A Sale! And Presenting: Pumpkin Nights
Realm of the Ghost King is now on sale for 40% off on Steam and Itch! It will be on sale at this discount for the rest of October and probably for a day in November. It's a game with ghosts and monsters, so it's certainly a good October type of game in that regard.
If you need more enticing, I added something strange and weird to the game as well. If you play it at night (specifically after 7pm) for the last ten days of October you'll get a slightly modified version of the game with more pumpkins than the original. The main change is all the Spirit Bombs have been changed from skulls to pumpkins, which is kind of weird but silly. The second change is, if you manage to make it to the Ghost King he will be a pumpkin instead of a ghost. I don't know why I did this, but it's there. The changes to both the bombs and King are purely aesthetic, so everything otherwise works exactly the same.
I know I said I probably wouldn't be doing more updates, but it just seemed too fun and weird not to do this. Other games have more in-depth Halloween updates, but have they ever replaced the titular character with a pumpkin? I doubt it!
The Final Trailer
Since the original announcement and launch trailers no longer reflect the final state of the game, and the 1.1.0 update trailer is for an update and not the full game, I dove back into the trailer pool to... uh... make a trailer? Malformed metaphors aside, you can check it out below:
Also as the title of this post implies this is most likely the last trailer I'll be putting together for this game. It reflects the current (and final) state of the game and I'm overall pretty happy with where it eventually ended up. It's certainly possible I'll release a bug fix or two, but there probably won't be any changes major enough to cut a new trailer. Enjoy!
Realm of the Ghost King Postmortem
With the release of my first Commercial Indie Game comes the release of my first Commercial Indie Game Postmortem. It's a rite of passage for indie developers, I think. Even small, unsuccessful ones such as myself. I'll be partially following the standard software development postmortem formula, which asks the three questions. What went right? What went wrong? How can we learn from this whole ordeal?
What Went Well
This is the fun part because I get to talk about all the good things! So let's talk about what went right.
I finished a game!
My main goal from all of this was to actually make a thing and release it. When you build a small-ish game there are lots forks in the road. You work on it for a while and add all the fun and exciting stuff and then you can pretty easily get bored and never finish it. The saying about the last 10% of a game taking 90% of the game's development time is entirely true. Games go from horrible and unplayable to good pretty suddenly, but the transition from "good" to "I can release this" is long and slow.
Another path that's easy to take without realizing is one where you infinitely rewrite portions of your game over and over. It's satisfying to a point, because you can see major changes and improving on your old busted functionality is always nice. However it's also a path to ruin since you can basically rewrite everything a million times over an never, ever be done. I tried to stay away from this mentality with ROTGK but I still ended up rewriting some basic things multiple times. I tell myself these were sound decisions and beneficial in the end, but I actually have no idea.
Realm of the Ghost King 1.1.0 Is Out!
Log into Steam or your itch.io app to grab the latest version of Realm of the Ghost King. 1.1.0 is a totally free update with new features, general improvements and bug fixes!
Additionally the game is on sale for 25% off on Steam and itch.io! The sale lasts until July 5th for both storefronts.
Read on for the full set of changes in 1.1.0!
NEW FEATURES
- UPDATED LEVEL RENDERING. Added a background fade effect.
- NOW PLAYABLE: The Ghost King
- To Unlock: Defeat The Ghost King
- Will be unlocked if you've already done so
- Special Attack: Teleport to safety and leave a bomb
- Passive Ability: The Crown Protects
- NEW MONSTER: Swamp
- Unlocked by doing 80+ damage in one run
- Will be unlocked if you've already done so
- Special Attack: Clone yourself (up to three at once)
- Passive Ability: Enemies attacking you will take damage
- NEW MONSTER: Phantom
- To Unlock: Freeze (Icecap), slime (Glob) or turn (Vlad) 40 total enemies
- These are newly tracked stats, so you'll need to accomplish it!
- Special Attack: Possess closest enemy for 10 turns (costs 3 souls)
- Passive Ability: Start with one soul
- FULL GAMEPAD SUPPORT:
- Auto-detects your controller once you press a button
- Button graphics for XBox 360, XBox One, Playstation 4 and Switch controllers
- Menu option allows you to select a specific button graphics if you want
- ADDITIONAL FEATURES:
- Daily Challenge countdown clock (or countup if you already participated)
- Player highlight is always on
- Added new resolution: Massive (1440x1080)
- Steam Version: Eight new achievements
- 6 regular, 2 secret!
GAME UPDATES
- Updated titlemap colors
- Improved camera movement/following
- Revised the way controls work (if you rebind movement the menu controls will match)
- Simplified keyboard controls menu
- Status changes (frozen, slime, possession/turning) now tracked
- Small balance tweaks to The Depths (level 7)
- Updated to latest version of Electron
BUG FIXES
- Fixed specific cases that caused camera jitter
- Fixed cases where Moai and exit would be spawned in the same place
- Fixed rare case where Moai could block off part of the map
- Improved text caching
1.1.0 Free Update: June 21st
To my tens of loyal Realm of the Ghost King fans. the long awaited 1.1.0 free update will launch next Thursday (actually more like Wednesday night, but close enough), on June 21st.
I can also confirm that the game will be on sale (on both itch and Steam) for the first time since launch! The game will be 25% off, so if you're looking to snag it for cheap then this is a great opportunity!
If you already own the game it will be a totally free update, so all you have to do is start up Steam or your itch.io app and wait for those sweet, sweet bits to download. If you use the DRM/Steam-free version and don't use the itch.io app (and you really should) then you'll need to pop over to the game's itch page and download a fresh copy.
If you'd like a list of changes, check out the 1.1.0 announcement post which is more or less 100% accurate! A complete list of changes will be released on Thursday.
Thanks for reading and thanks for your support!