I just got this email today, and decided to share it (with the permission of the writer). The title of this post is the subject line.
Mr. Dunham,
Firstly, if this email is an imposition, I apologize in advance. I know you are probably very busy with Six Ages (which I am absolutely giddy to find out about!), and support for the various KoDP versions.
There is no need to reply, I just wish to share some of the joy that King of Dragon Pass has brought me as an avid gamer.
A close friend of mine was one of the original 1999 buyers, and I had watched him play a bit back then, though at the time I was more of an FPS gamer. He was completely enthralled with it for several months,and this convinced me to buy it last year when I found it in the Android store.
Let me say that my tastes have expanded considerably in the last 16 years, and my newfound appreciation for storytelling and immersiveness, have not been satisfied by many 'modern' game releases.
King of Dragon Pass has not only satisfied that desire in a unique and beautiful way, it has rekindled my long-forgotten adolescent dream to be a writer.
The richness and depth of the story woven by KoDP creates an interesting phenomenon where we as players begin to think about the characters in the game as far more complex than just game mechanic aspects. This is especially the case with the Duruluzei as I always spend far too many resources and too much time trying to get them into my tribe (no luck so far... But there's always next replay!)
At first I saw them as just a source of early food tribute to feed my growing clan. This changed pretty quickly once I saw some of the other events, and I confess it was they that inspired me to look into Glorantha's lore in depth.
I actually felt remorse for my previous playthroughs and now make every effort to befriend those valiant warriors of Humakt. Even to the extent of putting my tula at risk by lending way too many weaponthanes to their cousins to fight the swamp undead.
And here's where the genius of this game really shows: Even though I've only ever seen maybe five different Duruluz events, the writing, choices, and art create a living breathing culture in the player's mind that actually transcends the few megabytes of content presented, and we begin to think about the Ducks in the same complex ways as we think about traditional book fantasy cultures where literally thousands of words are used to fill in cultural detail.
I also very much love the intentional ambiguity and risk of the magic system, as it creates that same kind of complex mechanics-transcending thought with the gods as participants. Does giving food to a clan in famine help you with your Ernalda heroquest? I have no idea! But I am going to play like it does, and the game is just vague enough that things like this may make a difference at Sacred Time.
I own very few mobile games, and play them rarely. Not the case for KoDP, I have been playing it approximately 8-10 hours a week. It is so perfect for killing a 2 minute wait in the grocery line, or settling into a comfy chair and spending a rainy evening trying out strange heroquest options.
The art is beautifully unusual and paints a picture of Dragon Pass that is exotic yet familiar, bronze-age yet not of this world. The music is catchy and never becomes annoying, I occasionally whistle along with it while I'm playing.
I cannot thank you and the rest of A# enough for creating such a wonderful game, and I have no words to say how fortunate I am for the Android re-release, and the extra content that has been included. It is so rare that a older, less than profitable game gets a fresh chance at a new audience, and on such an ideal platform for the pacing of gameplay (Also: nice work on the UI modifications for mobile!). It is my sincere wish that Six Ages will receive sevenfold the acclaim and distribution that King of Dragon Pass
should have gotten in the first place.
I look forward to the release of Six Ages with an eager heart, thank you again for an unforgettable game experience.
Sincerely,
[name withheld]
P.S. please feel free to use any part of this email, except my name, in any way you see fit. This game does not have enough testimonials online, and I want as many people to know about it in time for Six Ages' release as possible.
The first public release of King of Dragon Pass was 18 years ago — 29 October 1999. Back then, it was a boxed CD.
Recently a player was having trouble sending exploration missions to Kero Fin.
We just posted a progress update to the Six Ages development blog, and here’s a sneak preview of some of the art.
Not long ago, someone asked (on Facebook) how sales of the game on the Android platform compared to iOS. I recently got some quarterly updates, so figured it was a good time to share.
Which is partly because of a suggestion made by another publisher. When we began the game, we were targeting 8-bit graphics systems that could display only 256 colors. We used a wonderful tool called DeBabelizer, that figured out the optimum palette (the 256 colors that were most frequently used in our specific set of art). The results were good, but the producer we showed the game to wondered why we weren’t targeting 16-bit graphics.
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).
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.
Fortunately, like a heroquester travelling on the Other Side, I could call for help. HeroCraft, a “top developer” on Google Play, took on the daunting task of making the game’s 50 screens work on arbitrary screen sizes. Plus all the other work needed to get a game that depends on UIKit, Apple’s Core Audio sound format, Game Center, etc. to run on different operating systems. And they own a lot more Android devices to test on than I do (just a Kindle Fire I bought to check out the port). Actually, with all that work, maybe they were the heroquesters, reenacting “The Making of KoDP…”
I’m extremely happy to say that the journey is now complete.
King of Dragon Pass will be available via Google Play on 12 August for $9.99. If you’ve played the Windows or Mac version of the game, this is the updated version, with a host of new content, more advice, heroquest hints, and a somewhat simplified game. If you haven’t played before, you’re in for a treat!
Here are all reviews for version 2.3 so far. (And yes, all of them are five stars! So are the ratings without reviews! We are so pleased that people appreciate the work we put into the update.) These are all unedited, so you can truly read what other players say.
Version 2.3 is now feature-complete, and we’ve given it a reasonable amount of QA ourselves. But there is a bunch of new content (16 new scenes), and people will play it differently. So we’d like to have a few more outside (beta) testers.
But we always make sure you can continue a game you’ve started. King of Dragon Pass is a long game, and it would be unreasonable to have players not upgrade because they’re in the middle of a game. So KoDP reads the previous format, but writes the new format. In fact, we’ve done this before, so it can read several old formats. We also sometimes have to go through gyrations to make sure new variables appear only at the end of our data files. (During development, we’re less strict about this, and testers occasionally have to discard games in progress.) Just to make sure, I just loaded a game which was actually saved in 2011, before the 2.0 release.
We also do our best to test all the new content. There are 16 new full scenes, plus news and other followups. We run through every outcome of every choice, ideally in the context of a normal game. The last thing we want is an update that has serious bugs! All this play can uncover minor bugs in previous parts of the game, and we fix those too.
Certain acts are considered slights — stains on a clan’s honor. (Raids are annoying, but unless the context decrees otherwise, aren’t considered slights.) If you slight another clan too many times, it will declare a feud, which is essentially a statement that they consider themselves at war with your clan.