itch.io

It's not publicly available yet, but we're working on a demo for this year

No release date yet, but we're working on a demo for this year

Hey, thanks for the reply Luca, we somehow missed this comment. Indeed, we haven't abandoned the project, but we don't really psoted updates on itch anymore. We post all our latest updates on our discord server these days!

Yes! We're working on a gameplay demo that will precede an Early Access Steam release :)

Hi, this tech demo is not representative of the state of the game anymore, so we pulled it from itch. A completely overhauled version is in internal/closed testing stages for now.

Note that this reflects a pretty old version at this point - you can still get it on our Discord server, though.

Hi! We haven't tested it for x86 bit specifically, but it should work! You can get the old build for free on our Discord - and be sure to let us know if it works (or doesn't)! 

Hi there! You can download the old build on our Discord! We've just started internal alpha testing with a new build, which will be available to all members of the Discord in a few weeks!

Very glad to see you around! Hope things are going well for your own projects, too?

Very happy to hear that :D Yep, we're definitely putting out public updates more frequently in the future. Putting the Discord link up front is a good idea!

Hi, sorry about the late reply - please see our latest blog post here about our next steps: https://www.kinstrife.com/post/still-alive

Hi, sorry about the late reply - please see our latest blog post about our next steps here: https://www.kinstrife.com/post/still-alive

Yes, it is! If you haven't yet, you can subscribe to our e-mail newsletter which we'll use to send out development updates. There's a signup form on our website: https://www.kinstrife.com/

Oh no, now I feel bad for having missed that! :D We're good, hope you're fine as well and that you had great holidays!

We don't have a Discord server (yet), but we are preparing a Reddit page where we will soon start again with showing updates.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Kinstrife/

Discord server will follow with a first proper internal alpha release, which we have been working on for the last two years.

Hi hhhg,

You can navigate directly to the installation folder and launch the executable from there. (Typically: "C:/Program Files (x86)/Kinstrife/bin/Kinstrife Pre-Alpha.exe")

Apologies for the inconvenience, we have changed servers since the last public release.

We're on it! We're looking at roughly the end of the year, but it might also be early next year.

Thanks for the encouraging words! Hope you're also staying safe!

Sure is! :)

(☞ﾟ∀ﾟ)☞

Yep, we certainly are still working on it, especially during the lockdown!

Thanks for your supporting comment! It's definitely tough having to tell people they need to be patient, even though it's been a pretty long time.

Bannerlord is actually a pretty good example, it's taken them around 8 years and it's actually become a bit of a meme implying that it'll never get released. But, there it is!

While I personally haven't played it yet (no time...), the two of us working on Kinstrife actually met on the Mount & Blade forum and it's certainly been our initial motivation for getting started with this project.

So, yeah, thanks for your comment and I hope you'll stay tuned in :) Things are moving very quickly for us with Unity ECS and the new rendering pipeline.

Well, that was savage. It's not like we don't feel bad about this ourselves  :D

However, we're two people doing this in addition to earning living wages at the moment, so things are still progressing slower than we'd like. While we would like to quickly reach a point where we can focus on this project full-time, we do not want to sabotage the technical foundation of this project, which would bite us in the ass down the road. This is especially the case because we're self-taught game developers, so many of the previous prototypes - the pre-alpha build included - were not suitable as a foundation for a full-fledged game and were valuable learning experiences. Armed with this knowledge, we've spent the time since 2018 to build such a foundation, which is paying off handsomely now that we work on gameplay features again.

Alright, enough for this mini-rant - know that we're just as frustrated about not being able to show off cool new features or release new builds and that we're working our asses off to make that happen again soon!

We're starting a new development milestone this week where we combine our physics based collision & damage model with our new and vastly improved actor controller - that also includes armed combat!

We also appreciate your patience and sticking around with us! It really means a lot to us.

Woah, we're really happy to hear that! :D Rest assured, despite things having been quiet recently, we're still very much busy developing the game with all-new and exciting kickass technology! Including a weapon system that's much better than what we had started building for the preview build.

Great to hear! What fixed the issue for you?

Yup! We currently are busy with some contract work to pay the rent and after that is resumed, it's back to Kinstrife for us :)

Woops, looks like we missed that. Yep, that's right, the current release is unarmed combat only :)

You bet.

We currently port the project to the newest version of Unity (the game engine we use), set up a UI framework because UI development can be a huge time sing and of course work on campaign continues.

And we're working on it ;)

Hi! I took the liberty of replying on our forums :)

(1) Yep.

(2) In short: yep. Once we release on Steam, people who got the game on itch will receive steam keys.

Thanks! That's very encouraging to hear :)

Unfortunately the payment options on itch don't seem to work out for some people, but we'll definitely be on steam in a couple of months! In the mean time, though, there will be a couple more dev logs, though, so we hope you stay tuned :)

We've been considering a discord channel, but we've noticed that our communications are spread out a lot already. We'd like to be able to respond quickly & as in depth as necessary, so we decided that narrowing things down on our forums will likely work best for us for now. If at some point a lot of people ask for an official discord channel, we'll certainly reconsider, though :)

Thanks for the elaborate feedback! It's super helpful and actually the main reason we are making the game available at such an early stage.

That feeling of 'hm, something doesn't add up quite right' yet about the flow of things is something we want to balance out with feedback from the community. As you mentioned some issues with the input system - maybe that could be the 'missing part' that kinda puts you 'out of the flow'? You're also right that there's not a lot in the way of tutorials or introductions - this is something we want to tackle soon. We have not done so, however, because we haven't settled on a control scheme yet. This is a topic we've put a lot of consideration into - one of the things we've decided was that unarmed and armed controls are going to be different. This also ties in with your observation that there only seem to be ~four moves: This is actually due to the fact that there are only really three types of different boxing attacks - straights, upper cuts and hooks. They may target different body targets and be executed with either hand, and their angle may also change slightly. But they are generally limited to pretty narrow angle ranges that also do not really transition very fluidly. This is of course because we for now take grappling, throws, choking, clinching and elbows out of the equation.
Contrast this with weapons combat, where swings can transition fluidly in the upper 240° - which you can actually do with our armed combat. That is one part of the question why we do not adopt the same attack scheme like M&B. Another is - we do not like essentially just 'watching' attacks unfold after the 'charge' was 'released' in M&B. It creates a disconnect between what is happening on the screen and what you actually do/control as the player.  Another issue is that it causes a delay to attacks. We instead work with a 'guard' system - think about the 'charged' state in M&B, e. g. a raised arm, ready to strike. Actors would mostly be in a 'guard' state that allows for very quick strikes from that position, but also telegraphs the angle. Strikes from vastly different angles take longer in contrast. It's all very early, but there's been great progress. You can see a gif of it in action here: https://twitter.com/KinstrifeGame/status/1034078220918943744

By the way, have you explored the different attack control schemes (e. g. drag & release etc.) yet? Any thoughts on that?

Regarding footwork - Do you mean general combat movement or how footwork aligns with attacks? The former is actually because we currently do not have proper animations for combat locomotion. You'd be surprised, but the majority of combat locomotion uses crossed feet... Which can be especially fatal with physics based combat and tripping ;) It's very high on our list of graphics-related things we want to get replaced, though!

As for speed - that's a good question and may even be up to personal taste in games.  As you said, reactions in real-life are very instinctual - trying to put up one's hands to protect the face is a super important instinct. But also reactions like 'uh oh, I should probably duck now and avoid that hook' are very instict-based - which is not an issue in real-life because that very easily and naturally translates to movement of the body. But with games, it has to go the route of remapping that to a game control scheme and clicking buttons. There's certainly going to be a noticeable delay and it's something we need to keep in mind.

Again, thanks for the elaborate feedback and we're super happy to have discussions like that! But for the sake of posterity & overview, we'd love to bundle discussions like these over on our forums. So it'd be great if we could carry on there :)

EDIT: Woops, just saw you've already signed up and posted there :)

Hey there!

Sorry for having missed your comment :( We're very glad that our dev logs and updates transport the passion and time investment we're putting into this project! We hope you've enjoyed the alpha and will be joining us along for the ride :)

Hey there!

Thanks for the encouraging feedback, it means a lot to us :)

We shipped a lot of performance optimizations in the last update, so things should be running a lot smoother. Combat speed is a tricky thing to balance. We're convinced it needs to be a bit slower than in real life to offset the reaction penalty you have because of the additional input layer (think keyboard & mouse input.) Another thing to consider is that movement has 'weight' in our game, so it's not possible to cancel an attack and immediately blocked. As you said, planning ahead is an important aspect there. However, this poses another difficulty by itself, because with physics, there's very emergent and dynamic gameplay which is even very hard for us as developers to predict and plan ahead for.

All in all, these are things we want to balance based on feedback in the community. We are also in the middle of setting up infrastructure that allows modding, so people can also directly change some of the physics and weapon stats by themselves to see what they like best.

Hey there!

Quite frankly, we do not necessarily see it as selling the game at this point, it's more about getting people on board early. We'd like to reward those who stick around with us for the majority of development, after all :)

We certainly are inspired by Mount&Blade! Funnily enough, we met on the game's forums and also modded that game. We have also clocked in dozens of hours in Exanima and are following its development with great interest as well.

lol nope.

On a more serious note:
We're still in the middle of figuring out how to go about this whole public communication thing. We're still very much behind this project (as our response rate may indicate) - we're just having a hard time communicating that progress. Since we've been developing in 'seclusion' for so long, we still need to find a good groove to keep you guys in the loop without diverting too much time from actual development. We first thought streams would be a good idea as well as video dev logs. We then found authoring those too time intensive, considering that we have to, you know, develop a game :P We then scrapped the video production mid-process and decided it's better to keep it for major updates.

We realise we've done a pretty poor job at that since the release, so we've started opening up more to our patreon backers recently, posting less 'filtered'/scripted dev upgrades. We'll round them up and turn them into an official update soon. And cut us some slack, we're still new to this whole PR thing :D

We have our first devlog scheduled for the next few days that will shed light on the hows and whats of the release!