Gordon/Love Letter to Kingdom Two Crowns

Dear Monarchs,

Two years ago, we released Kingdom Two Crowns. A super ambitious project that took so much energy from us to create but has given more back to us than we feel we deserve. It was a crazy journey, with many awesome people involved, all of whom have helped carry the load over the years. And its phenomenal teams at Raw Fury, Fury Studios, and Stumpy🐙Squid that continue to carry this amazing game, then and now. Without these awesome individuals, and all the ones from before, there’s just no way this game would exist. So, I’d like to take this moment to thank everyone that worked on Kingdom Two Crowns, in any capacity. You’re all amazingly talented and your passion and love is forever embodied in Kingdom Two Crowns. All of us who are still here right now, love you for all your contributions.

I’ll say an equal, actually an even bigger, thank you to our extraordinary community that has supported us over these past years. You’ve stuck by us and we’re tremendously grateful for your love and support. Your continued feedback and love for Kingdom Two Crowns is inspiring to us, a driving force for our continued efforts to make it even better.

Now, I’d like to take you on a trip down memory lane and share some of the highs, as well as some of the lows, of our Kingdom Two Crowns journey. How we’ve dug in to overcome the challenges and recognize the successes we’ve accomplished. So, what is that story? Well, let’s go back, waaaaaaay back!

Even before we released the first Kingdom back in 2015, coop play was a very early feature idea that we really wanted in the game. At that time however, it just wasn’t possible for us to do it since our team was tiny. We’re talking like, two–of–us tiny. About a year later, August 2016, we added Kingdom: New Lands to the world and people really enjoyed it, which was great to see. But those early discussions of co–op we had held always stuck with me. I loved the idea of a game like Kingdom being a shared experience, so I never let go of wanting to do it. Then, one day the Nintendo Switch launched, and that event really cemented my desire to make a co–op version of Kingdom.

After I pitched coop, our first thought was “let’s just do an expansion of New Lands and call is Kingdom: Two Crowns”. Notice the colon in the title there? Yeah, that disappeared later, but has its own story! Anyway, we set out with that idea in mind and even made a trailer for the launch week of the Switch, to have the game at their “Nintendo Switch Nindies Showcase”. And as you can see in that trailer, we presented it as exactly that: a coop expansion. As we dug deeper into the creation of our awesome co-op feature, and really tried to make it work, we started realizing that this would take more effort than we had thought and decided to go full speed on creating a fully new experience allowing us to really design the game around coop, instead of just adding coop on top. This paved the way to creating the Campaign mode to build a coop experience that was more forgiving, player two could hop in and out, allowed players to travel between multiple kingdoms, and when they lost their crown returning as an heir. Then we realized we wanted to explore new settings like Japan, the idea came up we should have themed challenges so keep the roguelike heritage of the original Kingdom, and so much more… inspiration flowed, and ideas came to us in a nearly endless stream! 😊

Our release date, December 11, 2018, was coming up fast though. We did our very best, working our hardest to get this amazing coop Kingdom game and all the other wonderful additions finished for release. And we did get it in, but not to the quality we had hoped. Players saw the potential, but we knew we had made some mistakes along the journey to release. When the game came out user reviews were harsh, but given what we already knew in our hearts they were fair. At first, we were crushed. We had tried, really tried, so hard to do our best. It was clear we had missed the mark. We decided, however, that it was absolutely not going to be the end of the road for us. So, we took in all the feedback, rolled up our sleeves, and went right back to work with one goal: we were going to improve this game and get it to the quality level we knew it could and should be.

Fast forward two years to today, and I really feel we’ve gotten close to achieving that. We released Challenge Islands that brought back roguelike crown loss in unique and cool themes to challenge our most hardened Monarchs. We then added a new setting “Dead Lands” that added abilities to rulers for the first time ever. Perhaps most importantly, we have made huge progress in fixing our online co–op. Following all this effort to improve Kingdom Two Crowns the user reviews show that you guys really appreciate our commitment so far – but we are pumped to show you what’s next. We think you’ll like it even more.

We’re still working hard on the game to bring new awesome features, and we’re absolutely still really focused on adding online co–op to Nintendo Switch (I know, we’re so sorry. It’s top of mind, always). More than that, we’re also creating even more new content for everyone to enjoy and excited to share this teaser image below.

From the bottom of our hearts, we thank you all again. Thank you for your tireless support throughout the years, it’s fantastic to have had you follow us as we’ve continued to grow and improve Kingdom. We’ll keep striving to be and do our very best for you, always.

We salute you all, the Monarchs of our Kingdom!

Sincerely yours,

Gordon Van Dyke

Design Director

**Originally published:**
11 December 2020, at
rawfury.com/love-letter-to-kingdom-two-crowns