Chronicles of Elyria outlines the basic gameplay beats of the colony sim Kingdoms of Elyria

Soulbound Studios CEO Jeromy Walsh would like you to ignore the elephant in the room and instead take a look at the overall gameplay cadence of Kingdoms of Elyria, the standalone colony management sim title that is being developed in parallel to MMORPG Chronicles of Elyria.

In a recent development vlog, Walsh provides a look at a pre-alpha version of Kingdoms and discusses some of the early gameplay of the title overall. Players start off with a hamlet consisting of three parcels of land and 10 citizens. The game’s map will initially be a procedurally generated forest biome, with later updates promising more diverse biomes later. As for time, that ticks by about four times faster than it would in CoE, with options to increase the passage of time by as much as 20 times in offline mode.

While Kingdoms is ultimately a game about colony management, the first version will not feature the ability to control your colony’s citizens. Instead, players will have their own citizen that they control directly who will also be responsible for completing manual labor tasks like gathering resources. On the subject of gathering, that will be expanded upon in a separate blog post.

Finally, the game utilizes a fog of war mechanic, limiting players’ vision of the immediate area. This feature works like most similar systems experienced in RTS games, for example, but Kingdoms also makes use of tall buildings and lookout points to increase the view radius and collapses the fog of war around a settlement after dark to represent the unknown dangers of nighttime. This can be mitigated a bit with better lighting, however.

Chronicles of Elyria, of course, stunned MMO gamers last year by announcing it was out of money, had laid off the devs, had closed Soulbound Studio, and had ended development on the game. And though CEO Jeromy Walsh later retracted much of that and said the game was still in production with volunteer staff, the gamers who’d backed it for $14M+ in crowdfunds pressed onward with legal action. Over the last few months, Walsh has been releasing new videos on the production he says is happening, though the focus has been more on Kingdoms of Elyria. You can get caught up on the whole saga right here: