If you’ve e-mailed me to mm@thd.vg in the last few days and I haven’t replied please send it to michal.marcinkowski@gmail.com. That e-mail broke for some reason and I need to fix it, sorry.
MM
If you don’t know this by now we’re testing the new release constantly for over a week now. There’s a ton of new stuff there, including new menus, loading catapults on catapults and so on. We had to rebalance the whole game because the new features like workshops made some unexpected changes to the fighting classes. We are heading towards perfection, still got to do the menus better – more intuitive. Anyway the new build will be amazing, I’m sure you will love it!
MM
I got frustrated with not being able to pick blocks as builder when standing on a catapult. So I decided to dig out some nice code from my archives and introduce in-game pie menus. This will really deepen the gameplay and introduce many new features in a nice clear manner.
We need suggestions for a new chat/command menu. Please reply to this topic.
(the KAG Forums use the same account as your game account, so please join us on the forums!)
MM
Test build available with a draft implementation of workshops and coins to test and balance. As it is there’s been hardly any attention made to balancing those changes so we’ll be looking for feedback from experienced players on what changes they think should be made based on a few hours of play.
Here’s me atop my freshly created stack-o-workshops.
I was well paid for my efforts building this, netting just over 600 coins I think. That’s probably too much and we’ll need to balance it all, but regardless this sort of building is stupidly useful – anyone standing in the quarters gets free HP over time, arrows on top of the murder-section and beside a bunch of firing ports means archers barely even need to leave the window to stock up and, well, everyone knows what the bomb workshop is for 😉
In summary, get ready to test out how this plays over the next few days, hopefully it’ll be in a suitable state to go live for the weekend!
NO MORE KNIGHT SUICIDE BOMB RUSHES 😀 😀 😀
Geti
EDIT: grab the test and give us your comments in this thread.
I’ve been trying to code all the stuff we are planning for the next release which you can read here, like coins, workshops and movable ladders. Unfortunately it has become increasingly difficult for me to add stuff with the current engine. The problem with it is that it is a mash-up of 3 games I’ve been working on for the last 5 years and all of the KAG code is more like prototype code than proper game code. I did this because I wasn’t sure KAG would be a success so I just coded it really quickly without thinking much how that will affect the future.
This method is great and I spent an entire game development lecture last month emphasizing this approach. So if you’re a game developer – please do prototype your games and don’t think much about what will happen later!
However last Monday I just sat for an hour or so trying to add points scoring for digging resources and I couldn’t do it! I couldn’t figure out a way to do it without breaking the existing game elements or completely rewriting the game.
So I decided to actually rewrite the KAG engine completely from scratch. Now this is an amazing opportunity for everyone so please take the time to read what benefits there will be from this change:
1) New additions a lot faster
The rewrite will probably take about 3-6 months before it reaches the stage the game is right now. This will take some time and this is the only negative side of this decision. I know you guys are waiting for new stuff!
I decided not to drop the current KAG engine and continue developing it along with the new KAG. This means there will be new updates as usual, it’s just that they will probably happen less frequently (as at least half of my time will be spent on the new engine).
What will happen after these 3 months will be worth the less frequent updates. From then on additions to the game will happen extremely fast. This is because:
2) Less bugs
In the current engine it takes me a large amount of time to track and fix bugs. This is because of the spaghetti nature of the code. With the new engine, bugs will happen less frequently and if they do, they will be very easy to debug.
3) Much deeper gameplay mechanics
What we have presented publicly is the tip of the iceberg of what we are planning. We are redesigning things like building mechanics and the user interface around building and using items. So the game will not only have more stuff but it will be easier to use them.
Wish me good luck. I hope we have an even more awesome game in the next half year. In the meantime expect (a little less frequent but still) updates. This will come as promised probably next week:
MM
There’s an interview up on IndieGames.com and Gamasutra.com with me. Half of it is about Soldat and alpha funding, so it’s not strictly about KAG but I’m posting because it’s exciting to have those sites write about us.
MM
So, this little thing:
http://adrenic.net/?page_id=284
So, we’re losing on this poll, and they spelled the game’s name incorrectly! Not a great start, but considering there’s less than 200 votes on the board we can turn this train wreck around with your support!
Voting us up takes ~5 seconds, get in there! Vote KAG! Tell them the spelled the name wrong in the comments for bonus points! Support your country Game! … Oh, and us, too 😉
Edit: Huzzah! We’re on top and they fixed the name and it’s thanks to you guys!
Thanks for your support guys!
Edit2: Yikes, AoS is catching up! If you haven’t voted yet, hop to it! It’d be good fun to win this thing.
Sneak peek into what I’m working on this week all explained in a nice picture.
Other than that I’ve started exporting the game rules (like what happens on score, how much points for doing stuff etc.) into a script file.
MM
This from one of our Guards, Neat:
Red, and blue, the biggest recorded single battle ever yet. We now have a 128 player server. It may have crashed at 60 players the other night but I think it’s worth a try to get as many people, hopefully the maximum number in at once.
If posted to tumblr and facebook and this forum, I reckon we can get 128 people at any one time and keep it going for a while (presuming it doesn’t crash, they’re going to work on the issues)
Kag is not tennis, Kag is WAR.
Help us iron out the networking bugs by tweeting/spamming facebook/mailing your grandma about this and playing on that huge server, we want to see some epic recordings and hear some amazing tales, and most importantly bug reports when it dies detailing when, how and why 😛
MeteorVPS 128 Slot is the place to be!
Have at it!
Geti
Oh this was a bad one. It seems like the big guys, like us and Apple are having problems these days :). But I was faster to fix it!
I noticed the amount of players online suddenly dropped so something was wrong. Servers and clients have to patch. Please restart to auto-update.
Changes 157-158:
– fixed not being able to connect to server after some time of server running
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