The team behind Krunker, a free-to-play competitive FPS, has revealed they faced quite a few ‘big challenges’ when working on the game’s just-released Season 9 update. Speaking to FRVR, the devs highlighted the balancing act they need to go through each time a new season comes to the game – juggling player feedback with what is feasible with an eight-year-old engine.
“There are quite a few big challenges in developing seasons for Krunker in general, and season 9 is no different,” they said. “The first challenge is creating and handling all the skins that we need to import into the game, given we have now over 8000 different items. We will be revealing more about skin making to the players soon.
“There are also technical challenges like keeping the engine updated to the latest versions of the rendering framework to provide the best performance for the players, and improving the overall quality of the code for the developers themselves. And finally, but not less important, knowing where to take Krunker in general for the benefit of the community, and dealing with what the players want versus what is feasible to do vs maintaining a good quality game.”
They added: “That one thing we will always struggle with is the fact that krunker has a lot of communities within it, such as map making, trading, competitive, speed running, and it’s not feasible for us to deliver something that everyone wants, so whilst we try our best for the community, we understand there will be people left out on each season and we’re trying to navigate that better.”
During Krunker’s lifespan player numbers have, unsurprisingly, fluctuated. The devs are hopeful that with Season 9 they’re able to re-engage those who haven’t played Krunker in a while and are ‘always looking’ for player feedback to improve the game. “We always trying to re-engage and bring back players, we focused on some features that were asked by the community like including Krunkies in direct trades, as well as general improvements to Ranked based on community feedback,” they said.
“We always trying to re-engage and bring back players”
The Krunker dev team
“We are always looking for community feedback, and we have been doing some big surveys for quite a while now, and we also started to include some in-game surveys to prompt players on specific issues about the game in real time, and understand what we should work on next. Our community manager (Leo) also collects feedback via community servers that get thousands of responses, that drives a lot of what gets worked on too, it’s not just in game polls.”
Based on one of those in-game surveys, the team revealed they’re going to be focusing on progression within the game as well as ‘social interactions’ with clans. The devs also said that while the game is compatible with mobile, the focus right now is on web and desktop.
“This is what the game was designed for and where we want to grow primarily, since our community is majority desktop players,” they said. “We have the advantage (and the disadvantage) of the game being able to just be accessible through Web in a few seconds, which there’s no barrier of entry to go play a round of Krunker.”
