (like Rimworld or Going Medieval). The goal is to allow players to build their kingdoms together, recreating the action of a Diablo 2 LAN party combined with the chill base building of games like Terraria.
What experience does the team have?
Tim Reiter (CEO): former founder of Kolibri Games | Daniel Bischoff (CTO): over five years of experience as Unity developer, formerly at Kolibri Games and Popcore | Bri Davis (Design Director): 18 years of experience as a Game Designer | Dominik Hackl (Unity Developer): two years of experience | Maiken Lubkoll (3D Artist): two years
of experience
Why did you decide to use Unity to create this game, can you tell us anything about using the engine on this project?
Unity is a very versatile engine with very fast iteration times. The round-trip time between coding, launching, testing is super fast compared to other engines. This allows for a very fast and efficient workflow. The recent developments have really brought the engine further: we are using URP, the new Input System, Cinemachine, and TextMeshPro. Another huge advantage of Unity is how easy it is to implement any kind of tooling. We are relying heavily on code generation and have also integrated a lot of automation tools related to localization, importing and inspecting save files, etc.
How long has the title been in development, how long will it likely take to complete?
The game has been in development for about 13 months now. We currently have plans for the next 18 to 24 months.
What kind of support are you looking for from a potential partner?
We are mostly looking for support in marketing & strategy support and funding. We are currently looking into 2 scenarios for scope which range from €500k-800k to complete.
