Merry Xmas!

We’d like to wish everyone following KAG development and playing the game a happy and wonderful xmas. May you have power in your sword, aim in your arrow and strength and wisdom in your hammer to build the best unpenetrable castles.

Got some good news. The IndieDB Awards for 2011 have ended and King Arthur’s Gold got a really significant award. Despite being still in alpha stage it captured IndieDB’s founder attention. It seems it is his favorite game. I know why, because it is awesome fun!

We’ve got a lot of good stuff coming after holidays in a few days. As you probably see there won’t be any release right now. We aimed to release a little something before Christmas but unfortunately I got a bad cold and was out of service for 3 days. Bad timing, but things like this happen. I’m a little sad because we have a ton of stuff done and it could be shared but I don’t want to release anything untested and then leave it for the holidays. So we are aiming now for something before New Year’s.

Once again Merry Xmas and stay tuned. Exciting times ahead of us!

MM 

PS. Read the rest of IndieDB’s Editor choices. 

Little zombie survival screenshot

We’re gonna just publish little bits of things from the new gamemode because we want this game mode to be a surprise.

 

When was the last time you said “holy shit!” in a video game? We’re aiming to bring you that experience back.

MM

KAG Tournament!

While we’ve been busy getting this round of goodies together, the community have put together a tournament, set to kick off December 26 or 27!

The forum thread has the needed info: currently sign ups are closed but if you get onto IRC and hassle Carver, Stevedog, and anyone else involved with the organisation they might allow another team to participate, if you’re interested in doing that I’d suggest you get in quick before everything’s been timetabled and set in stone.

There’s a gold account to be won if you’re after some motivation ;)

It’ll be quite exciting to see how this turns out, there have been a few well organised clan matches in the past but nothing so formal as a tournament, props to Carver and Stevedog for getting this sorted and to the community for being keen enough to participate!

Geti

Lighting!

The next release (which should be out in time for christmas!) is looking to be chock full of features! Insofar we’ve talked mostly about zombies, but also the new level format.

Now, the next feature to talk about (and the first thing that we’re going to give you some visuals for) is lighting! Days and nights will cycle in the next version and at night time, lighting will be important for making out anything and thus make wandering in the field a very dangerous thing to do!

Lanterns will be vital to coordinating a working, safe castle at night-time, but will also give your position away to the enemy should you use them during a night-time raid! They might also prove to be a fire hazard if left lying around in wooden forts ;)

Workshops are going to have a quick overhaul to all fit into 3x3 and use a unified interface of construction and destruction - this means less potential clutter in a builder’s F menu as we add more workshops, and that we can add more workshops in less time - the quarters with lantern in the shot above is an example of how the workshops are being converted graphically.

Sorry to all the people who’ll have to wait it out with crashing 228 KAG - we’re looking into the crash issues and have fixed most of them but we wont be able to release fixes until we have this build completed.

Know that we’re working our butts off on this release, and we’re making up for lost time for sure!

Keep the bugs flowing to bugs.kag2d.com as you find them - though please check for duplicates before reporting!

Geti

New map format

Today I’m creating a new map format called simply .kag. Right now map saving is done via PNG files. So each map is in fact a bitmap that you can edit in a paint program. This is cool and easy to edit however it is very limited because you can only save tiles and simple objects. The new map format will be able to save and load the entire world with all map objects and their current state. This means we’ll be able to create little single player maps with zombies on them, make multiplayer campaigns with “stories”, put catapults with specific amount of rocks in them, save castles with rooms, drop items and make them available for discovery and much much more. The old PNG format will remain for compatibility and ease of use.

In other news..  we crossed over 2500 full version sales. Thanks everyone for supporting us! We have a terrific community and as you can see we are working hard now to deliver that full version content.

MM

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82E7vhtLxNs?feature=oembed&w=500&h=374]

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

Grrrrrr... mmmmh...

The sounds of grrrrr, mmmmh and “brains!” are filling my room. Guess what I’m working on?

Gonna post more soon.

MM

King Arthur's Gold. Now on Mac.

Mac version en route!

Michal’s confident the OSX version will be working on all macs soon, we’ll release a testing version as soon as possible, probably within 24 hours with a OSX-size temporary icon to boot ;)

Geti

Linux version fixed

Unfortunately with the recent changes the Linux version didn’t autoupdate so smoothly. Good news is I fixed it and re-downloading the full version should fix it.

Download:
http://kag2d.com/download/file/kag228x.tar.gz

Build 228! Finally!

Restart your game to auto-patch!

We’re probably happier than you guys to see this one out the door, haha. It’s taken way too long.

First thing you’ll notice is the different menus and the awesome menu music by David Pencil (in-game music coming soon), but that’s not all that’s changed:

Collapses are the largest in-game alteration - we’re working to make them more predictable at the moment (short on time…) but I think most players will like the extra residue and danger of a large collapse, as well as limited ability to ride atop blocks in a collapse - we’re hoping to get a proper rubble system happening soon too, I’ve got a few ideas there. I’m planning on adding to the effects first chance I get, been watching a lot of building demolitions.

(be goddamn careful)

Customisation is now done in the settings menu rather than in-game - we think this makes a lot more sense but might easily confuse people.

There’s now a quick-join feature in-game! We’ll probably have to tweak the selection algorithm a little with real-world

There’s now some access to the internet in-game, allowing you to browse the forums, chat on IRC and read the KAG manual without opening your browser! This seems to have issues with older graphics cards, which we’ll look into.

A bunch of smaller fixes have been snuck in as well - it no longer says “his” when girls kill people, autobalance should be less retarded and less rude, physics should be less CPU intensive, bridges aren’t so cheap, doors aren’t so expensive, resources are lost in ripping out bridges and doors, there’s clear terms of service, see the changelog for more!

For server hosts, you can now specify overrides for the number of slots, IP and port number on the command line, as well as a break_time_static variable that lets you set the building time at the start in seconds that’s independent of the number of players, due to popular request. See the changelog for details.

Needless to say, there are probably some very strange bugs that’ll only become apparent through the heavier testing of a public build so we’ll be running bugfixes as needed. Hit up bugs.kag2d.com to report issues to get them dealt with sooner!

Changes build 203-228:

- added pre-game launcher
- added (windows only for now) ingame web browser with links to:
  (manual, wiki, IRC chat, creating account)
- added server favorites
- added in-game Manual by SirSalami
- removed player name mouse hover chat
- clicked server in server browser updates ping meter icon
- improved first ping performance in server browser
- added double click join to server browser
- added building time/match started information in server preview
- added menu music
- changed collapse physics
- fixed ambient sounds
- fixed screenshot folder on Linux
- fixed crash in editor mode when jumping on bridge
- fixed builder can’t pick 3rd heart
- fixed door pick sound being wood
- builder has to stand still to build
- autoupdater does not require restart
- changed collapse physics
- console accepts and / for commands
- bridge takes 20 wood
- bridges and ladders can’t be built only against dirt background
- optimized all game object collisions
- icons in scoreboard are double size
- class icons point in same direction and builder is distinguished from sword more
- can’t shield against falling blocks
- can’t destroy rooms after match has started (anti-griefing)
- fixed far view on fixed camera for lower resolutions
- added disclaimer after server startup for sv_allow_globals_mods variable
- rooms require 5 hits to destroy
- changed some HUD fonts (including above head chat)
- added command-line option to start server with specific ip,port,slots eg.
  ip 123.124.125.126 port 50213 slots 32
- added break_time_static for a build time that doesn’t change with number of players

Geti + MM

Discuss on forums!

More voting to do!

Oh god so many buttons to press I know, but we’re really hoping for your support on this one. Be sure to check out the other indie titles vying for the top-100 (after you’ve voted for KAG of course ;)

2011 Indie of the Year Awards via Indie DB

(scroll down to the area with the nice trees after clicking)

Geti

Bug Reports!

So, we get a lot of bug reports, naturally, as the game is in alpha and we simply don’t have time to fix everything when it comes to making a release. Problem is, a lot of those reports are duplicates and reading through them burns precious fun development time!

We’ve decided to implement mantis bug tracking (same thing Bay12Games use for tracking all the bugs in dwarf fortress, so at least we know it scales well) so that duplicate reports are minimised and bug reports are separated from the discussion on the forums.

Check out bugs.kag2d.com!

If you find something screwy in-game, search for it first and then if it’s not there, report it. We’ll be addressing them in any spare time we can muster - do note however that as we’re more or less about to make a release many of the 203 bugs are fixed!

A story about my recent experience with EA.

Excuse me while I vent a little.

You know that game that came out about a month ago, Battlefield 3?

Pretty fun right? With the shooting and the giant maps and the tanks and explosions and marksman headshot +500…

I assume so, anyway. I played and enjoyed the beta, but insofar EA haven’t actually let me download the game ever since I pre-ordered. This wasn’t some $10 indie alpha pre-order either. This set me back 80 bucks.

Here’s how the last month has gone:

Day -1, I try to preload: It’s there in the menu, it has a nice shiny download button just like the beta did, and it’s going to be fucking awesome. Come to papa you tasty slice of shooting heaven… Now, to wait 5 hours while it downloads…

*windows “warning” sound*

For some unknown reason at some point towards the end of the 11GB download for the full version, I disconnected from EA’s “activation server”.

As a precautionary measure, Origin deletes the entire download.

…The entire, mostly done, 11GB download.

I’ve seen some bad, un-user-friendly DRM, but this is the first time I’ve had to deal with something this heavy-handed. I told myself “It’s likely some issue with preloading, Origin is quite new, it’ll be sorted after release week”.

Release week came and went and I tried again.

Same thing. Another 10GB wasted.

Now, I live in Australia. Bandwidth isn’t cheap here (As you might have noticed with how frugal I’m having to be with the Aussie Official Server…) so the combined 20GB pushed me over my download limit for the month. Not only was I without my game, I was also stuck with internet throttled down to dial-up speed.

At this point, naturally I’m less than happy. I give up for a few weeks, then give in to temptation again. I really want to play this game!

Same thing. Another 8GB wasted. I guess at least this time I’ve got 2GB spare…

As such, I’ve given up for now. I’ll see if I can install from a friend’s disk or something, but I’m not going to get my hopes up. I’ve probably purchased some download only licence.

I think the lesson to be learned here is: Let people play your game. I’ve been looking forward to the next “real” Battlefield for years now, but I still haven’t actually been able to play it, even though I’ve payed for the damn thing and downloaded it 2.5 times over!

The ridiculous part of this is that from what I understand, cracked versions of the game are missing the DRM layer. Pirates get the fun bit, without all the bullshit, for free, and thus the only people affected by DRM are people who’ve payed for the game legitimately!

I’ve paid a company 80 dollars to spend about 28GB of download on… nothing. I haven’t been able to play it. However, buying voxatron from lexaloffle as part of last months humble bundle was painless, cost me 15 bucks for a cheerful, colourful adventure and a peek at some very interesting technology. I also picked up two other games as a bonus. When you buy alpha access to KAG, as soon as your paypal payment goes through we send you a code to redeem for full version access to everything we’ve got finished.

What’s so hard about letting people play a game, EA? *grumble*

tl;dr: This is me trying to play a game I’ve been anticipating for years that I’m unable to play due to some borked copyright protection protocol. I wish they’d be less stoogey about it and let me play:

Geti

Aus Server up for testing!

I’ve been trying to find a good hosting partner for KAG in Australia for a long time, hopefully I’ve found a suitable company now :) I’ll be running the server as a trial for the next month to monitor bandwidth usage etc, over the next week it’ll likely stay as 16 players only to make sure it’s not going to explode with traffic, but feel free to give it a shot.

The current settings:

• 12 players


• 512x64 map (long and short, prevents skybridges and overpowered catapults)


• Default generator only


• Default CTF

If all goes well this week I’ll be bumping the player count to 24 and attaching an RTDM server as well for some more low-latency fun! Sorry for the time off the air!

We’re busy as beavers at the moment, hopefully that’s reflected in playable advances soon ;)

EDIT: forum topic here.

EDIT: dropped the players to 12 while we sort out odd networking issues, sorry!

Geti

Oh So Close

We’re pretty much on the home stretch with this build, just sorting out the menu presentation. All things going according to plan, we’re hoping to have it out tomorrow so we can get started on some fun stuff!

Things still on the todo list include:

• Try to get the Mac build up to scratch


• Tweak menu layouts a little more


• Ensure it’s working properly on all systems


• Optimise collapses


• Ensure there are no new nasty bugs.

Sadly, no new test build.

Some of it’s still going to be a bit cut and dry by the time the release makes it out, but we’ll be running bugfixes as normal alongside normal development. We’re very keen to be out of this cycle because we’re a month behind where we wanted to be content wise.

Keep your eyes on the blog!

Geti

Off for the weekend, Quick Update.

I’m going camping, back monday. MM might be around, but be nice to the forum staff while I’m gone, yeah?

Test build coming fairly soon, if Michal can merge all my changes and get it out over the weekend then he will. We might have to drop ingame browser functionality for now which would mean no wiki, or IRC in-game, but less headaches for us. Either way we’re hoping to have this build done and dusted as soon as possible because both of us are sick to death of fixes and interfaces for now.

(translation: zombies, boulders and powder kegs as soon as we can make them)

Geti

I’m working hard on a “one-click” deployment system. Which ideally would allow me to compile KAG for 3 systems (win, mac, linux) at once and instantly upload them for you - available as autoupdate. I’ve been working hard on making the necessary scripts and even made a small tool called Wizard which takes care of uploading all the necessary files. Along with the GUI changes allowing you to see the autoupdate progress bar this will be a really nice addition. We’ll be needing this once we start pumping out content and updating REALLY frequently. I hope that starts happening next week.

Have fun!

MM

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!

Master Playing Up

The master server that controls kag2d.com, kagforum logins and the ingame logins is playing up so KAG mightn’t work until we can get it fixed. Sorry for the delay, we’ll get it working again as soon as possible.

Geti

Unfortunately this happens whenever there is a big spike of new players. Master authentication is temporarily turned off. This means you won’t see yourself as a premium player nor guard until this is resolved.

MM

Build 203 released!

A quick patch hopefully solving some most important issues. Also added the long awaited server name on scoreboard and all players have a little class icon next to their names so you can quickly see how much of a given class is in the team already.

Changes build 200-203:

- added server name and address in scoreboard
- added class icons next to player names
- sword strike knockback is half power
- removed semi-stun from hit
- clash doesn’t work on slash
- less stun on fall
- game is not rendered after alt+tab
- unit_count can use floating point variables
- unit_count = 0 - no respawns; unit_count = -1 - unlimited respawns
- added sv_deltacompression variable (set to 0 in dedicated_autoconfig.gm to improve performance at the cost of bandwidth)
- sv_compression temporarily disabled (always true)
- limited CPU usage

MM

Build 200 'Player Customizations' released!

Good news for anyone who’s paid for the full version - you’re getting new stuff for your money now!

Remember this?

I’m sure you do ;)

Gender swapping is available to everyone using the Misc [BACKSPACE] menu.

Head customisation is now available to all paid players in-game in all servers. Enjoy wearing flashy hats, helmets and haircuts in-game! For those that have been hoping for a more custom (Do-it-yourself) form of customisation - patience! We’re contemplating adding that but will need to figure out a way of making it ergonomic for you guys…

Knight combat has been changed fairly significantly:

• Two colliding hits will now bounce off each other!


• Getting hurt interrupts charging (this applies to archers too)


• Jab no longer stuns but does push away (this applies to builder hits too)


• If two knights jab or slash at each other they clash!
  
  Not actual game footage.

Other key changes include bridges being two way platforms and not blocking arrows (allowing for quite complicated team-only structures and elaborate traps, not to mention disguised pathways and more intuitive elevators than doorladders as well as being pretty crap for skybridging now as you can be shot with ease).

Just press [S] (crouch) on a bridge to fall off it.

The camera is now fixed on the player. You can scroll by moving your mouse to the edge of the screen. This change is mainly for new players (especially ones that never played Soldat). You can easily return to the old camera system in main menu -> Player.

An arrow indicating bomb throw direction, many UI improvements (catapult menu especially), a bunch of things to assist in making guards lives easier including the name of anyone causing a collapse in the console, and the usual pile of tweaks likely to garner a thousand complaints ;) (although we tested these for nearly a week to make sure they are good)

Changelog B190a to B200:

- added female characters (player customization) ([BACKSPACE] in-game)
- added head customizations ([BACKSPACE] in-game)

- Misc menu (backspace) doesn’t require to hold key
- bridges are now two-way platforms (drop from them with down key [S])
- arrows go through bridges
- removed Advanced Movement tutorial
- fixed arched not falling from top tree
- all objects now fall through bottom of map (flag respawns after falling there)
- increased pick radius of pie menus
- pie menu items are also selected with left mouse click
- fixed collapsed blocks not disappearing at the bottom of the map
- fixed not being able to build castle background over spikes
- fixed spiked castled background not giving support
- catapult fire progress is always displayed when in fire mode
- fixed catapult not changing team on fire
- fixed shield ladder not working on ladders
- removed “test” name above head
- tweaked bomb throwing
- added throw direction arrow on HUD
- fixed bomb wall bounces
- fixes in fast moving player/map collision
- optimized map collision code
- misc menu (BACKSPACE) doesn’t require holding the key
- fixed bridge open/close glitch
- rcon commands are logged in console ([RCON FROM PLAYER_NAME])
- admin/guard : [F3] key freezes [F2] key unfreezes player
- added “COLLAPSE by PLAYER_NAME” in console log
- can’t switch to team with units depleted
- removed tutorial box and emoticons from tutorial display
- fixed joining game errors
- added fixed camera on/off option in main menu (Player tab)
- lowered bomb jump velocity
- bridges can be built on dirt background
- removed material dropping when overloaded
- hovering mouse on player and pressing chat adds his name to chat (works for chat menu too)
- tweaked jumping
- help UI improvements
- 30% of fallen coins is lost (not dropped) on death
- near spawn respawn multiplier multiplies half the time for outpost
- HUD doesn’t fade out if typing in chat
- break time is now set based on a multiplier (lowest team size)
- unit counter is now set based on a multiplier (lowest team size)
- added 1 archer discharge frame
- fixed loadmap [name] command - loads the map from the folder Maps/[name].png
- added sword blocks when hot other sword
- bomb sparks turn red when approaching explosion time
Combat:
- you lose charge on being hit
- fixed slash on team player
- fixed knight hitting after being hit
- fixes in knight double slashes
- can’t hit or shield for 0.5s after being hit

Zombie survival is next on the TODO ( :D )

Geti

KAG on IGF 2012 !

It’s official now. King Arthur’s Gold is in the competition for grand prize on the Independent Games Festival 2012. Here is its entry page.

It is pretty overwhelming to see so much games there (must be a couple thousand). I know KAG is the best game there, but will it be noticed by the judges?

MM

News on next release

I’m already working on the next release. This time it will be much faster (a matter of days). The planned releases are segmented into 3 parts: hot fixes, player customization and zombies. In that order.

The last one will probably take longest but will be also the most cool thing. Probably the most fun thing in the entire game!

There will be also some surprises…
But first things first:
fixes and improvements to the current version.

The unit counter is a very fun addition. Many players especially like what happens when unit counters get depleted. The thrill of permanent death is amazing!
I am thinking of changing the team unit counter to player life counter. So each player would have their own life counter (like 20 lives each round) and would not have to be penalized by some prick that gets killed over and over again.

But this also means that players might sit in the lobby forever if they deplete their lives. So a “sudden death” would have to be introduced. I’m thinking that, if half of the team is dead and can’t respawn, the whole team’s lives deplete and its sudden death. Just to make matches quicker and not be boring for people that killed themselves quickly.

Thoughts?

MM

'Workshops Build' released!

This is the largest update we’ve ever done. So much new cool things to do! Please read this whole post so you’re not confused by the changes.

First watch this video for a really brief run through the new features:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6svGnBdylKE?hl=en&fs=1]

Of course that is not all. One of the main gamemode improvements is the addition of UNIT COUNTERS. On the top of the screen you’ll see a team unit counter. Everytime you die, this counter decreases. Once the counter is depleted nobody on your team can spawn any longer. The team that kills all enemies on the counter and all remaining ones wins.

All the main combat mechanics have been changed and improved. Until you jump to conclusions please spend some time playing the game and actually seeing why this happened. The majority of time spent on this build was actually play testing. For every nerf there is actually a buff for each class. The addition of arrow workshops disrupted the games balance leading to many changes. For example:

• Archer has now 3 types of shots (slow, normal and charged) and can jump on trees!


• Knight can’t destroy stone but can use shields for gliding!


• Builders have 3 hearts and can kill knights (they are needed now more in offense)

The catapult arc and firepower has significantly changed. You’ll need to get a lot closer to the walls to destroy them. However you can pick up the catapult and bring it closer!

As you’ve probably seen on the test videos, you can now put anything into the catapult and launch it (not corpses but that is planned as a feature).

NEW CONTROLS

As a reminder. The controls are very much changed. All things to a degree, are controlled with pie menus. Pretty much like the blockmenu. So press the menu button and hold it. Hover over the pie slice (button) and release.

….

COIN ECONOMY

We have now coins. You get coins for doing useful things for your team.

CASTLE ROOMS / WORKSHOPS

You spend the coins to buy bombs, arrows and heal in the quarters.

PICKING / DROPPING / MOUNTING

Pickup items with [C] or by holding [C] and selecting from menu if there is more than 1 thing to pickup in that spot.

Some items (like stone/wood for builders) are picked up automatically, others are not.

Be a good team player and drop items by holding [C] (if there is nothing to pickup there)

You can mount objects (like bombs or other catapults) in a catapult by holding [E] on the catapult and selecting the Mount Item option.

I probably forgot about something, this a really big list of changes. Read the change log for details:

Changes build 157-190:

NEW CONTROLS AND PIE MENUS:
  [E] USE ITEM
  [F] BLOCK MENU
  [C] PICKUP /DROP
  [BACKSPACE] MISC MENU (CHANGE TEAM, SUICIDE)
  [V] CHATS
  [Q] EMOTICONS 
 
- added castle room: bomb workshop - for making bombs (press [E], costs coins)
- added castle room: arrows workshop
- added castle room: quarters - gradually heals you for coins
- added droppable coins
- added HUD resources blink when added/removed
- generated maps are mirrored by default (can be switched off in Rules/gamemode.cfg)
- CTF and Swordfight gamemode now have a default unit count limit
- map editor mode from menu uses Sandbox game rules
- mount bomb on catapult (light bomb with [F] and then put on catapult with menu [E])
- added shield down attack animation
- added “Quit Editor” main menu option
- added recent added/decreased resources display on HUD
- changed chat fonts to support european characters
- admin kick/swap menu is team sorted

Bugs:
- fixed knight shield not shielding teammates
- fixed not being able to connect to server after some time of server running
- fixed time limit game rules setting
- fixed unit count game rules setting
- fixed doors not closing near tent and other objects
- fixed bomb bounce sounds
- fixed bots not respawning after map change
- fixed timed out rcon/mod players not disconnecting
- fixed help texts smooth rendered
- chat with 1 letter can be sent now

Gameplay/Balancing:
- bottom of map is a hole in which you die
- when team becomes unbalanced players with lowest score get switched
- each hit at dirt stone gives 2 stone; thick stone 5; gold 2
- archer doesn’t draw arrow if no arrows
- bombs are stronger and have larger kill radius
- tents and outposts don’t heal
- wood, stone, gold is automatically picked up only by builder; arrows by archer; bombs by knight
- fixed class selection on custom class rules
- removed arrow added to player resources when arrow hit player
- fast arrow knockback is smaller
- bomb isn’t dropped on knock back
- only 50% of arrows drop drom dead archer
- bomb can destroy dropped arrows
- bombs can launch knight from ground (with shield; greater velocity achieved from air)
- added 5s immunity on tent after respawn
- increased stomp damage velocity

Archer:
- archers can climb trees
- archer has 3 firing options (indicated by cursor color): slow, normal and charged
- arrows are generally faster but have a lot more drag
- arrows damage is based on velocity (dragged/out of screen arrows are weaker)
- archer can cancel shot with [right mouse] click
- fixed arrows losing effectiveness when lobbying them
- archer stomp doesn’t do damage
- archer charge cursor appears only after arrow is drawn
- fixed killed archer arrow not firing
- moved arrow origin 2 pixel higher

Knight:
- knight double slash only works when actually hit somebody
- knight shield up works more like a ladder
- knights can glide on shield up (shield parachute)
- fixes to shield collision
- less knockback on sword hits

Catapult:
- catapult fires more sideways
- catapult uses 5 stone per shot
- catapult loads much longer
- catapult against catapult is more powerful
- catapults don’t regenerate
- catapult rocks have more gravity
- destroyed catapult drops half loaded stone
- the more vertical the catapult rocks the less damage they do

Builder:
- builder has 3 hearts
- builder can hurt knights

Tweaks:
- changed scoreboard colors
- object/workshop usage help texts are always shown
- blocks without required resources are not drawn in block menu
- outpost shows health on mouse hover
- items fall out with greater velocity on death
- bubbles on minimap show only for own team
- stance animation changed when carrying something
- knight shield is unlagged
- ladders can’t be placed far horizontally (they don’t drop now)
- all player names show when waiting for respawn
- changed player label colors
- menu and prompt bubbles don’t show on minimap
- added spawn immunity blink indicator
- trees regrow slower
- added smoke on catapult rocks hit stone

Above head chat:
- above head chat messages background is transparent
- chat longer than 200 chars doesn’t appear above head
- above head chat breaks into lines if long
- default above head chat color is white; team chat is team colored

Commands:
- added addBotX command    - addBotX( team, class, name ); eg. addBotX( 1, 0, “St. John” );
- added disable compression option sv_compression=0
- fixed unban; unbanhost; unbanhid commands

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtvNdOlQJkw?feature=oembed&w=500&h=374]

Bug/feature? from the test build.

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

Server Issues

We’ve had the master go up and down a few times in the last while, so please bear with us while we sort out what’s going on. Sorry for the interruption!

Geti

Testing testing 2

We’ve been playing the test build all day, just tweaking, adding new ideas, removing the ones that don’t work. This is gonna be a really polished build and well worth the wait. Each class will get a buff and KAG will be even more fun. Still a couple test games ahead of us and I’ll feel ready for a public release.

MM

Adventures, Overworlds and the "Full version"

Before I get to cut into the juicy bits of this post, we’ve decided that there’s too much ambiguity and not enough oomph in the way we’ve been naming the two versions of KAG.

We’ve decided that “KAG” and “KAG Premium” are misleading names for the free and paid versions respectively. “KAG” as the free version and “KAG Premium” as the paid version suggests that the free version includes most or all of the content and that the premium version holds a few extra goodies and gives buffs in game or something.

As such, we’ve decided to dub the two versions “King Arthur’s Gold: Classic” and “King Arthur’s Gold” respectively. The classic game will preserve the older, faster paced and less polished roots of the game in the free to play package. This will serve as a demo for players who aren’t sure if they want to buy the game yet. The full version of the game will contain expansive game-mode changes, more classes, items, mechanisms, zombies, and eventually a fully dynamic adventure-cross-fortress-cross-teamplay gaming feast.

For what it’s worth, “KAG classic” is nearing completion and will be feature-locked shortly. The full version of the game is unlikely to be finished for quite a while.

————————————————————————————————

We’ve made a fairly large decision about the direction we’d like to take the main full version game-mode in. If you’re an advocate of TDM or CTF or any other fast-paced mode of play then please bear with me, as we’ll still be supporting them. For those who want a longer, deeper play experience though (me me me me me) we’ve decided that we’d like to make each game into more of an adventure, with much more character attachment than players get in the current game.

We’re going to do this by rolling out three things:

• An overworld - each team would set up a base on a randomly generated overworld map. Players could leave their fort to journey out into the world, fighting bands of raiders and wild animals, going spelunking in caves, and even penetrating undead kingdoms to slay necromancers. They could also naturally get a party of allies together to go and lay siege to the enemy’s tower, or form a band of raiders and mug passers-by for their sweet, sweet coins. Each feature of the map would be a “map” in the current sense of the game, with players leaving the map by walking off the edges and entering each map from the overworld by walking into it.


• Character and team progression. Characters will start the game as a peon with nothing and no-one, unless invited to join the game as part of a friend’s team. They’ll be able to join and leave teams, as well as creating and naming their own civilisation and gathering their own followers. Over time through adventuring, building and much slaughter of zombies and enemy knaves, players will accumulate items and resources enabling them to progress down a potentially deep and complex class tree, becoming a feared juggernaut or a noble lancer. 


• Persistence and permadeath - A player’s character in a server will be persistent, meaning if you leave the game they’ll still be around, you’ll be able to come back the next day and adventure further. Conversely, if a character dies, all progress will be lost, all items dropped and all ties severed. This makes killing the king (or queen) of a nation a massive event as the whole hierarchy of that team would change, and the whole battle dynamic would be quite a lot more serious because of the massive penalty of death. Obviously we’ll be making higher “level” characters take many more hits to kill than they do in KAG currently to make retreat from a battle a viable option for those that don’t want to lose their characters. We fully understand how much anger permadeath would cause with the current quick and bloody battle system.
  
  I should note that permadeath will be a serverside variable -> not all servers will feature it, and a player with no currently active character would still be able to spectate the world, so you don’t miss the end of a war just because you died in it.
  
  You’ll also be able to make a new character if your old one dies (…though there might be a setting removing this option, a sort of “hardcore” mode) so that you can continue to participate.

Here’s a rough concept of how the overworld might be presented:

(yes those are cavalry units in the background)

Obviously in-game it’ll be made of sprites and potentially mode7’d into submission for a nostalgia kick for anyone who’s played an old RPG. Something like this but 1024x768 and with a bunch of characters jogging around (this is a shot of Terrigama, copyright Enix 1995 for the SNES):

These changes will make the default mode of KAG play vaguely like an RPG (though we’d like to think of it more as an action adventure). Hopefully also it encourages playing with people you know and team-play in general. Each server will build up its own history of events and hopefully some epic stories will spring up from each game.

For those that aren’t keen at all, there’ll always be TDM and CTF for you :)

As a side note, this means we can have many, many more players per server without a stupidly high increase in bandwidth usage because the players in each map only need to know about the nearby players. Massive sieges with 64 units per side on one map would still lag as bad as ever, but considering not everyone playing a server would be playing at the same time (-> some characters would be sleeping) and players will usually be dispersed around the world, each additional player wouldn’t double the bandwidth consumed, which is a start.

Whew, so that’s that. I’ve left out some of the finer points (including “BUT WAHT ABUT GREFIERS!!1! D:< D:<”) but if you post thoughts and concerns in the comments I’ll endeavour to respond to as many as I can.

Next release is slated for ~2 weeks from now, possibly earlier, possibly later. The featurelist is uncertain at this point, more info coming when we have it.

Geti

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

Testing testing

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

New ingame menus

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

Just a heads up:

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 :D :D :D

Geti

EDIT: grab the test and give us your comments in this thread.

A new engine

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


2. Less bugs


3. Much deeper gameplay mechanics

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:

• I am designing the engine in a way so that I can add new stuff very quickly without breaking any code


• It will be easy for new people to jump in and code with me (Geti is actually designing the engine with me, so we’ll code together)


• Modding will be even easier than it is now (the engine will use scripts and a plugin architecture from beginning)

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

Interview with MM on IndieGames.com

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

Go vote!

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.

This weeks sneak peek

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

Call to arms!

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 :P

MeteorVPS 128 Slot is the place to be!

Have at it!

Geti

Build 158 released!

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

Features Coming!

This picture basically outlines 5 things we want to get done alongside the October event, some after, some before:

• Gendered players - not much difference between them, but being able to select Male or Female as part of your player customisations will help us be more inclusive as well as getting some variety onto the battlefield. After that we’ll include customisable heads - including hats helmets and haircuts for paid players.


• Workshops - Arrow and Bomb workshops pictured here, allowing construction of those items and potentially upgrades to them later on.


• Mechanisms - Spike and Arrow traps that you can attach to pressure plates and levers to allow forts to be more easily defended and to give builders a more interesting engineering task than 10-ply walls. These will be paid only.


• Wooden Buildings - A cheaper faster option than stone that will actually very likely be required before “upgrading” a tile to stone. A lot of work will have to go into balancing this, but I’m alright with that. We may add stone doors at the same time.


• Fire! - Bombs, fire arrows (and perhaps a few other things later on) will be able to set fire to wooden buildings. We’ve devised a way to make “putting out” flaming buildings possible without water that basically involves cutting out the flaming parts. Fire will give players a genuine reason to upgrade from wood to stone - fire hazards are a real concern you know ;)

Not pictured:

• Coins - a system representing the work a player has done for the team, you’ll drop coins upon dying and gain them from building, killing enemies, capturing flags, and manufacturing items. You’ll be able to use them to buy items (including bombs and arrows) which will provide a much better self-balancing system than the current resupply on spawn.
  That means no more endless stream of suicide bombers!

We’ve got more plans, but they’re not concrete so I’m not posting them. Feel free to ask questions in the comments - I’ll be watching this post over the weekend.

Geti

Build 157 released!

Changes 156-157:

- added “nocollapsing_nearspawn” variable to game rules file (CTF/gamemode.cfg)
- near spawn collapses prevention works for larger structures only (>15 blocks)
- fixed collapsing issues again
- fixed unbuildable spots bugs
- fixed crash reason
- fixed not being able to return to menu after disconnect
- knight image files height correction

Build 156 released!

Another quick patch. We’re ironing everything out before the next major builds that will bring some awesome new stuff. In the meantime the major bugs are being eradicated, I’m especially proud of fixing the collapsing issues. Should look much better now!

- unlimited resources on warmup removed (get 250 stone and 100 in tent)
- fixed creative/sandbox mode resources
- when max resource limit reached item falls out
- fixed picking resource item when full
- added circle on player when freezed
- fixed flag scored when touched on flag carrier
- fixed unsupported resolutions in fullscreen
- fixed frozen players dying
- fixed server browser sorting
- sort selection in browser is saved
- teams open doors can’t be destroy by team members
- fixed collapsing issues (floating blocks & not all blocks collapsing)
- fixed crash on start for old video cards

Build 154 released!

Added a “Basics & Building” tutorial. This is something everyone starting with KAG should play first. Something like this might be mandatory to pass through in the future so that new players don’t spoil the fun for people already playing.

Fixed numerous most critical bugs. Please report if any of the mentioned bugs still remain.

Beware griefers! Mods can now freeze you by pointing at you with the mouse cursor and pressing [F3]. If you didn’t do anything illegal you can explain yourself during this time.

Changes 151-154:

- added “Basics & Building” tutorial
- added password prompt in server browser
- added moderator key [F3] to freeze a player
- fixed map tile desynchronization on game join
- fixed chat console not scrolling when joined game
- added infinite resources on warmup
- lowered amount of resources on round start (100 wood and stone)
- lowered amount of wood falling out of destroyed catapult or tent to 30
- builder automatically picks up stone and wood parts
- fixed castle background blocks requiring support
- fixed /kickid names display on Linux
- removed clantag brackets (default name separator is space; other chars can act as separator)
- cannot pull catapult while holding [F]
- fixed minimap dissapearing on death
- dedicated_autostart.cfg and mapcycle.cfg don’t get autoupdated
- fixed server map preview memory leak

Hotfix released:
- fixed 4 crash reasons

One "KAG Day"

I might or might not do this monthly or quarterly or whatever to see how everything changes over time. Here’s the rundown on new user registrations and total user logins per hour over one day recently:

(click for full size image)

That is what happened in KAG last Thursday. I picked Thursday because it marked the start of how the game’s population seems to be progressing - the day before had a large jump in registrations (see the log graph preview on the first graph above!) - and every day since then has been roughly the same in terms of activity both in registrations and activity (if you look closely you’ll see a higher volume over the weekend with some interesting spikes, but it looks to be continuing roughly the same)

User logins seem to peak around 2-4PM in a “KAG Day” (wherever that is) which is slightly after the peak in registrations. A “Dead” period (server population likely lower than 50) occurs from 11PM to 11AM.

By the sound of things the peak is probably when France does most of its gaming, which would overlap considerably with the rest of Europe. It seems to me that we don’t yet have as much of a presence as we could in the US, as logins are low apart from the EU spike. So, if you’re in the US, feel free to tell everyone you know good things about this game ;) We could do with evening this graph out a little, I think.

…That’s more or less all I wanted to say about the stats we have at hand (we also have cumulative registrations and are looking into logging more so we can learn more about when/how you guys play), I hope someone gains some insight from this - see you all for more chatter about blue lines in a month or so!

Keep your eyes on the blog for some gameplay (and premium) related content coming soon!

Geti

"New Server Browser" build released!

Besides tweaking some things, improving the auto-updater and fixing bugs we have now a completely NEW SERVERS BROWSER!

Includes:

• pinging (sorting closest server)


• map preview (check and see what is going on the server before joining)


• sorting by map size


• better view of locked and full servers

Attention knights! You can’t destroy now castle backgrounds with a normal hit and you can’t destroy your teams open doors. This is to prevent random damage when fighting inside your castle. You’ll need a full slash to destroy the castle back wall.

Changes 142-151:
- new server browser
- server pinging
- server minimap preview
- optimized GUI rendering
- max server name length added
- server info limited to 144 chars
- client disconnects with message when trying to enter full server
- autoupdater reads another download URL if first one fails
- precache.txt doesn’t update in autoupdater
- block cursor always shows for archer & knight
- knight can’t destroy team open door
- knight can destroy castle background only with slash
- changed default team switch button to ALT

Alpha Funding on Desura!

King Arthur’s Gold is now officially part of the alphafunding program on the games distribution channel Desura. Alphafunding (or crowd funding) is a way for independent game developers to create their games without being dependent on a publisher that pays salaries. These games are only for you, players. Once you pay for them, you can play the alpha version and when the full version is complete you get it first! The main benefit is that you get the game now for significantly less money than when it’s done.

We’re honored to be in a group of 5 awesome games.
Definitely try out the other games!

Hello new players!

We’ve got a new online record!

We have a massive spike of new players. Where are you people coming from? Stats engine hasn’t logged it yet.

If you’re new, here are the most important things in the KAG community:

http://kagforum.com - Forums where we hang out, discuss, add ideas, ask to solve problems

http://kagwiki.com - Everything you want to know about the game

Suggestions

KAG is in alpha phase and it is funded by players. If you want to check the roadmap where this game is heading checkout this page and definitely this page.

Server browser inbound?

Server browser inbound. Includes:

• Sorting options


• Ping checking


• Map preview


• Player counts


• Simple Bookmarking


• A few other misc usability-wise useful things (game mode and password indicators)

Also likely included around the same time:

• BLD


• TDM

The full gui overhaul will need to wait, but this should make finding a game simpler. Should be around by this weekend.

Geti

Build 142 hotfix

Available on auto-update. Please note that some fixes require servers to restart.

- fixed emoticon bubbles not working on other players
- fixed kill feed truncating names to 1 character
- fixed main menu disappearing on player death
- fixed server links authentication eg. kag://127.0.0.1:50301

What's next

I was away for a couple days but now am back in business, ready to work with new ideas! It seems people are grabbing the premium edition like hot buns. This is really cool because we’ve got more motivation to finish it faster and make it even more awesome. There are some things though we need to fix to make the ordering process more clear and quicker.

KAG is steadily becoming really popular. I really need to make a proper server browser now since 25 servers is a hassle to browse right now. So that’s on my todo list.

I want to make the bomb workshop soon, since I feel the game needs that right now.

Also a builder tutorial is missing.

That’s all for now, we’ll keep you updated with the latest news. So subscribe to the feed or just drop in here later.

MM

Build 142 released!

Just a quick patch fixing most important issues cause I’ll be gone until next week. Attending Game Developers Conference in Poland (http://zjazdtworcowgier.pl/)

MM

Changes 137-142:

- fixed crash after too many objects
- ladders and castle background need support when building horizontally
- bombs just damage dirt blocks instead of destroying

Premium KAG and The Future.

We figured we should shed some light on where we’re going with KAG. As such, hit the jump for a rough roadmap of where we want to go (it has pictures!)

French translation / Française

Premium accounts reactivated

Everyone that bought KAG Premium should get an e-mail from me. If for some reason you haven’t got it (check spam folder!) please e-mail me personally with your paypal e-mail and game account name: mm [at] thd.vg.

In other news:

1. King Arthur’s Gold should be available on Desura within a day


2. MacOSX version is really coming soon now, I’ve got it compiled at 99%, just a few errors to fix

French, Polish & Russian subforums

We have new forums and our community is growing larger!
We decided to make language subforums. Everyone is welcome!
Currently available:

French forum, Polish forum and Russian forum.

(Forum francophone, Polskie forum, Русский форум)

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEasSaaaUNk?feature=oembed&w=500&h=374]

Found a nice trailer for the last few versions of KAG from Crashman208, figured it’d be a nice preview for anyone “on the fence” with the game.

Also, some large news coming possibly later today (or by the end of the coming week at absolute latest if everything goes wrong and we spend this weekend in tears) about alternative pricing, and exactly what the awesome people who buy the game are going to get in terms of bang:buck ratio.

Geti

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

New website & game accounts

New KAG website is online check it out! We also took the time to improve the game accounts system. Unfortunately there are some issues that don’t allow for automatic transfer of old accounts. This means that you will have to re-register your account. Don’t worry this will take a second. Your premium account won’t be activated automatically also. Please allow 24 hrs and you will get an e-mail with instructions how to activate your premium account again. Don’t worry nothing is lost.

Also a new KAG forum is waiting to be launched…

New Official KAG Forums launched! It uses the same account/login as the game!

Enjoy a better gaming experience!

MM

Human Catapult build Released!

There is so much goodies in this build that I can wait to play it with the public! Here’s what we have in this latest installation of King Arthur’s Gold:

Every material now (wood, stone, gold, bombs and arrows) are physical game objects inside the game. This means you can:

• drop them (or use momentum to throw across walls) (default key [C])


• pick them up


• healing heart can be picked up with [E] if you don’t use it

So no more lost gold after being gibbed! But there’s more:

Presenting…

the Human Catapult!

I think it is obvious what to do with this. You’ll need a teammate to help launch you. Just watch out because long falls will cause falling damage or death.

Default key for loading catapult has changed to the drop key [C] !

Besides these features there are dozens of tweaks, changes and BUG FIXES. Worth mentioning are:

Attention server owners

The master server has been transferred and the address has changed.
Please restart your servers for them to update correctly now.

Server issues

There might be some temporary issues with master server login and server downloading. This is happening because:

• we’ll be moving the website and master to another system for better performance


• with more players the database has become inefficient and it clogs the server


• we’ll be replacing the current database along with introducing a new KAG website

When this happens you’ll be asked to re-register your account. Hopefully from then on it will be smooth sailing.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5xakGLn2yI?feature=oembed&w=500&h=374]

Only gameplay promotional medley with new graphics since version 120. Includes knight & archer combat. Different castles. Explosions and gibs! A full castle collapse!!!

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

New catapult ammunition

I figured out how to make a better more fun sky path. Simply sit on the catapult and let your teammate launch you. It’s already coded, now needs some bug fixing and the release will be ready to go this week.

MM

Build 130 Released!

Most critical issues fixed and improved slightly. More to come. Run the game for autoupdate. Have a fun weekend!

Changes 129-130:

- added “small hud” option (mainmenu -> Options -> Player )
- added knight charge cursor over head also
- changed archer charge cursor
- minimap is smaller
- HUD fade happens closer to screen edge; removed block menu fade
- fixed password saving issue
- fixed case sensitivity in master logins
- fixed some chat console color errors
- fixed chat console overlapping text
- disabled team bridge opening with up/down
- fixed playerslist staying scrolled after switching servers
- no resupply happens only if left a certain distance from spawn location

I see a French community emerging. I’m very happy about that. If you want to translate news from this blog I can link your site (this applies to you Russian folks as well). Let me know.

Gold Servers are running (including a builder sandbox). You can get a premium account to access them in a couple minutes here.

Known issues: small hud presents larger area; text overlap in block menu; knight slash push into wall

We’ll be tweaking the HUD some more. I agree we need more space for game screen, so don’t worry about that. Also bridge opening has some unexpected results. Patch will be either today or after the weekend, cause I need to rest. Be sure to read the post below KAG’s Direction if you haven’t already!

Also: our partners at hostedgameservers.com have just added a German wing of their servers. So if you want your own European or US KAG server check it here.

MM

"New HUD" Build Released!

This is second part of a big update that involves improving the game graphics. The old HUD was just something quickly scratched so now we introduce a completely new redrawn HUD. We hope you enjoy it.

There are of course other changes and fixes. Worth mentioning is that:

• You can now hug the wall to prevent fall damage. But be careful, hitting the wall while falling at big speed will also result in death!


• Updated gibs!


• Team bridge works like a 2way platform: press down to drop from it, press up to jump through it

Changes 127-129:

- new HUD cursors
- new HUD chat window
- new HUD resources & health bar
- new minimap window
- added dust animation on big fall
- minimap player icons indicate team color
- added minimap ground edge shading
- added variable “v_drawhud” useful to disable HUD when making screenshots or recording videos
- chat colors are team colored
- new team colored gibs
- castle back wall uses 2 stone
- message boxes replaced with graphics
- new menu buttons
- fixed menu inverting on smooth shader
- help texts only show up when toggled with F1
- added wall hugging to prevent fall damage
- fixed smaller fall damage not working
- fixed infinite resources from collapse prevention
- fixed tree stumps in front of players
- name labels above head use premium & admin colors

KAG's Direction.

I got asked about this on the forums recently and decided I’d have a short ramble here as a break from a coding assignment.

Note that nothing here is final and we’re still playing around with feature ideas and a roadmap, but it seems some of you have different ideas about where KAG’s going than we do.

In the short term, we want to get the basic, free version of KAG together and more or less finalised. That means:

• Some more structures (Rock pots, stockpiles, hall buildings, bomb and siege workshops)


• Bug Fixes everywhere oh god so many bugs.


• Making the HUD more presentable.


• GUI overhaul + Server lobby.


• Bison + Normal cows.


• Game modes: WAR, CTF, INF (as in soldat), TDM (first team to x kills wins), BLD (creative only servers, inf resources). ZOMBIES if halloween falls within that time period.


• Tutorials


• Maybe farming


• Maybe customisation

At that point, free KAG will be “done”. We’ll update it from time to time but that’ll be the point where we start working on a more in-depth game. As it is, KAG is fairly simple. We’ll make it as easy to get “into” as we can, with tutorials and maybe a button to turn on a more advanced HUD showing up later with all the complicated bits turned off.

Gold servers will exist throughout so you can still play safe from the stingy griefers out there :)

Once we’ve done that, with the assumption that free KAG will be played as a demo, paid KAG will get a lot more content. It won’t get too much more complicated (we still like the idea of simple, fun elements put together into something with emergent complexity, rather than elements that are complex in their own right) but there’ll be more stuff to do and a wider set of roles (which may or may not mean more classes). We’ll worry less about making the game idiot-proof as well.

We’re keen to explore:

• Mechanisms. I love the idea of hooking up a pressure plate to spike traps, or pulling a lever to open doors. Conveyor belts and lever-activated-crossbows and manually detonated explosives and water towers!


• Non-vanishing dirt (ie digging out dirt makes a pile of dirt that you have to deal with) for more realistic mining logistics.


• Moving castles/siege towers.


• Fluids in general (can you say Island Fort? Water tower? Magma-Dam?)


• Bots to give the boring tasks to. (Don’t feel like mining? Pay Urist to do it for you!)


• Population based play (ie permadeath per-unit)


• Unit progression and upgrades


• Religious buildings (area of effect buffs and nerfs eg. Shrine to Epona = all nearby team units get a speed boost)


• Flora and Fauna - being able to get food from picking fruit and hunting bison is a start, but fireflies, cave monsters and stinging plants could be fun too.


• …This list is getting long. Suffice to say we’ve got more than enough ideas for now and a long road ahead :)

As for large scale direction, we’re aiming for a sort of fortress mode being the main way to play KAG, with elements of dwarf fortress in there but designed to be much more accessible than ASCII only and from a side-scrolling perspective.

In other words, at the moment we’re thinking Free KAG = Demo, Paid KAG = Dream game. We’ll be actively encouraging people to play the free game because that’s where new players are most likely to go, and for those wondering we will almost certainly allow paid users to access free to play servers from the paid program.

So, that’s where we’re thinking of going. The list will likely be reordered and changed over time, but we want more fortress creation and proper warfare, and less spamming suicide bombers and knights digging with swords. Figured we may as well give you some insight into where we’re going.

Sorry for the lack of accompanying art, I’m not at home at the moment so can’t draw.

Geti

Building Ideas.

We think something like this will make building catapults, rock pots, stockpiles, halls, workshops and outposts (as well as anything else that gets added) a lot simpler and more intuitive than the current tile based system.

It also means we can make catapults cost some stone to make as well :)

We’ll likely use the little resource bubbles for interaction too, so you can click a bubble to fill up the catapult stone by stone (or later, item by item -> bomberpults) rather than using E for everything and loosing all your stone.

What do you guys think? I’m more or less set on this idea (it frees up more space in world.png for me to go nuts with the environments :D) but I’d like to hear your thoughts on potential improvements or flaws.

Geti

Build 127 released!

I’m quickly patching the game as well as adding new server commands.
Biggest change here is an anti-griefing solution which prevents collapses near your tent/outpost. This is a test so please report how it works. Basically you can destroy everything but the server won’t allow you to destroy that last block that makes a collapse if it is about half screen distance to your tent.

Changes 126-127:

- fixed menu sound on Linux
- fixed constructions not giving support
- new anti-griefing method: automatic collapse prevention in radius around tent/outpost
- fixed infinite tree chopping
- fixed point frame dissapearing when chat text above head
- added scoreboard scrolling
- fixed bot kicking from console
- new server commands:
  kickhost [host] [minutes] - kicks and/or bans host (host number can be found in logs when player joins)
  unbanhost [host]
  swapid [player id]
- fixed ground background tiles
- mods can freely change teams
- fixed player-bomb force when on ground
- possibly fixed other team spawning on captured outpost

Build 126 Released!

Fixing most important issues:

Changes 124-126:

- fixed game crash 1
- fixed game crash 2
- fixed editor not working
- clouds don’t render on “Less effects” option
- fixed doors not opening on ladders
- fixed bot kicking
- fixed player leave game message
- support required on very high constructions (near high map border)
- increased team unbalanced respawn time difference
- increased crouched hitbox
- fixed tents falling
- fixed tree stub not regrowing
- fixed weird block behaviour on trees
- fixed tree regrowing bugs
- fixed shadows appearing on trees
- added server variable “sv_deltapos_modifier”
  (higher than 1.0 uses less bandwidth but game will be more laggy;
   less than 1.0 will use more but will be more accurate)

Changes 123-124:

- bridges require support
- removed immunity on tent
- fixed premium ban spam on server
- Linux dedicated server performance version released
- Linux client version out

Judging by the amount of simultaneously playing premium account players I decided to bring back the ability to buy Gold Servers Access. I think it’s impossible for more than 10 of 100 players to come play at once (due to various reasons like timezone). So you can buy Gold Servers access now! The price is a bit higher than on pre-orders, it is 10$.

New servers will come as the demand goes up. Right now I put up a BUILDING SANDBOX server for premium players just to test out how it works.
I’m in the process of renting new servers to launch proper CTF ones. The one thing I don’t have handled is Australia/Asia/Oceania servers. If you have a server there that you can lend it would be awesome! I’ll give you premium account for that. If not, do you know any good dedicated servers hosts there?

Attention server owners!
If you do not want your settings to get overwritten during autoupdate do the following:

1. Create your own dedicated_autostart.gm and dedicated_autoconfig.gm


2. Create your own copies of rules files (eg. Rules/CTF)


3. You can set your custom rules file in dedicated_autostart.gm


4. Make your own dedicatedserver.sh start script and edit this line:
   ./KAG autostart Scripts/CUSTOM_autostart.gm autoconfig Scripts/CUSTOM_autoconfig.gm