As the year ends, I thought it'd be fun to take a look back at where we started five years ago. In 2016 Kingdoms and Castles was a little game Michael and I were working on in our spare time (nights and weekends). Back then the game looked like this:



Things were quite rough! As you can see I had no idea how to pick a pleasing color palette and was just learning to made 3D models.

Then came our launch in 2017 and the many updates since. Now we're approaching the beta phase of our biggest update ever. The game has come a long way and there's lots of new mechanics we've added for the upcoming AI Kingdoms update. We've also taken time to improve the visuals. First, here's a city from the current version (117r7):



And here's what the same city it will look like in AI Kingdoms update (we've adjusted the fog, colors, shadows, and lighting):



It's been four years since we launched on Steam and working on the game really has been a labor of love for us. We're so grateful people are still playing and enjoying the game.

This year the AI Kingdoms update has been in alpha and we've been incorporating as much of your feedback as we can (and fixing as many bugs as we can) - thanks so much for that feedback and for your patience.

The update will enter it's beta phase soon, expect another announcement around that sometime in December!

We're very excited to be so close to beta (and then final release) of the AI Kingdoms update. Thanks everyone for all your support over the years. There's lots of deserving games out there (and you've probably decided already), but please consider us when nominating for the Labor of Love award!

-Pete, Michael, and Sam