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Hey everyone.
With the Steam Next Fest coming to an end, we would like to announce the further milestones on our roadmap to a release of Runekingdom.
But before we reveal the date you will be able to buy the game, we wanna do one more thing.
We wanna say thank you to everyone, who visited our game during the Next Fest, played our demo and most importantly wishlisted the game. We managed to double our wishlist numbers in a single week, tripled the number of players who played either the demo or the playtest and overall just had a very good week watching the analytics data coming in, showing us that you actually enjoy the game.
Now onto the second most important thing:
There it is. The release day.
Turns out the more items, quest, recipes and enemies you have in a game, the harder it is to balance it. And even if you manage to balance it for the first ten players, there is no guarantee that the eleventh player will have a good experience.
So the main thing we hope to get from releasing into Early Access (EA) is balancing data.
Quick FAQ:
Will the game be content complete on EA release?
No, later game content balance is depending on earlier content balance. It would result in a lot more work for us, which delays further updates.
Will the price stay the same during the EA phase and full release?
Probably not, we are currently debating smaller price increases on bigger milestones like the full release. We will inform you about that in detail at due time.
How long will the game stay in EA?
Relatively short, we expect a full release before the end of the year. However, game development comes with surprises in all shapes and colors, so this might change.
In all honesty, there is no final price decided yet. We have it down to a narrow price span, but we are still thinking about it. We will inform you about the final price (and the launch discount) shortly before EA release.
After the EA release, we are planning several bigger content updates to add the freshly balanced content, improve the balance of previous content and introduce new gameplay systems. As stated above, we are planning to leave EA this year, so the waiting between these content updates is gone short and the amount of bigger updates is limited.
We will add a more detailed roadmap once the EA release is done and we have the data to know for sure.
Last but not least, if you have not done it, join our Discord to get in direct contact with us and absolutely tell all your friends about us.
Made a number of performance enhancements aimed at reducing lag spikes, improving stability, and increasing overall game performance.
The Public Playtest for RuneKingdom will officially close on Saturday 24th as we prepare for the next stage of development.
Once the Playtest closes, it will automatically disappear from your Steam Library.
We are transitioning into the Public Demo phase, which will be featured during Steam Next Fest from June 15th – June 22nd.
We want to give a huge thank you to everyone who participated in the Playtest. Your feedback, balancing suggestions, bug reports, and ideas have been invaluable throughout development. You have truly helped shape the game, and everyone here at UDC deeply appreciates your support.
Our goal with the upcoming Demo is to introduce RuneKingdom to a much wider audience while continuing to fine tune gameplay ahead of the Early Access launch.
The Demo, of course, will remain completely free to play, though progression will still be capped at Level 15. Thank you again for being part of this journey, you’re an awesome community, and we can’t wait to show you what’s next.
When you see this we have just dropped a major update to our playtest of Runekingdom. There are a lot of new functions, mechanics and systems in place now, which we gonna introduce in detail to you here, as these can be quite different from the systems you have experienced in previous playtests. Also, this update marks a major steps towards the release and we gonna explain what our plan is in the end of this post.
To make it short, we touched effectively every single mechanic in the game to improve the visuals, the mechanics, the fun or all above. Most systems are now nicely intertwined to build a robust and fun core game loop, that keeps you entertained for a good chunk of time (more Info below). Overall, we are really happy with the result and think that you will be too.
However, as some of the reworks have been massive, we are gonna explain some topics in detail now.
Starting with something that is minor in terms of gameplay impact, but has bigger implications all around. With this version of the game, we have introduced analytics code via the Unity Analytics Service. This means, on start of the game, you will be greeted with a Data Collection Agreement.
For the playtest your agreement to these terms is mandatory for playing, this will not be the case for the full game!
Reasoning for that is that we need the data it provides to balance and fine tune the game to its best possible state. This kind of feedback is also the main reason for a playtest, that is why we combined these two things for the time being. Once we release the game, we still need balancing, but its up to you then to provide this kind of insight or opt out if you do not feel comfortable with it.
For your decision, the only user based information Unity Analytics collects by default without a way to opt out is:
The country Unity considers you playing from
A unity given persistent user ID
The platform you are playing on (e.g. Windows, Linux)
Anything else is in game data only, consisting out of completion of checkpoints, usage of items/weapons/equipment, combat behavior, economy values, session times and skill levels.
We are not looking forward to selling or passing this data to anyone. It is purely a mean to help us see where difficulty spikes, unbalanced equipment and overpowered enemies are.
While this type of analytics is standard in most games, we feel you should be well informed.
Combat has received the biggest overhaul of all systems. It is now equally easier and more complex at the same time. Your equipment matters more than it ever did before, enemies differ in meaningful ways now, running away will come in handy more often than you will like it. So let's break it down.
Weapons
Weapons now have the following stats:
Damage
Hit Rate
Attack Cooldown
Damage is exactly what you would think it is, same as attack cooldown. The hit rate however is a bit more tricky. In general, the higher the value, the more likely you are to hit. Internally the hit rate value is checked against an enemy value. If these are equal, you get a 50% hit chance on the attack. If yours is double compared to the enemy you have a 66% hit chance. As you cannot see the enemy values, you gonna need to get a feel for it. Just do not take it as a direct hit chance.
Equipment
Equipment now has the following stats:
Evasion
Damage Reduction
Evasion is the counterpart to the above mentioned hit rate. Enemies have their own hit rates and will use it to challenge your evasion. In case your evasion does not work out, damage reduction comes into play. This is a flat damage decrease, that is applied to the damage an enemy can do. Most important here, but applies to the damage, a value of 1,45 means a guaranteed 1 with a 45% chance of getting a 2, so getting a slightly higher values still has an effect.
Strength and Weaknesses
Completely new to this version, enemies now have strengths and weaknesses that influence damage dealt to an enemy. There are two types of categories regarding this.
Physical: Slashing, Piercing and Blunt
Magic: Air, Fire, Earth, Water
There are also five different levels of strength/weakness: Very weak, Weak, Slight, Strong, Very Strong.
Figuring out the affections of the enemy will make beating them a lot easier.
Enemies do not attack with special attacks, so you do not need to worry about your own resistances.
The quest system is now fully operational, giving access to the story. You can now follow a path that not only introduces you to the mechanics of the game, but also grants access to new items on the market.
Yes, you heard correctly, the market now starts with a limited set of items to buy from it. If you want more items, you gotta jump some hoops from now on. Enemies still drop what you need, but fighting them is bit more tricky now.
Quests will notify you once you can complete a quest or start a new one.
We are aware of a few things that need more work.
The weapons stats are not shown until equipped, it will need some kind of tooltip.
Once equipped, equipment cannot be unequipped any more.
Quest items need to be in the inventory, while market items need to be in the bank. This is confusing and needs unification.
So, whats our plan from now to the release?
Starting with this playtest, we will close in release in the near future. For that to work, this playtest will be limited in time from now on, potentially ending in the beginning of May.
With the data collected from that, we will work on a fleshed out demo for the game, which should be available shortly before the Steam Next Fest. We are hoping to get a little bit of attention there, which we then take to release shortly after the Steam Next Fest.
So if you are waiting for this game to come out, you do not have to wait much longer any more.
We will inform you with more details regarding release and update schedule as well as pricing once we are closer to that point.
About
This page aggregates Steam news feeds, patch notes, and developer announcements for RuneKingdom, sourced from official Steam community posts.
Major updates, balance changes, and seasonal events often correlate with player-count spikes — cross-reference announcements here with the live charts on the main RuneKingdom statistics page.
Articles link back to Steam for full changelogs. SteamScope refreshes news entries as new posts are published to the game's Steam hub.