This month's Inside Chronicles of Elyria, Jeromy Walsh, the CEO of Soulbound Studios, talks about its colony sim, Kingdoms of Elyria, and some of what backers can expect as the dev team works on milestone one of the stand-alone project.
If you'll recall, Kingdoms of Elyria is a stand-alone colony sim the team is working on in conjunction with the MMO, Chronicles of Elyria. Soulbound Studios says that development of KOE will directly feed into the development of the MMO, and the standalone sim will be released to all backers, free of charge. This month's episode looked at some of the base mechanics of the colony sim, such as the player character, fog of war and more.
Walsh talks in the video about the building blocks of Milestone One: the environment, the camera controls and user interface, as well as controlling your "player citizen," the fog of war, and animal AI. According to Walsh, these are some fo the first things you'll encounter in your first five minutes of Kingdoms of Elyria.
The video also mentions some of the various biomes players can expect down the road, like tiaga, wetlands and swamps. However, to start off players will find themselves on the "mixed leaf forest biome" as part of a procedurally generated map. Land is divided up by 64 x 64 meter parcels, though in KOE players will start off with just three parcels with 10 citizens.
You won't be able to control your citizens directly, instead you'll need to encourage them to work for the Kingdom via contracts and more. The time cycle will also differ from the planned cycle in Chronicles of Elyria, with KOE operating on a much more focused, swift timeline.
"When thinking about time, it's important to note the different role time plays in a colony sim or grand strategy game versus an MMO like Chronicles of Elyria," Walsh says in the video. "In COE a typical day/night cycle takes place over a few hours, with a single year lasting an entire real life week. Althought that's great for a game that mixes settlement and domain management with crafting and adventuring, such a duration would be detrimental to a game like Kingdoms of Elyria."
As such, the timescale in KOE is set by default to run four times faster than COE, though if you're in offline mode you can increase this to up to 20X faster.
Walsh also talks about some of the decisions you'll have to make early on in your settlement management, such as deciding whether to harvest a tree for its wood, or leaving it be to provide fruit for years to come in your settlement.
As with previous videos, the comments have been turned off, though the team is requesting feedback from players through an email address at the end of the episode.
Chronicles of Elyria has in recent months been trying to increase it's forward-facing communication with backers with the Inside Chronicles of Elyria episodes. This is all with the backdrop of the class-action lawsuit being brought forward by backers of the MMO against Soulbound Studios and XSolla, the payment processor for the studio after Soulbound Studios closed (and then announced it wasn't shut down) last year. The lawsuit was officially filed last month, though as with all legal proceedings it'll be some time before more updates on that front are made available. Chronicles of Elyria released a roadmap last month in the meantime, showing the different milestones for Kingdoms of Elyria, including milestone one as discussed in this month's video.
