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Vote KAG! (for serious this time)

OHEY EVERYONE.

http://www.indiegamemag.com/igm-awards-2011-vote/

Vote King Arthur’s Gold for Best Free Game of 2011 in exchange for free internets! Tell your friends for double points!

Discuss the IGM Voting here (including how much you love and want to marry our game)

In other news (and to sway your vote) – new build due out asap with menu fixes and a bunch of bugs slain, to be followed quickly by zombies to redeadinate, boulders to crush those pesky enemies with, and powder kegs because everyone loves dangerous pyrotechnics.

Huzzah! Build successful!

I’ve finally been able to get everything behaving out of the repository which means I can run around doing all the little fixes that Michal doesn’t have time for.

NOTE: this doesn’t mean bug me about every tiny thing you want changed any more than you guys do already!

Geti

Bye bye Disqus!

As good as Disqus is for quick blog comments, we’ve decided to detach it from the devlog.

We’ve decided that we want to cut down on the number of accounts that you guys need to maintain, therefore we’ll be moving discussion of the devlog posts to the forum announcements section from now on.

We’ll be setting up a bot to crosspost from tumblr to the forums soon and potentially auto-link into the devlog post, but in the mean-time we’ll be setting up the links manually, so expect some delay in the posts getting across – If we’re taking far too long feel free to make the copypaste yourself, forum staff 😉

Forum thread here.

Help out on the Wiki!

Are you an experienced KAG player with a bunch of free time and a drive to help new players learn the game?

kagwiki.com needs more love!

Hit up this thread for pages that need updating and to learn the system that everyone’s using, then either click here (or join quakenet’s #kag.wiki if you’re IRC savvy) to get organised and start putting together some quality knowledge!

The wiki (and hopefully the ability to edit it) will soon be accessible from inside the game so it’s important that it’s in tip top shape before then but we can’t get it in shape without you guys! It’d be great to see more people lending a hand there, so hop to it!

Geti

Main Menus overhaul

This has been something that I have been postponing for a long time and there never is a good time to do it. Well now it is because I think the benefits are worth it. I am completely redoing the main menus as well as the auto-update launcher.

Players on Linux and Mac OSX don’t see the autoupdate in the black console that’s why the next version will have a nice graphical interface. (btw. haven’t yet found the reason for the crashes on OSX, working on it…)

Main menus will be completely new, much more intuitive and easy to use. There will be a couple nice things added like a “Quick Join” button if you don’t want to bother with the server browser and just quickly join the estimated best server.

These changes should be ready for next week.

MM

Some Changes to run by the Community regarding Builders and Bridges

So you know that point in the game where you’ve just got your tower repaired from the last wave of enemies, cleared away any mess and you’re back inside? I can’t think of anything that ruins that more than spammy enemy builders.

I’ve just come out of a game where we spent 40 minutes or so repeatedly clearing drawbridges and ladders from our base, only to have an enemy builder come back and spam another 10 or so before getting killed. It’d then take us time to clear those ones out again by which point the builder would be back, spamming bridges at our wall.

Now, this doesn’t strike me as fun. At all.

As such, a few proposed changes:

• Builders would only build while standing still (ie on solid ground, not pressing any buttons, not getting attacked) – this means no more jump building, no more spamming stones while running away in tunnels, etc. Ladder or bridge scaffolding would probably be more or less necessary to build a big castle or even a tall wall.
• To compensate for castles being harder to build, the builder’s construction radius would be larger, perhaps almost double what it is now. Ideally you’d be able to build quarters and a roof for it without having to move.
• Constructed Blocks would no longer get support from background dirt, only natural blocks would – this means castles in caves can fall down if they aren’t held together with background stone walls like outside. Basically, tiles underground would work the same way tiles overground do. The background dirt would just prevent overhangs of dirt from falling down.

I think this will make battles involving builders far less frustrating, and will make structures underground far less overpowered, as well as drawbridge- and ladder-spamming being less effective because the builder in question will have to actually be standing still at the bottom of the wall, not jumping at it spastically.

That said, I might have overlooked something, so I figured I’d run it by you before we make the changes. What do you think?

EDIT: A revised #1:

• Builders have to charge up to build (based on the block they were building, ladders would take less time than stone blocks) and have limited movement while charging (much like a knight when charging their slash) (the time taken would be based on a serverside variable so that you can have instant building in some servers).

The build radius would still probably be increased to prevent the need for jump-building.

Geti

KAG Minecraft Art

I thought this was funny enough to repost here (from the forums):

MM

And finally, he’s also done the archer:

Glad to have such a keen community!

Geti

Some updates!

This has been a fairly hectic weekend!

Both days (which aren’t even finished yet, barely beginning in some parts of the US) have seen record traffic with a anywhere between 200 and 1000 logins per hour! This has seen the masterserver throw occasional tantrums and server owners complain of a hard kick in the bandwidth. Cheers to TotalBiscuit for the feature and to all those who’ve bought the full version over the last week!

On that note:

The Aussie servers went down at some point today and it’s still not quite clear what the issue is to me – I knew we were getting close to pushing the bandwidth cap over but I’ve heard tales of memory leak issues and I cant even ssh into the server at all to check, so sorry to any australian players! We’ll try to find a solution over the coming week, but it’d be great to see some fan-run servers pop up in the mean time so we can have some low latency fun.

There’s a guide to hosting a server here for those interested: http://kagwiki.com/wiki/Server

More news coming this week about our plans for the next release. Sadly, we’ve had to put off those undead things again for more pressing matters – getting the game more friendly for new players.

OSX build on the horizon too, had some… enormous bugs that’ve slowed the release.

Geti

Hello new players!

We see a new big wave of new players again. Greetings to all of you! I hope you stay and enjoy the game because I promise you incredible fun times!

The game currently has limited tutorials and no introduction. So if you get right into the game and figure it out congratulations. It’s definitely worth it so give it a try. We’ll be adding new tutorials and single player challenges in the near future (like zombie mode!).

It’s worth reading what this game is about and seeing what you can get when you buy the full version of KAG. It’s a good idea to do it now, since this is a pre-order and you get a 60% discount!

KAG is a work-in-progress. If you run into trouble head on to our friendly forums. You can ask for help or post your own game idea suggestions. The forums use the same account and password as the game so it’s easy!

You can also directly talk with the devs, that is me (MM) and Geti on IRC.
Server: Quakenet
Channel: #kag

You should subscribe to the blog feed or join the KAG FACEBOOK PAGE and come back frequently because we have new updates every week on average!