Recently revealed game Kingmakers seems to perfectly capture the childhood thrill of smashing together characters from different worlds, with its debut trailer featuring a huge medieval army being demolished by a modern soldier with automatic weapons, a beat-up pick-up truck and command of a helicopter. Beyond that now-infamous plot twist at the 23 second mark, there’s a lot going on: third-person shooter gameplay, real-time strategy elements and a massive scale to the proceedings with thousands of soldiers on-screen; it’s like dropping a guy from Battlefield into Medieval: Total War.
The developers behind the title are Redemption Road Games, best known for the Road Rash spiritual successor Road Redemption that featured in our retrospective of that iconic series. Following that piece’s publication late last year, the development team reached out to offer an interview about what they were working on next.
Here’s that interview, which features John Linneman speaking to four members of Road Redemption Games: co-founders and programmers Ian Fisch, Paul Fisch and Daniel Balazs, and programmer Trace Myers. As usual, the text has been lightly edited for length and clarity, with the full interview available via the video embed below.
I want to start on the tech side, as this is Digital Foundry. I don’t know anything about the underlying tech yet – are you using an engine like Unity or is this all made from the ground up?
Ian Fisch: We’re using Unreal Engine, but there are a few different aspects of the tech that make it special. The goal of this game was really to push this generation forward; this is not something that can run on last-gen, this is a next-gen game.