News
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✨ Gearing Up for Greatness!
Curious what’s coming up next? Read the new dev log for a juicy peek around the next corner!
And as always, let me know what you think!
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Gearing up for greatness!
Some of you may have already guessed that a big part of what makes developing Konkr fun for me is taking it way too seriously for what it is. I guess it’s a bit of an indulgence project for the perfectionist side of me, the side that suffers a bit in my day job as a software developer (where compromises and good enough solutions are the daily bread and butter).
So today I’m here to share some new and exciting ways in which I’ve been obsessing over the game!
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📼 Putting the win into rewind!
The “Rewind” superpower is now a super-superpower! For the meager cost of one life, you can now go back not just to the previous turn but as far back as you’d like. Use your newfound powers responsibly!
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🏆 Relive your most glorious victories!
The victory screen now lets you review the replay of the whole match! You can even save it to a file for future enjoyment or sharing with others.
Continue reading here for more details!
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🔁 Let's watch it again!
Not quite sure what the heck just happened to your kingdom? You can now view replay of the enemy turn! Look for the new option next to the rewind button and stay tuned for more replay-related features!
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✊ Claim Victory!
Rivals will now offer to surrender to you when they become hopelessly outmatched. If you’d rather not witness their pathetic groveling, you can turn this feature off in the settings menu 😉.
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🚫🐢 Anti-turtling update!
One more tweak to AI behavior is here! The rivals got greedier and more motivated to actually try and make something happen when they are losing. I think I finally found the right balance between risk taking and defense, but let me know what you think!
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⛷ AI performance improved!
You should notice the rivals are playing quite a bit faster now!
Continue reading for a quick look at the roadmap poll results.
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🚀 2023 Roadmap!
Hey everyone, I think it’s about time for a new update on where Konkr is heading next! Get comfortable and
get ready to get excited, this will be a big post! continue reading -
🔥 The AI update is out of the oven!
…along with rebalanced campaign and a number of new levels!
You should suddenly find the AI rivals to be much more cunning, diligent, but also less unhinged and hopefully more fun to play against. Let me know what you think! (survey link).
I will continue to tweak the AI in the coming weeks (there’s still some known issues), but I’m also eager to move on to new exciting features, more info on those plans shortly!
Beware: Due to changes in level generation, old conquest map links are unfortunately not compatible with this version of the game. If you want to replay some old favourite maps, you can still play them on the older version of the game over here.
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New year, same old news
Happy new year everyone! I hope Konkr will keep bringing you joy in 2023! At the moment I’m still hard at work on finishing the major AI update which you can test over here (for more detailed news on that check Discord). I’d like to incorporate it into the game ASAP! More regular content updates in the main game will resume once I manage to do that.
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🎅 Merry Christmas!
Thank you for your support and continued feedback, you make making this game worth it! ❤️
You may notice the game got some cute little wholesome additions for the holiday season. Rest assured this is strictly temporary!
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👁️ I see you!
The AI rivals in the test branch are now much better at noticing when you’re actively leaving them alone and appreciate you for the benevolent neighbour you are (or at least feel slightly more guilty while invading 😉).
- There’s also a Short feedback survey about the AI changes, have your say!
- You can now also read about the different AI personality presets over here.
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About the AI personality presets
Currently, you can find four AI personality presets in the customization console in the test branch. These represent a few different answers to the crucial question: How should the AI rivals behave in order to be fun to play against?
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Looking for your feedback!
I’m finally quite happy with the current state of the new AI!
GO MESS WITH IT HERE and let me know what you think! A more structured feedback survey will be coming up shortly.
It’s also where you find the new levels for this week 😉.
Coming up next in the AI update branch:
- overhaul of the diplomacy layer (how your actions affect relations with other players)
- looking into ways to scale back the difficulty so that players looking for more relaxed gameplay aren’t totally left behind 🙂
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AI beta test guide
Here are some tips for messing with the new AI available at www.konkr.io/releases/dev/test-ai-update/:
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Getting there!
The new AI in the test branch has become a lot more consistent over this weekend and just learned to properly defend multi-town provinces, but it still needs a bit more time in the oven before it really works the way I’d like it to. Stay tuned!
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I may have created a monster...
You can now play against the in-development version of the new AI over here! It still has a few major blindspots at the moment and may act a bit drunk, but I’m already having a blast playing against it, so might as well share!
It may play a bit too well in some aspects, don’t expect all campaign levels to be beatable in the test branch! Do expect a proper beta test by next week, when I’m done fitting the few remaining pieces and ironing out a bunch of bugs.
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AI update progress
As it often happens when I start digging in the AI code, the scope of the update grew a lot larger than I originally expected, with major changes in three of the AI pillars (attack planning, high level strategy and diplomacy). But at this point it’s starting to all come together pretty nicely! Aiming for public beta next week if everything goes smoothly. For another small sneak peak at the progress continue here.
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AI Playstyles
No exciting changes this week, so instead I’ll share a peek into the ongoing work on the next AI update. Continue reading if that sounds interesting to you!
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What do bandits and zombies have in common?
Neither can now move over walls! This gives you a bit more power to manipulate bandit movement. Some subtle UX improvements were added too, for example you can now shift-click to quickly place multiple units!
For other news see changelog and if you miss the zombies already, the infected version of the game is quarantined over here.
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What the 🎃
Terribly sorry around this, but the latest release seems to be infected with some kind of conveniently thematic mutation. Hopefully I’ll manage to clean it up by next week!
In the meantime, if you don’t want to deal with this, an untainted version of the game is still available over here.
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🔪 "It's not you, it's me!"
In this week’s update “allies” are still as likely as ever to backstab you at the worst possible moment, but at least they should no longer keep smiling at you afterwards!
A few other small improvements are detailed in the changelog, while I work on a larger rewrite of the AI decision-making and diplomacy layer.
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The game has changed!
A major upgrade of AI defense capabilities is now released! You should find your rivals to be less recklessly aggressive, but also not quite as easy to outmaneuver anymore! Many campaign levels got slightly updated and moved around to match their new difficulty level, sorry for any confusion that might cause!
Now I feel the main remaining weak point of the AI is attack planning, that will be my next focus!
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🤖 "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that."
The AI is getting feisty! You can test a beta version of a major AI overhaul at www.konkr.io/releases/dev/test-ai-defense. I’m very much looking for feedback, so give it a go! It’s where you can also find this weeks new levels (they will arrive into the main game later, together with the update).
Continue reading here for more details!
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AI tuning continues...
I just restored some teeth to the AI, it was becoming a bit too eager to leave you alone and focus on defense in some cases 😈.
I’m working on a big upgrade of the AI tactics when it comes to defending choke points and large provinces. Expect more news on that soon!
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Rivals now 35% more satisfying to crush!
Your rivals just became a fair bit more expressive! Watch them react to your actions! Be it with love, awe or despair 🙂.
Some tweaks to the AI behavior have landed as well. You should see a bit less suicidal aggression from the AI and fewer facepalm-inducingly stupid moves. If you’d like to know more about the changes and what’s coming next, continue reading here.
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Say goodbye to "Unknown Island"!
Conquest maps now get unique names! You can bring back your favourite islands or share them with friends by entering the name, or even more conveniently…
…look for the brand new “link” button!Your links to fun maps are also welcome in the new
#map-sharing channel on discord! -
☁ Play from anywhere!
The cloud sync update is live! If you’d like your campaign progress safely backed up and shared between your phone and PC, just click the little ⚙ cogwheel icon in the top right corner and choose your preferred sign-in option!
You might also notice some additional UI changes, you can read about those here.
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New levels!
This week’s new levels landed at numbers 8, 13 and 26, have fun!
My focus remains on the cloud sync update, which is nearly ready now. Should be landing later this week! 🤞
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Survey results 📊
Hey everyone, this weeks new levels can be found at numbers 5, 17 and 18! Other levels got moved around and one got removed. Sorry for the constantly changing level numbers! I’ll try to move to a better system soon.
If you’d like to know about a subtle rule change to bandit behavior and the player survey results, continue reading over here!
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🧭 New levels every week!
Hey everyone, I would hate to keep you starved for content while I’m working on the bigger improvements. So starting today, I’ll be adding 3 new handcrafted levels to the campaign every week!
Today’s batch includes new levels 8,9 and 10 as well as rebalancing of some existing ones. There’s also a bunch of bugfixes and little improvements, more in the changelog.
Also the player survey is still open, big thanks to everyone who gave their feedback so far!
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📋 What do YOU want to see next?
Help me decide by taking this short survey!
Slowly but steadily there’s more and more of you awesome folks playing my game, so I’d love to learn more about what kind of improvements you’d appreciate the most 🙂.
Also if you’d like to know more about my own thoughts around the future of Konkr, continue reading over here!
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What's next?
Hi everyone, so ever since v2 was released about a month ago, I’ve been trying to collect as much feedback as I could.
And it’s been kind of amazing.
Sentimental rambling
After about a year of hacking away at this thing, seeing that I’m clearly not the only one who is utterly in love with the concept of this game is beyond rewarding. Massive thank you to everyone that gave me feedback on this or the earlier version of Konkr.io over the past months (and years). You are my heroes, and I wouldn’t make it this far without you ♥.
This is also the first time that Konkr feels to me like a complete, finished game. There’s no longer a laundry list of things I still need to do before It’s truly fun and playable, and that feels awesome.
Of course, this does not mean I’m done! In fact I’m more excited than ever to keep expanding the game and bring it to the next level of greatness! But how does the next level of greatness look like is a somewhat open question now. I will share my thoughts below, but I would also love to know what you think. So if you didn’t yet, please do me a favor and take this short survey!
The Paths Ahead
I’ve recently transformed my massive todo/idea list into a more high-level overview of the possible paths in which I could see the game expand next. Here it is!
As you can see, I think the next big feature should be an option to login and save your progress in the cloud. I view this as a blocker for a lot of other exciting stuff, like a map editor and a big expansion of the campaign.
Why? Currently, all your progress in the game is just stored in your browser. There are two big problems with that:
- it’s really easy to lose all your progress by for example clearing your browser data.
- it’s impossible to share your progress between devices (like your phone and a pc).
The current 20-level campaign is about the limit of the amount of content I’m willing to bet on such a flimsy storage mechanism. I really don’t want you folks randomly losing many hours of progress!
So my main plan at the moment is:
- get an (opt-in) login/cloud-sync in place
- add a lot more campaign content
- add map editor & map sharing
And after that, there’s a sea of other cool improvements I could be working on.
All that said, the results of the survey posted above might still shake up things quite a bit, so stay tuned for more updates!
I hope this cleared things up a bit. Going forward I would like to be more transparent about my plans, rather than just dropping random updates on you folks out of the blue 😉.
Thanks for reading all the way through this! As always, I’m happy to chat about any of this with you on the Discord server.
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New campaign levels!
The main campaign was just expanded to 20 levels, check them out! There are 9 new ones, some old ones were shifted around, others tweaked and the utterly evil last level was removed for now.
Big thank you to everyone that has been sending me feedback on the levels, it really helps. ❤️
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Play on your phone!
Konkr is now touchscreen-friendly! Visit konkr.io on your phone to try it out. As always,
let me know if you run into any issues.For the next update I will be most likely focusing on content, so expect new and rebalanced campaign levels soon!
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New website!
A shiny new version of Konkr calls for a shiny new website, so I took some time to update the web.
It includes a standalone version of the in-game How to Play guide and a new About page.
You can now also keep a closer eye on any changes to the game by following the Changelog.
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Welcome to Konkr v2!
I hope you’ll enjoy it!
If you have any feedback, don’t hesitate to email me or
join the Konkr.io discord server.And just in case you want none of this new fanciness, you can still play the old konkr here 😉.