Another week, another update! For this patch batch we've done some work on star ratings, growables, gifting fixes, among other tweaks. Have a lovely rest of your weekend folks and we'll see ya again soon!
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🔷 Setup for most growables and fish to now reach higher star ratings ᅠᅠ• Across current items, approximately 140 of 260 possible extra stars are obtainable through certain conditions being met ᅠᅠ• Future builds will make more stars obtainable and give players more guidance on how to obtain them! 🔶 Growable indicators have had further UI refinement 🔶 Old crops updated to draw the new versions 🔶 Various minor tweaks to presentation across the UI's 🔶 Auctions, races, and markets drawn on the local map when visible and text for offscreen exits should be a bit more visible now 🔶 After getting a skill there's an option to jump back to gifting state for the next skill 🔶 New sound effects for star rating in gifting ❌ Refined hitbox for hitting trees/bushes with slingshot and no XP from repeated hits! ❌ Gifting inaccessible if left on a blank star rating tab ❌ Goddess offering gets greyed out if left on a blank star rating tab ❌ Clicking a star rating can gift an item for the NPC gifting screen ❌ Pig riding animation alignment and tool holding positions improved ❌ Fix out of hours crash with animal racing while riding a pig ➕ Mostly hidden work on item traits setup for over 70 items ᅠᅠ• Some of these will affect the player in the current build and the next build will expand this much further ➕ Hidden work on customisation for player skin tones which should be available in the next build
🔷Additionᅠᅠ🔶Improvementᅠᅠ❌Fixᅠᅠ➕Internal ᅠ
Game Update - v0.1.18.2548
Today's patch notes include some presentation improvements as well as a few balance tweaks, among other things. Cheers!
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🔷 Various level adjustments across the Vale haven 🔷 Status info and Goddess offering and Inventory have had additional visual presentation polish 🔷 Slight rebalancing of goddess offering for one and three star items to only affect one of the adjacent Goddesses ᅠᅠ• There's a help screen via F1 key or clicking the left stick on controller which describes the current balance of points in case it changes further 🔷 Various minor tweaks to presentation across many UI's 🔷 Noticeboard showing on the local map 🔷 Tweaks to the pixel font to be hopefully even clearer 🔷 Tweak to display adult hero on the load save screen if applicable 🔷 Only the first unexpected gift per day to an NPC affects their friendship rating as intended ᅠᅠ• Favours and noticeboard tasks will still allow more friendship rating to be obtained per day 🔷 Poop effects adjusted ❌ Fix for workers not working when loading from a save if the shop is not visited ❌ Fix for bug where certain items weren't drag as mappable ❌ Fix for larder not being accessible if you have no items but there are items in it ❌ Fix for crash using triggers on gifting where no categories are present
🔷Additionᅠᅠ🔶Improvementᅠᅠ❌Fixᅠᅠ➕Internal ᅠ
Game Update - v0.1.18.2540
Here's the latest batch of changes that we recently pushed out to all players. Of particular note is the new Goddess offering system which we've recently reworked. As always, don't hesitate to let us know how you get on with these changes in the community. Cheers!
Cʜᴀɴɢᴇʟᴏɢ
🔷 Goddess offering system reworked ᅠᅠ• Now happens on the Solsday, the last day of each week, and has had a complete change of points setup to use star ratings and UI to be clearer of the consequences ᅠᅠ• Missing weeks will start to stack up random negative effects. 🔷 Local map has several more bits of information labelled on the map with icons 🔷 Status info has a bit of extra info to help with discovered growables and when they'll replenish 🔶 Level tweaks to Tir Na Nog and Mellowbrook 🔶 Improvements for targeting priorities so growables are above NPC interact, object interacts are above follower interacts, and the interact sign should clearly show when it is the priority 🔶 More goddess boons/jinxes setup where possible 🔶 Shop's transaction view now includes the date 🔶 Shops have a weekly mail summarising what has happened 🔶 Gifts subcategory populated in the inventory with some stuff from the Other subcategory 🔶 Secret info limited per NPC per season 🔶 Blacksmith shops on buying show what you'll get on buying them (the exact items are still due a balance pass) 🔶 More reputation effects are tracked in the transaction log to make it easier to pinpoint reputation losses 🔶 Presentation tweaks for filtering based on star rating 🔶 Up/down can be used on buying screen when there are sufficient items 🔶 Keyboard input boxes converted where newer gamepad boxes are used 🔶 Glutton trough handles star rating items and doesn't auto add item on interacting ❌ Fix for inventory where select dragging an item to use/discard would actually lead to selecting and using/discarding a different item the mouse went past ❌ Fix for workers not always using their current sprite if they had aged ❌ Fix for crash on gossip with NPC with no other NPC's of that region to gossip about ❌ Fix for transaction when you run out of money paying staff not being included correctly ❌ Fix for Silver Skipper icon ❌ Fast travel to Naida's Glory was going to the level start rather than statue ❌ Calendar should only show birthday rather than age if you don't know that info for NPC's ❌ Wheat now usable for baking as per the recipe ❌ Pet up for sale won't appear outside the shop level if it was following ❌ Fix for some tasks not being creatable ❌ Fix for crash when trying to view inaccessible NPC's during the first season ❌ Removing last task in the list doesn't select previous one ❌ NPC's for lemonade stand and racing weren't set up correctly with their stats ❌ Adjustment for pig riding collision that should make interactables targetable as intended ❌ NPC's don't teleport to appear at their beds just after waking in their routine ❌ NPC's don't start moving at 6 in the morning while targeted
🔷Additionᅠᅠ🔶Improvementᅠᅠ❌Fixᅠᅠ➕Internal ᅠ
Game Update - v0.1.18.2520
Our carrier pigs accidentally forgot to post this changelog a few weeks ago! They have been turned into bacon accordingly. (Actually, Matt was the one who forgot to post it. He's been punished by a week without bacon accordingly.)
Cʜᴀɴɢᴇʟᴏɢ
🔷 Ash and Boots Winter now age, making Ash eligible for dating after he reaches adulthood 🔶 Heat/cool range for blacksmith is more challenging while matching better with the onscreen gauges 🔶 Some materials for blacksmith can have moving heat/cool targets to hit 🔶 Noticeboard's 'big requests' limited so they will only show up based on how many active big requests you have (typically less than 6 depending on the type) 🔶 Books now split into 3 subcategories 🔶 Various level fixes 🔶 Updated map screens for most of Summerdown 🔶 Partner gathering UI has slight tweaks to have a bar for stamina once active and footsteps to show it is working (progress only occurs in game hours while the menu is not active) 🔶 Selling a blacksmith shop will give you a percentage rate for any shelf items and return ore to the player 🔶 Selling the goods store will give the items from the store back to the player 🔶 Tweaked presentation of the inventory subcategories ❌ Crash when swapping to selling the pig you are riding ❌ Properly preventing buying more than 3 of each animal type in the auction ❌ Fix for some white pixels in certain grass sprites ❌ Fix for gamepad not handling shop closing with staff correctly ❌ Fix for handling shop closing where it wouldn't close again after already sending the workers home ❌ Fix for trader intro repeating incorrectly based on the player's location
🔷Additionᅠᅠ🔶Improvementᅠᅠ❌Fixᅠᅠ➕Internal ᅠ
The PixelCount Post - Issue #79
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It's been a while since our last issue of The PixelCount Post, but we're back and ready to give you more short updates on how things are going here on the team. You may've caught our most recent monthly progress report which included some new lovely bits and improvements, such as adding the oh-so-important feature: poop.
Once completing this last monthly update, we turned our attention to tweaking the Goddess offerings setup (which Neal talks more about below) as well as putting together our final "must haves" list for the relationship features. There's so many moving parts to how relationships are handled in the game (be it romantic or otherwise) that we're now at the point where we need to start focusing on just the absolute most critical parts of that feature set. Which isn't to say more relationship features or polish won't come further down the road (they most assuredly will), rather this will help us prioritize the most important bits so we can get them in game rather than falling into that tempting but endless loop of perpetually working on and polishing a thing over and over.
In other news, Gary continues toiling away at making more and more aging art for the world's characters. No doubt it'll make for an impressive art collection by the end of it all. Weekes, our environment artist, has also been making some new tree types to adorn future regions of the game. As for design, Charlie's been working through design docs closely with Neal. Meanwhile, Matt is diving back into production-focused work and helping put some new things in place to help the team stay more updated with each other and to minimize workflow bottlenecks. Naturally, Tice is still putting out lovely bits of audio, be it SFX or music, though he's away from the computer this week and so you'll not see his usual entry for this week's Post.
Meanwhile, the world has continued to have its hands full with everything going on which, thankfully, has had minimal impact on our already remote team. Though, as with anything, the situation has still presented its unique challenges for us but we're grateful that we've been able to keep our nose to the proverbial grindstone regardless as we continue working on this game. We hope you're all managing well circumstances considered and welcome you to enjoy this brief distraction of developer ramblings below. Cheers!
Strange times and stranger sleep patterns. Vivid dreams and overeating. But enough about life in Quill...
Trying to sum up what I have been doing since the last post is like trying to catch flies with a straw. The usual fixing, tweaks, prettying, and rearranging. Then the design docs and finalising this, that, and the other. Writing tons of dialogue for various situations and playtesting the game. Oh...I just caught a fly with this straw.
Whilst playing the game one night I realised something: I wasn't testing the new features and was compulsively doing anything but that. And lo it came to pass that the gameplay was really starting to solidify and emerge. Playing also highlights just what is needed next - NPC stories, the next part of the main story, more NPC reactions, recipes, star ratings working, and so on. So many things but so little Neal!
It has been great to see the positivity and continued support and we often pinch ourselves that we have such a thing. So stay safe and keep the Kynseed flame burning, because there is great stuff to come!
It's been a while since last writing a post so will have to see how long this one becomes, though I will try to rein it in! The last month has seen a continued adjustment in routine due to the lockdown. For the most part it hasn't had a great effect on the development work because of working remotely already but there's still some unavoidable ones and a difference between doing something knowing you could do differently and being forced to do something the one way. Development has switched paces a bit from the last update where there were several new features like animal poop, partner gathering setup, and family secret boxes to working more on improving the existing setup as we aim to complete the relationship update work.
At slight odds to that I have spent quite a bit of the last two weeks working on revamping the goddess offering setup. This was a system that had been due an update because it didn't feel exactly right ingame. We've been trying a new process for this kind of work where there is more of a flow between the design and art completing their work before the code is worked on with the aim of reducing the churn when it gets into code that can leave some aspects feeling unfinished (as by the time design/art catch up I'll have moved on to something else). I think this went quite well and hopefully the results (visible soon in the current build) will show a more sturdy setup. That's not to say there isn't still room for improvement though, as there was still some back and forth due to not having a code prototype to look over until after design and art were completed.
The other curious aspect in this case is considering the "connectedness" that the feature had to the game. Initially when we decided to work on this I was expecting it would only take a week at most and that it seemed relatively self contained but as it started to come together it seemed to link with more and more bits! In particular, star ratings and the inventory setup but also thinking about the ingame economy and the effects of offerings which had only been half implemented before. It felt a bit like untangling a bunch of wires to ensure a neater setup.
There's a lot of that untangling work ahead for me to do on this relationship update as I'm determined to start pushing the quality bar higher again with the code. The size and relentless pull of this project has stretched the code work quite thin I've found lately but little by little I've been able to begin to fix and improve on that. Noting down almost triple digits worth of potential improvements to process that will all continue to smooth out the work, I feel like I've started to identify ideas that would previously mostly just be on my mind but never go anywhere and in a way be quite frustrating. Now having written them down there's more of a sense of fun and enjoyment that during an hour where maybe I need a break from the typical grind on updates I can pick one, make things just that little bit better and be satisfied with that. Wishing everyone all the best!
It's been a curiously challenging past few weeks for me and mostly for reasons I can't quite put my finger on. To provide a bit of context, I live smack dab in the center of downtown Los Angeles which, when talking of current events, is the second most impacted city in the US (namely due to its very high population density). So it's not that surprising that the quarantine has been understandably taken very seriously here.
Thankfully though, as I'm sure I've mentioned before, we're no doubt luckier than most that our team situation here at PixelCount was minimally impacted due to the fact that we all worked remotely from home anyway. Plus, I'm very fortunate that a city the size of LA has a robust offering of (relatively) inexpensive delivery services in place. So ranging from groceries to food to even alcohol, pretty much anything you'd want can be delivered to your doorstep with contactless delivery. (Which is to say the delivery person leaves the items at your door, knocks, and then promptly departs.)
So I really feel I don't have much room to complain, all things considered. Yet I did detect in myself a bit of a dip in my mood and overall gumption for things in the past few weeks. The conclusion I came to in order to explain this was when it suddenly occurred to me that I had not step foot outside my front door, nor seen another human, for over 5 weeks in a row now. (To go outside in my building requires walking down a long hall, riding an elevator down, walking through a shared lobby door, and then walking through yet another shared community gate which then steps right out onto the sidewalks of downtown LA. Which is to say, I've been very fastidious in leaving my building as little as possible.)
It seems a somewhat petty thing to gripe about I suppose, but if there is one thing I know about myself it's that I'm solar powered and social powered. As anyone with even a modicum of insightfulness has probably detected when reading these devlogs, I'm a very chatty people person. *broadly gestures at his typical wall-o-texts*
Getting outside on occasion and spending time with others is one of the chief ways that I restore my creative energies. Don't get me wrong, my situation isn't that bad really. It's always important to keep perspective in mind and, as that old adage goes, this too shall pass. Yet all the same, I couldn't help but notice the subtle impact its had on my overall productivity and creativity in general.
However, lest this update be an uncharacteristically gloomy update, I'd be remiss to mention the fact that this game's community has been such a source of positivity for me during this all. I think many folks (especially some game devs) have this notion that a game's community is simply the means to a public relations end. As though a game's community were just a cog in the marketing machine. I mean sure, there are tangible marketing benefits to game communities and they do help a great deal when it comes to word spreading and playtesting. But in danger of getting on one of my waxing poetic tangents, game communities are so much more.
To me they're like a support network too. They help celebrate the game's wins and they also help keep your perspective in place. They're also a great litmus test to know which direction the project should be heading, by either expressing doubt when choosing the wrong direction or by expressing encouragement when headed the right direction. Ultimately, though, it's just nice to have folks to hang out with and talk to and ask questions of during the long workdays. We're really lucky to have the kind of community we have and it spurs us all the more to hold up our side of that bargain by trying to do the best work we can. So a big thank you to all of you in the community, ranging from the daily chatters in our Discord to the occasional retweeters on our Twitter all the way to you most lurky of lurkers who still, I promise, are just as appreciated as anyone by being there in the shadows and following along on this journey of ours.
Lastly, to end with a more tangible devlog update from me, we've recently begun doing team-wide calls every few weeks which we're feeling has had a positive impact on keeping our entire team on the same page. It's an obvious thing, really, because of course doing team-wide calls would have a net positive benefit overall. Yet the tricky thing has always been that our time zones don't always overlap and that most of the calls we do are department-specific. If I need to talk with Tice about audio stuff, then we conduct a call between just the two of us. Or if Charlie and Neal and I need to discuss boring business-ey stuff, then we just do a call between us three. And so on.
In fact, on any given week it's not unusual for me to have 3 or 4 calls spanning a couple hours each. Even more if you count our weekly community voice chat on Discord, which I try to pop into as often as I can. (They're every Thursday around noon PST and all are welcome to drop by!) So it's not as though we don't have calls very often. Rather, we just don't have them with everyone very often.
This month, however, we've sought to change that a bit and are now doing team-wide calls more frequently. Interestingly, the benefit of these calls is not so much that we can more easily discuss work. As mentioned above, we have the smaller department-specific calls for those, which tend to be more productive overall. Instead, I've been finding the benefits to these new calls are more from the perspective of just hanging out with each other as a team, something we don't do often enough yet has a noticeably positive impact I've found.
Just as it's important that our community has a 'sense' of community, it's equally important that the team has a 'sense' of teamwork. It's not that we didn't beforehand, but for a small group of individuals like us to embark on this difficult high-risk adventure of Making An Indie Game™, it's important that we're able to occasionally just kick our shoes off and hang out as friends, not just as coworkers. Which, to tie this all together, is often how I feel about our community as well. Between it all, I feel like I've got some of the greatest friends an overly talkative indie dev could ask for.
Dev Update: Credit Where Credit Is Poo
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Hello and welcome again to another progress report of this roadtrip we're all on called game development. April has been a most unusual month for us all, but amidst the unusualness we've been doing our best to keep things moving forward and onward here on the Kynseed team. Our last major game update, which somehow ended up being rather poop focused, was pushed out a little over a week ago followed by an additional week of community feedback rounds as we pushed out another handful of smaller polish updates to follow. For a full look at this update you can read on to the following section which'll give you a few highlights as well as a good ol' fashioned hyperlink to the changelog.
In other news, our artists continue to impress us all the more with their pixel pushing as more and more assets get churned out. Gary, our character artist, has been carrying on with the army-sized cast of NPC's in the world and all their various aging states. Meanwhile, environment artist Weekes has been working on some new species of trees and grass, to be used in some as of yet released game areas. Charlie and Neal (design and programming respectively...as opposed to disrespectively?) have been recently going over game areas applying some polish where needed and have also undertaken the task of redesigning how Goddess offerings work.
As is our custom, we have a few previews to share below, though as always just bear in mind that these our early drafts and it may be some time before you see it included in a game content update.
CHANGELOG HIGHLIGHTS
It's been a somewhat distraction heavy month between everything going on in this ol' world of ours, but we've been lucky in that we were able to carry on with work with minimal disruption all in all. This last update represents another step towards completing our largest milestone to date: relationships. Yet one of the important things that happens when nearing the completion of a major milestone is that you have to take time for polishing and fixing near that final leg of the milestone. So essentially, that's what this update's focus was all about.
For those of you who don't always dive into our changelogs, we categorize each item as one of four icons/categories: 🔷Additions, 🔶Improvement, ❌Fixes, and ➕Internal. (Granted, "Internal" doesn't get used so much, as it's chiefly used for invisible behind-the-scenes engine work.) So for this recent content update, you'll find that the full changelog is more focused on items categorized as Improvements and Fixes. Focusing on such things becomes evermore important as we prepare for finishing a milestone. Granted, we don't expect a milestone to be perfectly polished at release, but as we've gained more and more players on this journey we've been finding it more and more important to set time aside to polish as much up as we can before major milestones.
All that to say, you'll see that focus on polish reflected in the changelog and in the highlights below. So feel free to carry on reading below for more info.
Poop Apparently not everybody poops. But as of our last update, at least a few animals now do! The byproducts of which can then be collected in the wooden bucket and used as fertiliser!
Partners Can Go Gathering Partners can now go gathering via the housekeeping book. This allows them to leave the farm to gather items based on equipment given and location chosen. Items gathered will appear in a sack outside your farm building.
Family Secret Boxes Initial setup for family secret boxes. Uncover the keys by raising your relationships 'til they tell you their secrets. Only some families currently have secret boxes to unlock, with more to be added in the future.
Full Changelog Jump on over to the full changelog to check out the entire list of additions and fixes.
At the time of writing this, the team is already back to work on preparing the next update. We'll be sharing more details about it in the coming couple of weeks no doubt, but in short we're starting to get pretty close to the relationship milestone and are excited to share some concrete info on its release once we, ourselves, nail it down first.
That also means that feedback is more critical than ever when nearing a big milestone like this. So don't hesitate in the slightest to reach out to us anywhere you find us (Bugs@Kynseed.com, Discord, forums, Twitter, etc) and let us know if you have any problems or just some ideas.
In the meantime, the team will be pressing onward with working on the game. We hope you all stay safe and stay smart out there in the world and, for now, we'll get back to working on a world of our own called The Vale. See you there!
Love, PixelCount
Game Update - v0.1.18.2511
Here's an itty bitty changelog for some followup fixes to our recent update, which you can read here.
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❌ Fix for songstrell audio persisting if gathered with the sickle ❌ Fix for old packs of seeds being sold in Summerdown ❌ Fix for duplicate recipes showing up in the goods store if you already have it and cleared any duplicates from the inventory of recipes/proverbs ❌ Fix for pet whistle crash from trying to access it while having no pets and then again with a pet ❌ Prevent partner putting up noticeboard tasks ❌ Speculative fix for shop changing crash and issue with selling shops ❌ Fix for animal selling in shops if they had turned invisible (though the cause behind the invisible animals is still at large!)
🔷Additionᅠᅠ🔶Improvementᅠᅠ❌Fixᅠᅠ➕Internal ᅠ
Game Update - v0.1.18.2509
Here's the changelog for our regularly released monthly update (with our typical monthly written progress report to get posted next week)! Let us know if you experience any issues or have some burning feedback to send our way. Cheers!
Cʜᴀɴɢᴇʟᴏɢ
🔷 Setup for family secret boxes ᅠᅠ• Uncover the keys by raising your relationships 'til they tell you their secrets ᅠᅠ• Only some families currently have secret boxes to unlock 🔷 Partners can now go gathering via the housekeeping book ᅠᅠ• Allows them to leave the farm to gather items based on equipment given and location chosen ᅠᅠ• Items gathered will appear in a sack outside your farm building 🔷 First pass of new noticeboard task for watering NPC farm areas 🔷 New skills relating to Fishing and Farming 🔷 Certain animals now poop, which can be collected in the wooden bucket and used as fertiliser (placeholder graphics in use for now) 🔶 NPC gossip/secrets are now geared towards learning more about other NPC's you don't already know info for 🔶 Use and discard confirmation from the inventory 🔶 Dandelions no longer accepted by NPC's as gifts 🔶 Adjusted growable position on farm soil and made its height relative to objects moving past 🔶 Now able to sell a shop via the Select Shop option (which only offers some of your money back and all stock is lost currently) 🔶 Improvements made to Mellowfield regions ᅠᅠ• Additional area in Outlane ᅠᅠ• New hut in Testy Acres ᅠᅠ• Many other fixes and subtle level improvements/prettying 🔶 Slightly more pronounced blacksmith difficulty based on material and more reward based on star ratings 🔶 Apprenticeship balanced to give slightly more reward scaled to star rating 🔶 Trader now shows up in 6 different locations with different goods available in each haven 🔶 Baking and stove recipes are properly divided (the range of recipes is filtered when going to the two different workstations and indicated in the inventory) 🔶 Pressing escape during the intro sequence will skip to the next image instead of jumping all the way to ingame so it feels a little nicer (and helps quicker testing of the later parts for further refinement) 🔶 Some improvements to spouse behaviour 🔶 First pass of a better pickup screen for sack on the farm contents 🔶 Various UI improvements to the player status, trader buying, and skill screens 🔶 Pinned tasks for larger item requests now show the details of items required 🔶 Adjusted interaction priorities so that books and bedside money will have higher priority than nearby characters ❌ Target interaction corrected while riding ❌ Riding won't offset the player's position when getting on ❌ Item star ratings should all default to 1 star as intended ❌ Fix for workers not always matching NPC friendship rating ❌ Fix for task list not always scrolling down properly with a certain number of tasks ❌ Fix for a rare shopper trade crash depending on the item they want to trade in ❌ Fixed new animals not loading their appearance correctly from a savegame ❌ Gifting option is now correctly inactive when you have no items to gift ❌ Fixes for shop customer spawn points to occur offscreen and for shop owners departing when the shop is bought ❌ NPC's now have individual start locations where possible so they don't clump up on certain activities ❌ Fixes around animals being sold at the goods store which could lead to a temporary duplicate or stuck animations ❌ Fix for the pickaxe's level up message getting stuck onscreen ❌ Fix for text bug when hiring a blacksmith worker ❌ Fix for an issue when changing which pig you're riding caused the first pig to be untargetable ❌ Local shoppers should now work in Mellowbrook ❌ Fix for problems with dates while gifting items ❌ Prevented player getting stuck if crafting during the end of year (though will lose any item currently crafted!) ❌ Fixed a case where the cat in the tree wouldn't appear ❌ Fixed a case where duplicate key messages could appear after buying the last cat ❌ Fixed crash when claiming an item from an owned blacksmith shop ❌ Fix for Freyl blessing affecting fruit rather than vegetables as intended ❌ Fix for the ledger's yearly accounts not scrolling and potentially containing blank entries ❌ Chickens now practice good hydration habits and no longer spontaneously explode from drinking water
🔷Additionᅠᅠ🔶Improvementᅠᅠ❌Fixᅠᅠ➕Internal ᅠ
The PixelCount Post - Issue #78
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Over the last few weeks the team has been keeping themselves burrowed indoors amidst the world's current state of things. The silver lining is that our small indie team is already quite acclimated to working from home remotely and so we've been able to carry on with development relatively unfettered. We hope you've also been keeping well and, of course, invite you to pass the time with us on our Discord and forums.
In development news, March's monthly update was successfully pushed out a couple of weeks ago and has helped pave even more stones on our path towards what has become a rather large milestone: the Relationship Update. You can read more about it by hitting the image below, but the short version is we opened up a new region called Mellowfields and also addressed a number of small fixes and general improvements. For April, we're looking to start knocking out some of the remaining relationship-related bits and bobs. Fingers crossed, we'll have some more info to share in the weeks ahead of when we can finally expect to reach that ever important milestone of the roadmap.
In the meantime, we'll keep you up to speed with our individual team member devlogs below. Stay safe out there friends and we'll see you again soon in the next issue.
This week has been a bit both disjointed and inspiring. With all that is going on it is easy to be distracted.
I have been playing the game a bit, making some notes, and catching up on design docs. There was a big spreadsheet to fill in for Smithing prices. We have 10 materials and 10 things you can make, and we need them all to be useful and have some variation. There will also be some variety added to the minigame itself...with variable speed targets and strange behaviours you would expect from crafting Fae metals!
I have also been working on NPC story stuff, monster attack thoughts, events, and adding new recipes and Fairweather items to the list. On top of that I fixed a bunch of things in Mellowfields and tweaked some bits of some of the levels there.
Thankfully the recent weeks have seen some stellar game releases to inspire the mind. Half-Life: Alyx is just phenomenal...a sense of presence and scale that is just incredible and beautifully polished. The Room VR is just beautifully made too and another in that series of tactile, wonderfully crafted, titles. There are so many games to play and draw inspiration from, even if not a similar genre. The amount of talent out there now is staggering. We just hope we can create something of value that will inspire others too.
For the past few weeks I've been shifting between wrapping up the last update and starting on the next one. As usual there was a bit of extra time from the last update to address some fixes before work could begin in earnest, but it felt like it might have been a bit easier to wrap up this time with less knock on issues.
In terms of the next update, I've been working on a new noticeboard task for helping water other NPC's farms which is turning out quite nicely thanks to the maturing noticeboard event system in place. I've started adding more skills for the player to learn for farming and fishing (with extra requirements possible for quantity and quality of item that a master is after before they will teach a skill). Then most recently I've been setting up animal poop as fertiliser in the game. Never a dull moment working on this game!
In a slight return to talking about productivity, I've been finding a bit more focus lately between choice of music (Rez soundtrack) and keeping notes to come back to rather than let my mind wander too far while in the midst of something. I think it's helped a fair degree in being more productive and given me a better sense of areas to follow up on (of which there are a lot!). Quite often in the past I think I've usually just pushed back on these parts to follow up on, which usually has a tendency of feeling like I'm slowly grinding to a halt. Not because the followup part is that important necessarily, but it is just very tough going when all around there are these intended ideas stopping satisfaction in what is being worked on.
Fortunately with the return of the new update, I've been back to my weekly schedule which is allowing me slowly but surely to relieve these blockers and it feels very satisfying! Wishing everyone all the best!
I've finally managed to make music for Wisptrail that was approved! It took some attempts, but I got there in the end. Wisptrail is a region where will 'o' wisps reside. They lure you, who knows where...
To musically represent this, I took inspiration from the 'nyah nyah' song that children sometimes sing to taunt each other. It's also sometimes referenced in horror movies, such as The Evil Dead. The atmosphere I tried to give it was a little less of horror and a little more fairytale, albeit closer to the darker fairytales you might expect from the Brothers Grimm or Guillermo del Toro.
Originally the song started with a very low raspy bass clarinet and slowly moved towards more familiar fairytale-esque sounds with strings. But Charlie liked the ending so much more than the beginning that he wanted the beginning to be more like the end. So now, like an ouroboros, the beginning is the end is the beginning. I actually quite like the symbolism of this, as no matter how you deal with those who taunt you, you'll only ever end up back where you started...
I'll be keeping this week's entry of mine pretty short in order to free up some extra time for other tasks that I've been getting behind on. I tend to be the main person who writes/assembles all our communications, so between the recent monthly progress report and the rather lengthy DreamHack postmortem before that, it's felt like I've spent more time writing than even usual.
Not that I mind it really, as I do rather enjoy the writing process and, for the most part, writing to you good folks never feels like much a chore. Still, it can require a fair chunk of my time between everything (particularly if it's also image or GIF heavy, which can often require more time than the writing itself).
So to give a cursory update of things from my end, the team and I have recently concerned ourselves with putting together an overview plan (and very tentative schedule) of the remaining road of development still ahead. We've done something like this a few times already on the project but due to the evolving nature of development (and, in particular, our organic approach to things), we have to make new overview plans like these semi-regularly. The process is equal parts updating the old plans whilst also making new plans.
I find these sorts of overviews always have a bit of duality to them. On the one hand, it can often be daunting to always feel like there's still so much work left ahead. Yet on the other hand, I always feel a slight sense of relief in at least mapping it out and putting it all down in writing. Better to have a daunting plan than no plan, I say.
Dev Update: A Vegetable Patch
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Hello there and welcome to another monthly progress report, sent straight your way by our castle's most trusted carrier pigs.
Due to the world recently going topsy turvy, we got about a week behind in getting this month's written progress report to you all (but thankfully the update/changelog itself was already pushed out earlier this month). It's been a crazy world out there in this pre-Quillian era, but our little team here has been managing alright with fairly minimal disruption. For now, we've locked ourselves away in Castle PixelCount and bolted all the doors.
In the midst of it all, a few of us on the team have taken to discussing what our "desert island top 5" games, movies, and records would be. (Though personally, if I was on a desert island, the only record I'd want is for long distance swimming.) In the meantime, we've been diligently keeping ourselves as healthy and sanitized as we can. We hope you all are faring alright as well. Fortunately, the only health concern of mine lately has been randomly getting hiccups. I'm hoping for a cure, but I'm not holding my breath.
Unsurprisingly, it seems all these recent events have left many folks with a lot of sudden time on their hands. Of course there's many entertainment options these days, such as Castle PixelCount's favourite DIY TV programme starring Count Dracula giving his castle a revamp. Or our favorite never-actually-released Netflix show: You're British, I'm British, My Son's British. Though thankfully, to truly help us pass the time, we still have a whole game left to make! Let's just hope the world returns to normalcy at a faster rate than your average Early Access developer.
As for the update itself, this one serves as another incremental step towards implementing things like the relationship mechanics as well as our gradual rollout of aging for all our NPC's. Yet we also want to make sure that adding to the game's map is done in relative tandem with adding to the game's mechanics. So for this month's update, we've included a nice handful of new regions as part of a haven called Mellowfields.
Mellowfields is a peaceful little part of the map to visit where you'll find big gardens and small townsfolk. Almost everywhere you look you'll see lovely (and large) things growing. Though it is important to note that this is just our first implementation of these regions, as there's still quite a bit more we have left to do with them. Regions take a lot of work to make, which is why we typically approach the addition of new regions as a multi-update process. This update takes care of our first step, which is to simply add the physical people and places into the game world.
That means things like: making the initial level designs themselves, adding those designs into our engine piece by piece, adding in the new art, adding in layers for things like where the player/characters can walk, adding in all the NPC's and their sim/schedule behaviour, adding new items/collectibles, writing dialogue for the new NPC's, writing music for the new regions and shops, and then connecting the new regions to the rest of the world map. So this update includes all these first steps, but rest assured there's still much more to come with Mellowfields (and other havens too, like Summerdown).
Of course, we worked on far more than just Mellowfields this update, ranging from adding new things (like picking a spirit during the wedding ceremony) to improving existing things (like new art for farm growables). There was also quite a bit of behind the scenes system and engine work done, which by their nature aren't always visible on the surface of these updates.
So read on below for the highlights and, as always, hit that link at the bottom for the full changelog.
CHANGELOG HIGHLIGHTS
Below is a general overview of noteworthy items this update includes. As usual, these are just a few selections from the full list of changes made, so be sure to drop by the full changelog to see the proper list. Lastly, for any of you players who enjoy getting more frequent yet experimental updates of ours, you might be interested in checking out our development branches.
New Haven: Mellowfields Welcome to Mellowfields, our initial implementation of a new farming haven in Quill! This haven includes:
New character and environment art.
Quirky new NPC's.
A glimpse of the Master Gardener (though gardening skills are intended for a future update).
New lovely music for regions and shops.
Sheep, a new animal type! Currently they're for riding only, but don't have a broader purpose (yet).
Plus some new items of different kinds. Some can be found around the world, some can be grown as crops, and some can be bought from the Goods Store...including a new item to spice up married life. (As it happens, we've lately been spending a lot of design time on the importance of items and their purposes in the game. Our next update is intended to get as far as we can on that.)
Status Info Screen This is our first pass of a new Status Info screen, available via "Back" button on controller or "L" on keyboard (by default). This gives player's access to info like active buffs from food, Goddess effects, and partner info if you're married.
Marriage Spirits No, we don't mean liquor. The marriage cutscene now includes an interactive section where you pick a spirit which gives a bonus to stats for both the player and their partner. (For existing marriages prior to this version, a random one is currently assigned.)
Billy & Milly Aging As part of our gradual rollout of NPC aging, Billy and Milly can now grow into adults.
New Dialogue, Interact Range Tweaks, & Other Fixes In addition to the new stuff, we've also done quite a bit of polish and quality of life improvements for the gameplay experience. We've also hopefully resolved several reported problems as well. As always, we'll continue to sort through your feedback/bugs and push out hotfixes when necessary (as well as a few experimental branch and preview branch updates over the month.)
Full Changelog Jump on over to the full changelog to check out the entire list of additions and fixes.
It's always exciting for us when we add new people and places for players to explore, so we hope you enjoy your time visiting the new locales. Don't hesitate to let us know how you get on in your community corner of choice (Discord, forums, etc.).
Our next update will likely focus on getting in some remaining relationship features plus further improvements to the current gameplay experience (particularly in regards to overall item purpose and implementation). Then, once all the core pieces of the relationship system are in place, we'll take a step back and review the system as a whole and polish it up to a point where we're comfortable marking it off our roadmap and moving on to new milestones.
In other news, one of our team attended DreamHack Anaheim recently and set up a floor demo of the game! This was one of our first times doing something like this and it was quite an exciting experience for us. To get a full account of how it went (with pictures), you can drop by our most recent Dev Log issue.
Though for now, we better get back to work here in our quarantined quarters. As always, we'll have another one of these updates and progress reports ready for you next month, punctuated by our usual flow of Dev Logs in between. Stay safe out there and we'll see you all again soon!
