Kingdom Eighties News

[h3]Welcome back, Campers!
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We’ve already met The Leader and The Champ but there are two more friends that will provide specialized skills to help defeat the Greed.

The Wiz 💾



The Wiz is the smartest kid on the block - and he knows it. When he’s not inventing new gadgets, he’s topping the leaderboards at the Polybius Arcade. Whether the scores are real or if he just hacked the machines, only he knows. While he’s easily frightened compared to his companions, once you find and return his remote controller, he’ll put his skills to good use building mechanical turrets and even assembling a siege robot. Along with the Champ's strength, this will be key to defeating the Greed.




You’ll be surprised what he can make from just a few spare parts and circuit boards.


The Tinkerer 🔧



As a member of the Junior Firefighter Brigade, all the training in the world could never have prepared The Tinkerer for the Summer of Greed. This resourceful optimist is pretty handy with a hammer and a wrench. If it’s broken, the Tinkerer can most likely fix it. You’ll find her at the firewatch tower but she’ll only join you when it’s safe to come down and you’ve proved yourself a worthy leader. Have you got what it takes to explore the foreboding forest and expand your territory beyond the shadows to win her favor?

Once on board, she’ll help in many ways; fixing things, upgrading your walls, and reinforcing the Wiz’s turrets.



Excited to see more about Kingdom Eighties? Why not follow us on Twitter, Facebook or chat in our Discord?

[h3]See you next time![/h3]

[h3]Since we’ve talked about Camp Kingdom and beyond, let’s talk in more detail about the characters you’ll meet along the way and their abilities. Re-introducing The Leader & The Champ.
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The Leader 👑



In Kingdom Eighties you play as The Leader, a young camp counsellor who has just discovered that strange creatures attack the camp at night. These attackers, which experienced Kingdom players will recognize as the Greed, demolish anything that stands in their way. But their main purpose seems to be something else... stealing The Leader's family legacy, the Crown of Creation.

The Leader will coordinate the neighborhood kids to build fortifications and gather resources. When the night comes, the Greed will attack without mercy. If you lose your crown, everything is doomed!

With no response from anyone at home, it’ll be up to The Leader to save not just the camp, but the entire town. Some of the older kids could provide specialized skills, but it will take some extra persuasion for them to join the effort.

The Champ 🏆


The Champ is one of the older kids at camp and one of The Leader's allies. Each will lend their special abilities to help the Leader complete a level and ultimately get one step closer to their goal. The Champ's strength, loyalty, and athleticism will come in handy when the time comes to fight back against the Greed.

You’ll meet him hanging out by himself close to the camp, but you’ll need to find and return his trophy to him if you hope to lift his spirits and enlist his help. Once he’s feeling like a winner again, he’ll aid you by shielding your troops with a heavy dumpster especially when launching an all-out attack on a Greed portal.

In our next post, we’ll learn more about The Tinkerer and The Wiz. For now, thanks for reading! Excited to see more about Kingdom Eighties? Why not follow us on Twitter, Facebook or chat in our Discord?


See you next time!

Development team calling!

A couple of weeks ago, we introduced you to the composer of Kingdom Eighties, Andreas Hald, and gave you a peek into how his mind works when creating the music for the game. This week, Andreas takes us even deeper into his process and nerds out about synthesizers!





How do you achieve the sound of the 1980s?
I think the most important elements of ‘80s music are the synthesizers, arpeggios, gated reverbs, sequencers, drum machines, tape echoes, cassette recorders, and something called FM. It stands for frequency modulation, which is a type of sound that you can get out of synthesizers. It was extremely popular in the early ‘80s, so that’s why you hear a lot of FM sound in the music of that era.

Furthermore, and I don’t mean this in a demeaning way, a lot of the music from the ‘80s was somewhat simple harmonically. I have a degree as a jazz musician, but bringing in some of those complex chords and structures just wouldn’t make sense for this soundtrack.

So the interesting stuff happened in the textures and the sounds. Maybe back then you were limited by, for example, a drum machine with mediocre samples because it only had a small memory buffer, as well as somewhat basic sequencers. Or maybe that sequencer or the synthesizer was difficult to program. So I wanted to keep that in my music by limiting myself by using the same gear from that era and trying not to cheat.

My not-so-secret weapons are delays and echoes. You can take the most boring and basic synth sound but if you run it through a delay, you instantly get magic. And then you use the delays and the echoes like instruments. You play with them, you move the knobs around or you touch the tape with your fingers to do small pitch things.

I’ve done a lot like that to get that ‘80s vibe, but at times it’s actually kind of modern-sounding as well. In order to create the darker side of the score - for example the Blood Moon cue - all the textures that I can’t create on a limited classic ‘80s synth, I’ve used a more modern, modular synthesizer.



What were your main inspirations when composing the Kingdom Eighties soundtrack?
I’ve honestly tried to steer away from listening to music for direct inspiration because I try not to be too colored in my choices. That’s a really difficult thing to do. But I’ve listened to this kind of music my whole life and I am an ‘80s guy at heart, so if I had to name some inspirations it would be Tangerine Dream, Vangelis, and John Carpenter, tv shows like He-Man and Knight Rider, as well as pop music by artists like Cyndi Lauper. The wailing, crying guitars that play in harmony in rock music - I love that, so I have that in there as well.

I also had the early graphics and storyline in front of me when composing. I like to darken my studio and only have lights from my gear, a few soft lamps, and maybe even turn some lava lamps on. It’s just something that gets me in the mood - the dark environment and the pictures in front of me.

But the main inspiration comes from my gear. I’ve been collecting synths for a very long time and I have a huge range of classic synthesizers from the ‘80s, but I’ve never really quite gotten to use them as much as I really wanted in my film composing work. Then this project came along and it felt like something I couldn’t let slip away from me because it was just up my alley.

I very quickly decided that this was a project where I wanted to record everything outside of the computer, through hardware synthesizers, hardware recording equipment, and tape recorders, and keep it analog, organic, and human. I’m playing everything myself. And I’ve tried to do that for as long as possible before committing it to tape and recording it on the computer.

Of course, I bought a new synthesizer for this project alone - the Oberheim OB-X8. It’s a new synth based on a very old synth from the ‘80s which money can’t buy. The Oberheim is known for its voice panning, which means that the synthesizer alternates between the speakers for each note. So when you play a note, it first plays in the left speaker, and then you play another note and it plays in the right speaker, spreading the synth across the stereo spectrum. It makes many people go “oh, I can hear it’s an Oberheim”. It’s kind of weird, but it’s something that I really, really dig about it. I’ve used the Oberhiem extensively throughout Eighties and there is one track where you can hear it prominently - during foggy days there is a song played with only that synthesizer.

So I would say that the music in Kingdom Eighties is an homage to those artists as well as to the classic synthesizers from that era. It has to be the most enjoyable project I’ve worked on so far. I’ve been given so much trust and in return, it has boosted my ambition for this project through the roof. It’s really nice to have that freedom.



Thanks for reading part 2 of Andreas' interview! We’ll be sharing more info about the Kingdom OST further down the line. See more of Andreas' work here: http://andreashald.com/

Until next time, why not follow us on Twitter, Facebook or chat in our Discord?

See you next time!

As part of the Raw Fury Publisher Sale, we have prepared something special for you: A sneak preview of the first level of Kingdom Eighties!

Just tune in Twitch tomorrow, April 20th, at 11:30 am EST / 5:30 pm CET, and join our community ambassador Vicki on a tour around Camp Kingdom. The Kingdom team will be there to answer your most pressing questions. Well, maybe ALMOST all of them...

Don't worry if you miss it, we'll tape it for you :vhs:

Hey there, my name is Vladimir, and I'm part of the programming team here at Fury Studios, blogging at you live asynchronously from beautiful Zagreb, Croatia. Today I'll share more about what we've been up to in the last couple of months. You've probably guessed that this post is going to get more technical, but fret not; all the techno-babble results in some wonderful upgrades to the look of Kingdom. But you won't have to trust me on that; I come bearing gifs!

Today is a gift, that's why they call it the Present!

[h2]Today I'll focus on a new effect we added to Kingdom Eighties: Emission.[/h2]

Emission is best described as a property of an object to glow independently, highlighting itself and objects around it. It's achieved by drawing pixels that should emit a glow into a separate texture and then adding that to our final image. Since it's all done dynamically, it allows us to play with the intensity, color, and spread of the glow to achieve the look we feel is perfect for Kingdom Eighties. Plus, it's fun to add to different objects in the game and see what a rad glow-in-the-dark deer would look like.

Ghost Glow Intensity Example
Ghost Glow Color Example
Deer Glowing in the Forest


[h3]So why add this to Kingdom? And why now?

Two reasons.[/h3]

Kingdom has that "wow" factor in its presentation, and a lot of that comes down to the water and reflections, combined with the crisp pixel art. We knew we could expand our palette of visual effects and make it even more enjoyable to boot up a Kingdom game and just vibe out.

Kingdom Eighties is special and stands apart from other Kingdom games and settings. While I know the 80s aren't exactly "modern times", our comparison points are the knights and vikings of Two Crowns, so I'll just go ahead and call this a Modern Setting. And so we've included a lot of sprites of modern architecture, some of which glow. Ferris wheels, shop signs, street lights... Plus, we also have a bit of a sci-fi twist, so it's not uncommon to see lasers.

Background buildings lit up in the night...

[h3]I hope you enjoyed this quick peek into just one of the techniques we're applying to make this the richest Kingdom experience yet. We've been working mad hard on it, and we can't wait for you to get your bodacious hands on the game! And, like, hella soon too![/h3]