Hi guys, I received a kind email from Pedroapan advising me to create a thread here to announce the game we're working on. So here we go! Kindo is the first game of a french indie duo called Space Bears. Introducing the game Kindo is a minimal turn-based strategy game for 2 players. And it has a brand new trailer! It belongs to the Abstract Strategy family and has been designed to appeal to both beginners and experienced strategy games players. Playing the game The goal is to defeat your opponent's kingdom by capturing his territory and ultimately his king. Each player has two moves per turn. Each move can be spent placing a new tile or fortifying an existing tile. Disconnecting your opponents tiles from their king captures them and gives you bonus moves (for your next turn only!), allowing players to achieve massive turnarounds. You can fortify one side only and cannot change the side of the fortification afterwards. A fortification stays until the tile changes side after being captured. You can play on every tile but the three different (darker/lighter) at the center and the outer tiles cannot be fortified. You will be able to play locally with a friend, asynchronously over Game Center or against an AI. A gif animation showing a big reversal Kindo comes with different color themes. Here is the dark "Antagonism" theme on an iPhone in Portrait orientation. Click to see a better version of the image. Showing the game Kindo was showed publicly for the first time last week. It was among the finalists of Very Big Indie Pitch at Pocket Gamer Connects in Helsinki and you can watch the AppSpy Hands-on video we made there. Pocket Tactics also wrote a really nice post about the game. It was also showcased at Radius Festival in London and will be showcased at Feral Vector (again in London) next week, so for those around, we'd love to meet you there! Releasing the game Kindo doesn't have a precise release date yet but we're aiming to release during this summer. It will be available on iOS 7 devices at a tier-2 price ($1.99, 1.79...) with a tier-1 launch week sale ($.99, .89...). There won't be no ads nor IAPs. Links You can follow the development of the game: - on twitter at @spacebearsfr - on Facebook - on our tumblr You can also subscribe to the low-traffic newsletter on the game's website. Thanks for reading
Hi! This looks absolutely stunning and is number one on my personal anticipated games list for now! I somehow get a tigris & euphrates-vibe though skinned down to the basics, which sounds great since it is hard to find friends willing to commit the time and effort to play t&e. Could you tells us more about fortifications? Is it permanent? Could you fortify one square in two or more directions? I guess you could use the whole 7x7 field for your squares? What could you tell us about the AI? Are there different difficultylevels and playstyles like For The Win for example? How is multiplayer? Async via gc? Could you set a timelimit for mp-games? Pedroapan
Thanks Pedroapan That's a lot of questions but I'll try to answer all of them! 1- you can fortify one side only and cannot change the side afterwards! 2- a fortification stays until the tile changes side after being captured 3- you can play on every tile but the three different (darker/lighter) at the center and the outer tiles cannot be fortified 4- AI is currently being investigated, I'll be able to talk more in details about it in a few days/weeks once we're done with the things currently in development. It will most likely feature different difficulty levels. 5- I haven't played For The Win but I'll take a look at it 6- We're indeed implementing asynch multiplayer via Game Center! 7- We're looking at different options regarding games limitations. Games like Ruzzle and Letterpress have solved this before us so we'll try and do the best thing I'll be updating the initial post with the details about fortifications for others to read. Hope that answers your questions! Cheers!
Sounds good! Is the mp one vs one only? This might work with more than two players. Maybe you have to incease the field for for player though. Pedroapan
Yes, 1v1 only at the moment! We actually haven't tested the game with more players. This is something we might consider testing after the initial release, thanks for the idea
We iterated a lot on the board and the current one seems to be working the best so far. It was initially 8x8, went through 9x9, 6x6, 5x5 and we finally settled to 7x7 as it was the one size that felt perfect for the game. It allows for some build-up, but you still reach your opponent fast enough to avoid staying on your side of the board fortifying everything and playing too defensively. Going straight to your opponent's King takes 4 turns. Because of the layout and the two moves per turn, only an board with an odd number of tiles allows a player to finish a turn by placing a tile on the King. Boards with an even number of tiles were always allowing the defending player to push back. Bonus moves were also added to help avoid stalemate situations and accelerate the game and the 7x7 still had the most interesting pace for both beginners and experienced players. We went through the same iteration process for the unfortifiable tiles at the center and on the border. Less would allow stalemate by fortifying too many tiles, more would just turn the fortifications useless
Sounds like you gave it a thorough thought! I was thinking more in terms of trying different shapes, not only square-shaped fields. Something like 5x10 would be cool, or even asymmetrical fields. I don't know if that would work or be funny, maybe it is best to keep it as simple as possible. //Pedropan
We preferred to focus on having one "perfect" (or as close to perfect as possible) board. It gives players a common ground to train, compete and evaluate their performances. It is also better for us as developers to stop at some point where we know that the game works well so that we can focus on polishing the rest of the game and release it
Sounds good... Do you plan to have some kind of ELO-rating, leagues or matchmaking or is it just random opponents or friends? The Outwitters-team One Man Left have done a pretty awesome job with that. //Pedroapan
That's the plan We're aware that skill-based matchmaking would give both beginners and seasoned players a more interesting experience with the game rather than matching them randomly, which would most likely end up increasing frustration for both.
Found this video posted by Appspy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MORr8HOESTM Would red have been able to take the middle square around 4:10 and cut you off? //Pedroapan
Exactly! It was actually quite hard to be both playing and talking, so I guess I was lucky that Peter didn't see it
Hi Paul! Do you mind telling us a little bit about pricing? I've understood you're aiming for 1,99 with a initial 0,99 sale. Do you plan on having some IAPs and in that case, what are they? I assume there is not going to be ads in the game since it is not free? Also could you confirm a release date at this moment? Pedroapan
Looking forward this one...I'm an async addict and this looks like something special. I'm loving the minimalist approach. EDIT: Speaking of the minimalist approach (which I love...I'm getting a Threes vibe for some reason, in sense of polish and sleekness) and seeing it's aimed at head to head play...it would be cool if instead of P1 and P2 the game will have the Game Center avatar of the players....Lost Cities like.
Thank you very much Pitta! Threes might be my most played game so far this year so it means a lot to be compared to it in terms of polish! The P1 and P2 circles will indeed be replaced by Game Center pictures (just keeping a small color circle around them). Same for PLAYER 1 and PLAYER 2 below, which will become Game Center usernames. The current layout will stay for local play only To answer Pedroapan's questions: You know everything about it don't you Kingdoms will have a Tier 2 price and we're planning to do a Tier 1 launch week sale price may vary depending on the currency used by your country but you get the idea We won't have any IAPs as we're doing a premium game and we don't have any features suited for this anyway (apart from color themes but we see them as a cool little bonus for our players). Ads would not only ruin the minimal abstract experience we're trying to create but also feel weird inside a premium game, so no ads! Unfortunately, we cannot confirm a release date at the moment but we'll let you know as soon as we can As a bonus, you can now see a couple new gifs on our tumblr
Great to hear...as soon as I saw those I immediately thought about Lost Cities (which is IMHO the golden standard for head to head games in terms of sleekness...dare I hope to look forward similar per opponent reports?). Anyway....really looking forward this, will buy day one for sure. I'm a head to head async games lover and after reading Owen (Pocket Tactics) impressions it jumped straight on 1 spot of my 'to buy' list. Alerting all my usual async friends right now.
I agree that the endgame report in Lost Cities is really great (like the rest of the game)! We're not currently planning to implement such a detailed report for our initial release but if the game sells well enough that we can keep updating it, we'll sure take a closer look at this kind of features. We definitely have a few things in mind regarding the end of a game
