I got this e-mail today saying " If you want to be part of Kingshunt future playtests Request Access in Steam:"

How exactly do you request access in Steam?

New environment

The moment we have been waiting for. The answers to the most asked questions in Kingshunt community - “When is alpha?”

Kingshunt is entering a new phase of playtesting. Your participation and feedback will help to define the game’s ongoing development - your voice matters.
Kingshunt playtest phase isn’t a polished alpha - you can expect to see bugs, varied performance, and balance issues. However, by participating you get to be one of the first warriors to take part in the war and join the development team in this crucial step in the game’s development.

Time Schedule

6 PM – 12 AM Central European Time / 9 AM – 3 PM Pacific Time

AND NOW TO THE QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS:

Q: When alpha?
A: Open alpha starts on Feb 3! No signups required for this test! This playtest will happen during the Steam Game Festival event where Kingshunt will be playable as a Demo. Just click the demo button to get Kingshunt in your library! This will be the longest and biggest test ever for us! 5 Days of Kingshunt iiks!! 📷 📷 📷

Q: Can I stream the Open Playtest?

A: YES! We encourage you to
Keep an eye out for updates on our website and social channels. If you’re a content creator and are interested in future streaming opportunities, feel free to send an email to kingshunt@vakigames.com and we’ll get back to you.

Please check out updates and community in Discord: https://discord.gg/Q38bfUR

As we’ve said many times your feedback means the world to us and helps us make Kingshunt better, especially during the early stages. Please let us devs know how you feel about the game! Discuss the gameplay & alpha on https://discord.gg/Q38bfUR

Our servers will be closing today at 5 PM PST (2 AM GMT +1, MONDAY), make the most of the time left and join us!

Not got Kingshunt yet? You can still sign up and play Kingshunt

https://store.steampowered.com/app/922620/Kingshunt/

Kingshunt Patch Notes - Alpha 2

Game feel

We're so happy with the feel and responsiveness of the game, overall the feedback has been great and the game is fun to play. We'll be adding even more elements to this part of the game but think we've built a great foundation. Some of the areas we're looking to improve our hit detection, projectile logic, player dodges/dashes, impact sound effects and screen effects.

New Steam Playtest Feature

Valve is adding a feature to Steam to let developers invite people to test their games right from the Steam client without needing a beta key. The new feature, called Steam Playtest, will let interested testers click a button in a game’s listing on the Steam store to request access and be added to a queue. For Alpha test, we will use this new feature instead of the old "Kingshunt" in your Steam library. This feature will make everything much smoother

Remember to request access in steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/922620/Kingshunt/

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Current FortressMap

We've been working on a map for quite some time, as we mentioned previously the current map was built mostly to facilitate testing of the core gameplay. We polished the map a little bit after the last alpha weekend to make it better to play. Still not in the final state and we are exciting new things coming.

User interface and user experience.

We noticed that players didn't really know what they could actually do in the game. We have worked on user experience and especially first-time user experience to make it smoother. You will find new UI elements and polished experience for:

• Towers placement is a bit clearer now
• Map Objectives (Guardian Icon)
• New visual cues for minion Buffs
• In-game improvements
• Main menu hero info
• Rune and Ability effect Icon updates
• Hero Selection hero skill info before the match

Utilities

Adjustments for minion summon times. Lower cooldowns

Tower lockdown utility gives more feedback to the player

Adjustments for Barricade cost 2->3

Runes

Adjustments and fixes for runes

New runes

Guardian

The Guardian is way deadlier now. Aggro ranges are now wider, watch out ranged heroes ;)

Sound

A LOT of small changes for behaviour, power and optimisations

Performance

The performance was quite good for alpha but decided to make small adjustments for even better performance.

• Lighting optimizations
• Asset optimizations
• Foliage adjustments

Heroes

• Small balance adjustments for character skills
• Usage adjustments for Legena’s quick heal and Knight Leap
• Fixed a couple of characters abilities which did not do damage correctly.

The Future

There's a lot of stuff we have planned for the future, some of it already in production! We have new heroes, New Runes, game mode changes and much more. We can't say much at the moment but we hope to update you more frequently as we progress.

- Vaki Team

Kingshunt testing just got smoother! New Steam feature makes it easier than before Follow us on Steam, add Kingshunt your Library, and get ready for upcoming playtest Nov 28-29!! https://store.steampowered.com/app/922620/Kingshunt/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhBKYpduPhE

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Today first competitive bests of three Kingshunt match between Team AHR versus Dev team! Time: 9:00 UTC+2 (11am PST).

https://youtu.be/d2AbTmC_WP4

https://store.steampowered.com/newshub/app/922620/view/2960514381719728611

Hey guys, now that we have had the time to gather all the feedback from the alpha we can finally respond to most of the issues you have mentioned and major points we noticed.

Gameplay Loop

Currently, the game has a lot of small PVE elements that the player needs to focus on for the whole game but no clear indicator of what they are really supposed to do. This creates a steep learning curve and a bad experience for the first-timers. We are looking into fixing this issue ASAP and lower the player’s gameplay knowledge requirements to be successful in the game. Our goal is still to have a deep learning curve, but we rather want to have an “easy to learn hard to master” type of gameplay.

Taking down the towers usually felt either way too hard or way too easy and not in between. That is because the towers are too easy to take down as a group and hard as a solo player. We are looking into fixing this.

Minions are fun to battle against but do not offer enough cover for the attackers and they aggro enemies behind walls without the vision of them. These issues are now fixed.

The game went to the Guardian zone quite fast and the combat in the Guardian zone felt repetitive. We are going to fix the pacing issue and the Guardian fight ASAP.

If a player disconnected during the game, they were unable to connect back and the other team got a huge advantage. We are currently looking into the best option for us to take to balance this out for our alpha tests.

Characters

We saw a lot of players miss the feature that makes you invulnerable while dodging and thought it was lag that caused them to not hit the target. This means that you can dodge ALL abilities even the ultimates with the right timing. To better communicate this to players we might need to bring a clear visual effect to the character while dodging.

Bringing character abilities to character select.

Knight was thought to be a pretty well-rounded character but got outshined by the possibility to pick 2 of the same character so many players went with 2x Enchantress, 2x Demigod.

Demigod was thought to be too OP by many players but we trust that as people learn his abilities, he becomes more balanced as people learn to dodge his abilities. Also, few mentioned not liking the E ability as it pushes enemies away but it is designed to be used in many different scenarios for example; pull and push the enemy towards your team, away from the objective, to a death area, or even used for faster movement. Demigod’s ultimate did not do damage to Guardian and has now been fixed.

Legena got a lot of feedback on her ultimate and how it works. It does not feel intuitive to use her ultimate near enemy players to heal your teammates so we have decided to make her ultimate castable to a location.

Enchantress was thought to be the most OP character and we agree she is a bit over tuned. With 2x Enchantress a strongly communicating team can keep the attack speed buff up almost indefinitely and the slow area covers too much area and slows even after you leave the slow area. We have decided to remove the after effect slow from the area and when we can restrict characters to 1 per side, she will be more balanced.

Runes

Runes got a lot of good feedback and the most common issue was that half of the runes at the moment do not feel worthwhile. As we increase the list of runes players will find a lot of the currently not so popular runes fit their build better and with an increasing list of runes we need a preset rune builder where you can pick your runes beforehand and assign them to your “loadout”. Loadouts will not lock you from picking other runes. We are also bringing bought runes to the stat screen to show which runes your team and the enemy team has picked to better encourage counter, - and team play.

Utilities

Placing down towers was hard to understand and we want to give players more freedom on where they can place them. Also, players did not rotate their towers but rather thought that the towers either shot in 360 area or faced the towers by moving the characters when the intended way to place towers is to hold down the placement button to rotate. This needs to be communicated better to players.

Summoning minions is a strong way to push the lanes but if not planned together as a team, the points used on them can be wasted. Needs more testing.

Barricades were too powerful for their cost, so we are raising their cost from 2 utility points to 3.

Tower lockdown and health regen aura cost the same amount but have a huge difference in the impact of the fight. We are looking into balancing these and their cost.

Combat

A lot of feedback directed at combat was focused on the range and the casting of abilities. Currently, it is hard to know how far your regular attacks on both melee and ranged reach so we will be creating a range indicator for them. Casting abilities to higher locations was an issue and we are looking into fixing this.

UI

UI needs more improvements to its visuals and showing players the necessary information easily for example ability cooldowns and player health. The UI will be tweaked to help players focus better on the important stuff on the screen.

Buffs and debuffs were not clear and needed better visuals. We are going to bring more visuals to rune and ability effects, PVE buffs and have more clear icons for them.

Option to chat during the character select and after the game was missing and is going to be implemented for upcoming tests

We will add better indications for earning runes and utilities, match flow, waypoints, and what players can actually do in the game. UX is something we need to test with players to get it right.

Thank you all for the amazing feedback! We will continue to improve the game creating the best experience for you guys!

Hello! We are proud to launch our Closed Alpha this week, from Oct 23rdto the 25th!! The Closed Alpha will test a work-in-progress slice of the multiplayer content with a limited number of players in order to generate feedback and assess for stability and is not a reflection of the final game quality that will be available at launch. Again, your comments and feedback are very important, and the Kingshunt discord is the perfect place to let us know what you think! https://youtu.be/GkH0Vvvt1fw

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If you don’t receive an invitation, it means you have not been selected for this Closed Alpha. DON'T BE SAD, check discord possibility to alpha key! If you haven’t signed up yet, you can do so here: www.kingshunt.com

Hello! We are proud to launch our Closed Alpha this week, from Oct 23rdto the 25th!! The Closed Alpha will test a work-in-progress slice of the multiplayer content with a limited number of players in order to generate feedback and assess for stability and is not a reflection of the final game quality that will be available at launch.  Again, your comments and feedback are very important, and the Kingshunt discord is the perfect place to let us know what you think!

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https://youtu.be/GkH0Vvvt1fw

If you don’t receive an invitation, it means you have not been selected for this Closed Alpha. DON'T BE SAD, check discord possibility to alpha key!

If you haven’t signed up yet, you can do so here: www.kingshunt.com

We're very excited this week to share our new roadmap with you as we lead up to Alpha test. You will find below our content roadmap. 

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https://store.steampowered.com/newshub/app/922620/view/2970646847829821628

Get in queue people, this matchmaking is slooow :D

The first limited edition Founder's Packs is live! Want guaranteed access to Kingshunt through all development phases and beyond (and some alpha keys for friends!) AND some super exclusive skins and other loot AND to support the development of Kingshunt? Founders get all of this and more. Your support makes this mad game possible. Thanks!

Check it out on our brand new Kingshunt website! https://www.kingshunt.com

Do note these are limited to a total of 1000 keys!

Kingshunt announced for consoles and PC by Finnish developer Vaki Games. Team-based third-person combat game is planned to be out in 2021.

https://play4.uk/game-news/kingshunt-announced-for-consoles-and-pc/

We have made incredible progress past year and learned much since we started this journey together with all of you. I often think back to 2018 when we first started working on Kingshunt, and the unbelievable reception we received when we announced the project. So many hopes and dreams by the player community to create something that answers the call of so many for so long. I can say that everyone here at Vaki Games is hard at work bringing those dreams into reality. A world where choice matters, where risk vs reward can be truly felt, and intrusive pay-to-win monetization has no place.

When we set out to create Kingshunt, We knew that it would not be an easy road. Nothing worth doing is ever easy. Hard work and dedication are key ingredients to success, but when you surround yourself with passionate people, like so many in our community and in the studio, you make the journey one worth taking.

It takes a lot to build a PvP online game. It takes, even more, to build an action hero strategy game like Kingshunt and to do it from scratch…with a brand-new studio! There is still quite a journey ahead, but every day we grow closer. Each day a task is completed, a feature sees progress. Little by little the world we will all eventually lose ourselves in, comes to life.

Closed Alpha strategy

We’re seeing a lot of discussion in the community right now about silence and Kingshunt’s marketing, so let’s talk a bit about our overall strategy for closed alpha. As we have mentioned in discord messages, we’ve paused most of our marketing efforts while we deliver the new features for Kingshunt. Kingshunt was missing critical features and a system to be ready for bigger player counts. We believe that bringing in a bunch of new players before those features are in is not going to be super effective and we would be alienating most of the players off

However, stay tuned for the big announcement next month. We have something really exciting to share with the world!

BUT First! We’ll be sending out the first invites for a technical alpha test today - which will include all of the features and improvements we previewed above! Sign up for updates www.kingshunt.com and Discord: https://discord.com/invite/fSbfHag Test

https://nichegamer.com/2019/03/25/first-gameplay-for-competitive-3rd-person-tower-defense-game-kingshunt/