Months without any new items in game.

I'd be interested to hear what those differences are. Not saying that sceptically; I genuinely would be interested to hear. I read the blog, but from what I remember the new release hasn't been detailed to the public very clearly. What aspects of the game do you think will be lost, provided we'll be supplied with a thorough scripting tool? Geti said he'd be monitoring the thread, so now is a good time to express specific worries -so they can perhaps be addressed- rather than general disappointment with the game.

Correlation does not imply causality. Any game, with any feature-set, only has a certain life-span (for the wider player base, if not zealots like ourselves). Whether or not KAG could have become something "greater" is up for debate. Like I said, Overworld never interested me much. I think it would've been a failed experiment, or at least would've required so much separate dev time that we'd be in the same position as we are now.
On a related note, there were two full 64-person servers online at the weekend, and over 400 people playing in total. Not quite reaching the peak of "old" KAG, but pretty impressive for a game of this size that's been released for so long. I'm not so sure if the "peak" would have continued in a crazy upward spiral had development been handled differently.

Not saying you're wrong, or that you were criticizing unfairly. Nor am I saying mistakes haven't been made. I'm not taking either side here, just pointing out that I'm happy from a personal perspective with how development has gone overall since that time all so long ago when the only objective was to dig gold out of a hole. Don't think I've ever taken the chance to say so/ride the developers' dicks. (Sorry, just thought that description was funny).

I've been around further back than October, but that's beside the point. I'll admit I haven't ever participated very actively on the forums, just lurked around a lot. As such, I can only go from what I read in this thread. I might have garnered the wrong impression, but -solely from what you posted- it seemed as if you'd already given the game up as dead.

You can see how I might've misinterpreted your opinions from reading something like this. It's also how I might have come to perceive you as a cynic, as despite lurking around the forums a lot I don't really pay much attention to individual members. In my mind, cynicism isn't a bad trait anyway, and I probably misused the word. Didn't mean for you to take it personally at all, so sorry about that.

Anywho, wasn't targeting or disagreeing with you specifically, BluLu. Just making a general show of my own support for the developers. Like I said, I'm going to watch and wait before taking out my torch and pitchfork.

 

I guess anything different shouldn't be expected when the game is still essentially in its open-Alpha stages of development (well, I'm no expert on game development, but with major features still being added I think it can be classified as being in Alpha). Explosive, Minecraftian levels of success at this point would be exceptional. 200-500 people playing at any one time is still a lot, so I think we can agree that the game never "died", but went through a short period of relative drought before even being released.

Wasn't aware you were a tester. Obviously you're in a much better position than me to judge whether the next version lives up to old KAG, then, and I'm sure you've already shared your concerns with the devs. We'll have to wait for the full version before making a verdict on equal footing.

Yep. I know myself that KAG went through a rough patch. It's to be expected.
For example, I monitor the development of Dwarf Fortress, the developer of whom relies solely on donations to survive. Month-to-month his income fluctuates pretty erratically, usually spiking up by several thousand dollars when a large update is released. Hopefully that will be mirrored in KAG when it's released as a full game package.

Went up by about $10k when he released an update that had been pending for almost a year.

Anywho, I'm going to skip away merrily now and leave the stage open for the input of others. Nice to hear your opinions Blu :)

 

Alright dudes, I've played KAG for almost a year now, so I think I can provide an at least somewhat informed opinion on the subject at hand. Any items that I personally would or would not want added directly correlate to the amount of strategic thinking and use of said objects. Since KAG is essentially a sidescroller RTS game, strategy plays a large roll in any given match. Without the fast paced building this game involves, it would probably just be a mindless beat-'em-up set in medieval times. What does that have to do with new items being added? Well..


Wall of text incoming.

Spoiler

I'll use the water update as an example to expand on what I think before explaining myself.

On release, the water update drowned anyone trying to dig underground. Since the water was on a separate layer from any blocks, you'd drown even if the water 'technically' wasn't within your tunnel; everything below a certain point was a watery grave. Since nobody could dig below enemy towers, everyone had to take them head on. But THAT was a bad idea too, since you couldn't shield against arrows and make it across without drowning. The pros and cons of defense outweighed those of offense, so most matches on those maps became turtle wars.

With that in mind, you can understand my glee and absolute excitement when I discovered boats, and especially flowing water were being implemented. The addition of these features adds a strategic element for those using them to their advantage. This is different from things like heads, objects that just change the player appearance rather than gameplay. Most people bored of the game won't pick it up again just because they can make their character look different, they'd pick it up due to new and interesting mechanics being used in creative ways.

New and interesting being the keywords. Even if the developers stop development of KAG, once the scripting update is out of the way, the entire game will be handed over to the players to muck around with as we please. Suggestions won't need to run through a buffer to two sleepy indie developers, but rather to a group of sleepy, AngelScript fluent fans that want to see the game continue to flourish even after development.

Yes, it's a bummer that we won't see everything that was promised to us. But the potential will still be there for us; the user base. We'll just have to roll with that.

 

nope, I have always loved kag.
sorry, I don't really feel like resuming this discussion about how some updates were bad, and some weren't,
lets just say there were bad updates, and hope for better ones, awrite?

 

Holy nuggetsacks suddenly the quality of old KAG forums is back. aside from gofio's post

KAG's original potential did go to "waste", since bad decisions were made in the times when KAG had the biggest potential to grow. It still does have potential, but the KAG as we knew it died. Community got worse, game got worse, many players quit.

It has now been a long time since addon of "fun" features, and I can only understand all the impatience and doubt people have. (though Geti's still cared about classic even that it's a brainfuck to work with (I heard), so my respect goes to him.)
pKAG is still going to be worth the wait I say, because in the new engine Geti and MM can work much more fluently, track down bugs more effectively + do changes without breaking something all the time. Therefore the new KAG will live up to the old KAG. Imagine all the same bugs, even more of them as new features are added, slow development due to spaghetti code, imagine your face when a bomb flies through a wall and blows you to pieces. Imagine your face when you get 1hko stomped from 5 blocks height.

Afaik they are also going to do more games with the same engine. Rewriting it all and doing everything carefully will pay off lots in the future. :)

 

blue is acting too much blue and only little luigi =(

well, anyways, this does explain why you are less active, right?
</br>--- merged: Dec 15, 2012 9:50 AM ---</br>

you do realise that an income of 30K is already a lot, right?
some people don't even make that much money from selling agame!

 

It might seem like alot of money, but not when developing is a full time job and there's other costs that have to come out of it. If your working on games as a hobby and you make a bit of money from it that's great, but these kinda developers have to make enough to feed themselves and pay the rent and bills, not to mention the cost of running the website and other business stuff so they can keep making games.

 

I'm not sure, but the new update might be out

-ish around January i think

 

well...
oh poop, forgot the euro is worth more than the dollar...
nvm.

 

And I bet whatever they end up with isn't a great deal, hopefully the new release should do them some favours there though.

@Dawn, they hinted at maybe a demoish kinda thing perhaps before release too ;)

 

Just figured I would add in my two cents...

Spoiler: Why I Love KAG/There's No Family Here...

I joined up last January, just as KAG seemed to be hitting it's stride. When servers were full up for HOURS at a time and you were lucky to even make it into Jaedizzle's House on a weekend night. I'm going to be 26 years old soon, and some might look at this game, look at my age and think, "Wow, this guy is fucking weird." Yeah, maybe I am a little weird, but it's only because KAG has melded together concepts and daydreams I had as a child, smothered with nostalgia and deep-fried in memories.

I've posted it before but I'll post it again. I used to build elaborate castles and such using Legos, and buying those cheap Dollar Store bags of green Army Men for $1. I would plan out elaborate wars and my friends and I used to see who could advance faster... Of course, the problem here is that we had to think outside of the box, using dice, playing cards, board game pieces, etc. in order to give our little medieval war games some cohesiveness.

And I think that's why I love KAG, even to this day, even as I see classic KAG winding down and a lot of the friends I've made over the last year bailing on it. It took my love and fascination for Legos, medieval knights, Super Nintendo and fighting and threw it in a blender. It had all the factors that I wanted when I first bought Minecraft and it ended up being a huge disappointment.

KAG Classic is certainly past it's heyday. No longer can you find games like when I first joined, or when I first felt like a bad ass by bomb jumping into the enemy's catapult nest. No longer can I join Jaedizzle's House or Incarnum's servers and be guaranteed a good time. There's quite a few factors as to why this is happening. It's partially from bad judgement calls, sure. I might be the minority, but I still love Zombie Fortress and still boot up single player from time to time, even if it's just to fuck with configs and see what kind of crazy shit I can come up with. Another part is the game's increasingly low maturity level. Note that I am not saying that the community is YOUNG, rather they have the common sense and education of a summer squash. A lot of new intelligent players are likely to be turned off by the lack of brains floating around in the free servers, lack of moderation on a NUMBER of servers (I'm looking at a few RTDM servers right now) and overly zealous nature of some admins.

Sure, I'm kind of an asshole. I know it. You know it. I have no problem with everyone knowing that I'm an asshole. But I'm also not banning people because they killed me or restarting a game because someone fucked up my structure. I'm not pointing fingers but I see a steady decline in administration of servers. This is one reason why I have dreaded the "phasing out" of the guard system. There may be some days where I'm playing and there will be 3-4 admins on at a time, quickly squashing any griefer/hacker/etc. However, 9 times out of 10 I'm on a server, no admins in sight, a griefer running amok and tearing ass through our team's base. I'm trying my damnedest to get people to mark said griefer, but you might as well speak to a brick wall. No joke, the other day I saw a kid speedhacking, we needed one more vote to votekick, and the only remaining player who could get rid of him flat out said, "I don't want any part of it." I feel the sharp decline in the intelligence of the community is what is slowly killing this game. Too often I join some server where it's nothing more than "OMG COLLAPSES ARE SO COOOOOOOOOL" and I have the "nerve" to say it's lame. Almost immediately I have 2-3 kids saying, "lol y u no leav?1 u mad/"

It's really to the point where I won't even play on servers where I'm not an admin anymore. Which is sad, because there are TONS of great servers around here, but not a lot of great server moderation.

I'm kinda getting off topic, so I'll move on.

Spoiler: Being A Tester; The Future Of KAG

One day I was browsing the forums, discussing new changes and checking things out when I notice Geti wanted me to PM him about becoming a tester. What a delight! It was something I've always wanted to do, but knew what I was getting myself into. I once tested Final Fantasy XI during it's beta phase, and what I thought would be a great deal of playing through the game and having fun ended up being a nightmare of repetitive tasks and trying to break the game in increasingly ridiculous and unconventional ways. But I love KAG, I love it's community and I love the devs for all the hard work they've done, so I became a tester. I haven't been able to test jack shit for months now, because my version of the test build simply wouldn't work until yesterday morning. I will say that pKAG is very different from cKAG, but not so much that I think it should be called something different. I always feel bad when I read over some testing discussions because I haven't really contributed much due to not being able to get test build working.

I will say, however, that I have great confidence that pKAG could be just as good as KAG build 190, if not better. I wasn't around for B190, but I have heard stories and I've actually played Swordfight on build 123(124 maybe?) from a random link I found online. Combat was fluid and rewarded skill over spastic movements, much like how jab-spammers in knight combat always seem to win.

pKAG certainly has it's issues, but that's what the testers are for... I know that now that I'm able to USE the test build, I'm going to do my best to bring about bugs, give my input/feedback to the devs, and hopefully contribute to the rise of pKAG.

I sincerely hope I haven't said too much, and if I have Geti/MM/whomever, feel free to cut out whatever you deem necessary.

 

Plus it gets taxed, too.

 

The community rant is spot on, I could wait for a very very fucking long time for the update if the community was better at the moment - that and a couple of knight related combat things that were better a fair few months ago, not that I've ever seriously indulged in been one just it seems that it pisses enough people off to mention it all the time - but unfortunately that's the massive massive down point of playing at the moment. If I can be anything between a huge influence to the saving fucking grace of a team with my sub par building skills in pretty much every game I join at the moment, something is seriously wrong cos I fucking suck, and I know I suck cos I've played with players that know what they're doing and been taught a harsh lesson in the subtleties of this game. I'm just clinging on to the idea that with the new game hopefully we can have a new reich of neo facist servers that will mercilessly shit out anyone that doesn't wanna play a team game and/or make the decision to learn the basic principles of the game. With what we have I'd be pretty happy, and that's not to mention some of the cool gold server stuff you never see anymore that was actually cool in the hands of decent servers and their admins. I distinctly remember a decent few weeks of playing with kegs and laterns and shit in reasonably retardless servers and it been awesome, didn't last for long though unfortunately. Just hope there's a renaissance of those kinda servers with the new game.

 

I like this way of thinking. There are still plenty of things that keep cKAG at it's roots. I love BoW's zombie server because the maps are rather large and make it really cool to play. That Royal CTF server was a blast because 32 vs 32 made it feel more like old KAG. I personally miss walljumping... You guys remember walljumping? Where you could make your way up a 2 wide hole just by jumping and pressing A and D back and forth? Those were the days.