It is with extreme pleasure we can now announce that King of the World will transition from Early Access to fully released the 22nd of October 2018. It has been a long road, and double the amount of time we expected. This tells indirectly how much of a learning experience this has also been for us the developers. We started out with almost zero experience thinking the game would be fairly simple to make, but how wrong we were.
It is no secret that the game when going into Early Access didn’t do well both in terms of the state it was in and the player base. To the readers that weren’t there at the Early Access release, the game was barely functioning and only had 1 map with no options to play with bots or anything. In hindsight we did release far too early, which also adds up to this being a huge learning experience. However indirectly it did lead to some good things, as we found out the game needed to offer a whole lot more than what it currently did. So first of all, we started thinking about what we could possibly do to make it so players weren’t too dependent on having other players. The obvious answer to this was more maps, new armies and bots. So after the initial bugfixing and optimization these were released, but something still felt like it was missing. This is when we came up with the idea for a singleplayer campaign, which would not only be a great introduction for new players to learn the game properly but also add some more content which didn’t need several players to be fun.
But then it hit us, the way we had designed the game had been with UNET which is peer-to-peer networking with relay servers. It is obvious that since we wanted to have matchmaking we needed a dedicated server, sadly our functionality for that required us to remake almost all of the networking code. Which is why we went for 4 months without updates. However in July we finally released our update with the dedicated server and basically all the functionality redone. This explains for the people wondering why suddenly our updates came out a lot faster and more regularly. Through all this our community on Discord deserves some credit for being a huge motivation, they have been with us even when things looked the worst and always believed in it.
At last we hope for all the people who’s been with us from the start that you feel the wait has been worth it, and for all the new people that you will enjoy the game a lot!