Hello warriors,
We’ve had a busy spring, first preparing for the steam game festival and then iterating Kingshunt from the feedback.
First, we want to thank all of you who participated in the playtests, shared their feedback with us, and those who streamed and created Kingshunt content! All of this helps us to shape Kingshunt to the correct direction. A lot of improvements have been made on these since the last test, and we will be covering them more in upcoming development updates.
Finally, We are happy to announce that Kingshunt beta testing will begin in June 22nd. The whole purpose of testing Kingshunt is to create a solid and enjoyable experience, while iterating on game design and implementation. The important takeaway of this announcement is that we are making progress towards a playable experience. We aim to invite all Kingshunt players to participate in four day long testing session and push the limits of our Kingshunt experience
We will continue development as planned, implementing changes based on the test, and we hope to have you all playing an even better version of the game soon. Even with the general feedback being positive, there were still some topics that were discussed in the community that we would like to address: mainly the performance, game mode, new towers, new hero and time to kill.
UPCOMING CHANGES AND UPDATES
There is still some work ahead of us for Kingshunt beta. For beta we wanted to introduce new utilities, hero, tutorial!, map and game mode updates.
New Towers
Ready to burn the opposing team to ashes? There was a clear need for new kinds of towers to play with. Flame tower acts as a close range defensive placement against attacking side minions.
New Hero
This bad boy is something else. We will introduce him properly before beta
New Runes and Upgrade system
Customize your character with rune upgrades and create your own unique builds.
Also we have identified the following areas required more love:
Time to kill
The Time to Kill (TTK) is one of the discussion topics from the playtests. Since the previous test, we've made a lot of changes to the second-to-second gameplay. For example, we rebalanced characters, updated visual effects, all of which has affected the time-to-kill one way or another
However, it is important to mention that the TTK is still not final, and the feedback will be taken into consideration.
HUD & UI
- HUD updates. Fixing busy HUD elements and quality.
- Minimap Updates. Simplifying and clearer goals.
- Payload icon. Adding a clearer Icon and color for objectives
- Hero icons
- Ping Menu for quick comms!
Visual & Animations
- Animations polished
- Character Optimisations and graphical Updates
- VFX Elements updated for character skills
- New Status Effects
Audio
- Audio system. Fixing bugs in the audio system to get better sound propagation.
- Combat sounds. Weapon swings and impact sounds.
- Voice Overs for Characters
Level Design
- Collisions. It's always annoying to get stuck!
- Level Design changes
- Polished and Updated Church level
Flows
- Tutorial. Adding a tutorial and improving the onboarding to make gameplay features clearer for new players.
- Settings. Building options, Rune autobuilds and more.
- Keybinds. Creating additional keybind options to allow players to remap and reset their settings.
- New Main Menu
- Controller support. Adding more precise sensitivity settings and controls
- Quality settings
Performance
Quite many of you reached out to us regarding performance. Some of these problems were caused by simply missing optimization, and we have addressed these issues and we will continue optimizing. During Beta we will be able to investigate these further.
Overall, we are striving for a balance between performance and quality, where players could run the game well on older hardware with some limitations in the graphics, as well as push the visuals or framerates to the moon on high-end machines. We still have some way to go, but we are continuously working on optimization and other performance fixes that should make the game run a lot smoother going forward.