It was Feburary of 2022 last time Kalling Kingdom received a new version update. Where does the time go? When the Unity engine announced its runtime fee some time ago (and then went back on the idea), many game developers decided that they would begin taking matters into their own hands. We were among those who did, and began building our own game engine. In addition to the runtime fee announcement itself, we also feel that Unity has presented a number of reasons in the not-too-distant past for why they cannot be trusted as a partner and are not the best decision for our current game and future games, such as abruptly changing their terms of service, merging with a company widely regarded to be a malware software company, and not being transparent with its community. Introducing the Elega Aperture Game Engine v41.0 of Kalling Kingdom is the last version that will exist in the Unity engine, and we've instead been in the process of porting the entire game to our new game engine, which internally we call the "Aperture engine." Aperture is designed to be a simple, fast, efficient game engine for 2D games built upon the Raylib library and utilizing OpenGL sprite rendering. The engine itself is not meant to be a grand endeavor on par with the popular game engines you may have heard of like Unity, Unreal, or Godot, but it is meant to be proprietary technology that we have full control over, do not have to pay royalties for, and meets the needs of both Kalling Kingdom and future 2D titles. The engine has minimal world editing support, rendering for fonts and 2D shapes or sprites, audio playback for sound effects and music, input management for game pads and keyboards/mice, and more features on the way. On the Elega Corporation company blog, we've outlined other details behind our decision to part ways with Unity - please feel free to read more details about the original decision there. What Does This Mean for Kalling Kingdom? We are fully committed to finishing the original vision for our game, including delivering on original promises around the introduction of an early game tutorial mode, item trading into the game, bugfixes, and improved / additional graphics for the "gameplay canvas" as we call it ( or area in which you build your city). Porting the game out of the Unity engine is a large project and involves a complete and total rewrite of the game's code. With the port being the first step, we will release v42.0 of the game with the fully ported version into the new engine. This port will introduce 4K resolution support for 2160x1440 resolution, adding to the current options of 1920x1080 and 1280x720. Sprites in the game currently do not correctly scale to the respective resolutions, and this is being corrected as a part of the port, which will mean less jagged edges, pixelated font rendering, or distorted scaling of sprites that currently exists in some spots within the game. We do not have much to show just yet but here is a quick preview of a main menu screenshot: this is running in the Aperture engine, and shows the new version number and updated copyright notice.
As a part of this port, font rendering is receiving important attention, and fonts are imported in a way that is more correct for the output pixel resolution, resulting in much higher clarity for text rendered in-engine. We actually found that by taking full control of font rendering, it was easier to get the result we were after than with Unity (which does a few things under-the-hood by default that can interfere with your intentions as a developer). To be clear: this is not a new game, or a remake, or a remaster, or anything like that. We are simply porting the game into our new custom engine, and then proceeding with the rest of development. All existing customers who purchased the game receive the new version once it's available automatically. After our v42.0 target, we're going to continue on the original features that we've described in previous updates. Here is a short list we're working on after the port to the new engine is complete:

• People/person "happiness" and other attributes visible from within info panels, as well as options for how to improve their stats
• Market system changes and improvements: additional variability to market dynamics for how rate of return shifts over time, and the introduction of the item system
• Item system: businesses produce and require items, and these items can be traded with other cities. Currently, items don't exist at all in the game, so this will be a major addition!
• Savegames: long overdue and we've talked about it forever but we are working to deliver savegames as well
• Game configuration options: choose the number of turns you want, how much cash you start with, and other options. Currently, every game is always 60 turns with the same starting conditions no matter what. We'd like this to be comprised of player choices.

v0.41 is out today and we've been hard at work on making lots of visual tweaks and other improvements. We're still in the midst of the user interface (UI) overhaul that was announced previously. We're hoping to see the rest of the planned changes through in 2022. The important update for v0.41 is the new Business Info panel. The old business info panel back in v0.40 and prior looks like this:
But here's the new business panel, with different layouts of icons for workers based on the business type!
In addition to the business info panel updates, which we're not 100% done with just yet (a few more tweaks are coming!), here's the other changes from the log that have made it into v0.41... Bugfix: when citizens move out of the town from unhappiness due to lack of funding on certain categories, there was an issue with not re-assignment business ownership. This is corrected. Bugfix: When citizens move out due to lack of funding, there was a memory issue that would cause failures further into the game, and this has been fixed. Now, multiple people may move out once the culmination of negative effects has increased enough across turns. Bugfix: one scenario resulted in the infinite playing of building build sounds if hitting the escape key and not assigning a business a name. This is corrected so sounds should only play once. Bugfix: when moving the owner of a business to another business, sometimes the business from which they were moved would not receive a new owner if one was available - this has been fixed. The world market behaves more erratically once it reaches negative rates of return less than -5%, sometimes entering longer lasting market depressions. Other times, the market will have a big positive spike recovery. Business income on each business type has been re-adjusted, and overall all business now earn more per turn. Additional visual tweaks have been made to the world market screen, adding a divider, centering text, and a change of font. The build screen has received font changes on each building type. The fonts have been changed on the Expenses panel. All help text widgets on the Build, Expenses, and Market panels have been updated to the new style. Graphics change: the escape menu while in-game, cannot afford notify screen, sell confirmation screen, next turn, turn summary, and others have all received updated button styles. The business info panel appearance has been updated with a new design layout. Expenses have been adjusted. All categories but Military now have only the option to have no spending, or spending 1K per turn. This will be further adjusted later in favor of some additional changes to the expense system.

It's been a long time since we've done a release, but not to worry: we're still working on the game and more updates are coming. With v0.40, here are a few important changes you'll find: * Using click, hold, and drag on Unemployed People no longer works. Instead, we just have simply: click and drag. As in, yeah, click once, then the icon is attached to your cursor, and then you can just drag it onto another business, click the business, and voila! No more holding down the mouse button. This was the only place in the game that required players to click and hold the mouse button, and thus broke the universal language in the user interface that was established everywhere else. This should now be much easier to understand for new players and more intuitive for existing players. * The market panel has been visually revised by the work of our user interface artist, with a few more small tweaks coming. Still, it now looks like this.
This is significantly different than the old market panel, which used buttons to add amounts for buying and selling the ingame currency, K (or what we're now calling "Kallings"). Instead of multiple buttons, you can just type in the numbers you want and click Invest (K) or Sell (K). We think this is much more friendly to players, especially given that this game is comfortably a PC-only title for the time being. So, hey, welcome you to use your keyboard to type some numbers. We also began working on the next update already, which focuses on two major areas: the new player tutorial mode and savegames. The tutorial mode will teach new players how to play by explaining all of the different panels in the town view, how the different game mechanics work, what to look out for, and then: it'll get out of your way and let you play. For savegames, we've begun working on the code that allows serializing game state into save files, and then loading that state in on demand. You know, like... like a saved game. But the real importance behind the savegame system is the ability to configure new games more how you'd like to play, thereby increasing accessibility - choosing your starting cash, setting the number of turns you'd like to do, and other possible options. These are both big undertakings with how the game is currently designed, so they'll take some time to complete. We will probably make a few more minor releases without these features as we continue to work on these areas, so please be patient while we complete these new features. Some minor features you may see in the near future we're working on include: -More new user interface designs which improve the experience and make the game more visually attractive, the first two of which will probably be the business management / info panel and the unemployed people screen -An overhaul of the expenses system and visual appearance of the panel which allows for different benefits at each expense level. The game will inform you of those in the Expenses panel screen -The grass field that your town is built on is nicknamed "the canvas" because it is just that: a blank, green slate. Instead of this, we're looking at how to improve the visual appearance of the canvas to allow more attractive scenery when you're constructing buildings, such as trees, foilage & greenery, and other small details Oh, one more thing: the game is now available on Linux. Please let us know how it works for you on that operating system. We've tested it with Debian but it should work on Ubuntu as well when using 64 bit systems. Thanks for reading! We'll get back to work now and let you enjoy v0.40.

This is a somewhat significant update that has begun laying the groundwork for wrapping up the turn summary tab, savegames, and completing the user interface overhaul.
The change log is as follows: * Additional hints from the hint panel now - some of these won't display before certain other hint points are addressed by the player. But assuming those things have been addressed... - The hint panel will let you know when city cash holdings are low, and as long as your market investment has at least 2K, it'll suggest you sell off some of the holdings. -The hint panel will suggest during market downturns (negative rates of return) that you sell off your market investment to minimize losses. -Since monster attacks now no longer escalate as turns progress, the hint system now suggests keeping your military spending at or above 5K to keep the city safe. * Income per turn on the business info panel now distinguishes between *business* income and *tax* income. The tax income is the amount of money going to the player. This will also match the summary panel that displays from the main town view. * The background for the business info panel has been adjusted - the grass in the background image now appears lower in the frame. * Settings can now be accessed from the escape menu. By hitting the escape key, you can get to Settings, access the music and sound effects sliders, and save the changes using the 'Save' button. This is now available in-game and was previously only available from the main menu. * Some events now generate messages in the turn summary panel and will appear when paging through previous turns. * No one can see this but it is important to other areas under the hood: the code for the ancient 'Business and People panel' from the early pre-alpha version has been deprecated. This means some de-cluttering and clearing out of old, unused code has been completed. * The available people person offer system has been updated. People now have differing happiness levels, which will influence whether or not they accept your offer in a given turn. They're more likely to accept an offer if they're unhappy where they are, but how much cash they currently have still plays a role in their decision. * Fixed a bug where, during the starving traveler event, a person would stick around longer than they were supposed to.

This week, the primary focus was the turn summary panel, which now has pagination for previous turn information. Since last week, it still only tracks changes across market holdings, population, and city cash, but more is coming. The pagination system is a new little mini-project, and the idea is to allow turn information across many, many more data points.
The user interface overhaul continues as well. The business info panel now looks like this and it has a little more versatility both practically and visually.
While not shown here above, the people icons that appear around this info panel that allow you to move people between businesses are going away in a later version, but they're still here for now. The full screen view of business info is going away in favor of something better too but one step at a time! In addition to these significant features above, here are some other things I'm taking a look closely at and completed with this new version.

• Bugfix: rising crime rate would never get cleared from the event queue after raising military spending to 5K. This is now corrected so that once raising Military to 5K or above, the event stops appearing.
• Fonts have been re-adjusted to better fit the 1080p resolution. The main menu font and text for copyright & version were adjusted, and many panels received font changes. The new business info panel uses a different font than previously. More work is coming on fonts and adjustments to font rendering.
• Business info panel now displays, in text, the owner and business type, while displaying the current workers vs. its maximum as a ratio. For example, in the above screen shot, a restaurant has 1 worker out of an allowed 5.
• Businesses can be renamed from the quill icon on the business info panel.
• Bugfix, sort of: tried to adjust the possibility of clicking the turn summary panel and a business behind the panel (currently, it will often think both have been clicked and interact with both). I couldn't quite solve it in time for getting a new build out this week but I'm continuing to work on this issue.
• Bugfix: the turn summary panel expanding / contracting animation did not used to consider real time but now it does. The result previously was that on older, slower systems that panel would animate extremely slowly due to CPU clock speed differences. This should now be corrected, although it can still run with a choppy visual appearance on slower machines.

The turn summary evolution has arrived ! Sort of.Thebottom'ViewTurn Summary'tabnowdisplaysasummaryofinformationfromthepreviousturnonthedimensionsofpopulationgrowth, citycashholdings,andthecurrentmarketinvestment. There will be additional information appearing here in the future from past turns, as well as a pagination setup where you'll be able to go back into many, many previous turns (probably all of them) to see what took place. Additional items that should show up here in the near future might be things like: who just got employed by a business, who is still unemployed, what was the market rate of return the last turn, and some other useful factoids that are relevant to the city. The tab animates with a nice 'whoosh!' sound whenever clicking on it too. Very fancy. In addition, there are some other things:

• Monster attacks no longer require escalating spending on the military as the turns progress. Before, if you wanted to make it to turn 55 safely, you'd want to have at least 5K from expenses going to military. This is axed. For now, 2K on Military at all times should be sufficient to defend against monster attacks.
• Bugfix: some conditions that cause the bottom bar to stop being rendered have been corrected.
• Bugfix: The unemployed people panel was displaying the bottom bar brick sprite when it really shouldn't have. This has been corrected.
• Bugfix: the main menu 'Settings' option was not showing up after 1 click and for some reason required 2 clicks. Well, now it requires 1 click like any sane person would imagine it does.
• We added a Credits item on the main menu which will now toggle display of the game credits.

The 'View Turn Summary' tab is here! ...Sort of, this isn't its final version. But it looks a lot better. Changes in this release:

• The turn info button has been done away with and replaced by 'View Turn Summary'. This will be again replaced later with a sliding text indication of all the activity that has occurred throughout turns, expressed in text descriptions. For now, it takes the player to the existing turn summary view that just lists some basic information about what income they've brought in, what expenses they've spent, and population growth.
• Bugfix: corrected error that causes the starting game loading screen to freeze. It should always load now after the Elega logo animates for a few seconds.
• Bugfix: there are still some remaining issues with music and sound FX levels but it should be more consistent based on what is selected in Settings now. The volume reinitializes from what is in the game's local folder settings file (which is a simple CSV file). Still to come: the ability to update settings while in-game (this should show up sometime around when we implement savegames but it's coming!).

It\'s been too long since our last update but here we are with a new version: v0.37.1, which begins the process of completely overhauling the game\'s user interface. We have taken what was originally a mockup being described around the release of v0.36 and have since begun implementing that. The top menu bar is now changed, and so the first visual hurdle is out of the way.
So what's next? We'll be continuing to build new versions of v0.37, and eventually, we'll do away with the numeric suffix. This new version is called v0.37.1. Next, with work coming on savegames, that will be v0.37.2, and so on. Those who currently own the game are free to try out the new builds as they're released. The very next things underway are getting a running log of actions between turns and making that available to the player. For example, there will be a place you can go that will display information like this: Turn 17 ======= Jhaknaw Dune is now employed at Trenn Ranch. You accepted a trade deal with the City of Rosper. Your market investment has gone from 306 to 319. Turn 16 ======= You added Jhaknaw Dune but they are still unemployed. Your market investment has gone from 290 to 306. This is a way to provide a running activity of the player\'s decisions over each turn. In addition to this, of course, there\'s also the tedious work of putting together savegames. Anyway, we just wanted to drop off the build to make it available to all of you and now: back to work! Thanks for reading.

Loading, display, and a few other small bugs were correctedfor v0.35 and v0.36. We've also added a custom cursor instead of the normal Windows cursor you would see just poking around your operating system! These updates are admittedly small, although work has begun on overhauling the user interface (UI), including all of the buttons / graphics within the game. The below image is a mock-up created by Jacob Ahlbrand, our Media Designer, who will be doing a lot more artwork on the project. The work shown here is not final at all, and it should be noted that just about everything here could change! But it indicates that the direction we're going is to get rid of the sloppy work done on the original interface in an attempt to finish the game by a deadline.
Following v0.36, we're soon going to be starting on a new version of the game. Before you ask, no, this will not be an expansion, a sequel, or a separate installment of any kind. All current and future customers will get the new version. But it's so different that it will change a lot of the gameplay in ways we think are way better based on the feedback we've received from players. There are two major lessons that we've taken away from the initial feedback from players since we did the official launch in September 2019: 1) Obscuring certain details from the player or making certain consequences somewhat mysterious for how they occurred based on player input was just a bad design choice. It has lead some folks to be frustrated with the experience. We hear you! It was a bad choice. So, instead, we're going to refine the gameplay so that every decision you make along the way, the game will have some way of immediately informing you what will happen as a result of that given decision. 2) We were way too rigid in the beginning with what we thought the design should be. Instead, all future design we'll let be completely guided by player feedback. This game isn't just ours and our creative vision anymore: it's our customers' and players' to a very large extent. With that in mind, we want it to feel intuitive. If it feels like you ought to be able to do something in the interface, we want to focus on putting that thing there. If you haven't seen it already, take a look at the Kalling Kingdom website's 'About' page, which has a number of 'Coming Soon' items we're working on for the rest of 2020. It includes the following:

• New artwork - The first bit being focused on is a color revamp for the existing art but we're also looking at adding additional new content and hand-drawn artwork for the official website and lore bible that's being developed.
• People happiness vs misery, skills at certain jobs - This was always intended as a part of the original design but we want the decisions you make and the job assignments you do to have a profound impact on the people that you bring to your town. People will have personalities and to a greater extent: their own goals they're after.
• Resources, items - Also intended as a part of the original design but resource & item trading with other towns we want to be an integral part of the experience. We'll be working on this after some of the other priorities but stay tuned on details.
• Market enhancements - We've been happy to hear this is everyone's favorite part of the game. And we want to add even more sophistication to the market system, including ways in which you can exert greater influence over it, use it to your advantage, or respond to more sophisticated events based on a broader world simulation.
• New original music - The game's current music is likely going away but if you really like it and want us to keep it then let us know. The plan is to replace it with a fully original score. Right now, the game uses very generalized royalty free music that we felt worked well for the initial launch.