Kin and Conquest news & patch notes

After a period of development and optimization, Kin and Conquest will launch on Steam on August 3!

Deep beneath the surface lies a mysterious mine where danger and fortune await. Venture deeper underground, discover valuable resources, defeat the enemies blocking your path, collect materials to strengthen yourself, and create your own path of growth.

In the full release, you will:

⛏️ Explore more maps and uncover new underground adventures

⛏️ Face stronger enemies and increasingly challenging battles

⛏️ Gather resources and enhance a wider variety of weapons and equipment

⛏️ Unlock powerful new skills and challenge deeper layers of the mine

As you continue your journey, you will discover new resources, gain greater power, and uncover the secrets hidden deep beneath the surface.

Whether you enjoy fast-paced combat or the satisfaction of watching your character grow stronger through continuous upgrades, Kin and Conquest hopes to bring you an endless journey of exploration and progression.

Thank you to everyone who has followed Kin and Conquest, played the Demo, shared valuable feedback, and added the game to your wishlist.

Your support has helped us continue improving the game and has prepared this mine for more brave explorers to uncover its secrets.

On August 3, begin your journey of conquest!

Hello! Hope you're all doing well.

Steam Next Fest is officially here, and we're excited to welcome everyone to the latest demo of Kin and Conquest!

If you're discovering the game for the first time, now is the perfect opportunity to jump in. Explore a mysterious mountain, delve into dangerous dungeons, gather resources, craft powerful equipment, and challenge formidable enemies and bosses as you grow stronger throughout your journey.

To make the experience even better during Next Fest, we've released a new demo update featuring balance improvements, bug fixes, performance optimizations, and localization updates based on player feedback.

Demo Update Highlights

Improved Combat & Progression Balance

We've rebalanced weapon damage and enemy health across the game.

Previously, progressing into a new Floor could feel overly difficult until players discovered the appropriate weapon recipe for that area. With this update, progression should feel smoother while still rewarding players who find and craft stronger equipment.

Combat Adjustments

• Increased the explosion radius of Ferret Exploder by 100%

• Dashing enemies now continue their dash briefly after reaching their destination, creating more natural combat behavior

Performance & Bug Fixes

• Fixed an issue where Chain Lightning could cause lag the first time it was used

• Fixed an issue where Chain Lightning would not properly jump between nearby targets

Localization Updates

Updated and improved the Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Japanese, and Korean localizations.

Rendering Device Selection

When launching the demo, players can now choose which rendering device to use. Unless you're experiencing technical issues, we recommend using the default option.

We'd Love Your Feedback!

Steam Next Fest is an important opportunity for us to gather feedback from players.

Whether you have suggestions regarding combat, progression, exploration, localization, or encounter any bugs during your adventure, we'd love to hear from you. Your feedback helps us continue improving the game and shaping the future of Kin and Conquest.

If you enjoy your time with the demo, please consider adding the game to your Wishlist. Every Wishlist helps us tremendously and supports the continued development of the game.

Thank you so much, and as always, stay awesome.

Hello! Hope you're all doing well.

This is mostly a patch to address some balancing issues, bug fixes, and translation errors. Here's the changelog:

• Added: Traditional Chinese language support.

• Added: When launching the demo, you are now asked which rendering device you wish to use. I recommend the default option unless your game is having problems.

• Changed: Rebalanced weapon damage and enemy health. The previous model felt terrible when entering a new Floor until you obtained a recipe for a weapon from that Floor. This makes balancing a bit softer, so that the increase is very nice to have, but not completely mandatory to progress.

• Changed: Buttons that link to Steam now open the Steam app directly instead of on your browser.

• Changed: Updated localization for Simplified Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.

• Changed: Ferret Exploder radius has been increased by 100%.

• Changed: Dashing enemies now continue dashing for a brief duration after reaching their destination.

• Fixed: Chain Lightning blessing is now properly preloaded, solving the issue of it lagging the game when it's first used.

• Fixed: Chain Lightning blessing now properly jumps from target to target, as long as a target is close enough.

Hello. Hope you're all doing well. Did you see? Kin and Conquest now has an official launch date! Kin and Conquest will be available August 3rd!

In celebration of this milestone, I'd love to take a moment to showcase some upcoming games from fellow incremental developer friends. If you enjoy incremental games, these are definitely ones to look into. Check it out!

Fleshborn

My good friend Castitatis is creating an incremental game about destroying fleshy growths with a flamethrower. It's honestly a lot of fun and I think it's going to be a great game. It currently has a playable demo. You should play the demo and wishlist it!

Nightwater

Studio Ashty is working on something special that I really want more people to know about. If you were a fan of Forager or Outpath, you need to check this game out. It's a 3D incremental game where you forage, craft, and automate your growing factory. It also has a playable demo. Play the demo and give it a wishlist!

IGTAP: an Incremental Game That's Also a Platformer

What if Celeste was an incremental game? The awesome and talented dev over at Pepper Tango Games is creating a game unlike any you've seen in this space. Clear obstacle courses, optimize your path, and amass an army of clones to follow in your footsteps and get you crazy gains. If you're into speedrunning, this game is also ripe for it. It also has a playable demo and you should really wishlist it!

A lot of developers are creating incrementals and idlers and I hope the best of success for everyone. These are just some that my friends are making that I really wanted to shout out.

- Changed: Tutorial system has been revised. This should now help clear up common misunderstandings throughout the game as well as be overall presented in a better, more easy-to-follow manner.

- Changed: The hitbox of the Slime King was a little bit wonky. It's been made bigger.

- Changed: You can now hover over your equipment slots when in the equipment shop menu.

- Fixed: The Soul description tooltip no longer incorrectly states that you gain souls by defeating bosses for the first time. It's technically attached to a challenge.

- Fixed: When transition to a new floor, any Essence / Coin that falls with you was not keeping its merge count.

- Fixed: Exaggeration skill effect was not working on some Book / Staff effects.

Hello!

Kin and Conquest's Playtest has been retired in favor of a shiny new Demo with new features! I'll outline the changelog below.

You may have also noticed that the art has been changed! I just like this one better, not much more complicated than that. It was commissioned from the talented Naiaru, who makes their art with watercolors! Pretty cool stuff.

Here's the patch notes! (only really makes sense if you played the Playtest):

If you played the Kin and Conquest Playtest, it's recommended that you start a new Save File for this version, as skill nodes have been changed and in some cases replaced.

Lots of balance tweaks and QoL stuff. A major thing is getting the Survival tree to be more impactful. It can be difficult to get defensive-oriented paths to feel good, so lots of adjusting has happened there and I think it's much more powerful now.

Also, new Floor, and you can now access Books and Staffs!

GENERAL STUFF

• Added: You can now access the next tier of nodes in the Skill tree.

• Added: You can now use Books and Staffs.

• Added: You can now access Floor 3.

• Added: Skill tree node tooltips now have a feature where you can hold a button to see more info.

• Added: Nearby Coins now merge together. Same with Essence. In order to respect effects that trigger when picking these up, the number of times merged is taken into account for these effects, so nothing is lost on that front. I primarily did this change to help with visual clutter.

• Changed: New title art.

• Changed: When starting a new save file, irrelevant town NPCs start off as being hidden. This should help with how needlessly overwhelming the game can be at first. These NPCs are unlocked exactly when you can use them, so the game flow is kept the same.

• Changed: Player Projectile Opacity has been changed to Player Skill Opacity in the Settings menu. This setting is also placed higher in Settings so that it's more obvious that it exists.

• Changed: Player hitbox is a little less generous. I want the game to feel unfair in the players advantage, but it was a little bit too hard to actually get hit by enemies.

• Changed: Buffed various skill nodes.

• Changed: Coins dropped by ore nodes now launch a bit further out. This is mostly to prevent the coins from instantly being merged together on creation due to the new merging system.

• Changed: The speed in which a skill tree category pops in its nodes is now faster if you have more nodes revealed.

• Changed: Enemies on higher difficulties now move faster (except Boss enemies).

• Changed: When hovering over a difficulty in the run select menu, it now breaks down what changes.

• Fixed: Added safeguards against the game softlocking when transition to a new Floor.

• Fixed: When destroying an ore node, enemies would still path around where the ore node used to be.

• Fixed: When facing upwards, your shield was accidentally invisible. Strictly a visual bug.

SKILL TREE NODES

SURVIVAL

• Changed: Thorns now reflects damage based on your Damage stat instead of a flat number. It also provides a new stat: A chance for Absorb to not be lost when an enemy is defeated via reflected damage.

• Changed: Revenge Orbs now follow you to the next Floor.

• Changed: Bouncing Shards has been replaced with Unbreakable Spirit. Shield Shards now have the Bouncing Shards bonus by default.

• Changed: Indominitable Spirit now inflicts 1,000% Damage, up from 100%.

• Changed: Shards generated via Reactive Armor now have +10 bounces.

CUNNING

• Changed: Wind Walker nodes have been merged, with the 2nd node being replaced with Determination.

• Changed: Base Haste Duration increased to 5s.

• Changed: Gale Runner now gives +5s Haste Duration.

• Added: You can now navigate menus with keyboard and gamepad, pressing Space/Enter on keyboard or the confirm button on gamepads to open shops in the hub.

• Added: General Settings -> Reset to Default button at the bottom. Same with Audio Settings.

• Changed: "Click to Move" setting replaced with "Mouse Movement", now cycles through 3 settings and is much clearer on how it works.

• Changed: Cleaned up equipment tooltips, also included that this is the button you click to equip.

• Changed: When entering a new floor, the initial totem spawn is slightly delayed. This should prevent situations of you spawning inside a totem and activating it when you didn't want to.

• Changed: The run select menu now clarified which difficulty of the floor is required to unlock a floor on a particular difficulty. X Floor 2 -> X Floor 2 (Hard), for example.

• Fixed: In web-browser, a recipe dropping should no longer lag the game.

• Fixed: In wen-browser, Ultraviolence should no longer lag the game.

• Fixed: In rare situations, the transition screen would hang and you'd be stuck with a black screen.

• Fixed: Shield sprite is invisible if facing up.

• Fixed: If you were snug up against walls, enemies could not reach you to hit you.

• Fixed: Scrolling down on a touchpad simultaneously adjusted sliders.

Introducing Kin and Conquest, a combat-oriented spinoff of Kin and Quarry.

I could tell you all about the game right here and now, but why not experience it for yourself? The Playtest is live right now and playable. If you request access, you're automatically accepted. Give the game a shot and let me know your thoughts!

Thank you.