beyond the horizon

Just released an update for Cute Knight Kingdom that adds some speed boosts for players who are highly impatient or have been grinding for days trying to get those last few endings. When flipped, the switch raises walk speed and allows you to skip through jobs and classes by button mashing.

Since that game has only just wrapped up, you can expect it will be a long while before there's a sequel. I have plenty of other ideas I want to pursue. Still, no harm in speculating. A long time back I joked that each entry in the series should expand the size of the gameworld, so therefore after Kingdom would come Empire, then World, then Galaxy...

What would be involved in Cute Knight Empire? I'm thinking that the empire is made up of several different states, each with strongly different national flavors. The Empress is old and has no heir. A number of young people are chosen from the various corners of the empire to be raised as potential heirs, then set loose to see what they can make of themselves. So there's this group of other people in your age range who are both your friends and your rivals, and none of you knows exactly what you're supposed to do to achieve your goal. You explore the Empire, probably with a lot of sea travel and pirates, raising your skills, gathering treasure, and so on, while occasionally crossing paths with the rest of your classmates who are doing the same thing.

Probably not going to do walkaround-style again. Been there, done that, time for something new. No, more likely each city will be more like PM4- a map with locations to click on. And when you go to a location, a background image and larger size characters on the screen like in a VN.

That means dungeons might go back to first-person perspective.

Of course, this is all complete speculation, I have no intention of even starting this for at least a year!