The fall and rise of Kingdom
Retronator Games Watchlist
Kingdom was a pretty popular Flash game released in 2013. Thomas ‘Noio’ van den Berg started toying with the idea around 2011 and he finally made it happen two years later while graduating from university.
From that point on, the game started a journey to grow bigger and eventually got released as a full blown desktop game (also just called Kingdom). Since you’re reading Retronator Magazine, this will not be a (normal) game review of either of the games, but rather a dive into their development and art style.
Speaking of art style, one thing that’s hard to miss in Kingdom is the never-ending river that always fills the bottom third of the screen. The one-man studio Noio is based in the Netherlands so you won’t be surprised to find that the aesthetic was inspired by Amsterdam’s many canals.
Water reflections have forever been favorite eye candy, but (apart from surfing games) this is the first time I saw someone capitalize on it by simply PUTTING IT EVERYWHERE! Kudos, sir, we are not even complaining.
The visual makes it hard to take the eyes off of the 2D sidescrolling pixel art environment and it helped the Flash version not get overlooked.
Kingdom delivered both in style and action. Game’s minimalistic controls (left and right to move, down for spending coin) provide an unexpected variety of things you can do, from recruiting people, supplying weapons and tools, upgrading your settlement and expanding into the wilderness.
It took me a while to realize that in gameplay terms Kingdom is basically a cleverly disguised tower defense game. Upgrade your defenses, fight through the night and survive 10 days to win the game. It worked great.
In an unrelated corner of the universe, developer Marco ‘Licorice’ Bancale thought Kingdom was great too. After losing many nights to the game he approached Thomas with a proposal to make an iOS version together. Excited about the possibilites, the duo started expanding the design and in 2014 launched a Kickstarter campaign for a mobile version.
Crowdfunding didn’t go as smoothly though and in 3 weeks the game managed to raise only half of the 8,000 € goal. Backers expressed a lot of interest for a PC version, but that seemed far out of reach at the 37,000 € stretch goal level.
Fortunately Noio and Licorice didn’t put all their hopes in one basket. Luck came to their side from another direction when they recieved a Nordic Game Program grant of 200,000 DKK (Danish Krone, about $35,000 at the time) right in the middle of the Kickstarter campaign.
Since the amount wasn’t too much short of their PC stretch goal, the duo canceled crowdfunding and went into full-time development with the allowance, focusing on the desktop version instead. They rewrote the code in C# and took on Unity as their engine so they could easily release the game cross-platform to Windows, Mac and Linux, and if they wanted later, to mobile or consoles as well.
The development took more than a year and as you can imagine 30 grand wore down quite thin between two people over such a period. To cover the last stretch of production in 2015, the project partnered up with Raw Fury Games, a self-titled “(Un)Publisher” from Sweden, and became one of their two debut titles.
With paychecks and marketing covered, on October 21st, Kingdom was released for PC!
After the perils of a 2-year development cycle, it all paid off and Raw Fury reported that launch-day sales alone covered their investment.
Thomas and Marco have kept tweaking the game (latest version at the time of writing is 1.1, released on November 30th) and Raw Fury announced the game will come to Xbox One in 2016.
As you can see from the screenshots the game turned out gorgeous. It’s not only visuals, but the way you experience the setting. I’ve waited for a game like this ever since FEZ perfected the tranquil non-violent gameplay in 2012. Even though in Kingdom the goal is to fight off monsters, you do it through a supportive role, developing your camp while riding your steed through the lush environment. You’re not a god, building things from the sky like in strategy and tower-defense games — you’re right there on the field playing a real person in the environment. But you’re also not an RPG hero that single-handedly kills all the fantasy fauna in the game world.
If nothing else, the game deserves a place next to FEZ (and Sword & Sworcery from 2011) in terms of its stunning, peaceful pixel art aesthetic.
The game lets the physics engine take care of many animations but avoids rotating sprites at their big-pixel size as lots of other games do these days (compare it with Moonman). The result is a beautiful mix of HD effects that blend into a coherent, low-res, colorful style.
From its promising Flash beginnings, over the ups and downs of development and into the successful PC launch, Kingdom is a game every pixel art enthusiast should experience for themselves.
Although it doesn’t take too long to explore the environment and upgrade your settlement to its fullest (destroying all the enemy portals and winning the game will take a bit longer), the game is well worth its $10 price—right now just $7 on Steam through January 4, 2016. Other popular places to buy Kingdom are GOG and the Humble Store.
To keep an eye on further development including the upcoming Xbox release, you can follow Noio or Raw Fury Games on Twitter.
And don’t forget to upgrade your walls before the day turns into night.
Happy 2016 from Retronator Magazine! I’m happy to add Kingdom to my games watchlist, next to Tower 57 and Moonman that I’ve featured before. In this year you will definitely see more games, among the usual crowd of artist and community features. The next few months might be a bit rough in terms of getting new articles out as I’m starting my most busy grad school quarter, but I’ll try my best. In any case, 2016 will be a great year for the mag!
Cheers,
—Retro
