2025 was a great year
We made many improvements and I made a lot of announcements on Steam. …. On the MD App … not the MD Playtest App, so you and over 700 people who joined could not see them. ːsteamfacepalmː
To make it up, let me sum up the recent updates.
Playtests
We are now meeting regularly for playtests.
We meet every second Saturday at 20:00 UTC.
Come join us goofing around and just have fun playing the game.
Next dates are:
3.1.2026
17.1.2026
Here is a video of the new map
Massive Map Updates
We fully remade the arena to give you the feeling of jumping around in a fantasy world.
It’s far better than before. Lots of ways to use wall jump, from the ground floor upt to the treetops.
We have not thought too much about strategies, as you can do so much.
Go nuts. We will take a closer look later.
To improve movement even further, we increased the jump height and movement speed of all characters, making it way easier to jump from branch to branch and pull of these cool jumps see in MOBA cinematics.
With the updates we are getting way closer to the final vision. There will be other forms of movement, some even specialized to one character, like climbing up walls, but the basis is done. Experimenting with it will light the way forward as we have to figure out what you like and what is just not fun.
Micalanious
I will share announcements here from now on
We post on X and our Discord too
In a match, everybody starts at lvl 3 and gains 1 exp per second, getting you right into the action with all your abilities.
Many bug fixes, like your character vibrating when walking sideways
Better performance on low-end PC's
Jungle monsters are disabled, we will re-add them later when the arena has proven itself
At some point we will have to limit the maximum movement speed you can have. It very funny but uncontrollable when you buy only boots.
Plans for 2026
Behind the scenes we have worked tirelessly to prepare everything to go all in.
The paperwork, business parts, presentations and pitches.
When we get funding, we have a small team assembled that will create our own engine based on godot, the foundation of Monarchs Dawn. The goal is to make a super snappy and performant game that can run on low-end hardware.
The reason for why we did not go with Unity is low trust, after the pay-by-install retardation. Further, working with it for years has shown us that it lacks features that are essential for a competitive MOBA, for example, mirroring terrain.
Unreal on the other side is far more advanced, but is badly optimized. I can tell if an indie game is in Unreal by my GPU lifting off. Big titles like Monster Hunter and Silent Hill have the same problem, stemming from badly optimized rendering. The coming GPU and RAM shortage will make this even worse. You should not have to deal with this, so we adapt.
Merry Christmas
The Monarchs Dawn Team