http://indiestatik.com/2013/03/20/king-arthurs-gold/

http://www.facebook.com/michal.marcinkowski

Also KAG development is heading full steam towards full version:  http://devlog.kag2d.com

 Donald J. Trump

That is a goal of a theater/movie director, a choreographer or even a writer.

Game Designers should design what the player can experience and come up with game mechanics that will allow him to do that.

Let me give an example.
I’m currently playing a game called Zeno Clash. There is a level where there are these huge monsters and on top of them a boss/hunter rides them. You have to shoot him off the big monster while at the same time avoiding squirrels with dynamite that he throws at you.

The whole arena is staged. The hunter is placed on top of the monster from the start. The whole movement is scripted. You can shoot the hunter off the monster only when his health bar is depleted. The only freedom you have is how fast you shoot and kick the squirrels to avoid them exploding on you. You can’t even walk beyond what the level designer made. You have to sit at a specific place and be forced to do what someone thought was going to be fun. It is like theater not a game.

This would be fine if it was 1982. But we have 2012! A new era must start.

The way a game like that should be designed is for the game designer to make a checklist, of what he wants the player to experience:

1. Battles with riding monsters
2. Shooting each other off the monsters
3. Exploding squirrels

These should be as vague as possible, because you want the player to define the specific actions he wants to make. Let the player decide how he wants to kill the boss.
So now the engineering department should make another checklist with things to code that will accomplish these experiences:

• Mount/dismount on big monsters
• Collisions between squirrel/monster/player/enemy/explosion
• AI that can chase/runaway/idle/attack
• Gravity

Does that sound hard? It is basic stuff that anyone that has coded at least one game will have to go through. The hard part is making them all work with each other, so that the player can discover the game mechanics himself and use them as he wishes to accomplish the goal (in this case kill the boss/hunter).
Ironically this isn’t more work than scripting the whole thing in some fancy 100,000$ game tool. But the potential is enormous. Making all the elements work with each other will allow the player to experience a level where he can jump on a monster, kickback an exploding squirrels at the boss, explode the monster with the boss on top and make him fall dead and gib in full bloody glory.

I want to mount that monster and stomp the boss. Not  have to go through some chores that the game designer imposed on me and force me then to watch a scripted sequence that I feel I had no influence on. There is a way to do this better.

I feel a new era is beginning. Where video games are finally starting to detach from the archaic forms of entertainment of the past. I am beginning to understand this new path and if more people making games do too, we’re gonna have some amazing games waiting for us to experience in the future.

How did it happen? I think because game developers forgot what games are meant for. Modern video games have in the essence become movies with rendered graphics. You only control how fast the movie progresses.

How many times have you bought a game thinking it delivered what it promised, only to experience the same repetitive gameplay over and over? These games are developed with a trailer in mind. Game companies try to blind you with flashy effects and trick you into buying the game – NOT fun.

The good news is that this trend is starting to reverse. The successes of indie games like Minecraft in the last year, tell us that millions of gamers are tired of mainstream games and are beginning to see what games should be like and what they themselves enjoy most. This is the beginning of a revolution. A revolution that will show you what video games were always meant to be…

This is where King Arthur’s Gold comes in.

This game is my dream come true. My name is Michal Marcinkowski and I am a single coder and game designer who used to draw simple war games on pieces of paper with friends at school. All my life I have been looking to experience that simple wonder and fun on a computer. So much freedom from something so simple. Few games come close. That’s why I decided to make them myself.  The pencil doodles have come to life and you too can experience the sheer fun of it. This is the only point of my games. To have as much fun as possible.

King Arthur’s Gold – affectionately known as KAG – is a unique build’n’kill game. KAG lets you use siege engines and catapults to knock down castles in randomly generated medieval worlds. It lets you mine for gold and set traps. Cooperate with your friends and watch as the meticulously-built enemy fortress topples down on the tiny pixel heads of your foes. It’s bloody fun. It’s Free. And hey… King Arthur’s Gold will have ZOMBIES! You haven’t seen anything if you haven’t played this game.

KAG is a perfect blend of the coolest aspects of modern games. Mine, build and fight real people in real-time. Use castles, catapults, siege engines and traps to gain advantage. In KAG the environment is 100% interactive – everything can be built and everything can be destroyed.

KAG brings a new level of fun never-before-seen in a computer game. We all deserve to enjoy and have some REAL fun after years of being robbed of our time and money by shitty games.

As gamers..
We love to explore.
We love to build.
We love to fight.
We love to cooperate and compete with others.

Not with a scripted character that is being forced on us.

How many times have you been tricked into believing that a given next gen game will feature a revolutionary cooperative AI only to end being stuck in a corridor? A real person playing like you, interacting with you and striving to achieve a common goal is the only friend you will ever need. Playing with other people is fun. Destroying your enemies castle is fun. Watching them fall into your spike trap is fun. Dropping a rock on their head and seeing them make an angry face is FUN.

But that is not all. While most independent games focus on gameplay, they tend to forget about the graphics and do not appeal to the eye. That’s a mistake – the visuals are also important. And I’m not talking about bleeding-edge bloom effects that try to mimic reality here. We’re talking about special aesthetics, because that’s what counts. KAG is presented in beautiful hand-drawn pixel graphics. Every pixel is carefully picked and matched to create a unique visual experience and to paint a great story. A story of King Arthur and his knights trying to prevail over the evil enemy.

Experience a work of love that mixes mythological themes of grandiose battles and dreams of bravery and combines that with the best aspects of classic and future gaming trends that rock the very foundations of video game design.

This is King Arthur’s Gold. And you are invited to join the adventure.

The “Hint: Shoot enemy to kill them” isn’t even funny because in Day of Defeat: Source there is the exact same hint.

Why didn’t I do that with Link-Dead?

Because I was struggling with a solid foundation. This time, with KAG, I have a solid foundation and can build upon it.

Or can I?

The problem I am facing now is that the KAG engine is terribly written. Because it is a mesh of Crimson Glory and Link-Dead code on top of which I basically “Ludum Dare’d” a completely new game. I am actually really proud of my development speed. It took me just 5 months to have a really deep fun game, a growing community and make money off of it.

But you know me. I am never satisfied with my work because I have haunting visions of the game I would REALLY want to play. And that game involves going on non-scripted adventures with your team-mates, building civilizations and waging war.

So now I’m trying to do that. The current engine is a mess and when I add something I need to spend the next 3 days fixing bugs after that. Which is OK and I will probably go on like this for the next couple months with the free/classic version of KAG. However for the full version this is unacceptable. This is why I have already announced A New Engine.

The new engine will fix all the previous engine issues because I know how to engineer good code. Bad code was just my choice (I still highly recommend it!!!)

I wrote the basics of the engine when I encountered a roadblock. Mainly, the thought: if I’m gonna rewrite this game why not rewrite it in some nicer language than C++ and make it browser based? I’d love to have the game in a browser because that way I can reach out to a larger audience and it is cross-platform out of the box. Java came to my mind but I don’t like Java. I know something better, a language called Scala.

Scala is like SuperHeavy or the Travelling Wilbury’s or Ringo’s All Starr’s. It’s a blend of the best features of programming languages and it works on top of Java. So it can be launched as an applet and use all of Java’s gigantic libraries. Programming in Scala feels like smooth sailing compared to hitting rocks with a hammer (C++).

So Scala is nice but the problem is – I am not efficient in it. I just haven’t learned it well and I need to code with documentation in hand, which is sloooow. I figure it would take me about a year to become efficient in Scala and the next year would be actually making the game. Too long, taking into account that the world is gonna exist only for a year longer.

So I ditched Scala and am back to C++.
I should get back to writing the new engine but again I am facing an obstacle – the possibility of actually largely refactoring the current engine. Something like live organ transplant in the programming world.
I have to go out, so I’ll write a second part later… cya

When a mystery is too overpowering, one dare not disobey. Absurd as it might seem to me, a thousand miles from any human habitation and in danger of death, I took out of my pocket a sheet of paper and my fountain-pen. But then I remembered how my studies had been concentrated on geography, history, arithmetic and grammar, and I told the little chap (a little crossly, too) that I did not know how to draw. He answered me:

“That doesn’t matter. Draw me a sheep . . .”

But I had never drawn a sheep. So I drew for him one of the two pictures I had drawn so often. It was that of the boa constrictor from the outside. And I was astounded to hear the little fellow greet it with,

“No, no, no! I do not want an elephant inside a boa constrictor. A boa constrictor is a very dangerous creature, and an elephant is very cumbersome. Where I live, everything is very small. What I need is a sheep. Draw me a sheep.”

So then I made a drawing.

He looked at it carefully, then he said:

“No. This sheep is already very sickly. Make me another.”

So I made another drawing.

My friend smiled gently and indulgently.

“You see yourself,” he said, “that this is not a sheep. This is a ram. It has horns.”

So then I did my drawing over once more.

But it was rejected too, just like the others.

“This one is too old. I want a sheep that will live a long time.”

By this time my patience was exhausted, because I was in a hurry to start taking my engine apart. So I tossed off this drawing.

And I threw out an explanation with it.

“This is only his box. The sheep you asked for is inside.”

I was very surprised to see a light break over the face of my young judge:

“That is exactly the way I wanted it! Do you think that this sheep will have to have a great deal of grass?”

• Soldat 1.6 has been released! Big up, for Shoozza!
• King Arthur’s Gold is part of Desura’s alphafunding
• Look what I found
• I’m gonna have a lecture about KAG and the process of indie games development on game developers conference in Lodz, Poland (8-11 September) (Zjazd Twórców Gier 2011; jak ktoś chce mnie spotkac to zapraszam w ta sobote:)