Our hosts sit down with Thomas van den Berg, creator of the beloved Kingdom series, for an in-depth conversation about minimal strategy design, the golden age of Flash game development, and the philosophy behind prioritizing atmosphere and accessibility over mechanical complexity in strategy games.
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This episode explores the complete journey of Kingdom from Flash game prototype to genre-defining franchise, examining how creative constraints shaped its innovative side-scrolling strategy mechanics. Thomas discusses the challenges of following up indie success, his collaboration with composer Amos Roddy, design philosophies around diegetic UI and player discovery, and his upcoming projects including the tower defence game Garbage Country. The conversation covers the creative explosion of Flash game development, the evolution of mobile gaming, genre-blending in modern indie titles, and what makes strategy games engaging beyond their mechanical depth.
Critical Moves Podcast Episode 11 Show Notes
Episode Title: Thomas van den Berg on Kingdom’s Design Philosophy and the Flash Game Era
Hosts: Jack, Adam
Guest: Thomas van den Berg (Creator of Kingdom Classic, Kingdom New Lands)
Episode Length: ~83 minutes
Episode Summary
The eleventh episode of Critical Moves features an extensive interview with Thomas van den Berg, the creative mind behind Kingdom Classic and Kingdom New Lands. The conversation spans Thomas’s development history from Flash game beginnings through Kingdom’s surprise success to current projects, exploring design philosophies that prioritize aesthetic experience and player discovery over traditional strategy game complexity. Jack and Adam dive deep into topics including the creative environment of early 2000s Flash development, the intentional design constraints that made Kingdom’s minimalist approach successful, and how indie developers can balance creative vision with commercial viability in today’s crowded market.
From Flash Prototype to Franchise: Kingdom’s Origin Story
The Wild West of Flash Game Development
Thomas describes the Flash game era as a uniquely creative period in game development history, where accessibility for both developers and players created an explosion of experimental design. Flash provided a complete development environment where creators built everything from scratch, leading to innovative solutions unconstrained by engine conventions. The ease of sharing games through simple web links eliminated friction between creators and audiences, fostering rapid iteration and community feedback.
The Flash development community embraced open knowledge sharing, with developers freely exchanging programming techniques and design solutions. This collaborative environment contrasted with modern development’s competitive atmosphere, where developers often focus on survival in saturated markets rather than collective advancement. The introduction of Box2D physics engine spawned entire genres of physics-based games, demonstrating how accessible tools could catalyse creative movements.
Thomas’s early work in Flash, including the game Seed, explored dynamic foliage systems that would become recurring themes throughout his career. The technical limitations of Flash actually encouraged creative problem-solving, as developers had to optimize carefully to achieve acceptable performance on varied hardware.
Kingdom’s Design Philosophy: Minimalism Through Intention
Kingdom’s distinctive minimalist approach emerged from intentional design constraints rather than technical limitations. Thomas explains that accessibility remained paramount—players should immediately understand basic controls without overwhelming tutorial systems. The three-action control scheme (move left, move right, drop coin) provided instant clarity while concealing surprising strategic depth.
The design philosophy emphasized letting complexity emerge gradually through player discovery rather than frontloading explanation. This approach required trusting players to experiment and learn through experience, a design confidence that Thomas questions might be harder to maintain in current gaming culture where players expect immediate clarity about consequences and optimal strategies.
The decision to maintain this purity throughout Kingdom’s evolution required constant discipline. Adding traditional strategy game features like choosing building placement or unit composition would have increased strategic options but violated the core aesthetic of simplicity. Instead, the team mitigated design friction through careful number tweaking rather than fundamental system overhauls.
The Challenge of 2D Strategy Design
Developing strategy gameplay in two-dimensional side-scrolling perspective created unique challenges that don’t exist in traditional top-down strategy games. The fundamental question of whether units can occupy the same space immediately impacts all combat and movement systems. Kingdom’s solution—allowing unit overlap—created its own complications around combat resolution and tactical clarity.
The aesthetic priority of maintaining appropriately sized forest environments conflicted with optimal gameplay pacing. Thomas explains that wanting forests to feel expansive meant enemies required significant travel time to reach defensive walls, limiting potential mechanical complexity. Compressed spaces would enable tighter gameplay loops but sacrifice atmospheric immersion.
These constraints exemplify Kingdom’s consistent prioritization of aesthetic experience over mechanical optimization. Rather than redesigning around these limitations, the team accepted certain gameplay friction as acceptable costs for maintaining the game’s distinctive atmosphere and visual identity.
Aesthetic Strategy: A New Genre Definition
Prioritizing Vibes Over Mechanics
Jack introduces the term “aesthetic strategy” to describe games where atmosphere and presentation take precedence over mechanical depth—games that engage players through immersive environments and satisfying interactions rather than complex decision trees. Thomas embraces this framing, noting that strategy games have always attracted him partly through their visual atmosphere, citing Warcraft 3’s beautiful early campaign levels.
This design approach inverts traditional strategy game development priorities, where mechanics typically drive all other decisions. Instead, aesthetic strategy starts with desired player feelings and experiences, allowing mechanical systems to serve those goals even when optimization might suggest different approaches. The coin-dropping mechanic in Kingdom exemplifies this—mechanically limited but atmospherically perfect.
Thomas acknowledges that this approach naturally limits strategic depth compared to games that prioritize mechanical complexity. Players cannot choose building placement or unit composition, fundamental strategy game features. However, the benefit comes through maintaining conceptual purity and reducing cognitive overhead, allowing players to stay immersed rather than constantly evaluating abstract choices.
Diegetic Design and Immersion
The conversation explores diegetic design—presenting game information through world elements rather than separated UI layers. Thomas describes this as removing layers of abstraction that pull players out of immersive experiences. In Kingdom, the coin bag’s limited visual space directly represents the player’s current wealth rather than displaying numbers in UI elements.
This approach requires significantly more development effort than traditional UI implementation. Representing information spatially within game worlds imposes natural limitations—characters can only physically carry limited amounts, status effects must be visually communicated through character appearance, and spatial arrangements must remain readable without becoming cluttered.
Thomas notes that while diegetic design represents a “holy grail” for many developers, practical considerations often necessitate compromises. His current project Garbage Country incorporates more traditional UI elements than Kingdom because increased mechanical complexity demands clearer information presentation. The key becomes finding appropriate balance points between immersion and functionality.
The discussion acknowledges games that take diegetic design to extreme levels, like backpack systems where items exist as physical 3D objects. Thomas clarifies his interest lies less in showcasing technical achievement and more in reducing friction—keeping players engaged with core experience rather than constantly managing abstract information layers.
The Mobile Gaming Golden Age and Its Decline
Kingdom’s Multi-Platform Strategy
Kingdom’s availability across numerous platforms reflects both the game’s technical accessibility and strategic publishing decisions. The Flash-based origin meant the game could run on virtually any hardware, enabling ports to unusual platforms like Apple TV and Nvidia Shield. Thomas particularly enjoyed developing for Apple TV, which featured a unique remote control with touchpad enabling distinctive interactions like whip-cracking gestures to make the horse sprint.
The mobile version represented a particularly successful platform for Kingdom’s design philosophy. The one-finger control scheme translated perfectly to touchscreen interfaces, and the game’s pixel art maintained visual clarity on small screens. Adam’s experience playing Kingdom extensively during university lectures demonstrates the game’s suitability for mobile gaming’s interrupted, session-based play patterns.
Thomas reflects nostalgically on mobile gaming’s earlier premium game era, when developers could release complete experiences at fair prices without microtransaction pressure. The current mobile market’s dominance by free-to-play games with manipulative monetization represents a loss of that creative potential, despite mobile hardware becoming exponentially more powerful.
The conversation touches on negotiations for unusual platforms like airline entertainment systems, though these ultimately didn’t materialize. Such discussions reflect the opportunistic approach to platform availability that small teams could pursue when games ran efficiently on minimal hardware.
The Death of Premium Mobile Gaming
The shift from premium mobile experiences to free-to-play dominance represents a significant loss for game design creativity. Thomas expresses desire to return to an era valuing compact, complete experiences over endless engagement optimization, though he acknowledges current market realities make this unlikely. The paradox of increasingly powerful mobile hardware running increasingly simplistic games exemplifies misaligned technological and commercial incentives.
Adam notes regional differences in mobile gaming culture, with Asian markets maintaining more substantial mobile game experiences while Western markets largely abandoned them for casual puzzle games. This geographic divide suggests cultural rather than purely economic factors influence mobile gaming’s evolution.
The discussion contextualizes Kingdom’s mobile success as arriving during a transitional period when premium mobile games remained viable but were beginning to decline. This fortunate timing enabled the game to reach mobile audiences before market conditions would make similar releases commercially impractical.
Creative Constraints and Design Purity
Resisting Feature Creep
Thomas describes constant tension between maintaining Kingdom’s minimalist purity and pressures to add conventional strategy game features. The most obvious expansion would enable players to choose which buildings to construct at specific locations, but this would require fundamental redesign around that increased complexity. Instead, the team consistently chose numerical tweaking over systemic expansion.
This disciplined approach to scope management kept Kingdom conceptually coherent but necessarily limited strategic depth. Thomas acknowledges that many games inspired by Kingdom successfully expand in directions Kingdom avoided, like Thronefall’s tighter mechanical focus or other titles adding direct combat control. These alternatives demonstrate valid design paths Kingdom’s constraints prevented exploring.
The conversation reveals how aesthetic priorities created cascading limitations. Wanting appropriately sized forests meant accepting suboptimal enemy travel times. Maintaining immersive diegetic design meant forgoing clearer information presentation. Each choice reinforced Kingdom’s distinctive identity while closing off potential mechanical avenues.
Thomas reflects that this purity emerged partly from development naivety—simply following intuitive design instincts rather than systematic genre analysis. Kingdom succeeded by not overthinking, implementing obvious solutions without questioning whether they aligned with strategy game conventions. This unselfconscious approach paradoxically created something more distinctive than deliberate innovation might have produced.
The Value of Procedural Variation
Procedural generation provides crucial replayability while maintaining Kingdom’s discovery-focused design philosophy. Each island’s different layouts and resource distributions mean optimal strategies vary between playthroughs, preventing the game from becoming solved. This variability sustains player interest across multiple sessions without requiring massive content creation.
Thomas emphasizes the importance of unpredictable, emergent gameplay where even developers cannot predict exact outcomes. Physics systems, unit AI, and procedural elements combine to create situations that surprise everyone, maintaining engagement through novelty. This design philosophy extends to his multiplayer work and current projects, seeking systems that generate unexpected moments.
The discussion touches on how procedural generation enables compact development teams to create substantial content. Rather than hand-crafting hundreds of scenarios, developers can create rule systems that generate varied experiences. This efficiency particularly benefits indie developers with limited resources but ambitious scope.
Collaboration and Creative Partnership
Amos Roddy and the Kingdom Soundtrack
The collaboration with composer Amos Roddy represents an ideal creative partnership where artistic visions aligned without extensive direction. Amos approached Thomas after the game’s announcement, submitting demo tracks that immediately captured Kingdom’s intended emotional tone—nostalgic, melancholic, beautiful. The music required virtually no revision, instead shaping game development as Thomas built scenarios around specific tracks.
This reversed typical game music workflow, where composers score predetermined scenes. Instead, Amos’s rainy morning track inspired Kingdom’s rainy morning implementation, with gameplay serving the music rather than vice versa. This approach treats music as a standalone artistic product that games complement rather than background elements supporting predetermined experiences.
Thomas advocates for complete musical tracks rather than looped segments with dynamic intensity layers. While interactive music systems serve important functions in many games, Kingdom benefits from playing three-minute compositions start-to-finish, allowing moments of silence between tracks. This approach respects musical integrity while creating more varied atmospheric pacing.
The Kingdom soundtrack’s standalone success as a listenable album demonstrates this philosophy’s effectiveness. Thomas experiences genuine nostalgia hearing the music years later, triggering emotional memories of Kingdom’s development period. This enduring impact reflects how successful collaboration between complementary creative visions can exceed what either creator might achieve independently.
Finding Collaborators in the Internet Age
The conversation explores how internet connectivity transformed creative collaboration, enabling partnerships that geographic limitations previously prevented. Thomas found various collaborators through online channels, continuing this approach through recent years via Twitter. The accessibility of direct messaging enables creators to propose collaborations with minimal friction.
This democratization of networking contrasts with earlier entertainment industry models requiring geographic proximity or institutional connections. Gareth Coker’s discovery by Moon Studios on an internet forum, leading to composing Ori’s soundtrack and eventually Halo Infinite, exemplifies how online communities enable career-defining opportunities.
The Flash game era particularly exemplified this collaborative spirit, with developers freely sharing technical knowledge and design innovations. The widespread adoption of Box2D physics engine emerged from this open-source mentality, enabling entire genres of physics-based games through shared tools.
Thomas notes this collaborative culture has diminished somewhat as gaming markets became more competitive and saturated. Modern developers face greater pressure to differentiate and survive commercially, reducing emphasis on community knowledge-sharing. However, collaborative opportunities still exist for creators willing to reach out directly to potential partners.
Life After Kingdom: Pizza Possum and Cloud Gardens
Escaping the Kingdom Shadow
Following Kingdom’s success created both opportunities and pressures for Thomas’s subsequent projects. The financial cushion enabled continued development but didn’t provide permanent security, maintaining motivation to ship new games. More significantly, eight years working with pixel art knights and archers left Thomas creatively exhausted with those aesthetics, driving desire to explore different artistic and mechanical territories.
The decision to sell Kingdom to Raw Fury provided closure enabling fresh creative directions while creating self-imposed pressure to prove he could succeed with entirely different concepts. This pressure intensified when attempting nonviolent game design, a significant departure from Kingdom’s defensive combat focus.
Thomas reflects on the extended development period for Cloud Gardens, admitting to significant noodling without clear process or deadlines. This lack of structure enabled creative exploration but allowed insecurities to accumulate. The eventual success validated the experimentation but highlighted the psychological difficulty of unstructured development.
The conversation touches on unrealistic business expectations following surprise indie successes. Observers might expect developers to immediately replicate success with similar games, but creative sustainability often requires exploring different ideas and aesthetics, even if less commercially optimal.
Pizza Possum: Embracing Process
Pizza Possum emerged from deliberately inverting Thomas’s typical unstructured approach. Collaborating with fellow Berlin developer Freedom, they established a rigid process: one-to-two-week prototype followed by defined production timeline. This structure eliminated the anxiety of open-ended development, providing certainty about project scope and completion date.
The game’s six-to-eight-month development cycle demonstrated how process discipline enables efficient execution, though Thomas acknowledges this efficiency came at the cost of depth and iteration opportunities. Fixed timelines prevent going back to revise fundamental choices or adding substantial features that emerge during development.
Pizza Possum’s multiplayer focus reflected Thomas’s long-standing interest in social gaming experiences. He describes multiplayer as a “cheat code for fun”—even minimal mechanics become engaging through player interaction. This philosophy aligns with the current “friend slop” genre of cooperative games where social experience outweighs mechanical sophistication.
The project’s success proved Thomas could deliver complete games efficiently when following structured development methodology, contrasting with his typical exploratory approach. This experience influences his thinking about future projects, balancing creative freedom against the psychological and practical benefits of defined processes.
Current and Future Projects: Garbage Country
Tower Defense Meets Exploration
Thomas’s current project Garbage Country represents another evolution in his design philosophy, combining tower defence mechanics with open-world exploration in a post-apocalyptic setting. The game features driving mechanics providing the unpredictable physics-based interactions that Thomas values, creating emergent moments that surprise even developers.
The project’s development has been complicated by ambitions extending beyond initial scope. Thomas acknowledges pressure to include numerous mechanics and systems, creating exponentially increasing work as overlapping features require extensive integration. This scope expansion contrasts with Kingdom’s minimalist discipline, though Thomas maintains that aesthetic priorities still guide major decisions.
The comparison to titles like Dredge and Sable reveals how aesthetic strategy evolves when accepting greater mechanical complexity. These games maintain atmospheric priority while incorporating more substantial gameplay systems than Kingdom’s purist approach allowed. Thomas hopes to find similar balance, though admits to sometimes regretting the additional development burden.
Garbage Country continues Thomas’s interest in foliage and environmental aesthetics, though players will also engage with tower defence mechanics more complex than Kingdom’s passive defensive systems. The challenge becomes maintaining atmospheric cohesion while supporting mechanical depth that keeps players engaged across extended playtime.
Multiplayer Ambitions and Single-Player Reality
Thomas discusses his long-running interest in implementing multiplayer experiences, attempted in early Garbage Country prototypes before focusing on single-player. Multiplayer development presents unique challenges, particularly the inability to easily test systems in development flow states. This friction contrasts with single-player development where constant playtesting naturally integrates with programming work.
The success of Pizza Possum’s multiplayer demonstrated Thomas’s ability to execute social gaming experiences when properly scoped. However, Garbage Country’s complexity makes multiplayer integration significantly more challenging than Pizza Possum’s focused design. The decision to prioritize single-player reflects pragmatic acknowledgment of resource limitations and development realities.
Thomas expresses ongoing fascination with multiplayer’s capacity to create fun from minimal mechanics, noting how player interaction generates engagement that single-player mechanics struggle to match. This interest suggests future projects might return to multiplayer focus, potentially with lessons learned about structuring development to accommodate multiplayer’s unique requirements.
The Warcraft 3 Custom Game Legacy
Creative Breeding Grounds
The conversation explores Warcraft 3’s level editor as a crucial creative incubator comparable to Flash game development. Unlike starting from scratch in Unity, the editor provided complete strategy game infrastructure—units, pathfinding, targeting, damage systems—enabling creators to focus on rule design rather than technical implementation.
This accessibility enabled rapid experimentation with game rules and mechanics without requiring advanced programming knowledge. Creators could think in board game-like terms about unit interactions and victory conditions rather than getting mired in technical implementation details. The result was explosive creativity spawning genres like tower defence and MOBA that now dominate gaming.
Thomas fondly remembers various custom game types, particularly tower defence variants allowing maze construction and mini-game compilations like Uther Party featuring diverse challenges. The auto-battle games where players purchased units without directly controlling them particularly appealed to his interest in watching systems play out rather than executing mechanical actions.
The parallel between Warcraft 3 custom games and Flash development illustrates how accessible creation tools with sufficient built-in functionality catalyse creative movements. Modern game engines provide more powerful capabilities but require significantly more groundwork before creators can experiment with novel game rules, potentially explaining why fewer revolutionary design innovations emerge despite superior technology.
The Missing Strategy Game Toolkit
Thomas expresses desire for modern equivalents to Warcraft 3’s editor—comprehensive strategy game toolkits enabling rapid prototyping without rebuilding fundamental systems. Unity and Unreal provide powerful general-purpose engines but lack strategy-specific infrastructure, requiring developers to implement pathfinding, unit behavior, damage calculations, and numerous other systems before experimenting with actual strategy design.
This gap particularly impacts indie developers attempting strategy games with limited resources. The technical overhead of creating functional strategy game foundations before adding unique mechanics creates enormous barriers to entry, potentially explaining strategy gaming’s relative stagnation compared to genres with more accessible development paths.
The absence of such tools also impacts creative diversity, as developers who successfully navigate technical challenges often produce functionally similar games. Shared technical solutions lead to convergent design, whereas providing strategy infrastructure as starting points might enable more varied mechanical experimentation.
Industry Trends and Market Realities
The Saturated Steam Market
The discussion acknowledges dramatically changed market conditions since Kingdom’s release, with hundreds of games launching daily on Steam compared to dozens when Kingdom arrived. This saturation creates discoverability challenges where quality alone doesn’t guarantee commercial success, requiring developers to consider marketing and positioning alongside pure creative vision.
Thomas reflects on Kingdom’s fortunate timing, arriving when indie game communities remained small enough that developers knew each other and shared information freely. This collaborative environment contrasted with current competitive atmosphere where developers focus on survival strategies and protecting competitive advantages rather than collective advancement.
The conversation notes how current market pressures might prevent something like Kingdom from succeeding if released today. The game’s slow burn revelation of mechanics and patient pacing might struggle against modern expectations for immediate hook and clear value propositions. Player tolerance for ambiguity and self-discovery may have diminished as options proliferated.
Platform Evolution and Accessibility
The comparison between Flash game accessibility and modern distribution reveals how reduced friction paradoxically coexisted with limited reach. Flash games required no installation and played in browsers with single clicks, but lacked discoverability infrastructure and monetization support. Modern platforms like itch.io and Steam provide better discovery and payment processing but introduce installation friction.
Thomas notes that even minor additional steps—downloading launchers, installing games, creating accounts—significantly reduce conversion rates compared to Flash’s instant accessibility. This friction particularly impacts experimental or unconventional games where players’ commitment levels may be lower, potentially explaining why safer, more conventional designs dominate modern indie gaming.
The death of Flash and absence of comparable successors for browser-based gaming represents genuine loss of accessible creative playground. While HTML5 enables browser games technically, the ecosystem surrounding Flash—aggregator sites, easy sharing, consistent performance expectations—never successfully transitioned to new technologies.
Design Philosophy and Player Psychology
Discovery vs. Clarity
A central tension throughout the conversation concerns balancing player discovery with clear communication about mechanics and consequences. Kingdom deliberately withholds explicit explanation, trusting players to experiment and learn through experience. Thomas questions whether contemporary gaming culture maintains patience for this approach, given how players now access comprehensive wikis and guides rather than self-discovering systems.
This shift potentially reflects both market saturation and community connectivity. With limited gaming options, players once invested time understanding individual games. Now, with thousands of alternatives, games must immediately demonstrate value or face abandonment. Additionally, comprehensive online resources mean mystery mechanics become optimization puzzles where players seek optimal solutions rather than personal discovery.
Thomas acknowledges designing with more explicit communication in current projects, pre-empting player confusion rather than embracing it as Kingdom did. This evolution reflects both market realities and personal development maturity—understanding player psychology more thoroughly and designing proactively rather than assuming players will persist through confusion.
The conversation notes that some communities, particularly around Discord and social gaming, might actually enable greater tolerance for ambiguity through collective problem-solving. Players who would abandon unclear systems individually might persist when experiencing them socially, sharing discoveries and collectively building understanding.
Sandbox Mechanics and Emergent Gameplay
Jack identifies sandbox elements as crucial to games like Kingdom succeeding despite mechanical simplicity. The physically simulated coins creating unpredictable interactions, the environmental systems enabling varied scenarios, and the AI creating organic situations combine to generate novelty even for experienced players who understand underlying systems.
Thomas strongly agrees, emphasizing his consistent prioritization of mechanics surprising him during development. Physics systems, overlapping simulations, and capable AI create genuinely unpredictable outcomes rather than deterministic scenarios where developers know exactly what will happen. This unpredictability maintains engagement for both players and creators.
The discussion connects this philosophy to multiplayer “friend slop” games where physics and player interaction generate entertainment from minimal structured content. These games succeed by creating sandboxes for emergent moments rather than carefully scripted experiences, similar to Kingdom’s approach of establishing systems and letting unpredictable interactions emerge.
Thomas notes how efficient this approach can be for development—creating robust simulation systems generates substantial experiential variety without requiring massive content creation. This efficiency particularly benefits indie developers with limited resources but ambitious scope goals.
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Episode Verdict
This episode provides invaluable insights into the design philosophy behind one of indie gaming’s most distinctive success stories. Thomas van den Berg’s willingness to discuss both Kingdom’s intentional design choices and its accidental successes offers rare honesty about creative development processes. His reflections on the Flash game era contextualize how technological and cultural conditions enabled creative experimentation that current market realities might not support. The conversation successfully balances specific Kingdom discussion with broader examination of aesthetic priority, minimalist design, and how indie developers navigate between creative vision and commercial viability. For Kingdom fans, the behind-the-scenes development stories and design rationale provide satisfying context for beloved mechanics. For developers, Thomas’s candid discussion of challenges, doubts, and evolution across projects offers genuinely useful perspectives on sustainable creative careers beyond initial successes.
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