King of Kalimpong is a multiplayer vehicle battle game. It’s really simple: you drive a pretty dodgy vehicle around at an irresponsibly high velocity, smashing into and launching projectiles at anyone else you encounter. I don’t really know why I started building it. The way the vehicles destruct makes me laugh every time, so I’m just kind of running with that. Here’s a video of me terrorizing a prototype level:
2 weeks ago I started working on a UE4 implementation in my spare time. I’m trying to get a publicly available alpha and some dedicated servers up as soon as I can, life permitting. I’ll post updates to this thread periodically, and on the King of Kalimpong site, once that exists.
This game looks like it could be a lot of fun with friends. Watching the enemies explode when you hit them with a giant rock, or when you ram into them, was . Keep up the great work and can’t wait to see how the project progresses in the future!
Join me in #kalimpong in IRC if you want to setup a multiplayer game, or just join the dedicated server in game and see if anyone’s playing! (hold TAB to show the player list/score screen)
A need for income kept me away from working on this for a few months, but I’ve spent the last week or so implementing some team gameplay; specifically, capture the flag and a new map:
I still have to put together some videos from the first capture the flag game earlier this week, but here’s a brief clip from some helicopter testing I’ve been doing:
Played a lot of Twisted Metal and Star Fox 64 multiplayer as a kid and this project is bringing back the nostalgia. Hope there can be a single player campaign some time
Hope everything goes well for you financially so that I can own everyone at this game.
Thanks! That’s exactly what I’m going for. I loved those games, and I was big a fan of Tribes too so I find I’m kind of blending those influences together.
I hadn’t considered a single player campaign, probably because I’ve been too consumed with multiplayer, but now two people have mentioned it to me this week so I’m going to carve out some writing time and see if I can come up with something cool.
In an ideal situation would you go for a darker/grittier aesthetic like the Twisted Metal games? Given the assets available on Unreal 4 I can definitely see a Mad Max style being the easiest with their vehicle assets.
Right now I get a Flintstones vibe from the screenshots which I think is much more unique and cool though.
Thanks! I am pretty into the aesthetic at the moment; unpolished as it is, it feels good next to the gameplay. My brother and I have started working on a more permanent art direction, and while we’re just in the beginning phases it’s looking like it’s going to stay bright and cartoony. I think destroying your friends at high speed in an otherwise pleasant setting is a funny pairing.
By the time I get around to video editing the day is almost over, so here are two quick videos from last week’s CTF game. Full CTF videos remain forthcoming.
We did a feature on King of Kalimpong on the website I run, ShoddyPixels.com. We played a game of FFA and CTF with 4 of us and had an absolute blast (and recorded the whole thing). KoK is an game
I have been pretty jazzed about adding helicopters for some time. Not real helicopters; goofy trucks with rotors. I spent most of last week building and tuning the helicopter vehicle class and ran a playtest on Saturday to see the impact on gameplay.
It was immediately clear to me that airborne vehicles really mess with what’s fun about the existing gameplay. It’s funny to go from implementing a feature that I expected to be great for so long to deciding to axe it in a matter of hours. It wasn’t a total waste of effort. I think I learned some physics and the necessary refactoring made it very easy to break the wheeled vehicle up so I can assign different handling experiences. New testers find the steering very hard so I’m introducing a steering spectrum.
Today’s focus was cameras and some basic UI.
Vehicle Types (only the steering differs at the moment) + Camera Modes
Fixed a couple of bugs related to vehicle destruction and updated the destruction camera
