Welcome to Issue #63 of [I]The PixelCount Post[/I], a periodically released update from [I]Kynseed's[/I] team. In today's issue: Charlie scatters items, Neal does delivery boxes, Matthijs gets equipment, and Matt finishes the roadmap.
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The team's boost of energy from a week ago has certainly carried on into this last week as well with all manner of things being worked on. Charlie's begun churning through the mega-list of 500 items and redistributing them across the world. On the code side of things, Neal's been working on a new system that'll help players get pointed in the right direction towards a task or goal. Additional work has begun on a delivery box feature to help give NPC's items for when they can't be found at their home.
Meanwhile, Matthijs has been enjoying a rather good week of working on some new sound effects as well as getting a bit of new equipment to begin playing with. Over in the land of production and community, Matt has put the final touches on the new batch of roadmap updates to go over with the team this Monday and, from there, to get posted and shared across the entire community likely by the end of that week. Additionally, he'll be sharing more information on how to access experimental update branches, which we'll be using more frequently going forward. Read on below for all that and more in today's issue of [I]The PixelCount Post[/I]!
Well, after last week's epic post by Neal, I felt like I should match him for effort...but thankfully that feeling was fleeting, so I will keep it brief as always.
This week I have got back into the levels and been fixing up some Vale annoyances, plus starting to redistribute collectible items. Our Master Items list has all the 500 plus items listed with columns for if we have icons, in-game versions, stats, descriptions, and locations.
There are some Vale changes afoot as well. Out go Poppies, Nightberries, Whistleroot, and Bowing Nancy. They will enjoy their new homes to the north. The flowers of the Vale are Bloodfew, Primrose, Grave Lilac, and Cuckoo Dew - with Basil and Thyme as the local herbs. I bet you can guess where the poppies are native to...
Also been just carrying on with design docs and mockups in [URL="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Visio"][B]Visio[/B][/URL]. Having Trello organise us has been great and creates a much better sense of immediate professionalism. Let's see if we can keep it up! (we will)
I have also been getting more and more obsessed with board games and card games. I need [I]Kynseed[/I] to be a huge success so I can afford a proper [URL="https://crokinole.guru/product/crokinole-tournament-premium-gold-set/"][B]Crokinole table[/B][/URL]. The steamed Beech and Cherry is just so gorgeous.
This weekend I have a bunch of dialogue to do while dreaming of [I]Kynseed[/I] monsters being made into hand painted miniatures. Thanks for setting me off on that dark road Gary (our monster artist)! The team really seems pumped at the moment, so let's hope this momentum carries on, as it is nice to see Neal cheery for a change! Zing!
This week flew by pretty quickly. After last week's talks unlocking a lot of stored up thoughts, this week has been one of action and enthusiasm. It's funny how easy it is to actually bottleneck one's actions by not giving the space to have fun. It wasn't like I specifically set out before to not have fun, but in keeping myself locked into this mindset of only doing the most important thing and being critical of everything, not allowing breaks and not really communicating except to talk progress, it really blocked up my ability to actually enjoy things.
With the rush of communication reduced a tad from having covered most of the unspoken ground (and the lack of further water encroaching into my room), I've been getting on with various code and other tasks. Since last time that's included two new additions to make the playing experience that little bit smoother.
The first is a way of setting one in-game task as the active one. Where a specific level is known for the task, then the world map will highlight which level to go to and in-game you can use F1 to have a pointer appear briefly on screen that leads the way to a level closer to your destination. While doing this I found out that I'd kind of missed out previously in properly setting up a route grabber between levels. So instead, if it wasn't a direct connection, then it would choose the first exit which is usually wrong!
For this it did take a bit of time to ponder the right way (and a little procrastination) but eventually I ended up taking some code of an old unreleased game I'd been working on around ten years ago and converting that to this new setup (using [URL="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dijkstra%27s_algorithm"][B]Dijkstra's algorithm[/B][/URL] as the basis). We're deliberately intending for this to only direct you to the general level and not the specific location in question so there's still some challenge and exploration required, so will see how this works out...
The second is a delivery box that means even if you can't locate an NPC out and about, you can still stick a requested item in the delivery box by their home for them to find (and each whole household has their own). The reward in friendship rating will be a bit less for doing so given the impersonal touch. It's a feature that Charlie's been pushing for a while and like the noticeboards of last week have similarly been held off a bit too long. It actually only took around a day to implement (thanks in part to recent efforts I've made in refactoring the gifting system for reuse), which seems like pretty good value! Hopefully players will like it too.
Apart from those two new additions, we're trying out the more flexible approach to development with Wednesday being a day where we intend to not work on the essentials if possible. In my case, I managed to get a bunch of accounting done (which always rolls up quickly), started organising and reducing my to-do list of 1,500 lines (that doesn't represent all of it by any means, just it's my latest scratchpad of notes), and get back underway with the setup of development notes in-game so we can share feedback at the place it happened and bypass the need for a task system on the hundreds of polish items to be found.
It's been a good week and hopefully just continuing to keep working on the things we're passionate about and keeping communication open will let that continue as we expand out this ambitious game of ours!
Things truly have been exciting around here since last week's surge of energy around the team, and I'm enjoying every minute of it! Positivity really is contagious, and I'm infected! This week has been a great one for me personally. New studio equipment trickling in, a composer I look up to complimenting a track of mine, and [I]No Man's Sky[/I] in VR making me feel like a child again. Suffice it to say, this week has been treating me well!
Our renewed efforts on Trello to get more organized are also paying off. It's not only much clearer to see my task list now that I've added it all to Trello, but the other team members also get a clearer picture of what I'm up to because of it. And I've been enjoying quicker communication than ever before. I can't tick anything off of my to-do list that Charlie hasn't OK'ed and before he does, assets can wait in limbo. But with the increased organization, that's all being smoothed out. The extra energy and positivity seems to have permeated into everything.
Before our next update I still have some sound effects to finish, but for that update there is no music left to do. After I complete these sound effects I can return to the swampy music of regions yet to come in the game. I rather like how doing a sound effect is a relatively short project, and it gets very diverse. From a jingle signifying that your friendship with an NPC has improved, to the spinning of a 'wheel of fortune-esque' Wheel of Copulation (you know that ticking sound it makes as it's being spun?). It's almost like a palate cleanser, in a way. Something to put your mind on that's fresh, when you've been composing in the same style for a while.
The team's recent energy boost has certainly spilled over into this last week and has had everyone getting a fair bit done as a result. The trick, as always, will be to keep that energy going so it can spill forward into yet another week ahead. Keep it up enough and suddenly that 'energy boost' will become an instilled habit!
On my part, the last week has involved a variety of work on a spectrum of different things. The main thing I wanted to get done was a proposed draft of the new roadmap, which will include the next batch of updates you can expect from us as well as a few other tweaks. This 'next batch' is something we've talked about for a few weeks now and so it'll be good to finally get it properly finished and posted everywhere. I've got the final version that I'll run by the team on Monday and assuming all look's well it should probably be going up by end of the same week.
Something else I'll be doing this upcoming week is posting around info on how to access our more experimental branches and how we're going to approach these branches in the future. We've had experimental branches available for some time now, but we've never really talked much about how to access them or exactly what they are and how they're different from the main branch. As a result, folks that might've been interested in getting access to our more frequent (but less stable) updates may've not really known anything about them this whole time. So expect some more info on all that to get posted around the community in various spots, likely in tandem for when the new roadmap updates get posted.
In other news, and as Neal briefly mentions above, we started experimenting last week with dedicating a bit of time on Wednesday as a sort of 'flexible' time to allow us to work on things that we may otherwise not always be able to make time for. It's a tricky balance to strike, because every week we always have a list of high priority items that we all need to get done. Yet over time, it's easy for each of us to accrue a list of smaller items that would be 'nice to have' type things or even 'just for fun' type things. The challenge is finding time to do these things, because the higher priority items often take all our attention and all our time.
However, if you never spend even a tiny bit of time doing 'nice to have' tasks or 'just for fun' tasks, then that can lead to a bit of a dry development that feels like a trudge. Perhaps on a more subliminal level, it can even lead to a game or community feeling a bit soulless. Oftentimes it's the little things that can have the biggest impact.
One of those community 'for fun' things that I worked on this last week was setting up a small feature on our Discord where players can drop into a channel and listen to a stream of the game's soundtrack on shuffle (which is already about 2.5 hours long!). There was no real practical reason for me to add this, but I figured it'd be a fun and relaxing thing for members to join in on and listen to. The soundtrack stream isn't something I'll be leaving on 24/7 though. Rather I'll probably turn it on once every month or so (with new tracks added as we go), just as a fun thing. Though interestingly, this did spur talks on the team about how we don't have much of the soundtrack uploaded on [URL="https://www.youtube.com/PixelCountStudios"][B]our YouTube channel[/B][/URL]. So I spent an hour or so making some simple videos for a handful of our favourite tracks and I'll be uploading those to our channel every Monday for the next couple of months or so. In the end, we'll have a nice little YouTube playlist that folks can check out as a sort of 'soundtrack sampler' of the game.
All in all, it's been an incredibly packed and busy week, one that struck a nice balance between making progress on big priority work as well as progress on smaller tasks that can otherwise get neglected over time. Be sure to check back next week for more info on the next batch of roadmap updates, on how to access the experimental branches, and on how progress is going with the upcoming relationship update. See you all again then!
The PixelCount Post - Issue #62
Welcome to Issue #62 of [I]The PixelCount Post[/I], a periodically released update from [I]Kynseed's[/I] team. In today's issue: Charlie makes a Wottyzit, Neal talks about talking, Matthijs hums a tune, and Matt's keyboard breaks.
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It turned out to be a rather packed week for the team between working on some new assets, roadmap planning, new sound cues, lengthy team discussions, and the set up of a new Trello organisation board. Many of the new assets in question have been coming in from Gary, our character artist. These include some animations for a new brounie character as well as early drafts on animating the Jabberwock creature - one of our much larger (and frightening) monsters based off of a similar creature as seen in Terry Gilliam's amazing film [URL="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aeLw0Pwwk7g"][B][I]Jabberwocky[/I][/B][/URL]. Charlie talks a bit more about all these new assets in his article below.
As for the lengthy discussions, the team has recently been diving into some fairly deep talks. We've found we tend to have these bigger conversations on the project every once in a while as a sort of 'checking in' with each other and seeing how we're all feeling about development and things in general. These sorta talks aren't really ever planned outright. Rather they seem to crop up organically, usually when we've reached a certain tipping point where we have a bunch of thoughts and ideas that we want to share that we've otherwise been holding on to internally so as to keep focus strictly on development and roadmap progress. So although we hadn't necessarily planned for having such in-depth team discussions this last week, they always turn out to be incredibly useful and productive.
We also ended up setting up a Trello board in the midst of these talks which, for those unfamiliar, is basically a project organisation platform that easily allows for multiple team members to collaborate on. We had a Trello board set up in the pre-Early Access days of development but since then have been largely depending on internal project organisation of our own (spreadsheets, documents, etc.). However, as of late we've been greatly preferring the particular format and ease of Trello. Between the team discussions and the new project organisation, we've got a fairly packed week planned ahead with finalizing details on new roadmap bits as well as progress on the next build. So see you again next week with updates on how it all went!
There has been a lot of chatter and organisation in the team as we try to make ourselves more efficient and organised. Personally I am about as organised as a jelly tornado, so for us to start using Trello properly is a relief and you can feel the upbeat auras coming from the others (especially Neal). We feel much more happy about where we are and the future, and are more determined than ever to make a special game.
This week I have been looking at the game's Prologue and improving player tutorials. I am always against hand holding and reams of text explaining the most basic concepts...but I do recognise there are ways we can keep the sense of discovery along with gently guiding the player. New UI boxes, improved info presentation, better tasks, plus explanation of tools and controls. All of which will go alongside new features such as Pott the Brounie and The Wottyzit.
But what is the Wottyzit? What is it exactly? The Wottyzit is a small wisp-like faery that hovers near interactive objects of interest, and when you get near will fly away. It will only do it once per feature to draw your attention to them. So this would be things like the oven, baking kiln, mapstones, lemonade stand, pig auction trigger point, etc etc.
Then for after the Prologue, we have Pott the Brounie: a sharp tongued goblin who will live on your farm and look after things. He likes to keep things tidy and ensures your kids are looked after. He can be talked to for advice and guidance on things to do, the status of things, and even tell you stories about the Fae realms. Fail to feed him offerings though, and he won't be very happy and let you know it! We feel that by making these things 'in-world' and part of the lore, they will add a rich character that really ties the room together.
The only other news for you this week is that the Jabberwock has had its idle animations begun. It is a bit of a challenge for [URL="https://twitter.com/armyoftrolls"][B]Gary[/B][/URL], but so far it looks amazing, with the best eyelids/blink I have seen on a huge dragony thing. I am so excited by our menagerie of denizens. The few we have revealed so far (around our forums and on [URL="https://twitter.com/Kynseed"][B]Twitter[/B][/URL]) are our smallest and weakest. We can't wait for you to see the Barghest, Fachen, Banshee, Ogyr, Spriggan...and they are just some of the mid-sized ones!
We are blessed to have such incredible artists - Gary, Matt Weekes, and Caz are just brilliant people to work with and I am insanely jealous of their talents. I couldn't draw the curtains, never mind a world full of fabulous beasts, colourful environs, and tastily detailed items. Onwards and upwards!
This week has been an interesting one and I'm going to ramble on in a stream of consciousness type way about it. I've made some progress on the noticeboards, typed and chatted what feels like far more than the past month, and had a mini crisis of sorts when the living room started leaking water from the ceiling (for the third time, but in a different place!). I think the theme for this week for me has been coming to some revelations of a sort about self-imposed limitations. Maybe these were triggered from having a break last week and that gap away from the normal routine really gave me pause on what was actually going on. I think it had begun before, but especially the last day or two felt like finally getting a better sense of what is up...
[I][B]Aside:[/B] Sometimes I wonder with these posts how many people read them or what they're expecting to read about (feel free to leave a comment below on that!). For me, I've taken them as a way of giving some insight into the very human process of development and perhaps also the cycles that my mind will often get locked into. When I write these I often quickly look back at our last issue but have never actually gone back to read older ones from being a little embarrassed in some ways about what I might have said. So I have this sense that maybe I'm repeating myself in slightly different ways, but then immediately a few weeks later I forget and get caught back up in the cycle of whatever is going on at the time...
With a long-term endeavour such as this project, I think it is inevitable that the excitement rises and fades and that we struggle to actually consistently keep going in an upward spiral of momentum, as there's always distractions and past habits to deal with. Weeks like this though give me more optimism about it when I feel like I've got a real buzz going on from stepping outside my comfort zone and laying out more of what I'm actually thinking (while trying to be humble that it is only my very limited understanding and experience and that I'm open to change).[/I]
Anyway...to get back to what I mentioned in the first section, the revelation (or perhaps just a return to sanity and common sense) that I realised is how often we impose invisible limits and boxes around what we do. Biases and habits reinforce us going in a certain direction without a chance to stop to think if it's the best way to be going.
To go into a little more detail, my work on code has for a long time been about ticking off features on [URL="https://steamcommunity.com/games/kynseed/announcements/detail/1799657041071529774"][B]the roadmap[/B][/URL]. The general aim has always been to get everything to a 'first pass' level and then we can start refining it and putting it together. That approach is definitely in large parts what my previous developer experience has been like on the [I]Fable[/I] games...right until near the end the game is very rough and there's little sense of the solidity that eventually emerges. I think it could be argued they released too soon where another 3 to 4 months at that solid stage would get the refinement right that really hits the mark, but that's hindsight for you! It is undoubtedly a reasonably sound strategy for many games, especially ones developed in private, but not all games are the same.
In our case, we have an incredibly ambitious game and limited resources (no publisher, a small but talented team where each person has a lot of responsibilities, and limited time due to our budget). It's true that there is a lot of pressure/risk in that situation, but we have experience and boldness on our side to make it work. We are doing our best to mitigate the risk and we still have contingencies and ways to keep going as long as possible while the game continues to grow. So it's not a bad situation we are in, but it is one where the bias and focus has limited us and started to box us into a corner where it seems like there is nowhere to go. Code is still the bottleneck right now where I've been constantly trying to catch up with the myriad of ideas/art/sound/bugs/improvements being thrown around. In doing so, I've limited myself a lot because of focusing on the checkbox approach of mostly sticking to stuff on the roadmap. That's not to say that focus is a bad thing, but when it becomes obsessive (filling all waking hours of the day) to the point of ignoring other options, then it lacks the common sense to take a step back and see what the real problems are and what to do about them. I guess what I'm mainly trying to take on-board from this is to split time up so the focus has a daily chance to shine but that other tasks are not left behind, including the need to be communicating with the rest of the team - and to get in some time to relax and enjoy life as well!
To tie this into the week itself a bit more, the noticeboards were something where until we had a meeting I'd been holding back continuously on them (maybe because they aren't on the roadmap, maybe because I had so many other things to do, maybe because no one else pushed me on them, but for whatever reason it was only when I started on it that it began to unveil the impact that I knew was there but didn't act on). The very basic implementation of them only took maybe an hour or two, but I just could not stop procrastinating/holding back on getting something in there. Now that they are there, it's a massive relief and I can see how much they are going to add to the game. After the basic implementation, I've been refining them in a further few days to have two initial types ('cook wanted' and 'lost item'), to set one noticeboard up per haven, to get them working with save/load, and to refine the random generation of them to feel a bit more natural. For now they are in our experimental branch on Steam (for anyone interested in trying it) and we're looking at getting them put into the main branch in perhaps a couple of weeks, along with other efforts to address player feedback on the game.
The water leaking incident of this week was interesting too. I almost felt like I'd set myself up for it by talking up how it often seems that crisis pop along one after another that disrupt our flow. Luckily it wasn't too serious and I saw it as soon as it started so nothing really got permanently damaged. The interesting part of it for me was recognising that feeling of how that crisis just took over all thoughts and actions. I pretty much dropped everything else I was doing to handle it and get it looked into. It made me remember how when something unexpected needs to get done, I can just focus immediately onto it and decisions suddenly become easy because you want to get it sorted above all else. To tie it into the limiting factor of our actions, sometimes things like that need absolute attention but when we're talking about things carrying over days/weeks/months trying to focus on on one thing unrelentingly then that just ends up wasting time. The mind wanders and rebels against that level of focus because it just weighs down creativity and inspiration. My plan is to try and mix things up more. Namely, we've talked in the team about having a fixed day where we are deliberately not working on the roadmap/update work. Letting things wander for a bit before diving back into focus. I'm additionally thinking to take that further within a day where I try to concentrate for around 4 hours on the main priority and then to be content then to dip into what I feel like doing rather than what I've tried to make my sole focus...
I guess I'll go a little into the team's recent typing and chatting, which maybe other posts might cover as well. What it boiled down to is another case of each of us having our limited box of what thoughts we'd allow out. Holding back from saying anything because we felt like everyone else was too busy or not really open to suggestion. Also perhaps that even when things are said, the other person isn't actually listening because of their own strong feelings on the matter. When you impose that limitation (of not listening, not asking questions, not putting out thoughts), then what you're really doing is passively accepting the status quo and biding time for a point which probably will never come.
That's not to say that all thoughts are welcome or are good ones to say, because there has to be some empathy/trust and mutual understanding there! The question though, is if you feel passionately about something why is it better to hold back on it? Surely if you feel that strongly about it you want to speak up and test if others agree, learn from the experience, and let the mind move on? It's a case of reading the room as to how/where to do this but it could even just start with a simple question of "Is there some way we can talk about X, as I have some feelings about that?". For myself (and I believe other people too), there's a lot of irrational fear at times about opening up because it exposes something in your mind and has a risk that you're wrong. But is it a good thing to just hold on to a thought to the point where it becomes permanent yet gets no outside scrutiny from people with vastly different experiences? Is it not better to test your limits and evolve your understanding by taking that step? I guess I would just stress again that my understanding/experience is limited and perhaps the position I'm advocating is too extreme where some limits are necessary. Food for thought really and something of an experiment!
Looking back on this post it has become quite an epic and I've still got thoughts flowing about connections that I've just realised in writing this. For now, I think I might leave it there and see what folks think of this. I know it's probably a lot to take in and perhaps not that much talks about the game itself but I do feel like it captures a bit of the way our development is going and some thoughts that right now really have me fired up. I definitely think I need to keep looking back on this particular post to remember it when I expect otherwise it might fade away in memory as more new unexpected developments take hold and as my mind wars a bit against being so open. Anyway, thanks to all of you who read this and I wish you all the best!
Another week goes by! This week I worked on the sounds for the smithing mini-game. In places, it's still a bit quiet as some sounds still need to be implemented. I also did sounds for the rating system on items you've crafted. There's 4 different levels of quality per aspect of the item, ranging from bad to perfect. I've divided the theme I use for personal growth into 4 individual segments for this so that the first tone in the theme is the bad rating, the next tone the ok rating, then good, and finally perfect to finish the theme with a flourish. (The full theme is more than 4 notes, but the first 4 notes already form a recognisable abbreviation to the theme.)
This theme can also be heard when leveling up certain skills or during other moments of growth for the player character. It can even be heard when you wake up on the pier at the start of the game. It also makes an appearance in an as of yet implemented track for the main menu. Sometimes I hide it a little by giving you the theme in a slightly altered or subtle way. Other times it's front and center. This set of rating system sound effects would definitely qualify as a hidden iteration of it though, as you won't likely hear all 4 sounds in fast succession (or in the right order). But subliminally, it's there.
Another thing I did this week was to alter the main melody of the track I worked on last week. The feedback the team gave me on it mentioned that this melody needed to be easier to hum along to. One way to facilitate how quickly you can absorb a melody and hum along to it is to make the melody consist of repeating patterns. The more something repeats, the easier it gets to memorize. But a repeat doesn't have to be identical each time. A pattern with a deviation can still feel like it's the same general pattern. This allows you to walk the fine line between keeping it easy to memorize and keeping it from being boringly or annoyingly repetitive. And oh boy, is that a fine line alright! If the team approves of the new melody, I still need to fix some other little things in the track before it's game-ready. But it'll get there...
I'm going to keep my article a bit brief (brief for me), partly to avoid this week's issue from getting overly long but also because I feel I've been typing a short novel's worth this week already! As mentioned above by my teammates, alongside our normal development work we also found ourselves deeply engaged in all manner of discussion. It's become something the team does semi-regularly on the project to help keep things going smoothly and to highlight any areas we want to make course adjustments on.
Above all, I think these talks tend to have a cathartic effect where it allows us to just dump a bunch of thoughts and ideas that we each have been meaning to bring up yet never really finding time to do so during the busy bustle of working on the game directly. Not being someone known for their brevity, I tend to dive pretty deeply into these talks and contribute paragraphs and paragraphs of my own. So it all makes for quite a bit of writing after a week's worth of these discussions.
Rather amusingly, the very first day these discussions kicked off I had [I]just[/I] bought myself a new keyboard. So I picked one helluva week to start reestablishing all my typing muscle memory that I'd obtained over the last couple of years with my last keyboard. Sadly that keyboard had become broken and thus it was time to get a replacement. Whenever discarding one of my PC's peripherals like that, I always get a slight tinge of weird attachment over it. That was the keyboard which was by my side from the very beginning of this project all the way to now. It was the keyboard I used for basically every development update, every Discord message I've ever written, and every issue of The Post up to this one. We'd been through a lot together, that keyboard and I. So farewell trusty keyboard. May it type away happily in the text fields of keyboard heaven.
The PixelCount Post - Issue #61
Welcome to Issue #61 of [I]The PixelCount Post[/I], a periodically released update from [I]Kynseed's[/I] team. In today's issue: Charlie adds a new character, Neal branches out code, Matthijs digests gassy music, and Matt tackles tiny tasks.
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This last week was spent sorting through the usual: fixing bugs that had cropped up, designing a few new things, getting a bit of new art in, and chipping away at the gargantuan soundtrack. Specifically, Charlie and Gary have been working on a new character for around the farm. Meanwhile, Neal's been looking at utilising a branching approach for the code. Then over in audio land, some new gassy music is slowly being digested.
In addition to this, we've been slowly circling in on our next planned steps for the relationships update as well as the next batch of roadmap updates to come. We'll be sprinkling in a fair bit of onboarding improvements as well, which we go into a bit more detail about in [URL="https://steamcommunity.com/games/kynseed/announcements/detail/2958220810097676654"][B]last week's issue[/B][/URL]. This upcoming week we have a couple of team meetings planned where we'll be nailing down all these specifics for good and, from there, getting it all prepared for sharing with you lovely folks!
A slow-ish week with Neal away, but it let me mess with some ideas for Mellowfields to expand the exploration and to get on with the onboarding designs among others. To help give your farm a bit of character, Gary (our character artist) and I colluded on a new character: Pott the Brounie!
All those offerings you have been giving or not giving? They go to him. After the Prologue, the idea is that you can now see him (and all other Fae) and he will hang around your farm. He will take care of the little things while you are away and be a source of advice and direction. All this delivered in a grumpy, sarcastic little fella who we modelled on Albert Steptoe from the old UK TV show, Steptoe & Son.
He is going to whine and complain a lot, and if you don't give your offerings he won't take it kindly! We hope he will be an endearingly enigmatic character who you grow to love. Let us give the little guy a chance to say hello...
"Nice to meet yer, I be Pott,
I sweep n' clean and wairk a lot.
Give me grub and be a friend,
Sweets make me loyal to the end!
About your house I will creep,
Mendin' things while you're asleep.
Scrubbin' muck and dustin' cob,
Polish wood and shinin' hob.
So feed me good and treat me fair,
Or I'll put spiders in your hair!"
This week was a little short for me as I was looking after some cats for part of it, which I used as a minibreak of sorts. The time I have spent on the game has been about figuring out some reported bugs on loading saves along with an unintended setup for fishing where they'd respawn every level load. I've uploaded a build with the fixes to the experimental branch which is where I'm aiming to put builds more regularly in the coming weeks. There's a few smaller areas I'm looking at for the next week, with the chat system getting UI tweaks along with the noticeboard as a source of new tasks (which should make it into the experimental build).
Something that I've started doing with the code is making use of branches for source control. For those unfamiliar, source control is a way to track changes to files (mostly code) over time and then branches is a way to have multiple simultaneous versions of the files for different purposes that can be merged as necessary - say one branch for releasing the game, one for fixing bugs, one for working on future features, etc.
It's quite a powerful feature, but at the same time can get complicated to figure out what's going on (as there's no longer that guarantee of consistency that a feature/bug in one version will work the same way in another, as the code is no longer the same). So I've been easing into it to see what benefits can be gained there.
The main benefit seems to be the ability to easily experiment without affecting the stability of the build, but the struggle I am finding is in then being aware of what the state of any other branch is like and knowing when to cross over. So definitely a new learning curve for me to figure out, as I can see it being very handy soon as we continue looking at improvements from player feedback while the next update is also starting to gear up!
Another week flew by. This week I spent working on a track for an upcoming town later in the game. It's in the swampy area I've worked on previously and from what Charlie told me, there's copper pipes everywhere and the town is being lit by gas.
I've tried to incorporate this into the music by using metal percussion instruments and some big bass trombone and tuba 'bwaaps' as a sort of 'fart' in the music. It gives the whole thing a tinker-ish vibe. The banjo and acoustic bass ground it all within the same soundscape as the other swamp music so that, even though it is considerably cheerier than the surrounding swamp tracks, it's still distinctly the same overall atmosphere. I deliberately chose working on this task first rather than going right back to the ambient track I was working on before because I just [I]really[/I] needed to get some composing out of my system.
I've also been shopping for some new gear, mainly a synthesizer and MIDI keyboard. So far, whenever I needed an instrument to have very free 'human' timings, I've had to emulate that sense of timing even though I'm drawing in each note with the mouse. This is very time consuming, but it means you get to micro-manage every single note. For the sake of efficiency, I need to bite the bullet and learn to do this with a MIDI keyboard instead. The one I want needs to be ordered though, so it'll take a while to get here. The somewhat jazzy timings I'm adding to the track I'm already working on will just have to be done with the mouse, like always. Though once I get plenty of practice with the keyboard, it'll do a lot to improve my ability to perform live, as a nice bonus.
Something that's always been a challenge for a team like ours is how to implement some basic project management/organisation that fits the size of our team. Oftentimes, it seems like these sorts of things are either geared more towards much larger studios or they're more for one to two person teams and thus feel far too simplified. So it's been a challenge over this project to find a balance that works best for us. Typically, this means making our own solutions to fit our own needs, which generally does the trick but it is something that needs revisiting now and then. So with us charting the next batch of updates for the roadmap, it seemed a good time to tweak some of our organisation solutions as well (stuff like spreadsheets, Trello, and so on).
In addition to this, I was able to also set aside some time to get caught up on an ever-growing pile of 'little' things. It seems that there's always a whole slew of small tasks I'd like to get done, but when compared to all the other work that needs doing it's easy for these smaller tasks to get pushed aside for a later day. The problem is, this can really start to pile up if not careful!
So it was nice to dedicate a handful of days last week to getting caught up on such things and marking them off as complete. This included things like researching info on future game events and their submission process, implementing some extra spam protections on our site, and even adding some new features and updates to our community Discord. It's good to have many of these smaller tasks finished, as it does give one a sense of relieving a burden and freeing up some mental bandwidth - all with the intention of being better focused to tackle some of the higher priority tasks ahead!
The PixelCount Post - Issue #60
Welcome to Issue #60 of [I]The PixelCount Post[/I], a periodically released update from [I]Kynseed's[/I] team. In today's issue: Charlie works on more design, Neal battles a crash (and wins), Matthijs studies studios, and Matt boards onboarding.
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This last week the team pushed out the latest "Song of Price and Hire" update to all channels! Contained within is the Goods Store as a new ownable business, managing hired staff, and the initial framework of the shop Reputation system.
This proved to be one of the more complex builds we've done, as it contained lots of 'moving parts' on the engine level. For those following along with development, you'll also recall that we had to rework how NPC-owned shops behaved, mainly to ensure there was some consistency between how customers and inventory worked across the world. It's an update that took a bit of extra time to do right, but all that work will help pave the way for future business updates and make it all that much smoother when it comes time to add the Apothecary and Tavern business.
We won't bother getting into the finer details of the update here though, as [URL="https://steamcommunity.com/games/kynseed/announcements/detail/1604889035730615726"][B]the official announcement[/B][/URL] is the best place to go for that. Be sure to give it a read for a fuller look at everything packed into the update.
We'll continue to take in feedback and bugs this week, but otherwise now that the update is out we're moving on to the next one ahead: "Growing Up & Going Out". This is an update that a fair number of you have told us you're keenly looking forward to and we're pretty excited to begin work on it ourselves. Its main highlights are progressing to the adult phase and pursuing romantic relationships. Bear in mind this won't include the [I]full[/I] generation aging loop, but rather just the next age [I]phase[/I]. Our tireless character artist, [URL="https://twitter.com/armyoftrolls"][B]Gary[/B][/URL], has been meticulously recreating every player sprite and animation, but as adult versions instead. In fact, he has to do it all twice to account for both playable siblings!
Something else we're wanting to tackle in the next update is taking a look at what's known as 'player onboarding'. This essentially refers to how players are introduced and taught the game's concepts and mechanics, oftentimes extending beyond just tutorials. Now that we're a handful of updates in, we've felt that the onboarding process has been getting a little left behind. So we're going to start spending a bit of this next update looking for what we refer to as 'cheap' wins, which is basically game dev talk for adding an improvement that doesn't take much time to do and doesn't necessarily require brand new bespoke assets to be made (which can often slow up development).
We're actually still hammering out a lot of those details, as this upcoming week will be a bit of a transitional one in which we tie off loose ends from the last update while nailing down the exact specifics of the next. Plus, on top of that, we're also going to plan out the next batch of updates to be put on [URL="https://steamcommunity.com/games/kynseed/announcements/detail/1799657041071529774"][B]our roadmap[/B][/URL], which you'll note only goes so far as the "Growing Up & Going Out" update currently. You can expect that next batch to get revealed in a couple of weeks.
There's definitely a sense of excitement here on the team, as it feels like development is really starting to hit a stride. We're happy to be able to mark many of our initial updates as complete and are looking forward to kicking things off with a whole slew of new ones - many of which will begin to take individual game components and connect them together into a more cohesive gameplay loop. No doubt the adult phase and romantic relationships will be a big step towards that and will help to really tie things together, not unlike [URL="https://clan.akamai.steamstatic.com/images/32044784/850a7ddf29d56fcb0a0c48c8844f3d320a99626f.gif"][B]Lebowski's rug[/B][/URL].
Lots of appalling weather this week...stupidly hot one minute, constant downpours the rest of the time. Been getting into some design work otherwise - looking at shop specialisations, tutorial stuff, map stuff, noticeboard requests, and special character bios.
Lately it's been great to play the new [I]Fire Emblem[/I] game as well, as it has many things that we're also doing so it is nice to see how they approach it. They have a wonderful UI and there's much to learn from it. Of course, we'll never match their resources, but there are still cheap wins we can utilise.
Was also good to finally get the Goods Store update out and it has given us food for thought. [URL="https://twitter.com/matwekpixel"][B]Mr Weekes[/B][/URL] had an idea to do with the currency, and we got some great feedback from the community. We love getting ideas, so keep them coming!
In my other spare time, I entertained myself by attempting to design a [I]Kynseed[/I] board game. Maybe we should take it to Kickstarter and make 10 million pounds like all the other board games seem to do!
The Goods Store update is finally out! It ended up taking a few more days to get through some polish and deal with one last minute problem. In this case, the night before, I'd made a change to avoid a crash I'd seen in a cheat debug state where I owned the Tavern. All seemed well for a few hours and then Charlie started noticing customers huddling outside the Goods Store and not going in. It took a bit of investigating to put two and two together with the previous change, as I couldn't immediately get the issue.
The cause I eventually found out is being out of the level and time passing enough that NPC's in other levels were going shopping and, without the shop data around, were creating blank versions of it with the wrong info. This didn't result in a crash, but it meant when you actually went to the shop in the level, they were looking at the completely wrong shop data to choose where to go. The fix was just to remove the small change from the night before, but then it actually revealed that without the fix it would actually crash the game in the same situation where it went wrong!
Thankfully that was easier to deal with and the build went out after a bit more testing. I guess the moral of that tale is don't fix cheat debug state bugs on the night before an update (and there would have been a high likelihood the out of level crash was spotted and diagnosed/fixed a lot quicker).
With the update out, it's been a chance to reflect a little on the progress of the game and catch up on our next steps while eagerly eyeing to see any feedback or bugs lurking around. Just round the corner is the relationship update and with it comes a large focus on NPC's, where I'm looking to improve my debug capabilities. I've started compiling a list of 'nice to haves' for this and have already begun implementing a special view where you can zoom out and follow all the sim activity in the map.
[I]Here's a very early look at the sim activity map, a handy debug tool which will allow us to track what any sims are up to at any given time throughout the day. [URL="https://i.imgur.com/ug3pMxA.gif"](Click here to enlarge.)[/URL][/I]
Though what we've started to realise with this update is how focused we've been to sticking to the roadmap ever since it came out and how it has led to the player experience being a little quirky or clunky (depending on how polite you want to be) outside the chosen area for the update. With the relationships update on the way, which seems a big draw for many, we're feeling like we need to level up the player experience a bit first. There'll likely be a little crossover between the two as say, improving the process of relationships will help for when the player can get married, but it probably will mean the relationship update takes a little longer while we make those changes. We're hoping to provide these player experience updates in much smaller chunks as soon as possible, so although the relationship update may be a while away, there'll still be improvements in the meantime!
I'm quite excited about it as it'll feel good to actually address the known issues that we've seen or heard about and then unwrap the next layer of fresh impressions based on the changes made.
I'm so happy with the reactions I've seen to the new update! I've watched some streams of people playing it and they seem really excited with what the team's put out.
In other news, I get to experience my home studio slowly taking shape. It's a wild ride, and a far bigger project than I had ever thought. I do start feeling guilty though. The studio project has been taking up so much time that I hardly got to compose throughout it all. That's tough for me, as I always want to be well ahead of schedule if I can help it. However, the psychological effect of being in a cleaner, more spacious, and prettier studio is undeniable. It had to be done sooner or later.
Meanwhile, I get to look forward to the next update, which I've already written some music for. Charlie tells me that he's been listening to it on repeat, even though it's a relatively short tune that was very tongue-in-cheek. I can't wait to see the full sequence it was written for. I also still haven't finished the ambient track for the dangerous swamp areas you'll encounter much later in the game, which is adding to my sense of guilt for lack of progress. But come Monday (which I'm guessing is when this text is published), I hope to be back to a sense of 'normalcy', as far as that exists!
Phew, what a busy last week! As you've no doubt seen us banging our drum about above, we released the Goods Store update! Though in the midst of juggling its release, we've also started work in earnest on figuring out some very important next steps for development - ranging from preparing the next update ahead as well as charting out the next phase of our roadmap.
This next update, which we (I) chat about in more detail in The Short Report, is going to be a fairly important one. It'll feature the next aging phase (adult) and the pursuit of romantic relationships (courting, marriage, and moving in), which will be an exciting step forward in fleshing out the sandbox and role-play experience. Granted, it's still just a step, but it's one we've been rather looking forward to.
As also mentioned in The Short Report, we've recently been having a think on player onboarding and how we can tighten it up a bit. This next "Growing Up & Going Out" update is probably going to bring in an influx of not just brand new players but also some returning players who've been letting the game accrue updates before diving back in again. So revisiting the early portions of the game experience and seeing how we can better communicate the game's core concepts and goals is certainly on our minds.
I suppose that's the catch-22 of getting an influx of new and returning players. Obviously it's a good thing, but it can also bring with it a feeling of urgency to make sure the game is adequately prepared for it. Oftentimes, I feel it's akin to being halfway through the first draft of a novel and letting everyone read your writing as you go. It can be a little scary letting so many people look behind the curtain while things are so work-in-progress, but in the end, that can be half the fun of it if you let it be.
All that to say, we've decided to expand our next update to also include some time for looking at that whole onboarding experience. This might result in this update taking a slight detour on our roadmap and will no doubt impact how long it takes, but something that's always been important to us is making use of the freedom that being an indie team allows by staying agile and making these small course adjustments as we go. We also have an 'optimization update' planned after this next one, but perhaps it'll just be a matter of borrowing a bit of time from that one to give to this one. It's all still an ongoing team discussion for now though, with more solidified plans to be shared in the weeks ahead.
We've also found watching streams of the game to be indispensable in helping us learn what points players begin to feel a bit aimless with which goals they should be working towards in the game. We tend to have a habit of randomly popping up in stream chats as well, ever-anxious to take notes and learn from different play styles. If you do end up streaming the game, feel free to mention it to us [URL="https://twitter.com/Kynseed"][B]on Twitter [/B][/URL] or drop a stream link in our 'Community Videos' channel on [URL="https://www.discord.gg/pixelcount"][B]Discord[/B][/URL], as we'd love to pop in.
The tricky thing with all of this is that for a game like [I]Kynseed[/I], we've got to strike a certain balance for how we approach onboarding (and tutorialising in general). We don't want to handhold to the point that we override player autonomy or restrict the sense of freedom in what is essentially an open world sandbox. Yet at the same time, open world games can sometimes suffer from having too [I]little[/I] guidance and can result in the open world feeling daunting if not aimless. A GDC talk I recently found myself checking out on this topic is [URL="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBSB2X4Sbak"][B]The Freedom Fallacy[/B][/URL], which I recommend to anyone interested in taking a deep dive into the concept of open world player autonomy.
(As an aside, another GDC video I've recently been soaking in is [URL="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdc9-N48Cl4"][B]Chris King's talk on Early Access[/B][/URL], which I found myself emphatically nodding my head to throughout.)
By the by, if this type of game dev chatter is something you find interesting (or if you're even pursuing games as a career), I'd recommend popping by [URL="https://www.discord.gg/pixelcount"][B]our Discord[/B][/URL], as we pretty much spend our entire workdays there and are known to frequently chat about this sorta stuff. Though speaking of workdays, it's probably time I get back to mine! Definitely be sure to check back soon for more details on the upcoming "Growing Up & Going Out" update.
"A Song of Price and Hire" Update
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Well hello there! You happened to arrive at a good time. We just finished cooking up a fresh batch of bread, so pull up a chair and warm your buns at our fire while we catch up.
Here at Castle PixelCount, our little team has been busy creating new goodies for you to sink your teeth into. Neal, architect of our grand engine, has spent the last number of weeks steadfastly adding a new ownable business in Quill: the Goods Store. This may seem like a simple addition on the surface, but there's a surprising amount of new systems going on underneath. So prop your feet up, nibble on some bread, and we'll tell you all about it.
[H1][U][B]MAKING CENTS OF THINGS[/B][/U][/H1]
Running your own business is one of the core components that make up [I]Kynseed[/I], but there's a lot more to it than just buying a shop to own. It's being able to run different kinds of businesses and to run them the way [I]you[/I] want to. The Blacksmith shop, from a couple updates ago, was our first step in laying that initial groundwork. As of this update, that now includes the Goods Store!
While that sounds straightforward enough, adding the Goods Store has actually had a cumulative effect on many other areas of the game. There's new systems in place for managing staff, gaining shop reputation, leveling up employee skills, ensuring NPC owned stores follow the same rules as player owned stores, and so on. Almost all of these new systems extend to the Blacksmith shop and will, in future updates, also extend to the Apothecary and Tavern.
There's far too many changes to list here, so for a comprehensive look at this hefty update feel free to take a gander at [URL="https://steamcommunity.com/app/758870/discussions/0/1748980761802478102/#c1640917832750717103"][B]the full changelog[/B][/URL] or simply read on for an overview. The team's been working on all this nonstop, much like our pie shop which almost never closes - it's 22/7.
[H1][U][B]WE'RE INTO ROLE-PLAY[/B][/U][/H1]
One of the fun things about the Goods Store is the role-play opportunities it affords. Depending on what types of items you choose to sell, you can effectively run any kind of store you like. You could run a general store by selling a broad variety of items. Or run a farming store by selling tools and seed. Or, a personal favourite of the team, run a bakery by selling homemade pies and bread. We even tried opening up a gassy apple store, but we couldn't keep up with the high cost of inflation.
Though there's a lot more to running the Goods Store than simply choosing which items to sell. There's prices to set, staff to manage, and rep to gain. Since the game's development is constantly evolving, we don't have a formal Goods Store tutorial in place yet, but upon purchasing the store you'll be given a Handbook which goes over most of what you'll need to know. While in the ledger, you can also press F1 or click the left thumbstick to bring up a handy info panel detailing what everything does.
Check out the highlights below for a quick crash course on how it all works as well as an overview of what the update contains.
[H1][U][B]BUYING THE GOODS STORE[/B][/U][/H1]
Use the ledger to see how much the shop costs and, if you wish, to buy it
Upon purchase, you'll inherit the shop's inventory
Interact with the sign outside to open and close your shop
The store will automatically close if you leave the region without any hired staff
[H1][U][B]PLACING ITEMS[/B][/U][/H1]
Place items for purchase and set their price
Customers may buy overpriced items, but they'll be unhappy about it (which will negatively impact your store Rep)
Watch your customer's comments for guidance
[H1][U][B]BARTERING[/B][/U][/H1]
To serve customers, stand behind the counter and interact
Customers won't wait around forever and will leave in a huff if ignored
Some customers may want to haggle over the price
When haggling, the barter wheel will appear - stop the pointer in the green to eke out some extra Brass with no negative effect on Rep
[H1][U][B]MANAGING STAFF[/B][/U][/H1]
Interact with the Ledger to manage staff (and many other shop matters)
Locals will be available for hire, each one with unique attributes
Overworked employees lose stamina, which negatively affects their stats - give them breaks or gift them food to keep stamina high
Workers have individual happiness levels which are affected by their pay, stamina, and friendship level
An unhappy worker will be more discourteous to customers, negatively affecting Rep
Workers gain experience and over time will level up to improve their stats
[H1][U][B]EARNING REP[/B][/U][/H1]
You'll gain Rep whenever a customer is pleased with service and price
Rep will increase in your shop's region and will grant a shop bonus at higher levels
Gaining higher Rep levels in one region will help spread word of your shop to other regions across the land
When that happens, customers from other regions will travel all the way just to visit your shop
As Rep grows, customers will be willing to pay higher and higher prices
(The Reputation system is still Work-In-Progress and will likely change to a more player customisable system in a future update)
[H1][U][B]OTHER BITS[/B][/U][/H1]
All balancing is still very much work-in-progress, ranging from the price to own stores to the overall economy in general
Many of the Goods Store updates extend to Blacksmith ownership as well
You can now order ore from the Blacksmith
You can also hire a second Blacksmith worker to do the actual crafting
The Goods Store and Blacksmith Shop are now available for purchase in Poppyhill (with their own music variations as well)
Ledger improvements for additional sections (such as the Accounts tab to track recent transactions)
New noticeboard added to Candlewych
Currently first pass, but will be fleshed out in future updates
For now, it serves as a reminder of events that happen in the region
Goods market and chicken racing now available in Festfield
Various minor UX tweaks with options screen, XYB slot assignment, calendar, mailbox gamepad controls, money notification, and SFX for various shop screens
For a complete look at all changes, check out [URL="https://steamcommunity.com/app/758870/discussions/0/1748980761802478102/#c1640917832750717103"][B]the full changelog[/B][/URL]
This is one of the meatier updates we've done, with a fair number of new things both on the surface and under. A hearty thanks to all of you playing these updates as we release them and an extra special thanks to those who give us feedback. Of course there's still further to go before all the core components of the game are in place, but this update puts a significant dent in the business ownership side of things.
That said, one of the big pieces of the [I]Kynseed[/I] pie still to come is relationships and aging. So once this update's dust settles, we'll begin work next week on our next major update: "Growing Up & Going Out". This is the one many of you have been anxiously awaiting. It'll include player aging to the adult phase, romantic relationships (courting, marriage, and moving in together), as well as a brand new region called Loverwood.
We can't wait to get started on it and, as usual, we'll be chronicling our progress daily around the community and weekly in [URL="https://steamcommunity.com/app/758870/allnews/"][B][I]The PixelCount Post[/I][/B][/URL]. We'll also soon be announcing the next batch of updates ahead on [URL="https://steamcommunity.com/games/kynseed/announcements/detail/1799657041071529774"][B]our roadmap[/B][/URL], as the "Growing Up & Going Out" update is the last major one listed at the moment.
All that in the weeks ahead - same bat time, same bat channel. (The PixelCount bat, of course.)
[URL="https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0BxcO6g9az8o9clFuZXczUWdad00"]Kynseed Media Kit[/URL]
The PixelCount Post - Issue #59
Welcome to Issue #59 of [I]The PixelCount Post[/I], a periodically released update from [I]Kynseed's[/I] team. In today's issue: Charlie designs shop reputation, Neal draws up testing plans, Matthijs gets cozy with coleslaw, and Matt sets the scene for setting scenes.
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This past week has been all about putting final touches on the Goods Store update as well as taking in feedback from any early players on the test branch. We've also spent some time putting together remaining plans for the update after this one called the "Growing Up & Going Out" update, which will add aging to the adult phase plus the pursuit of romantic relationships.
More on that later though, because for now we're ramping up the Goods Store update for a full release and can happily report that if all goes to plan it'll be heading your way this upcoming week! Keep your eyes peeled for a full announcement not long from now, complete with a big hearty changelog to go with it.
This week we hit a bit of a design brick wall. We tried to sort out the Goods Store Reputation system and to also ensure that owning shops has variety, that the Perks were good, and that their UI was clear. We had a lot of back and forth and it took some mock-ups, but finally we are getting there with only Perks remaining to sort out. We decided that there will be two types of Rep: Shop, which is for your local shop and Family, which is all your shops in all Havens. It may end in bloodshed but we will get there!
We got a bit more art this week as well: a new Master called Moon, who is an exotic archer and Master of Ranged Combat. She looks very cool with her shadowy hood and piercing big blue eyes. That leaves us with just three others to do (well, Gary). Gary will also be working on the final initial combat animations for the adults plus more monster idles. I also gave him a list of creepy characters that turn up at various times of the year, as is traditional. I can't wait to see Tickling Tom Hookfingers and Mag the Moghog, who in my brief I described as a "cat barrel chicken legged thing".
Weekes has been still working on the UI updates and I can't wait to see something we're calling 'the Wheel of Copulation'. He has also updated the cooking UI and we will be tweaking those mechanics to make stirring more useful. Tice is still cooking up secret musical sauces and Caz has her big item list to work through. Every day can bring us new treats and that's what makes working at PixelCount enthralling. Giant veg and strange swamps one day...gaudy boingy sex music the next...new features and mechanics the day after that...
It's been a slow week for progress. With the build up on the testing branch, player testing has commenced and a few blocking issues were found. These have been fixed and preparations for the update to go live continue. It did limit polish time, which is why we've set ourselves next Wednesday as the date for it to go live (barring any last minute twists of fate).
Bugs are an annoying but expected part of development. The usual reason for them is a combination of moving parts to a given process that makes exhaustive testing impossible. When you see the stats for a game, like say PUBG when it says there's been a billion hours played, then that's closer to an exhaustive test. Yet it still brings unexpected circumstances along the way because of a bewildering combination of computer drivers/hardware/internet connections/position of players at any given moment in the map/etc. So the dilemma of development for bugs is what is a reasonable amount of testing that can be done that gives as much coverage on expected problems as possible while allowing the game to finish some time before computers become obsolete to brain implants! Every time a change is made, a hunch has to be taken as to the extent of its effects. These can help to some degree, but can completely cloud vision on some problems as blind spots are developed to anything else...
The case in point for this was a few days before the test branch went up I made a change to the level temporary NPC's are spawned to. The change was a small simple one to make them associated to the level where they came from and was made so that when they buy something in a shop they are correctly counted for the region they came from for reputation tracking purposes. With our testing fixated on the Good Store, we checked thoroughly that it worked in those circumstances and were content it was all good. That left a blind spot though to the other places where temporary NPC's are spawned for events in say the Festival Green area where the NPC's were noticing their level wasn't their normal one and wandering back towards that to carry out their tasks!
Fortunately the fix in this wasn't too hard and lessons were learned about what to test. We're also looking to draw up more comprehensive test plans that cover all functionality and quick ways of testing. With that plan in hand, hopefully we can get ever closer to comprehensive checks prior to builds going live. Though there'll always be that lurking bug waiting to be uncovered, but as we improve processes and fix them there'll be fewer places for them to hide!
With work on my home studio still in full swing, it's been a chaotic week for me. I'm fully expecting to be moving my PC back into the studio next week though. Meanwhile, I've built up a collection of dry foley sounds to construct the background noises for the deepest sections of swamp.
It's a much more complex method than I've been using for the other background ambient sounds because it has to all be reverb-less. If I want the sound of a little rodent scurrying away in the bushes, I have to manually construct it from singlular sounds of russling bushes (or something that represents it) as well as any other sounds I feel it might need. Sounds that were captured in nature have a sense of space, and are accompanied by things like wind and other background noises. For this, it would be unusable.
That's why I'm going with foley sounds, recorded in a sound controlled environment. Often the sound you hear that seems like it'd be something like a footstep, or a clashing sword, they're actually recorded with entirely different objects. Who knew that the chopping off of a head sounds exactly like a person cutting coleslaw...
As the team starts wrapping up work on the Goods Store update, it's time for us to turn our attention to the next update ahead. That update is called the "Growing Up & Going Out" update and will bring some pretty exciting additions to the game. Namely: players aging to the adult phase as well as the pursuit of romantic relationships. (Among a few other bits and bots we'll be adding in.)
Game development tends to have periods of overlap like this, where part of the team is concluding work on one update while the other part of the team is beginning work on the next. Much of this is just the nature of how certain mediums of work are conducted, such as how design typically comes before art and how art typically comes before coding and so on. Thefore, the work on the adult player assets has already been well underway for a few months now (there's [I]so many[/I] to make) and will be ready and waiting for when Neal begins programming them in - hopefully a couple of weeks from now.
However, this upcoming week is when we're planning to release the Goods Store! It's been quite a meaty update and I'm looking forward to seeing what everyone thinks of all the things that've been added. We'll be taking in feedback and sorting through bug reports the week of release, and then shortly after we'll ramp up work on that subsequent aging/romance update. I'm personally looking forward to that specific update, as I get to make a handful of new cutscenes for it using our engine's Cutscene Editor tool. I'll be sure to chat about how all that works in future [I]Post[/I] issues and will probably even stream the process a few times. Should be fun!
The PixelCount Post - Issue #58
Welcome to Issue #58 of [I]The PixelCount Post[/I], a periodically released update from [I]Kynseed's[/I] team. In today's issue: Charlie manages chaos, Neal puts the build on the test branch, Matthijs plays mouth harp, and Matt is still talking about GIF's for some reason.
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This week the team has been putting the last bits of final work into the Goods Store update, with an early build now up on our Steam test branch! Assuming all goes well and there's no fires to put out, the public release will get pushed out forthwith.
Meanwhile, other bits of the team have begun work on assets for the update after this one, which we're calling the "Growing Up & Going Out" update. It'll be all about growing into an adult and pursuing romantic relationships. Both of those are things we've been really looking forward to, so it's pretty exciting for us to finally be at the stage where we're ready to start adding it all in.
Though for now, the forthcoming Goods Store update should give you some fun entrepreneurial adventures to get into in the meantime. If you're taking it for an early spin on the test branch be sure to let us know how you get on with it and for all you other fine folks keep your eyes peeled for the full announcement and changelog to follow shortly. Speak again soon!
This week I have been mostly playing the build, but other than trying to manage the chaos of my store at max Rep levels, I got stuck into some design and feedback.
Next update we have marriage, romance and...erm, nookie. So, how are we handling it? (wahey!) We're going to cover the act with an amusing mechanic that needs some of Tice's magic music to get the feel right. Mr Weekes had the unenviable task of creating the art for this most important of acts, and I had to deliver the system that dictates how it works. We will reveal all in an upcoming (wahey!) #ScreenshotSaturday [URL="https://twitter.com/Kynseed"][B]on Twitter[/B][/URL].
I have to write some flavour text for the deed, which should be fun, and just before I wrote this [I]Post[/I] article Tice presented the music for it which, with a touch of mouth harp and tuba, made the whole thing golden. We look forward to players getting intimate, but it will need some planning! We have Matt ready to finally get in on the action as our cutscene man, so the marriage ceremony will be in his hands.
It's going to be a great update...and we are hoping possibly the best sex mechanic in any game. ;-)
This week: more Goods Store progress. Have finally today managed to get the build up onto the test branch of Steam!
Each day was a case of checking internal feedback from the last build, working on the list for that day, and getting another build ready in the evening to review. As the week went on, there did start to be less of the urgent 'must fix' items and more of the 'nice to have' polish work which I'll be getting started on tomorrow! It's nice to have the build up finally to start seeing new impressions of the overall setup, unclouded by us devs knowing all the ins and outs.
Pulling together the changelog showed there was quite a bit of detail that has gone into the update around shops and hopefully it shows to the people playing! I've been finding that this update definitely felt more packed from the start to its current state, and expect the next few will too. As more of the systems in the game come together and start to interact then there's more work to do linking those details, while hopefully the tools get more refined making it ever faster to setup new content.
It's not clear when the tipping point of that will be to make it so that updates are less code detail and more content iteration, but it is starting to feel tantalisingly close. I'm not going to dare predict it though, suffice to say it'll happen when it happens, but I certainly will be trying to get there soon!
This past week started out with me working on the ambient sounds for the more dangerous swampy areas where the fog hides scary things...
It's intended to nicely accompany the music I made for the area the week before. But my work was cut short when I was asked to switch gears all of a sudden and work on music for a game mechanic to do with conceiving. All in an extremely tongue-in-cheek way of course, and the music needed to reflect this.
The first thing I tried was far too serious and romantic; not at all what Charlie had in mind. But luckily, there was an old draft I had for when we tried to get the music for Tir Na Nog to sound as though it was being played by a terrible orchestra of gnomes. It turned out that was a great foundation to work from! I messed around with getting it to fit for this new purpose but it took a while to get the sheer levels of absurdness that Charlie had in mind.
We brought in a tuba to accompany the terribly played strings and glockenspiels already in the track, but it was still not absurd enough. The final ingredient that got us there? A mouth harp to represent the springs of a bed going up and down...very on the nose! But with Charlie happy, I ain't complaining.
With that one completed, I can now turn my attention back to super creepy swamp sounds, which is one heck of a gear change!
A few days ago I finished up a batch of GIF's intended for use in the announcement for when the update goes live. We've been making GIF's of the game since the old prototype days and whereas these are typically used for marketing purposes by most teams, it's something we've oddly come to depend on for development as well.
When playing the game normally, it's sometimes easy to overlook areas that need presentation polish. The game's still very much in development, so it's par the course that there's imperfections like that during our playthroughs. But when capturing a brief moment of the game in GIF form, it manages to narrow focus in such a way that even the smallest of presentation blemishes become readily apparent and impossible to ignore. A pixel out of place here, a shadow not working there, and so on.
In that way, many of the GIF's I capture compels us to go back and polish those areas up (typically adding to Neal's gargantuan list of things to do). Then once the necessary fixes have been made, I'll have to go back and recapture the GIF's from scratch.
It's one of those things where you'd think making a GIF for a community announcement would be a pretty no fuss straightforward thing, but seldom does that ever seem to be the case in game development! The text draft I've made of the upcoming community announcement has 8 GIF's in total, a number of them redone a few times now. One GIF, in particular, has a ridiculously long runtime of about 45 seconds and yet I managed to squeeze it down to 2.95 MB's with no perceptible compression. The glories of using pixel art!
I seem to have rambled on a bit about this sorta thing two [I]PixelCount Posts[/I] in a row now, but I usually don't spend so much time fiddling with GIF's. So I'm looking forward to finishing up with the community announcement in the next day or two and then moving on to work on something I've been excitedly anticipating for some time: creating the game's cutscenes!
More on that in the weeks ahead. Until then, we'll see you all very soon at the Goods Store!
The PixelCount Post - Issue #57
Welcome to Issue #57 of [I]The PixelCount Post[/I], a periodically released update from [I]Kynseed's[/I] team. In today's issue: Charlie playtests the new build, Neal balances the Goods Store, Matthijs gets lost in a fog, and Matt whips up some GIF's.
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Progress continues along on the forthcoming Goods Store update. Neal has been chipping away at his list o' things for this update and it's all starting to come together. One of the trickier things with this update is that we've added in some new systems for overall world economy and balancing. Such systems will play an important role for any business owning player, but the challenge is we want non-player owned businesses to generally follow the same systems.
Ensuring that level of economic consistency is an involved task, but an important one. It's those sort of things that bring us closer to giving the world that 'sandbox' feel that we want. In this way, the Goods Store and its ancillary systems will be a big help in adding depth to the game's business ownership. We're getting so close to pushing the update out we can taste it. Mmmm...new update taste.
Been mainly testing/playing the build this past week, as well as getting ahead on future story stuff and clearing up some old design docs for the update after next.
We got a couple of new characters through from Gary: Marshtyt the Master Gardener and a Druidic wedding priest, who looks like he likes a sip of altar wine and longs for the old days of blood sacrifice. Weekes has been pumping out more environment art, with a lot of UI stuff including the Larder, which you stock to keep your family fed. I am looking forward to seeing him create the 'Wheel of Copulation'...something we will reveal on Twitter in the coming weeks.
Matthijs (Tice) has been making lovely sounds. Caz, our icon artist, has started on the Master Items list (there's a lot to do!) and Mr Allen has been busy prepping the update stuff for the stores and various social media gubbins. So it's busy busy....but my hat tips off to the mighty Neal who has been working through the complex nightmare that is the Goods Store and has done fantastic work.
Right then! Back to testing and trying not to get distracted by Antstream Arcade...
This week saw yet more progress on the Goods Store update. It's been a tough week to get everything all working correctly with all the needed items done. It is firmly staying in the single digits and in fact down to the last couple of items on the list today (but then likely a new playthrough will bring up more).
This week's big contributors to time (and also improving the Goods Store experience in general) is dynamic balance. Such as where the shoppers come from based on tracking the rep balance and getting shops to start working the same when the player doesn't own the shop. So progress is still happening and it's getting ever closer, but it has seemed like every build I made this week just had at least one little thing off that needed looking into and it kind of adds up into slowing down progress on the remaining items.
I think also nearly every day I've been predicting or expecting to get things ready the next day but then it doesn't work like that! Perhaps that's in fact the general rule: if you predict/expect a perfect outcome down to the day, the likelihood of it happening is pretty low. It will be a good feeling when it finally does happen though!
This week, other than the continuing effort to remodel my studio, I turned the draft I did last week into a full length track and I finished the ambient track for the swamp. I'm quite happy with how they both turned out, especially when played at the same time. The ambient track will be for areas of the swamp that aren't that dangerous, but also won't be for areas that are too populated. Both of those examples will be getting their own ambient track.
Rather than the many frogs and flies and winds of the current ambient track, the more dangerous areas of the swamps will be quieter. Charlie talked about how a thick fog would muffle the sounds and remove all sense of wide open space. If I manage to get it to sound like what I have in mind, every little thing that you hear will jump out at you because of how quiet everything else is. I'm a big fan of Frank Darabont's [I]The Mist'[/I], and I can't wait to evoke the same sense of creepiness! Plus, I already know from what I've seen the art team do...'there's something in the mist!'.
I started capturing a few GIF's for the upcoming Goods Store update release. Whenever I write up an announcement for any new update, I always like to include a handful of GIF's to sprinkle into the text. Typically, the function of these GIF's is to highlight recent feature/content additions in the update.
However, whenever the meat of an update is still being worked on, this usually means there's a lack of presentation polish in the meantime. Things like placeholder UI, animations not always lining up, and other little things like that. Because of this, I have to wait to make GIF's until the updates are nearly finished. (Presentation and UI polish is almost always the last thing done for any given update.)
The Goods Store update recently reached this point and so I've been running around the game world capturing GIF's of the new bits and bobs. As I talked about [URL="https://steamcommunity.com/games/kynseed/announcements/detail/1603760509537089819"][B]in last week's [I]Post[/I][/B][/URL], I employ the use of our engine's debug mode to help speed things along for GIF creation. (Namely, giving myself enough Brass to buy the Goods Store instantaneously.)
Capturing game GIF's is an interesting process, one that always seems like it'd be easier and more straightforward than it ever is. Sometimes I feel a bit like a Quill photographer, roaming the countryside in pursuit of interesting things to take pictures of. I've actually been meaning to start streaming during my workdays some more, so perhaps I'll do so the next time I go on a GIF hunt.
The PixelCount Post - Issue #56
Welcome to Issue #56 of [I]The PixelCount Post[/I], a periodically released update from [I]Kynseed's[/I] team. In today's issue: Charlie runs out of stock, Neal prepares the update for the test branch, Tice writes swampy music, and Matt is a dirty cheater.
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With E3 fading away as a distant memory, the whole team was able to fully jump back into update progress last week. Most of that work is falling on Charlie and Neal who are polishing up the final bits. Meanwhile, art and audio are working ahead by making all the assets needed for the next few updates (such as adulthood and relationships, which is what we're tackling in the update after this one).
As Neal mentions below, we're planning on releasing the update to our Steam test branch for any who are interested in taking it for an early spin. From there, we'll get it prepared for pushing it out to the public branch and then we're on to the next update!
I am always amazed by what our team comes up with. Other than marvelling at Neal the machine and his tireless engine, we have great artists and a superb musician. So this week we got the line up of all Mellowfield NPC's, [URL="https://twitter.com/armyoftrolls/status/1144877840313323521"][B]idle animations[/B][/URL] for some of them, cool new caves, a bunch of nice UI elements for a better looking chat system, music concept for Woemarsh, and more!
I spent a lot of time playing the build and running my shops and loving it...then time passing and me realising stock was running short and that I hadn't paid my staff or looked after my farm and pets. We hope that when you play the update, you'll share some of your stories with us. Just who buys what, and what you did to make money. What did the window shoppers say about your wares? How did you run your business? We can't wait! Now, back to gazing at art and listening to awesome music...
This week has kept things rather busy on the update front. On Tuesday, we had a playthrough to establish what to concentrate on and I've been busying away on that ever since. That 60 item list from 3 weeks ago had gotten down to about a net 40 on Monday. (Scanning my completed list, I've done about 200 items of varying sizes in that time so you can see there's quite a bit of extra work getting figured out!) This was then pushed to one side with the playthrough for a new list of 15 essentials.
In the last few days I actually got that down to about 4 of the 15 but now even more items have popped up in their place to drag things back to about 30 (albeit, these are definitely the smaller kind fortunately). This might all seem a bit meaningless to talk about, but I guess it just goes to show the chaotic nature of development and how you never quite know what's around the corner.
I think one thing I've also found is how lists can degrade in value pretty quickly. What seems optimistically possible a few weeks back becomes a burden when you get down to it and slows things to a crawl. There's definitely items on my list that I actively push to the bottom cos I just don't want to get to them quite yet, but the drastic improvements often come when you finally get to them because they really complete the experience. In this update's case, it's been about me figuring out shop reputation levels and how to handle the frequency of customers. Both of those fall into this tricky category of balance and felt fiddly to get a handle on to construct, but now that they're in it really starts to tie it all together as a whole.
Next week should see the build up on the test branch once the list is finally down to the single digits again and then we get to start again with new lists of feedback and the next update to work on. It's a good thing I like working on lists!
Since being back from the US, my focus has become an entirely new region. It's swampy and I was asked to make its music less 'happy-go-lucky' than what has come before. So in the last week I've been experimenting with creating a new sound. I ended up using a rather jazzy acoustic bass, banjo, and fiddle on top of a soundpad made by mostly strings and woodwinds.
I want the overall feel of these places to be bordering on scary, but not really scary. I want them to be bordering on sad, but not really sad. Swamps can be pretty from time to time. I just presented a draft of what I'm going for to the team today, and they seemed quite happy with it so it's full steam ahead for the whole region. Other than the music, I also have to create an ambient soundscape for these places. I'm going to be looking for the sound of frogs, flies, and water...all wrapped in mist. It's going to take a while, but I'll have a lot of fun doing this!
We've been getting back into our usual groove this week and my schedule has thankfully returned to some semblance of normality. Lately I've been spending much more time just playing the 'vanilla' game - basically, the public version that's up on Steam and everywhere else. Typically I do all my playtesting using internal dev builds. Which is to say: typically I do all my playtesting as a dirty dirty cheater.
Usually I do this purely for time saving reasons. A fair chunk of my work involves making a lot of our screenshots and video, so if I need to quickly take a screenshot of the player running the Goods Store, it's a whole lot easier to give myself unlimited Brass so I can quickly purchase it in a few seconds. Playing the game as normal would mean it'd take me hours just to get a single screenshot set up.
However, the biggest disadvantage to this is something that happens to a lot of teams: debug becomes a crutch and they can end up playtesting almost exclusively with dev tools enabled. All that to say, it's wise to still make time to playtest the game as it's intended to be played. I've been making more time for those kind of playtests as of late and they've been a really nice change of pace. Perhaps it's a good sign that as more of the game is put together I find myself more inclined to play it without debug.
Personally, I'm most looking forward to our current update and the next ( with aging and relationships) get added. I can't wait to start a new character from scratch to playtest it all. Perhaps this time I'll play as shop owner who sales delicious pies that become famous across the land.
The PixelCount Post - Issue #55
Welcome to Issue #55 of [I]The PixelCount Post[/I], a periodically released update from [I]Kynseed's[/I] team. In today's issue: Charlie gets carried away prettying, Neal whittles down his list of tasks, Tice copes with E3 jetlag, and Matt gets chummy.
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Welcome back readers! We've been rather busy these last couple of weeks due to some team members traveling and attending E3. This led to our virtual office being a bit more quiet than usual, so the other team members used it as an opportunity to dive deep into update work. As of earlier this week, the whole gang is now back together and we're running at full capacity once more as we get the "Song of Price and Hire" update prepared.
You can read accounts of E3 adventures in the individual dev updates below, some of which include double updates to make up for not having a new issue of [I]The Post[/I] in recent weeks. (As fun and worthwhile as E3 is, it does make for quite the development disruption!)
Earlier this week, the team did a catch-up meeting to play through progress on the update. Goods Store ownership is coming along nicely and its various mechanics are all starting to fit together into a cohesive gameplay experience - placing items, setting prices, bartering with customers, managing staff, and so on.
We've still got a bit of UI presentation and economy balancing to do before we push the update out (both of which will continue to evolve during development, of course). With E3 over and the full team back in place, we're back to firing on all cylinders, so keep an eye out for update news very Soon™.
I got a bit carried away recently. I was meant to be starting on the next haven, Mellowfields, and the plan was to block all the levels out roughly. However, I got carried away with the first area and ended up prettying it.
This was mainly due to the lovely art assets provided by our very own Mr Weekes, and the fact that as I built it, it was looking nice. Then I got onto the next region...and did the same. Then the next...
There is just something very relaxing about prettying and detailing everything. I would often step back and look at the layout, then change chunks of it, which is why you shouldn't pretty until layouts are done...but I don't seem to care apparently!
I have also been utterly addicted to the Goods Store ownership. It's enthralling seeing who comes into the shop and what they buy. Your brain fills in the story. It was great building my reputation and seeing more people come from further afield.
The balance still needs to be done this weekend, as currently everybody is happy buying strawberry pies at 99,999 Brass. Now excuse me while I go dive into my gold pile like Scrooge McDuck...
[U][B]7th JUNE[/B][/U]
Following from the first week on the update, I've been carrying on filling in the main areas of Good Store ownership and business reputation. As mentioned before, I've been trying to front-load the work a bit. I went through my list of things to work on and started labelling all the different types of tasks as gameplay/strategy/immersion/presentation/UX followed by concentrating on the gameplay/strategy ones first (such as reputation, blacksmith ore stock ordering, regional preferences, and customer price preference).
Now that those bits are in place, I've started moving into the other categories to improve the feel of it. I suppose I shouldn't be too surprised that these tasks are spreading out in volume to fill up the rest of the update (in fact, I'm pretty sure my list is bigger now than when I started the week).
On the plus side, I'm hoping it'll feel like a comprehensive new addition to the gameplay and it won't need revisiting much in the future. At the moment, the list is up to about 60 items which probably also need more breaking down, so I guess my challenge now will be to see how quickly I can get through them (without breaking anything) while also finding time to prepare for the next update!
[U][B]23rd JUNE[/B][/U]
About 2 weeks on now and am still whittling down the list. It took a while, where the list seemed to consistently expand as I picked up extra bits that needed doing and each item itself turned into a 10-15 step process. Thankfully, that is finally quietening down.
Mostly left is balancing and presentation tweaks which, in theory, should be self-contained. The only challenge is that the recent team playthrough with the shops has revealed a few intermittent issues which are proving hard to repeat and debug. The difficulty is mainly coming from the random chance aspect, where it would seem like some specific combo of events leads to issues.
Though I had it happen once this morning, I've not had it in a few hours of trying since. That leaves a dilemma: A) to carry on trying to figure out that issue or B) to get back on the tweaks. So far I've been on the 'A' choice but, without much to show for it, 'B' is starting to look more tempting.
Maybe stepping back from it for just a little bit will bring up some new angle to work on it as that is probably what is needed. That angle might just be a bit of extra debug that helps navigate the random chance. However it works out, it does seem like we're getting closer on this update. Still not sure exactly when it'll land, as we want to make a good solid build, but it's definitely getting there!
[U][B]7th JUNE[/B][/U]
In the past week, between packing and other E3 trip prep work, I talked to Matt and Neal about the future updates and when more music and sound assets might need to be done by. This allows me to plan and leave for Los Angeles without worry of being late on anything.
When I return, I'll know exactly what to get started on so that there won't be a slow start. (Except for jet lag, maybe.) Now I'm off to add the last few items to my bags and then I'll leave for the airport. E3 has never been as exciting to me as it is this year!
[U][B]23rd JUNE[/B][/U]
Soooo, the past two weeks were pretty epic...
I flew to Los Angeles a few days ahead of E3, but that didn't mean I got to take it easy. Matt and I went to the Bethesda press conference, held in a huge theater. It seemed Bethesda had spared no expense, making sure everyone in line had water aplenty, and when we got inside there were open bars to be had.
This was shortly followed by the press conference itself, which I'm sure many of you saw as well via stream. I particularly liked their [I]GhostWire[/I] reveal. Afterward, there was more open bar and free food while people from Bethesda walked the crowd - including Todd Howard himself, whom I was lucky enough to briefly speak to.
In the rest of the time before E3 actually began, we met some familiar faces from communities past and present, sharing drinks and stories. The convention center itself, a huge complex, was adorned with many a giant poster of the latest games. They even painted the side of a whole building to depict [I]Doom Eternal's[/I] cover art on a truly massive scale.
Like peacocks, everyone wanted to be seen by creating the largest and flashiest displays they could. Once the convention actually started, the lines to enter were as massive as the displays. An entire parking lot floor was filled with people wanting to be the first gamers to get inside. Once you do get inside, it's truly mind-bending how much visual information you get bombarded with. Companies did things like bringing in monster trucks, a modified school bus a la [I]Fortnite[/I], life-size dragons, elaborate water fountain displays, giant screens everywhere, obstacle courses, augmented reality gardens, huge gate structures, and even entire buildings were constructed inside the massive halls of the convention center - all to be the biggest and flashiest of them all. So many peacocks.
Almost hidden among massive titles like [I]Cyberpunk 2077[/I], [I]Pokémon Sword and Shield[/I], or [I]Watch Dogs: Legion[/I], was a small section of relative calm. Quieter than everywhere else, but filled to the brim with passion and hope, was an area for games of a smaller scale: IndieCade. This is where a dense collection of indie studios could be found, many of them single-person dev 'teams'. While sequels and nearly-guaranteed hits were being flashy like lives depended on it, these small indie devs humbly displayed their games and ideas. There were curious abstract ideas aplenty, like escape rooms that you could take with you in a small box and games that blended programs with real tangible objects.
There's still a wild west left to discover in game development, and many of these folks were the settlers traversing it. Sure, seeing a big game like [I]Lone Echo 2[/I] blew me away, but I'll always remember the time I spent playing curiously inventive and sometimes bizarrely abstract games like [I]Ascend[/I], [I]Infinite Children[/I], or [I]Neo Cab[/I]. Or that time when a small augmented reality game called [I]ARBox[/I] had me scanning the real world for a magic seal. No flashy stands, just interesting ideas with a lot of heart.
As 3 days of buzzing conference ended, followed by a magnificent Ludovico Einaudi concert as a cherry on top, I couldn't help but wonder if [I]Kynseed[/I] might ever find its way to that cozy corner among the peacocks.
E3 has once again passed by in a blur, and already the week-long extravaganza seems to be fading into memory. This marked my sixth E3 I've attended and it seems like each year feels distinctly different than the ones that came before.
Not long ago the [I]Fable Anniversary[/I] team was there, crammed into the Microsoft area right next to Sony and Nintendo's area - each as equally crammed as the other. A couple years after that the [I]Fable Legends[/I] team was there. Fast forward to 2019 and suddenly Microsoft's area is gone entirely, having moved down the street to the aptly named (and owned) Microsoft Theater. Not to mention Sony's notable absence this year.
It's all an ever-present reminder that the game industry is a constantly evolving thing. Yet there does seem to be one constant that I've noticed: the people. Maybe the real treasure was the friends we made along the way. [I]*Jim Halpert looks at camera*[/I]
The industry might change at breakneck speeds but the family of friends I've made over the years does seem to be the one constant thread throughout it all. This E3, I met up with industry peeps (ex-Lionhead and otherwise), new PixelCount friends, and even folks from the Fable community whose friendships span over a decade. In many ways, E3 serves as a sort of annual reunion for both dev side and player side. It's easily my favourite aspect of E3.
That said, when not gallivanting around with chums of yore, there was still work to be done. We didn't have a booth or anything (we feel the game's not [I]quite[/I] at that point yet), but there were meetings to have, panels to attend, contacts to contact, and even the impromptu laptop demo here and there.
I'm sure I'll have more E3 tales to regale you all with in the week ahead (likely in [URL="https://www.discord.gg/pixelcount"][B]our Discord server[/B][/URL]), though for now I find myself still recovering from a bit of 'post-con fatigue'. I'm very much looking forward to settling back in to my normal work routines this next week. As much as I enjoy E3, a part of me always just wants to get back to working on the game.
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