Hello, world! The game is not dead, neither are we, and work is still in progress. It has been challenging to keep things going because of life circumstances, hours, funding, this economy... all kinds of things. But no excuses: the dedication continues and we think you deserve an update on what we're up to.

For those who haven't heard, we have been at work on porting Kalling Kingdom and its last publicly known version, v0.41, from the Unity game engine into our new custom engine, which we call the Aperture Game Engine. There is no pretending that the new engine is anything particularly special - the intention is not to compete directly with anyone out there with engines... but it is meant to enable us to do very specific things we would like to do with 2D games - Kalling Kingdom inluded. With Kalling Kingdom in particular, the new engine serves the purpose of carrying us out of dependence on Unity for their engine, or anyone else, and granting us real independence.

So, part of the reason it has been so long since our last update, in addition to the things I allude to in the intro at the beginning, is that we haven't just been moving the game code into the new engine: we've had to *build the new engine itself too*. And that's been time consuming, hard, and occupies the precious few hours I personally get to invest in the game alongside a day job.

When the Unity runtime fee debacle happened some time ago, it severed trust with many developers who were actively building their business or their studios around that engine. That break in trust, it seems, has lasted all these months later even as Unity had walked its steps back from that initial direction. The intention behind-the-curtain, so to speak, has been revealed. We do not feel it's the right engine for any of our games, and unfortunately that meant starting on a highly ambitious project to get the game out of Unity for good.

The new engine is written in the Rust programming language, which is one of those latest-and-greatest tech trends from the past few years. We're not using it because it's trendy, though, we're using it because it is super fast, like C or C++ code. That said, we have to convert the game's original C# scripts over to Rust, and that has proved a not insignificant practice at times.

We are happy to report that the work to complete the port is coming along well and will soon be nearing completion. We will be running a series of stability tests with the initial port of the game, which is a very similar version of the game to v0.41 with some very minor changes. The minor changes are temporary - it was important to make a stable port as a starting point before we attempt to do a major, dramatic upheaval of the game where we improve its features.

Just as stated in the prior update: we are fully committed to finishing this game and giving it the care it deserves.

There are some improvements we have already mentioned coming. It is hard to convey it in screenshots too but every sprite in the game rendered in the new engine is done so in a way that is entirely uncompressed and true to the exact pixel-perfect intent behind the imagery. Unity did some strange things with its sprite rendering and since Unity is gone: the weirdness and lack of smoothness is gone too. Curved edges will now appear pefectly smooth and rendered crisply in a way they were not before.

The current version of the game does not support 4K resolution, of course, and so the artwork has been re-exported from the original 3D models and project files for 2560x1440 resolution.

We didn't think we would make *any* updates for the game outside of the port at first but the UI code, as it was translated into the new engine, needed a major update. It made sense in the instance of the Available People and Unemployed People panels to give those significant updates. Related to that, we'll also be updating the click-and-drag interface of assigning people to businesses in the game, and thereby fixing a couple bugs that exist in v0.41 in the process.

For the "small tweaks" bit that we're throwing in, there are many tiny details that many of you may not even notice, such as faster loading times. For people on older machines, the game pre-loads everything you need before getting to the main menu, so there's no waiting around, not even for half a second, to start the game once you've already got everything started up - it's an instant switch into the city view (which I call "the canvas" since we don't have a moving camera for the town).

Recent testing on the new build of the game reveals that we will be able to lower the original system requirements of the game, and we are using some new techniques to test the game at lower specs, including actual old machines and virtual machines. We won't quite match the optimizations of the games that inspired this one from the late 1990s but one some dimensions we are going to come close: 2GB of RAM will likely go down to 512MB of RAM, DirectX will no longer be a requirement on Windows, and the executable for the game will likely be significantly smaller than the one you would run from the Unity engine (and maybe, just maybe, this would result in comparably less space per game asset on the hard drive, but we'll see!). By the way, DirectX is this Microsoft thing that has been around forever and is used for graphics on Windows - doesn't matter much that you won't need it other than maybe eliminating any occasional weirdness that would ever result from that (now we'll have different weirdness, maybe?).

The important thing to know, though, is that the game in the new engine runs more efficiently than it did in Unity, and that's obvious from early testing. That, and we have finally had a bit more time to look at the system specifications more thoroughly than we did back in 2019 when we first released the game (too bad, this needed more time in the oven).

If you're interested in the other updates we have planned, none of our intentions there have changed - we've described a lot of it in previous posts if you're curious and I encourage you to go read those. In short, we'll be improving everything after we finish this port to the new engine. The market system will get individual items that can be traded between towns, businesses will produce items of their own that plug in to that trade system, the people in your town will have their own stats that you can view and attempt to change or improve... and a whole lot more.

As soon as we can! We are working on putting in consistent hours each week - it is never as many as I'd like but it is at least ensuring that consistent headway keeps getting made. I'm excited to reveal more, including when you can download and install the new build, as soon as it's ready. For the major new features we have coming down the road, expect to see a brand new trailer, some new artwork, and a much more obvious major announcement. For the initial port, stay tuned - it'll be somewhat quietly dropped here alongside a brief notification.

I haven't expected any of you to stick around but to anyone who has played our game at all: thank you so much.