With Kingdom Keeper being literally days away from being finished after months of delays and set backs, I have decided that it is about time to let you in on some of the development process, hopefully this helps people understand just how much of a demon child this game really was from a developers point of view.

Kingdom Keeper started development back in about August of 2008. Seeing as Mike (Riggsninja) and Myself (CCullen) are totally useless at drawing, Dan (Blips) ended up spending the better part of August and September drawing. It was my job to write the Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Mike's job to write the physics.

As you can see, I had the AI up and running before Dan had finished drawing so I used my expert drawing skills to test the AIs. Everything progresses as expected from there on, Dan gets more animations done, Mike gets the physics working and I continue to work on Artificial Intelligence.

So October comes along and we start combining all of our work together. Dan makes a shift into gameplay and Mike started to work on the Graphical User Interface (which is a fancy way of saying the stuff the player clicks on). Unfortunately near the end of October everything started to fall apart. The game had become so large that flash would no longer build it which effectively destroyed our end of October deadline. It was about this time that bug after bug after bug started to show up as well... and if we couldn't build the game, it was impossible to see if we had fixed the bugs or not. We were effectively coding blind.

It took sever weeks of frustration and attempt after attempt to solve our problem before we came up with our solution - Break the game into 4 parts: the Main Menu and the three levels... unfortunately this turned out to be as much a pain as it was a blessing. We now had 3 copies of the same code for each level, which meant that if we fixed a bug in level 1... we would have to fix it in level 2 and again in level 3. It was quite common find bugs in levels 2 and 3 which we had already fixed in level 1 and becoming extremely frustrated because we would spend a day or two chasing down a bug that had already been killed.

Over the next several months bugs and balance issues very slowly start to disappear and we could continue to develop the game... which made it become bigger and bigger until only one of our three computers could build the game. Eventually April 2009 rolls around and we finally have a game that we aren't embarrassed by. For the first time in a long time, it became fun to develop Kingdom Keeper again... even finding bugs was a minor annoyance because I knew we were done.

Of course it couldn't have been that simple. The final step in the process was to find a sponsor which was dead easy due to the fact that Dan and Dark Realm Studios have built up quite the reputation due to Pandemic. The problem was that no sponsor was willing to host all 4 parts because it takes up bandwidth (this is basically amount of information that be sent to and from the server). With no other options left, we ended up having to host the files ourselves which doesn't sound too bad until you get into the math. Over a million people will play a good flash game in a month, some times as much as 100 thousand in a day. All of these people will be downloading Kingdom Keeper from our server which means we need to pay for lots bandwidth; we were essentially put into a position where we had to pay money to make money...

We came to the conclusion that we just had to do it... otherwise all those months of frustration and headaches would have been a waist and we now officially own our own server. Kingdom Keeper is currently hosted on that server and we are just waiting to implement some of the sponsorship content so that the game can be released. One interesting side effect of now owning a server is that the idea of online multiplayer games doesn't sound so strange, I personally have been looking into what would be involved in creating a flash multiplayer experience.

So there is a long story made short (ish). I know I speak for everyone else when I say we are looking forward to Kingdom Keeper's release and hope you all enjoy it. Also leave comments on the new journals... tell us if you like the idea, hate it or just hate my rambling on for so long. Feedback is good!