Looks like Konkr updates are back on the menu!

It’s been a long time indeed since the last one and what better way to apologize than with some long overdue quality of life improvements:

• rival speech bubbles now fade on hover and let you click through them
• of course the best way to shut them up is still to raze their town, which now comes with a new animation
• the end of turn confirmation dialog is replaced with a much less intrusive warning
• the budget numbers overlay (hotkey Q) is now positioned better
• and a big one for the map makers: custom levels now allow faction colors customization; the color picker is available only in the map editor test branch for now, but the custom colors already work in the main game as well.

I also went through new bug reports that accumulated over time and fixed most of them, including one that makes the AI once again a bit less dumb. As always, full list in the changelog.

About the long silence

Okay, but really, I feel bad about the radio silence. I deeply appreciate the patience everyone has shown over the years for how much my time for konkr programming comes and goes. Still, I wish I’d kept you more in the loop. I suppose at some point I just wanted the next news post to be good news, not just more empty promises.

Many things have changed in my life over the past months, chief among them moving my life from Czechia to Slovenia to live with my soul mate. And I think the most honest way to put it is the growing gap between my ambitions for the game and the amount of time I could dedicate to working on it felt too wide, draining my motivation.

The World is Changed

It’s no secret that generative AI has transformed programming completely this year. It’s amazing, terrifying and in terms of my corporate job as a software developer, it resulted mostly in a whole lot of chaos and stress, sometimes bordering on an existential crisis (Do I even enjoy programming anymore? Will this thing kill us all in five years?). I’m no stranger to the general feeling of AI-fatigue that I’m sure many of you can relate to.

But regardless, this weekend I finally found the time to brush the dust off my konkr dev environment and dive back in for a bit, taking my best frenemy Claude Code along for the ride.

And well… Holy shit.

I did not realize how well Claude would pick up the Konkr codebase. That gap between my ambitions for Konkr and the time I have to actually realize them? It feels a lot smaller now.

My time for Konkr development will still remain more limited than it used to be. But it matters a lot less when some things that would take weeks now take hours and others that would take hours can be done in an instant.

To be clear, this doesn’t mean Konkr will become some sort of vibe coded mess, my obsessive perfectionism is not going anywhere. In fact, it just became supercharged.

And most importantly, I think I’ve found my answer to the gnawing question: Do I still enjoy programming?

More than ever!

It’s go time!

But enough with the self-reflection and back to the business of making this the best Slay-like game ever.

One nice thing about coming back after such a long pause is I get to see things from a fresh perspective. From big architecture decisions, to small UI things that seemed cool at the time but awkward with a fresh set of eyes. I plan to share more thoughts on that soon, but today I’ve been rambling long enough and I need my thoughts to settle a bit anyway.

The next milestone is clear however: Finishing the large map editor update that’s been tragically stuck in the test branch for all this time.

After that? Let’s find out together.

As always, I will be relying on all of you awesome folks for feedback, ideas and bug reports. I’m looking forward to being a bit more active on the Konkr discord, giving the lovely little community around this game the care it deserves.

I hope you’ve all had a great year so far, thank you again for your patience! ❤️