So today marks the end of the roughly month and a half long period of what was essentially me roleplaying as a full-time indie game developer!

I found myself with free time in between two jobs and decided to try what happens when I can really focus on Konkr for weeks at a time. And I have to say after letting the game more or less consume my life for the past month, I feel… Actually quite energized and excited to continue!

With an update released almost daily, the changelog for the past month is quite a read! But the main milestones can be summarized as:

  • greatly expanded gameplay statistics collection, error reporting and analysis tools
  • fixed a ton of long standing bugs thanks to the above
  • pretty much rewrote the AI diplomacy layer and added the AI chatter system
  • created new tutorial levels, and added alternate AI difficulty mode
  • bunch of polish, UI and performance improvements

I’ve also started working towards the UI and content overhaul I’ve been hinting at since january, but that will still take a lot of work.

The player base has been slowly but steadily growing in 2023, with a huge bump in the last week thanks to a promotion by the awesome folks at kongregate. At the moment, konkr is bringing fun (and frustration!) to around 1500 players every day and there’s around 3000 players that returns to the game at least once per week. This is very encouraging to see, especially since I still feel like I’m only scratching the surface of how awesome I can make this game!

What’s next?

First of all, I’m taking a break for a week or two to focus on my new job and life outside of game development. So if you got used to the almost daily updates on discord, don’t be alarmed by the sudden lull in activity. I’ll be back with steady progress soon enough, even if not at quite the pace you could see this month.

The main focus in the coming months will be on the plan that I already outlined back in January in the 2023 roadmap, with the major highlights being:

  • new multi-campaign structure with overworld map
  • better replacement for conquest mode (with no more unwinnable maps and more sense of progresion)
  • map editor and map sharing

I think these three things together can really lift the game to a whole another level, but they are also all pretty significant undertakings, so my best guestimate still stands at “hopefully by the end of 2023”!