Wild West Dynasty
Hotfix 0.1.7379
Hotfix 0.1.7379
- Load saves fixed from Main Menu
- Level message remaining on screen - fixed
- Potential crash in cutscenes - fixed
- Unlocking bucket for Shed - fixed
Wild West Dynasty - Welcome to Release Town, partner!
Hello cowboys and cowgirls!
The grand day has come, the conductor threw you off the train and your belongings are finally stowed in the carriage. "Dee" and "Lorean", the horses, are harnessed, as the journey continues a little further until you arrive at your destination. Grab the reins and off you go!
What awaits you out there in the prairie of the Wild West?
Hopefully an exciting Wild West story with remarkable characters that should provide plenty of amusement across generations along with the opportunity to build iconic Western towns.
Over the course of the first few months of Early Access, we will not only work optimization and fixes, but on the content of our extensive roadmap that will add more features, the continuation of the main quest, more side quests and a female protagonist!
The roadmap until June (subject to adjustments)
- The main story will continue. You won't be left with a cliff-hanger!
- More side missions will be added, in which you will get to know even more denizens of Redrock and the prairie.
- However, not all the inhabitants are peaceful or well-disposed towards you, you will be faced with bandits and/or go collecting bounties.
- We have been very attentive to the feedback we have received and have realised that our protagonist could just as well be a woman. Ergo, you can also play a female character.
- To avoid being chronically underchallenged with only solving the worries and needs of the small village, you can enlarge it. There are new foundations and buildings for this purpose.
- With new crafting recipes you can increase your arsenal of skills and items.
- To ensure that the West remains comprehensible and that there is no rural exodus among the inhabitants, more languages will be added to the game.
With that, we release you into the prairie, partner. Have a wonderful stay in the Wild West! As always, we welcome questions, suggestions, and criticism here in the comments or on our social media channels.
The teams of Moon Punch Studio and Toplitz Productions
Wild West Wednesday Special - Early Access, huh?
"Hey, Frank, why'd you toss that cowboy out of the saloon?"
"Came in, wanted an Old Fashion. So, I poured him sugar and bitter in the glass, reached for the rye whiskey, that's when the guy drank the glass and put a dime on the bar, even though the Old Fashion cost a dollar."
"I would have gunned him down!"
Hello cowboys and cowgirls!
About 15 years ago, Minecraft spearheaded a new trend in game development that can still be found today in the indie, but also occasionally in the AAA sector. We are talking about Early Access.
There is no hard-and-fast definition according to the ISO for this type of game development. What all games have in common is that they are playable but unfinished, they lack features and can contain bugs, while the balancing might not yet been fine-tuned.
The advantage of Early Access for the developer is that due to many different computer configurations, technical problems can be found faster and in a more targeted way, and due to the number of players, bugs can be found more quickly, even at the risk of redundancies in data collection.
Early Access also has advantages for the players. They usually get full access at a discount. The biggest advantage is that player feedback is incorporated into the game to the extent that it is compatible with the vision of the game. A serious shooter will rarely have colourful unicorns leaping out of rocket launchers (although that would certainly be an exhilarating spectacle).
On that note, welcome to the launch of Wild West Dynasty's Early Access tomorrow!
We're welcoming questions, suggestions, and good recipes from the Old West, and we'd love for you to comment here or on our social media channels.
The teams of Moon Punch Studio and Toplitz Productions
Wild West Wednesday Special – The Sounds of the Wild West
"The sound of the West is manifold, from the sound of gun taps clicking, to the screech of vultures, to the ubiquitous rumble of tumbleweeds, the Western creates its melodies..."
"Edward, move over and let the grown-ups handle this!"
"..."
Hello cowboys and cowgirls!
The music in the Wild West is traditionally oriented towards the folk music of England, Wales, Scotland or Ireland and therefore features strings, with the occasional harmonica added later. At this point, Appalachian music had already established itself in the east of the USA, with the same string instrumentation, but supplemented by the banjo and the fiddle. Later, guitars, mandolins and autoharp were added.
The music of western films originates from these two musical styles in the silent film era of the 1930s, somewhat later than country music, which is a style of its own.
The music genre additionally adapted elements from Mexican folklore. The instrumentation involved strings, saloon piano, ocarina, tom-toms, and horns. The works had their peak in the 50s with High Noon or The Searchers.
Enter Ennio Morricone - The Italian composer, forever associated with the Western, composed over 500 film scores, innovating, and expanding the style of the scores with unusual instrumentation such as electric guitars, trumps or audio effects. Thanks to him, film scores have become a language of their own.
Our composer Elina Ungarova shares a few thoughts about the sound and music in Wild West Dynasty in today's DevBlog #4!
Wild West Dynasty - Last stop, please all disembark!
"Mum, why is the train speeding up and who are those masked people out there with the guns?"
"Could be the welcoming committee from Hope, but I'm not sure!"
Hello cowboys and cowgirls!
The Hype Train will be hitting Releasetown soon and you will be allowed to go wild in the West! Meet people on the frontier, lend them a hand with their chores and catch the first glimpses of a promising future. But before that, take a deep breath and brace yourself for the cinematic trailer, which we would like to present to you here.
So, partner, now we'll leave you on the bench and relax before the exciting ride into the prairie begins!
Yeehaa!
Wild West Wednesday - Where the West was wild!
"John, which is the worst place here in the West? Purgatory, Hellhole or Hangman's Hill."
"It's where Karen's dog hangs out, Eric!"
Hello cowboys and cowgirls!
We are getting close to the moment when things get serious. In roughly two weeks the Early Access of Wild West Dynasty will kick off and that's why we also want to revisit Wild West Wednesday. We threw a few exciting topics (The Law, Ghost Towns, Gold Rush and Gunslingers) from the last few weeks into a pot of stew and out came: Bodie.
Bodie in California is a former Wild West town that must have had a population of several thousand people in its heyday. The rise began in 1859: After the great California gold rush, people flocked to the region and began working on their dream of fortune. The town offered them 65 saloons, several brothels, an opium den, breweries, and a railway station that spat out new fortune seekers every day.
But what happened in the subsequent years was more of a nightmare for most in Bodie. Alongside hard-working people, some settlers quickly arrived that wanted to share the dream with considerably less work: Grifters, touts, swindlers and people who also saw violence as a legitimate tool. Murder, manslaughter, robbery, and assault were the order of the day and Bodie became the most dangerous spot in the West.
In addition to the terribly bad reputation that prompted one little girl to write in her diary "Goodbye God, I'm moving to Bodie!", mining booms in Montana, Arizona and Utah ultimately decimated the population and by 1890 it was time to say goodbye. A small spark of life flickered through the town for a good 20 years, but then Bodie was doomed.
The place is now a ghost town and can be visited. We hope that your settlement will not become a cesspit like Bodie, and we are slowly setting the countdown to Hype!
Wild West Wednesday - Judge, Jury, and Executioner
"Some folks here, they should already face severe punishment for brewing this agave brew. No one can drink that. What do you think, Chris?"
"Yeah, you-you-you're absolutely right."
"Isn’t going to happen, fellas, the sheriff's men got a real slack attitude about it."
"Maybe someday we'll have to take the law into our own hands."
Hello cowboys and cowgirls!
Here at Wild West Wednesday, we have often come into con... erm... tact with the law and today we introduce you to the Judge Dredd of the Old West!
No, Isaac Charles Parker's appearances were certainly not all that dramatic, but his nickname "Hanging Judge" was justified.
Parker came from a farming family, but he taught at a school from an early age in order to finance his further education. At 21, he received the bar exam. By the age of 24, he owned his own law firm and represented clients before district and county courts. Parker was also politically active.
Then in 1874, Parker was nominated by President Grant to be the chief justice in Utah, but Parker asked to be appointed to Arkansas instead. The Senate confirmed the decision a year later and Parker became a judge of a district court.
In the years that followed, Parker tried more than 13,000 cases, including some 8500 guilty verdicts. In total, he sentenced 160 people to death, 79 sentences of which were executed and the remaining 81 died in prison, were pardoned, or had their sentences commuted. Even well-known criminals like Cherokee Bill or Belle Starr ended up in Parker's court.
In any case, we are curious to see what punishment Judge Parker will give you for illegal construction of a village. What will your defence be? Tell us here or on our social media channels.
PS: Judge Parker also appears in the must-see western True Grit!
Stories of the Wild West
Today’s dev blog entails the writings of Wild West Dynasty (with emphasis on Wild), which writer Ivan Ertlov explains in a more detailed fashion in an interview. Learn how Wild West Dynasty differs from most other westerns, how the western genre is connected to sci-fi and how Medieval Dynasty’s Uniegost role is connected!
We look forward to meeting you in the game soon (so you can lift the secrets of the lumberjack’s camp) but tell us what you expect from Wild West Dynasty’s story here or on our social media channels.
Wild West Wednesday - Forsaken by the Spirits
“Tell me, Misses, what brings you to this remote place? There is nothing here of interest for a young woman like you, is there?”
“Well, Karen, ma'am, I like quiet corners. Places where the nights seem particularly long, and many a man's heart despairs. It's because not everyone comes here that I like this place. And the children are so neat.”
“I guess you're right, miss!”
Hello, cowboys and cowgirls!
We live in the 21st century, the days of the Old West are over for 130 years, but what has become of the towns of the past? Many localities that were dug out of the ground back then still exist, even the famous Tombstone in Arizona.
As has always been the case in human history, people settle in places that are easily defensible or where resources are available. It was no different in the West. Someone found valuable resources like gold or silver and, poof, the settlement was built in no time. In the West, one looked in vain for a building authority or fire regulations that ensured that the bureaucracy slowed down the project.
Accordingly, fate was harsh when the wellspring of resources dried up and the place offered too little incentive to stay. One such place is St. Elmo in Colorado. It was founded in 1880 after gold was found there and offered all amenities to two thousand people, including a railway connection. But as the mines gradually closed, life drained out of the town, and it became a ghost town - well preserved and visitable.
Sometimes, however, it is not the lack of resources that makes a place fade away, but its reputation.
Bannack in Montana is such a place. The local sheriff made sure that the town became a place of discontent. He and a gang of villains committed robberies and murders in the region. Though his deeds were discovered, and he and his gang dangled from the gallows as a result, the aura of terror had caught up with the place and people believed that he and the others still haunted it. To make matters worse, the ghost of a drowned girl joined the creepiness. Truly a ghost town.
If you found a ghost town in Wild West Dynasty, would you try to get to the bottom of the mystery? What scares you the most? Tell us here or on our social media channels!
Wild West Wednesday - The Postman Always Shoots Twice!
No.
But the address is right?
Yes, but what would I do with a steam engine?
Hello cowboys and cowgirls!
You may be familiar with this situation: You live somewhere in the middle of nowhere and yet a delivery service finds you (or not). But what was it like in the Old West?
In the eastern USA at the beginning of the 19th century, it was straightforward to mail or send things from A to B and make sure they arrived. There was a postal network about 21000 miles long and with a solid 900 post offices. However, the further the distance from the East Coast, the more difficult it became to carry mail to the West, almost impossible beyond the Mississippi. This changed from mid-century onward.
Postal rates were standardised, and various private (express) couriers appeared.
The most famous name among them might be Wells Fargo, founded in 1852 in California. Wells Fargo stagecoaches were ubiquitous in the West at the time. Closely associated with Wells Fargo was also the Butterfield Overland Mail, with the so-called Oxbow Route, which ran year-round without snow from west to east and vice versa, as it bypassed the Rocky Mountains.
The Pony Express, on the other hand, braved its way through the middle of the Rocky Mountains, had a stop every 20 kilometres or so and was considered the fastest courier service in 1860. The Express mainly hired teenage riders under the age of 18, as the job was very dangerous. Although the Express had a highly successful run-in terms of speed, it was a financial disaster because a telegraph line was built the year after it was founded.
Should your parcel go back as "undeliverable" or how many dollars do you give your express courier on top? Tell us here or on our social media channels!