Dear Monarchs, when we set out to make Kingdom Two Crowns it naturally evolved and changed as the game’s core concept of a Campaign and Coop developed and inspired us to achieve more. Over these years we lost a colon in the title and gained online Coop for all the platforms, except one, our beloved Nintendo Switch. Many of you might even remember we announced Kingdom Two Crowns during Nintendo’s launch event for the Switch in March 2017. So, this platform is near and dear to us. Getting to the point, online is still coming to Nintendo Switch, but has taken longer than we expected (slightly more technical details below). We do appreciate all your patience on this, and we believe the wait will be worth it.
During development we went with UNET for the NAT Punch-through solution, this is necessary for peer to peer player hosting that we use. During our development Nintendo made its online solution available to developers. Since we didn’t expect it to be ready that soon we weren’t prepared to support another online platform. Fast-forward some months and Unity announces they will stop supporting UNET (they extended support a year, but that didn’t help us sadly) and Nintendo Switch Online requires a version of Unity that no longer supports UNET. Because of these changes out of our control we were left with several choices:
Build NAT Punch-through support for one platform and leave the others on UNET. This was a fast and dirty solution but makes long-term support messy with risk of even bigger hidden issues. Likely the quickest solution to get online for Switch, but long term not sustainable.
Move all platforms to a unified solution that has more features and options for us to not only add new platforms, but also continue supporting the game. This would take longer, require more work, but builds a better long-term path.
Cancel online for Nintendo Switch. While an option, it was never discussed and is clearly a lose/lose for everyone.
I think for many of us reading this, the answer is clearly “2”, and that’s what we’ve done. In this process we also had to accept our team was too small and decided to work with a more experienced partner. We’ve done that now and things are started, which is awesome!
While this isn’t the best news, I hope it adds context to why this delay happened and knowing it’s still actively being developed brings some solace. We love our community dearly and appreciate your patience and understanding more than we could ever express with simple words!
Your Humble Worker Citizen,
Gordon Van Dyke