Kingdom & Command: developments, thoughts and feelings

Hey everyone, Charles here, and I want to tell you about my personal thoughts about Kingdom & Command, and, of course, where it is in terms of development.

My thoughts on the game

In the past few weeks we've been running a playtest, and it's been a lot of fun. It's our longest playtest yet, and I've discovered that in addition to being a game, it's essentially writing a short story together. Just like game of D&D is creating and experiencing a story together,  this is writing one together.

It suits Arthur and me well, given that we're both writers (or at least like to think of ourselves as such!), and world creators in RPG games. Both of us have laughed, gasped and teared up from this game.

Developments on the game

The game is meant to be played by letters. However, to speed up playtesting, we decided to play this game by email. We will faithfully report below what we learned from this, but we nevertheless suggest playing by letters for the physical elements, explained in the first bullet point:

• The game plays perfectly via email instead of letters. Although one cannot use wax seals, letter folding or tea stained paper, the game retains all of the drama and story-based elements, which is the core part of the game.
• Just like with letters, swapping drawings is still totally doable. In fact, it means we could have one "master file" of a map that we exchanged with each letter, and here it is:

Behold! The island of Alamat!
(Or, including my favourite part, the mountains: "AAAAAAAALAMAT!")

• As well as being fun, drawing maps is an indispensable tool for allaying misunderstandings of where things are, so we include a section on it in the book:

Continuing with what we learned:
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• A "Stuff Tracker" is useful for - you guessed it - keeping track of stuff in the game. As with the map, both Arthur and I would add it to with each letter and send it back and forth:
  

• If we played the game with letters, we might each have our personal Stuff Trackers, and instead of exchanging one file, we might write what we call explanatory letters:

• Although playing by email, sending each other drawings was easy, just with the added step of attaching a picture to the email.

You can see I was destined to rival Rembrandt.
Lucky for him I prefer writing.

• Lastly, we decided to add a bit more content with the game with two new classes! Very exciting, if I do say so myself.
  
  These are the positions in the royal household that you can choose for your character. 

So what now?

What's next for the game? Not much:

• Commission a graphic designer for a front cover image.
• Finish off a few photographs for the book, just to spice it up, as with the images below.
• Edit in any desirable changes learned from our current playtest.
• Finish the playtest: just one letter left!

Oh, you're still here?...


Okay, I'll tell you one more thing about what makes this last letter special:

I'll be honest here, I'm a little frightened of how it might turn out. It's not just the end of a playtest game, but the end of a story.

Both Arthur and I have become invested in the lives and trials of characters we created together. Although I have creative license to direct the story and its ending, I believe fellow story writers can relate when I say that if a character becomes alive enough, they are no longer in your control.

I don't know how the story ends, but regardless, I adore the feeling of creating a vivid world, and I want to know how it turns out, even if I myself am the one to write it, and this is the feeling I want to share with the players of this game.