Sweet 16

King of Dragon Pass was first released on 29 October 1999 — sixteen years ago today.

Since then, we updated the game and adapted it for iPhone and iPad, and licensed it for Android and Steam (both Mac and Windows). And GOG made the original version available for download. To celebrate its birthday, the game is 50% off on all platforms for a limited time!

Over the years, it has been a well-regarded indie. For example Metacritic gives it a score of 90. Rock Paper Shotgun says it’s one of the top 5 strategy games of all time. And players give it 5 stars.

It’s also sold pretty well for an indie game, over 120,000 copies on all platforms. (The exact number is a little hard to determine, since our early records seem to have vanished, and we don’t get specific numbers for channels like Humble Bundle.) But we sold the most copies on iOS. And the original has been downloaded almost as often (probably because GOG periodically runs sales that make it ridiculously cheap).

To a large degree, these numbers reflect apples and oranges. The Steam version came out only 3 months ago, and this is the first Steam sale. And there is no way of knowing how many people have bought the game for both mobile and desktop (or even more often than that). So they aren’t really a way to compare platforms or predict anything.

Still, they give us hope that an indie game can find some success in today’s market, and and helped us decide to go ahead and start working on Six Ages, the spiritual successor. Thank you to everyone who has supported King of Dragon Pass so we could do that!

Not a Talkie

I recently saw someone suggesting that King of Dragon Pass should have voice acting.

We didn’t want to use voice because most text is not known ahead of time, but is full of placeholders:

After wearing the armor for a few days, <e> said that <he/she> felt quicker of step and clearer of mind.

(this is actually one of the simpler examples). It would be hard to keep this from sounding like one of those bad voicemail prompts, because it would have to be assembled out of pieces. There’s also the fact that the same text might be spoken by a male or female character, and they might be very young or very old when they spoke it. So it would be difficult to get quality results.

Plus of course there are over 640 000 words of text. That would obviously be expensive to record, but it would also make the game larger. If audio books are 160 words per minute, that’s about 67 hours of speech. Depending on compression, that might be another 800 MB to download!

And voice would make it really hard to update the game with more content, since we would have to have any new text recorded.

So while it sounds at first like a good idea, in reality it’s one of those things that’s impossible with a game of this scope.

New in Steam

King of Dragon Pass will be coming to Steam on 28 July. But the game has been available for mobile (iOS, Android, and Windows Phone), as well as the original version (either on CD or as patched to be downloadable by GOG.com). So what exactly is coming to Steam?

The version on Steam is essentially the mobile version, but tuned for desktop and laptop screen sizes (I ran it on a 30 inch iMac, but it should run on a 1024 x 576 netbook). HeroCraft has been responsible for the Steam versions, since I’ve been busy with Six Ages, so I am not completely sure of the specifics. But I believe the Steam achievements are the same as those we added in 2.0. There are also Steam Cards (which may have some new art).

So if you played on Windows or Mac before, you’d be moving from 1.7 to 2.2. There are 48 new scenes and 4 new illustrations (plus a new Lore map). There are also new advisors, and a lot more advice in management screens. There are also more treasures. We made many bug fixes (such as unblocking two of the original scenes), and fixed typos. You no longer have to worry about sheep. The economics system should no longer be quite as harsh, with death spirals less likely. (Rest assured that the game is still difficult, especially on the Hard setting.)

The Tula screen was too difficult to rework, but it wasn’t part of game play. And HeroCraft originally started their porting before our scene contest, so those scenes are currently only in the iOS version.

We like to avoid spoilers, so it’s hard to talk about just what the four dozen new scenes are about. We did mention the Troll Hero before, however. And here’s the artwork for one of them.

So if you have played King of Dragon Pass on a laptop or desktop, but not a mobile device, there’s a lot of new stuff. And if you haven ’t played at all, now’s your chance!

Full Circle

The King of Dragon Pass dynasty began in 1999 with its release on CD-ROM for Windows and Mac. We polished the game and enriched it with more stories, and brought it to iOS in 2011. HeroCraft ported it to Android in 2014. We’re pleased to announce that King of Dragon Pass will again be available for Windows and Mac, via Steam.

HeroCraft has brought the game back to the desktop, and added Steam goodness such as trading cards. And even if you played it on Windows or Mac before, you’ll find some game improvements, dozens of new stories, and new artwork.

King of Dragon Pass will be US$12, and available beginning 28 July!

King of Dragon Pass Map

The upcoming Six Ages game will have a map much like King of Dragon Pass. A blog post describes how the map works.