Kalling Kingdom Progress Report in August 2025
Hello, world! The game is not dead, neither are we, and work is still in progress. It has been challenging to keep things going because of life circumstances, hours, funding, this economy... all kinds of things. But no excuses: the dedication continues and we think you deserve an
Hello, world! The game is not dead, neither are we, and work is still in progress. It has been challenging to keep things going because of life circumstances, hours, funding, this economy... all kinds of things. But no excuses: the dedication continues and we think you deserve an update on what we're up to.
New Game Engine
For those who haven't heard, we have been at work on porting Kalling Kingdom and its last publicly known version, v0.41, from the Unity game engine into our new custom engine, which we call the Aperture Game Engine. There is no pretending that the new engine is anything particularly special - the intention is not to compete directly with anyone out there with engines... but it is meant to enable us to do very specific things we would like to do with 2D games - Kalling Kingdom inluded. With Kalling Kingdom in particular, the new engine serves the purpose of carrying us out of dependence on Unity for their engine, or anyone else, and granting us real independence.
So, part of the reason it has been so long since our last update, in addition to the things I allude to in the intro at the beginning, is that we haven't just been moving the game code into the new engine: we've had to *build the new engine itself too*. And that's been time consuming, hard, and occupies the precious few hours I personally get to invest in the game alongside a day job.
When the Unity runtime fee debacle happened some time ago, it severed trust with many developers who were actively building their business or their studios around that engine. That break in trust, it seems, has lasted all these months later even as Unity had walked its steps back from that initial direction. The intention behind-the-curtain, so to speak, has been revealed. We do not feel it's the right engine for any of our games, and unfortunately that meant starting on a highly ambitious project to get the game out of Unity for good.
The new engine is written in the Rust programming language, which is one of those latest-and-greatest tech trends from the past few years. We're not using it because it's trendy, though, we're using it because it is super fast, like C or C++ code. That said, we have to convert the game's original C# scripts over to Rust, and that has proved a not insignificant practice at times.
We are happy to report that the work to complete the port is coming along well and will soon be nearing completion. We will be running a series of stability tests with the initial port of the game, which is a very similar version of the game to v0.41 with some very minor changes. The minor changes are temporary - it was important to make a stable port as a starting point before we attempt to do a major, dramatic upheaval of the game where we improve its features.
Just as stated in the prior update: we are fully committed to finishing this game and giving it the care it deserves.
4K Sprites, Improved 2D Rendering, New UI Elements, and Other Small Tweaks
There are some improvements we have already mentioned coming. It is hard to convey it in screenshots too but every sprite in the game rendered in the new engine is done so in a way that is entirely uncompressed and true to the exact pixel-perfect intent behind the imagery. Unity did some strange things with its sprite rendering and since Unity is gone: the weirdness and lack of smoothness is gone too. Curved edges will now appear pefectly smooth and rendered crisply in a way they were not before.
The current version of the game does not support 4K resolution, of course, and so the artwork has been re-exported from the original 3D models and project files for 2560x1440 resolution.
We didn't think we would make *any* updates for the game outside of the port at first but the UI code, as it was translated into the new engine, needed a major update. It made sense in the instance of the Available People and Unemployed People panels to give those significant updates. Related to that, we'll also be updating the click-and-drag interface of assigning people to businesses in the game, and thereby fixing a couple bugs that exist in v0.41 in the process.
For the "small tweaks" bit that we're throwing in, there are many tiny details that many of you may not even notice, such as faster loading times. For people on older machines, the game pre-loads everything you need before getting to the main menu, so there's no waiting around, not even for half a second, to start the game once you've already got everything started up - it's an instant switch into the city view (which I call "the canvas" since we don't have a moving camera for the town).
Lowering Minimum System Requirements
Recent testing on the new build of the game reveals that we will be able to lower the original system requirements of the game, and we are using some new techniques to test the game at lower specs, including actual old machines and virtual machines. We won't quite match the optimizations of the games that inspired this one from the late 1990s but one some dimensions we are going to come close: 2GB of RAM will likely go down to 512MB of RAM, DirectX will no longer be a requirement on Windows, and the executable for the game will likely be significantly smaller than the one you would run from the Unity engine (and maybe, just maybe, this would result in comparably less space per game asset on the hard drive, but we'll see!). By the way, DirectX is this Microsoft thing that has been around forever and is used for graphics on Windows - doesn't matter much that you won't need it other than maybe eliminating any occasional weirdness that would ever result from that (now we'll have different weirdness, maybe?).
The important thing to know, though, is that the game in the new engine runs more efficiently than it did in Unity, and that's obvious from early testing. That, and we have finally had a bit more time to look at the system specifications more thoroughly than we did back in 2019 when we first released the game (too bad, this needed more time in the oven).
New Features Coming Later
If you're interested in the other updates we have planned, none of our intentions there have changed - we've described a lot of it in previous posts if you're curious and I encourage you to go read those. In short, we'll be improving everything after we finish this port to the new engine. The market system will get individual items that can be traded between towns, businesses will produce items of their own that plug in to that trade system, the people in your town will have their own stats that you can view and attempt to change or improve... and a whole lot more.
When Is This Happening?
As soon as we can! We are working on putting in consistent hours each week - it is never as many as I'd like but it is at least ensuring that consistent headway keeps getting made. I'm excited to reveal more, including when you can download and install the new build, as soon as it's ready. For the major new features we have coming down the road, expect to see a brand new trailer, some new artwork, and a much more obvious major announcement. For the initial port, stay tuned - it'll be somewhat quietly dropped here alongside a brief notification.
I haven't expected any of you to stick around but to anyone who has played our game at all: thank you so much.
As a part of this port, font rendering is receiving important attention, and fonts are imported in a way that is more correct for the output pixel resolution, resulting in much higher clarity for text rendered in-engine. We actually found that by taking full control of font rendering, it was easier to get the result we were after than with Unity (which does a few things under-the-hood by default that can interfere with your intentions as a developer).
To be clear: this is not a new game, or a remake, or a remaster, or anything like that. We are simply porting the game into our new custom engine, and then proceeding with the rest of development. All existing customers who purchased the game receive the new version once it's available automatically.
After our v42.0 target, we're going to continue on the original features that we've described in previous updates. Here is a short list we're working on after the port to the new engine is complete:
But here's the new business panel, with different layouts of icons for workers based on the business type!
In addition to the business info panel updates, which we're not 100% done with just yet (a few more tweaks are coming!), here's the other changes from the log that have made it into v0.41...
Bugfix: when citizens move out of the town from unhappiness due to lack of funding on certain categories, there was an issue with not re-assignment business ownership. This is corrected.
Bugfix: When citizens move out due to lack of funding, there was a memory issue that would cause failures further into the game, and this has been fixed. Now, multiple people may move out once the culmination of negative effects has increased enough across turns.
Bugfix: one scenario resulted in the infinite playing of building build sounds if hitting the escape key and not assigning a business a name. This is corrected so sounds should only play once.
Bugfix: when moving the owner of a business to another business, sometimes the business from which they were moved would not receive a new owner if one was available - this has been fixed.
The world market behaves more erratically once it reaches negative rates of return less than -5%, sometimes entering longer lasting market depressions. Other times, the market will have a big positive spike recovery.
Business income on each business type has been re-adjusted, and overall all business now earn more per turn.
Additional visual tweaks have been made to the world market screen, adding a divider, centering text, and a change of font.
The build screen has received font changes on each building type.
The fonts have been changed on the Expenses panel.
All help text widgets on the Build, Expenses, and Market panels have been updated to the new style.
Graphics change: the escape menu while in-game, cannot afford notify screen, sell confirmation screen, next turn, turn summary, and others have all received updated button styles.
The business info panel appearance has been updated with a new design layout.
Expenses have been adjusted. All categories but Military now have only the option to have no spending, or spending 1K per turn. This will be further adjusted later in favor of some additional changes to the expense system.
This is significantly different than the old market panel, which used buttons to add amounts for buying and selling the ingame currency, K (or what we're now calling "Kallings"). Instead of multiple buttons, you can just type in the numbers you want and click Invest (K) or Sell (K). We think this is much more friendly to players, especially given that this game is comfortably a PC-only title for the time being. So, hey, welcome you to use your keyboard to type some numbers.
We also began working on the next update already, which focuses on two major areas: the new player tutorial mode and savegames. The tutorial mode will teach new players how to play by explaining all of the different panels in the town view, how the different game mechanics work, what to look out for, and then: it'll get out of your way and let you play. For savegames, we've begun working on the code that allows serializing game state into save files, and then loading that state in on demand. You know, like... like a saved game. But the real importance behind the savegame system is the ability to configure new games more how you'd like to play, thereby increasing accessibility - choosing your starting cash, setting the number of turns you'd like to do, and other possible options.
These are both big undertakings with how the game is currently designed, so they'll take some time to complete.
We will probably make a few more minor releases without these features as we continue to work on these areas, so please be patient while we complete these new features. Some minor features you may see in the near future we're working on include:
-More new user interface designs which improve the experience and make the game more visually attractive, the first two of which will probably be the business management / info panel and the unemployed people screen
-An overhaul of the expenses system and visual appearance of the panel which allows for different benefits at each expense level. The game will inform you of those in the Expenses panel screen
-The grass field that your town is built on is nicknamed "the canvas" because it is just that: a blank, green slate. Instead of this, we're looking at how to improve the visual appearance of the canvas to allow more attractive scenery when you're constructing buildings, such as trees, foilage & greenery, and other small details
Oh, one more thing: the game is now available on Linux. Please let us know how it works for you on that operating system. We've tested it with Debian but it should work on Ubuntu as well when using 64 bit systems.
Thanks for reading! We'll get back to work now and let you enjoy v0.40.
The user interface overhaul continues as well. The business info panel now looks like this and it has a little more versatility both practically and visually.
While not shown here above, the people icons that appear around this info panel that allow you to move people between businesses are going away in a later version, but they're still here for now. The full screen view of business info is going away in favor of something better too but one step at a time!
In addition to these significant features above, here are some other things I'm taking a look closely at and completed with this new version.
The turn summary evolution has arrived ! Sort of. The bottom 'View Turn Summary' tab now displays a summary of information from the previous turn on the dimensions of population growth, city cash holdings, and the current market investment. There will be additional information appearing here in the future from past turns, as well as a pagination setup where you'll be able to go back into many, many previous turns (probably all of them) to see what took place. Additional items that should show up here in the near future might be things like: who just got employed by a business, who is still unemployed, what was the market rate of return the last turn, and some other useful factoids that are relevant to the city.
The tab animates with a nice 'whoosh!' sound whenever clicking on it too. Very fancy.
In addition, there are some other things:
The 'View Turn Summary' tab is here! ...Sort of, this isn't its final version. But it looks a lot better.
Changes in this release:
So what's next?
We'll be continuing to build new versions of v0.37, and eventually, we'll do away with the numeric suffix. This new version is called v0.37.1. Next, with work coming on savegames, that will be v0.37.2, and so on.
Those who currently own the game are free to try out the new builds as they're released. The very next things underway are getting a running log of actions between turns and making that available to the player. For example, there will be a place you can go that will display information like this:
Turn 17
=======
Jhaknaw Dune is now employed at Trenn Ranch.
You accepted a trade deal with the City of Rosper.
Your market investment has gone from 306 to 319.
Turn 16
=======
You added Jhaknaw Dune but they are still unemployed.
Your market investment has gone from 290 to 306.
This is a way to provide a running activity of the player\'s decisions over each turn. In addition to this, of course, there\'s also the tedious work of putting together savegames. Anyway, we just wanted to drop off the build to make it available to all of you and now: back to work! Thanks for reading.
