Weekly Development Progress Report, 13/03/2017

Last week I uploaded Super Endless Kingdom to Kongregate (play it here) and I mostly spent last week dealing with the feedback I received. As a proof of concept the launch went well, the Kongregate upload process and API are both pretty easy to get to grips with and I have a much clearer understanding of the rating system and the stages a new game has to go through. However, as an actual game launch it's been a slow start to say the least. I'll outline some of the positives and negatives below.

The Good

The upload worked with very little trouble. I've integrated with the Kongregate stats API to provide leaderboards for three separate stats and received no reports of bugs or crashes (so far). I've received a lot of useful feedback, so much so that I'm just about finished with the 3rd update of the last week (more on that below). The game has also earned a small (very small 😆) amount of money through Kongregate's revenue share scheme.

The Bad

While I still consider the game to be in beta, I found out too late that Kongregate's beta programme is only for a select few games. New games go through a review process but that was over in a few days, something else I wasn't prepared for. The most visible feedback I received was pretty negative and didn't really seem to take account of the game being a work in progress. Although I was able to find something useful even from a highly negative review it doesn't change the fact that it's still one of the most prominent comments, despite being several versions out of date. Still, all in all I've learned a lot about Kongregate as a platform and I'm very happy with the changes I've made over the last week.

Your tax <insert denomination here> at work.

The Updates

I've made a few quality of life updates to explain things better and remove some of the rough edges that people were getting snagged on, both literally and figuratively. I added separate hitboxes for collision detection to the player depending on whether the character is interacting with scenery or monsters to allow the player to move around scenery in a more intuitive way, this was simple in itself but caused other problems (the solution to which can only be described as an enormous kludge). I've also made many of the enemies spawn earlier on the game to improve variety.
However the major changes are the addition of a berserker style melee attack and the ability to move diagonally, both of these are pretty major changes to the basic gameplay that have only been tested by me over a few days. It does feel a little risky to make changes that affect the core of the game so quickly when that core has been in place for 6 months or so, but I feel I'm still early enough in the development and release process to take a bit of a chance. Once I've incorporated all the current feedback I'll be looking at uploading my game to other sites such as Newgrounds or Itch.io.

I'm spinning around, move outta my way - or else!

The Rest

Also this week I changed host for www.superendlesskingdom.com from heroku to github and removed all server side functionality (basically just a login system). The site already loads much faster and I'll be looking at ways to make further improvements this week.