Kongregate News

Thanks for all the feedback we’ve received in the last few days. We’ve added some features based on your suggestions, let us know what you think! 1. Significantly increased card award chance, especially if you don’t have many cards. 2. Added ability to host a private match vs the player of your choice (use the host game button in the lobby) 3. Decreased turn timer to 30 seconds 4. Choosing starter cards is no longer required to play the game. 5. Bug fixes! Note: Kongai is NOT eligible for the contest, but the contest rankings are automatic so it will continue to appear in it.

Thanks for all the feedback we’ve received in the last few days. We’ve added some features based on your suggestions, let us know what you think! 1. Significantly increased card award chance, especially if you don’t have many cards. 2. Added ability to host a private match vs the player of your choice (use the host game button in the lobby) 3. Decreased turn timer to 30 seconds 4. Choosing starter cards is no longer required to play the game. 5. Bug fixes! Note: Kongai is NOT eligible for the contest, but the contest rankings are automatic so it will continue to appear in it.

Woohoo! After 18 months of off and on development Kongai launches tonight. So build your deck and practice your mindreading, you don't need an invite to play anymore. No Rickroll, we promise, just good clean (okay, somewhat scantily clad) multiplayer fun.

Kongregate is hiring! We're looking for a Lead QA Engineer and Rails Programmer. See our jobs page for details.

We added a couple of new things last night - most obvious is the scrolling goodness on the homepage. Instead of staring at the same featured game all week you can use the scrolly buttons to see lots of them. Look for more interesting things in there soon (he says mysteriously). AND, hell is about to freeze over. That's right, we talked to Satan and he's moving south. Because we have a release candidate for Kongai. We've been busy fixing bugs, improving the AI, and now we're almost ready to launch. Woot. - Jim

GemCraft was the winner of last week's contest on Kongregate for $250. The runners-up were Hedgehog Launch and Bowja the Ninja 2 (In Bigman's Compound) for $150 each.

We added a new games for your site feature on Kongregate. If you're a webmaster who would like to host or embed some of Kongregate's freely distributable sponsored games, check it out!

Arcane was the winner of last week's contest on Kongregate for $250. The runners-up were Typing Ninja Hunter and Gimme5Games presents "Swinging Ball" for $150 each.

Time.com released its list of the 50 best websites of 2008 yesterday, and Kongregate is currently bouncing around the top of the user-rating poll (check out our write-up and weigh in here).

At the time of this posting, Kongregate is currently at #3, beating out a lot of other really great sites, including Free Rice at #5. Apparently when given the choice between playing games for achievements and playing games to feed starving children, the answer is clear!

Mr. Bounce by Pixelate was the winner of last week's contest on Kongregate for $250. The runners-up were TBA 2 by ArmorGames and DayMare Town 2 by MateuszSkutnik for $150 each.

The week before that, Spellblazer by rapaxus was the winner for $250, followed by runners-up Hungry Blocks by cookiemonster55 and Square Team by mikeromero for $150 each.

And here are the monthly contest winners for May!

1st. Monsters' Den: Book of Dread
2nd. Platform Racing 2
3rd. Tactical Assassin 2
4th. Music Catch
5th. 6 Differences
6th. Chronotron
7th. Dungeon Defender
8th. Nano War
9th. Temple Guardian 2

That's $1500 for first, $1000 for second, $700 for third, $500 for fourth, and $250 for all the others. As usual, implementing our stats API is a requirement for winners to claim their prize.

Several weeks have passed since our last update -- we once again had to hold back a Kongai update somewhat while we worked on performance issues, but with big improvements this week in site speed and reliability, Kongai has been unleashed!

What's new:
* Ranked matches. These matches show your skill relative to other players, and is based on the ELO chess ranking system (and influenced by Bungie's system for Halo) where beating a player with a high skill level increases your level much more than beating one of the same or lower skill level.
* Server polls clients for status frequently to improve the experience when one player has a slow connection.
* A mute button the main menu. So please no comments: "1/5 needs mute button" :-D
* Your win/loss stats are shown on main menu.
* New players with 3 or more character cards can postpone picking starter cards.
* Quick Tips added to the Starter Card Selection screen with advice on picking cards and three suggested starter decks
* Quick Tips added to the Deck Builder
* Earn cards page explains how to earn cards
* Balance changes 1.6 seen here:http://sirlin.net/kongai-beta
* Many, many bug fixes: -Sacred Candle can no longer remove an innate ability -Leafy Trap is not sprung by enchanted attacks -Scroll of Inner Focus has no effect on 0 energy move -Cards no longer get stuck if clicked on during switch -Cornelius is immune to slow -Procs no longer do an extra turn of damage -Takes 55 energy to change range with Stoneheel Totem -Attack buttons update to reflect General's Insignia and Staff Strike -Chakkra Slash can't make Trueshot -1 Speed -If deck card killed with Gem of Souls equipped, deck card's innate ability stolen instead of active card -many other smaller fixes

What's coming soon:
* Improved AI for single-player/practice mode
* More bug fixes, keep the reports coming!
* Continued Balancing Thanks for all your help and feedback so far, pleas let us know what you think! We appreciate all your help so far.

UPDATE: We've resolved the issues with Bubble Tanks, and the original challenge has been restored. Sorry about the problems, everyone!

Due to technical difficulties, the Bubble Tanks segment of this week's challenge has been replaced with a task in rotaZion. We apologize for the site lag throughout the day; hopefully this will help clear things up!

Last week definitely broke some records on Kongregate. Music Catch beat through the stiff competition to claim the $250 weekly prize, while Tactical Assassin 2 and 6 Differences were the two runners-up for $150 each.

Dungeon Defender, Nano War, and The Several Journeys of Reemus are all tremendously worthy honorable mentions.

All six of these games could've easily claimed a top weekly prize on their own merits if they weren't so bunched together. Be sure to check them all out!

Monsters' Den: Book of Dread was the winner last week for $250. Temple Guardian 2 and DarkWarStrategy Chapter 1 were the two runners-up for $150 each.

Two weeks ago, Platform Racing 2 was the winner of the $250 weekly prize. Castle Crashing The Beard and Bowja the Ninja on Factory Island were the two runners-up for $150 each.

Last week, Chronotron was the $250 winner, and Music Bounce and Planet Defender were the two runners-up for $150 each.

And, of course, we have winners from the monthly contest in April to announce as well! Here they are:

1st. Sonny
2nd. Warlords: Call to Arms
3rd. Shift 2
4th. Super Crazy Guitar Maniac Deluxe 3
5th. Super Energy Apocalypse
6th. Kongai Launch
7th. Whiteboardwar
8th. Tank 2008
9th. You Have to Burn the Rope

However, on account of sheer awesomeness, Kongai Launch was again disqualified from the contests, bumping everyone up a notch and allowing the well-deserved Doeo to snag the 9th-place prize.

As usual, the breakdown is $1500 for first, $1000 for second, $700 for third, $500 for fourth, and $250 for everyone else. Implementation of our statistics API is a requirement for claiming contest winnings.

Thanks for your patience while we stopped progress on Kongai in order to work on the performance problems on the main Kongregate site. We moved to new servers last week, and now we've finally gotten a chance to release a fresh build of Kongai. What's new: * Levels * A 2% chance to win a card with every win * Improved animations * Music & sound effects (plus a mute button) * Lots of small interface improvements (instantly updating health and energy bars, same speed attack animations play at the same time, cards added to a deck in the deck builder are now flippable, attack type icons on attack buttons, etc.) * Interface bug fixes * Quick tips in-game for new players What's coming soon: * Fixes for most of the game logic bugs * Skill rankings and ranked matches * Improved AI for single-player/practice mode

Good news! We're finally ready to move to the new servers we've been talking about for a while. We should have more capacity immediately, and also be in a position to restructure some code to get even bigger improvements over the next few months. Hopefully chat lag and slow page loads will be a thing of the past. The corresponding bad news: the site will be down starting at 10pm Pacific Time Sunday, May 4th (early May 5th for most of you) for many hours. Our current expectation is that the transition will take about 6 hours, but with technology things can always go wrong.

Doeo was the winner last week for $250. Doodle Defender and Abstracta were the two runners-up for $150 each. Also, give Postal Panic a try. It's worthy of an honorable mention.

What a week! Super Crazy Guitar Maniac Deluxe 3 was the winner last week for $250. Shift 2 and Super Energy Apocalypse were the two runners-up for $150 each.

I’m sorry to announce this, but we’ve decided to stop letting people into the beta for the next couple of weeks. I expect you’ve all noticed that we’ve been having more frequent server problems/slowness in the last week after another spurt of traffic growth. We’re very close to moving to new servers with more capacity, and we’re all concentrating on getting everything working there and testing to make sure it’s as efficient as possible. In the meantime unfortunately Kongai is experiencing intermittent lag, which makes it less fun to play, and we haven’t yet put in the bug fixes and new features that we’re planning to add. So we’re going to put a hold on new players in the beta until we are in a better situation server-wise and can start updating Kongai again. Thanks for your patience!