Kingdoms and Castles News

Hi Everyone!

We are very excited to announce the AI Kingdoms update is now in open beta! The update isn't done yet, but it's a big step forward towards final release. We've been previewing the new features in previous posts and we'll do a bigger post with lots of images for final release, but here's a quick list of the big features to look for in the beta:

• AI Kingdoms you can add when starting a new game
  
• Talk, trade, or fight with these AI kingdoms
  
• Hall of Diplomacy where you can make diplomats used to interact with the AI Kingdoms
  
• Fog of war system
  
• Siege Workshop which builds Catapults
  
• New harder 'Survive 250' game mode
  
• Theater and Jousting Arena
  
• Transport carts
  
• Minimap
  
• Ability to set maximum workers per job category
  
• Lots of other various improvements

Because this is beta there will still be bugs and things to improve and fix. Please send your feedback and bug reports to [email protected], chat with us directly in our discord, or post here in the forums.

You can try it now out by switching to the beta branch. Here's how:

• Right click on the game in the steam library
  
• Click properties, then choose betas
  
• Choose the next-version-preview branch

No code is necessary, your game should automatically update once you switch. Everyone who has been playing on the alpha branch will be kept up to date as well.

Until next time,
-Pete, Michael, & Sam

As the year ends, I thought it'd be fun to take a look back at where we started five years ago. In 2016 Kingdoms and Castles was a little game Michael and I were working on in our spare time (nights and weekends). Back then the game looked like this:



Things were quite rough! As you can see I had no idea how to pick a pleasing color palette and was just learning to made 3D models.

Then came our launch in 2017 and the many updates since. Now we're approaching the beta phase of our biggest update ever. The game has come a long way and there's lots of new mechanics we've added for the upcoming AI Kingdoms update. We've also taken time to improve the visuals. First, here's a city from the current version (117r7):



And here's what the same city it will look like in AI Kingdoms update (we've adjusted the fog, colors, shadows, and lighting):



It's been four years since we launched on Steam and working on the game really has been a labor of love for us. We're so grateful people are still playing and enjoying the game.

This year the AI Kingdoms update has been in alpha and we've been incorporating as much of your feedback as we can (and fixing as many bugs as we can) - thanks so much for that feedback and for your patience.

The update will enter it's beta phase soon, expect another announcement around that sometime in December!

We're very excited to be so close to beta (and then final release) of the AI Kingdoms update. Thanks everyone for all your support over the years. There's lots of deserving games out there (and you've probably decided already), but please consider us when nominating for the Labor of Love award!

-Pete, Michael, and Sam

Hi Everyone,

We are still hard at work on the AI Kingdoms update. We are getting closer and closer to our public beta phase. Huge thanks to everyone playing the alpha and providing feedback and bug reports - it's been very helpful! We wanted to show some of the latest progress.

[h3]City Building AI[/h3]
The city building AI has undergone more improvements and now can build large, sensible cities with better organization and an inner and outer wall. It also can make composed city blocks: you'll notice the well surrounded by parks in the screenshot below. Of course, still lots of issue to work out but it has come a long way. We wanted also to take this opportunity to introduce Sam Cook who joined the team and has been working hard on these improvements.




[h3]AI Personalities[/h3]
We've been fleshing out the AI personalities and adding more 3D portraits for the AIs. In the latest alpha build if an AI has an aggressive personality it's more likely to get angry with you and also periodically demands gold as tribute. We'll be adding more diplomatic interactions in the future. Here's the next couple of AIs you'll meet:



On the path toward beta for this update we'll be focusing next on improving the AI's ability to mount invasions and defend against you. We still don't have an exact date for the final release of this update but we're working as hard as we can. If you'd like to try the current alpha version, here's how:

• Right click on the game in the steam library
  
• Click properties, then choose betas
  
• Enter 'alphatester123' without quotes into the box, press enter
  
• Choose the newly available alpha-unstable branch

Until next time,
-Pete, Michael, and Sam