First of all I want to thank you for the absolutely incredible launch of Mail Time <3 It’s been an incredibly overwhelming few days and I’m so happy to see so many people enjoy this silly little mushroom game.
Now, you’ve all done a really good job informing us of bugs you’ve encountered and I’m here with a patch that’s out now that should address *most* of them!
The major issues that were solved:
resolved a bug where you wouldn't be able to click the 'woooooo' button when a character gives you an item
the game will return any items you might've not received before to your inventory due to a bug
reordered which UI should be on top of which one so that the handbook will always be on top of any other menus
made sure the "override save file?" confirmation always shows when potentially overriding a save file
fixed hair colour selection not saving properly from the player creation menu
when loading an existing save (continue game) the game will attempt to correct any steam achievements that you incorrectly hadn't received before
Backing up your save
If you'd like to backup your save before playing the new patch (just in case), you can find it in the following location:
It will be called MailTime.sav so just copy that file to a save location!
If you ever want to play on that file again just put it back in the folder, being careful to make sure the name is still MailTime.sav and you can start the game and play it!
Known Issues
Achievements
I’m aware there have been some issues with achievements, I’m really sorry! I’ve now implemented a feature that will attempt to give you any achievements you should’ve received already when you continue your game (press continue game from the main menu).
Specifically the bureaucrat achievement had an issue with a misspelling in the backend making it impossible to get which is resolved now. I’ve also implemented some additional checks for “express shipping” and “next day delivery” which should make it so that you can get those achievements as well.
To 100% test achievements and resolve them will likely take a bit longer as it’s a complex task. For now we’ve unlisted achievements from the main store page as to not disappoint anyone and it’s something I’m working hard on to resolve asap. I appreciate you all documenting where the problems are <3
Toph
Toph is a character that is giving quite a few of you issues with his mushroom samples quest. That is *not* being solved in this patch yet. It’s something I’m working on and as long as you keep your save file with the mushroom samples I hope I can resolve it in such a way that you’ll all be able to finish the quest.
Full patch notes V1.00.11:
🔥MAJOR:
resolved bug where you wouldn't be able to click the 'woooooo' button when a character gives you an item
the game will return any items you might've not received before to your inventory due to a bug
reordered which UI should be on top of which one so that the handbook will always be on top of any other menus
made sure the "override save file?" confirmation always shows when potentially overriding a save file
fixed hair color selection not saving properly from the player creation menu
when loading an existing save (continue game) the game will attempt to correct any steam achievements that you incorrectly hadn't received before
fixed a bug where sometimes you wouldn't be able to move after getting an item from a character
⭐MEDIUM:
fixed textures in player creation screen loading blurry
menu to change player customization is now always accessible from the handbook > settings (blue tab) > "player" (left side)
menu to change player customization has a player preview + reset button
disabled controller rumble until we can properly implement intensity settings for it
Daisy no longer has a "quest available" orange popup above her head when she has no delivery to give you. On older save files she'll still have this sadly.
re-eanbled the invisible walls above the fence in the farm area to prevent you getting out of bounds >:(
✨MINOR:
deliveries that are ready to be delivered won't show items missing in the deliveries tab of the handbook
removed some foliage around Irene to make her more easily accessible
prevented amethyst deceiver mushroom from disappearing
moved floating water drop to actually be on lily pad
fun fact: Soks isn't allowed back in Vegas since the incident.
prevented Kaz "raven black feathers" dialogue box from jittering
prevented Next Day Delivery patch UI from jittering
cleared more space around Egbert to prevent camera from clipping into him during dialogue
moved the line where music between the starting and village area switches so it's not so close to Kiki
fixed a few spots where you could get stuck around the map
fixed an issue where walking between Toph and the hat box could not allow dialogue to start
made it so that when you hold the turn buttons in the player creation menu the player preview turns faster
moved some out of bounds characters so they're not visible from within the map
Mail Time is finally here 🎉
Hello Mail Scouts! It’s finally happening!!!
✨MAIL TIME HAS OFFICIALLY RELEASED ✨
HUGE thank you to all of you for supporting Mail Time during development and I hope you love it <3.
If you find a bug (not the ladybug kind) let me know in the official Discord server, where we have a dedicated section to reporting bugs! If you don’t want to join the Discord you can also leave it in the Steam Forums.
now go deliver all the mail!! and commit crime
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If you need me I’ll be half crying half laughing while fixing as many bugs as I can and hanging out in the Discord :’)
If you enjoyed the game, please leave a review, it helps a TON!
bye bye! <3 ヾ(•ᴗ•๑)o
Kela
Mail Time update (almost there!!)
hey everyone!
It's been a while, I hope you're all well <3
Because we're nearing the end of the development of the game there's no new ✨stuff✨ I can show you but I'm happy to catch you up on the past weeks in Mail Time's development and some plans for what's next. ∘₊✧────────────✧✿✿✿✧────────────✧₊∘
Beta recap
I want to thank those of you that played the Mail Time beta for all your help! We used the Discord to receive bug reports and you all used it so well that it was very manageable for me to keep an overview of what I needed to work on.
Releasing the game in April is going to be pretty scary but it was really calming to be able to release it to you first and get some feedback before we do the big release.
During the beta you reported 56 bugs & I published 5 patches that fixed 88 bugs! (I found some you hadn't yet hehe >:) ).
I'm also happy to report that in true Mail Time tradition, someone did find a way out of the map. Since it's pretty difficult to find and do I'm going to leave it in (at least for now). BUT I did a good job making it really difficult as CMax said "Kela's done a real good job of patching out ways to get up there" (˘ ˘ ˘) hehe.
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Translating the game
While the beta was taking place we were also working on localization. We've worked closely with the localization team because Mail Time is quite a unique challenge to translate. Because one of the pronoun choices is gender-neutral pronouns (they/them), every translator had to figure out if that could work with their language. The translators delivered some amazing work and were able to incorporate gender-neutral pronouns for almost every language Mail Time will be available in! The only exception is the French translation where it's not yet quite possible due to the way their grammar is heavily gendered :(
look it's not English!! I don't remember what this says at all '^^ ∘₊✧────────────✧✿✿✿✧────────────✧₊∘
also, maybe watch the MIX showcase this friday 10am PST, no reason at all of course 👀
💌 Mail Time is releasing April 2023 💌 We JUST showed our new animated trailer in the Wholesome Snack: The Game Awards edition where I was finally able to reveal our release date!! So yes, Mail Time is coming to a PC/Switch/Playstation near you in April 2023!
Watch the trailer here if you missed it (I’m super proud of it <3):
We’ve been working on this trailer for a couple of months and I think it’s the cutest thing ever! I had the lovely help of Mireille Kiesewetter from studio MiNi and Tijmen Raasveld to animate the trailer while I storyboarded it and did the gameplay sections (with the help of my publisher <3).
As far as the release date we won’t give an exact day within April just yet as we’re still tying down the exact day (lots of things to consider because we’re launching on 4 platforms!!). But, it’s super exciting to be able to give you this release date now after almost 2 years of development ^^ I hope you’re as excited as I am!
🎇 Mail Time is coming to PS4 + PS5 🎇 The second part of our announcement is that Mail Time is officially coming to Playstation 4 & 5! It’s been in the works for a while so it’s really cool to finally make it official. I grew up playing games on my Playstation so it’s pretty surreal to get to play my own game on there ;-;
The PS4 and PS5 version of Mail Time is planned to launch at the same time as on here and Nintendo Switch so now you’ve got more places to pick from to play Mail Time 😊
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Huge thank you to all of you for supporting Mail Time and me throughout the year, it’s pretty incredible how far the game has come. 💛 The Wholesome Snack today was the first moment in a while that I really realised how cool this all is and I’m so so grateful <3
Happy new year if I don’t see you again! ヾ(•ᴗ•๑)o
Kela
🌈 Make sure to join the discord to come hang out with the whole community
Wholesome Snack: The Game Awards Edition & New Winter Demo!
Hey everyone! I’ve got two exciting things for you today :) let’s get right into it!
🎇 Wholesome Snack: the Game Awards edition 🎇 Mail Time is going to be featured in the Wholesome Snack: Game Awards Edition today!! Wholesome Games, who organise the most amazing showcases for cute and cozy games are teaming up with the Game Awards (yes, THE Game Awards) to show a selection of games during their event, and Mail Time is one of the games they invited!!
I'm super honoured to have been thought of for such a huge opportunity and so happy to celebrate with you all, it's your support for my game that gets me these opportunities <3
We're going to be showing an exclusive ANIMATED trailer and doing a very exciting announcement! I won't spoil the fun yet but if you want to watch this little cozy game on the big screen be sure to watch 1pm PT/4pm ET/9pm GMT/10pm CET.
what: Wholesome Snack: The Game Awards edition when: Today - 1pm PT/4pm ET/9pm GMT/10pm CET where: Youtube | Twitch
❄️special winter demo ❄️ To celebrate the Wholesome Snack and The Game Awards I’ve put together a super special version of the demo, winter has come! The best thing is, you can play it right now!!
If you’ve played the demo before most of the storyline will be familiar to you BUT we’ve added a little ✨community challenge✨. Toph the friendly bat has come to town bearing candy cane gifts. However, it seems he’s a bit clumsy and has actually lost them!!
Go talk to Toph (near the log bridge) to start his candy cane quest! Complete the quest, post a screenshot in Discord and you can get the special candy cane collector role 💝
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Hope to see you in the Wholesome Snack chat!! ヾ(•ᴗ•๑)o
Kela
🌈 Make sure to join the discord to come hang out with the whole community
Mail Time September Update: Next Stop: The Station Area
hey everyone! I hope you're doing well <3 Today I'm bringing you our monthly update where I go a bit deeper into some stuff in the game for you to see :)
🍀 The Overgrown Station 🍀
Welcome to the very first area you'll see when you start a new game! Originally, you were going to arrive by train which is why I still call this the station 😅. Since then I've changed that to be the lovely mushroom van you might know from the demo. Regardless of the tracks being replaced by a road a lot of the vibes for this area were thought of very early on into development and I'm super happy with how it turned out.
The above piece of art is actually from 18th of May 2021! Back then the game was going to be much much smaller but the idea for this really lush green area was already there :)
Above you can see the initial terrain setup for a part of the Station area (behind the camera there's more you'll see later). The area is a bit lower down than Bark Burg in the back which meant that we needed some kind of path to bring you upwards. I felt this little path that snaked its way up would be quite cute! It also allows for a good vantage point to look over the station area and see some other things you might want to explore. Once I have the general layout down with the terrain it's time to add all the foliage, props and other decoration!
Here’s some pretty images of how it turned out:
💌 Gliders!! 💌
I'm super happy to say I've been able to finish the gliders that were unlocked as Kickstarter stretch goals! As a quick reminder we unlocked 5 additional gliders (alongside the existing love letter one).
The original glider in the game was pretty flat. It was actually part of the very early prototype from April last year (you can even see the blockout of that really old map I shared with you all the way at the start of this post if you look closely haha)
But now that I had to make 5 more gliders I didn't really want to have them be flat like that. Especially the flower one really called for some more depth so I decided to take the time to redo the gliders.
ta-da!! I'm personally really happy with how they turned out! I hope you guys like them too :) which glider will you be playing with?? I'm super curious to see which one will be the most popular!
here you can see them in game:
🦢Haley the Goose🦢
(there's no goose emoji TuT )
Waaaaaaay back in May I was drawing on stream (clip) for a bit just for fun and we came up with the idea for a shy goose named Haley. I said at the time I wouldn't have time to add her BUT GUESS WHAT I DID IT
This was the idea:
Results:
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that's it for today! There's also a LOT a LOT of work being done on getting all the dialogue into the game (that takes up like 80% of my time) but I can't show you that without spoiling the game :( I'm so excited about how it's coming along though!! My friend and incredibly funny writer Maya Bloem has joined the team to finish the script (we're pretty much done writing now 🎉) and she's contributing some INCREDIBLE storylines.
bye bye! <3 ヾ(•ᴗ•๑)o
Kela
🌈 Make sure to join the discord to come hang out with the whole community
Timeline Update :(
hey everyone! Hope you're doing well :) I'm here today to talk about timelines with you all.
We'd aimed for Mail Time’s release sometime 2022, specifically Q4 2022. It's become clear since the Kickstarter concluded that we'll need more time. Over the summer I noticed that implementing all the storylines and getting the game to the level of quality that I want will take longer than I had originally anticipated. That's why...
Mail Time's launch is being delayed
My vision for Mail Time has alway been and will continue to be that the quality of the game comes first. That means that I take a good look at the game every now and then to see where it’s lacking and it just needed more stuff in the world, more characters, more storylines, more polish, more charm.
Mail Time is all in all a pretty big production for the size of the dev team. I'm the only person full time and while I do get the amazing help from Gina, Maya, Bloo, Mischa & my publisher Freedom Games it still leaves a mountain of tasks for me to complete. I work as hard as I can but cannot sacrifice my health to get the game done quicker. It's better for both me and the game to give it the bit of extra time it needs.
Mail Time will release sometime 2023.
At this time I won't be specifying a quarter or specific month because quite honestly I don't know. There's a lot at play and I currently don't know when exactly the game will be done for certain. When we do know we'll make an announcement but no sooner than that.
We're still looking to simultaneously release for Steam, Epic Games Store & Nintendo Switch. Making Mail Time available to everyone at the same time is very important to us and we'll be doing everything we can to make sure it does.
I deeply appreciate your patience and the overwhelming kindness you continue to show me! I'm so so excited to share Mail Time with you when it's ready <3
Kela
Mail Time August Update: Building out the Grumblewood Grove!
Hello everyone!
I hope you've had a great summer so far! I was able to tear myself away from my desk for a week to enjoy the sun in Italy (which was lovely) and now I'm back to it. So much has been happening on the game this past while that it's quite a writeup 😅
Let's go take a look! ^^
🌲 Bark Burg 🌲
as part of the Wholesome Direct we showed of the first of the new areas; Bark Burg!
⭐Welcome to Bark Burg⭐, the busy center of activity in the Grove where multiple critters have taken up residence. This has resulted in some neighborly problems you might be caught in the middle of!
The dense trees house plenty of houses all connected by a network of hanging bridges, mushroom platforms and tricky swings to jump across. In order to deliver all your letters you're going to have to figure out ways to travel vertically and get up those trees!
As you probably know, the game is a tiny open world with 8 distinct areas. Each area has it's own vibe, inhabitants and trinkets to collect. every area starts with a map like this:
The map is where I establish the general layout, some interesting things in the area and the overall colour palette. I don't always stick to them perfectly as they're meant more as a starting point. But, they do help to convey the vibe for each area to the whole team :)
ESPECIALLY the color pallete is important in this stage. The colour pallete will set the whole tone for the area as we only work with those colors for that area. This is the main way we ensure each area is eadistinguishedished from another (besides theme of course). If you start encountering a new color grass you can be sure you're in unexplored lands!
very early image of Bark Burg :O
When I start putting things in the environments I can really see if things feel nice or have to move. I especially think a lot about what ways you'll be moving through the space. If a rock is really in the way I'll move it or if I'd want to jump up somewhere I'll make that possible. It's important that most ways you'd think about moving about the game would be possible (no jumps you can't quite make so you're not sure if it's possible).
Since this area has a big village aspect to it we needed lots of new props to fill it! Part of that is these cute chairs that can be recolored :)
Everything you see in the game starts out with a drawing like this to get an idea of what it's supposed to look like:
Doing these drawings allows me to hand off some of the work to Mischa Penders, the lovely 3D artist that's been helping me with all of the things that need to be made. It also is much faster to draw something than to fully make it in 3D so it's a cheap/fast way to figure out what something should look like :)
Sometimes there's a reference from children's books or other media for what I want but very often it's straight from my imagination!
Putting all of this together lets me create these wonderfully intricate environments for you to explore!
Putting together an area like this takes me quite some time, anywhere from 4 to 6 weeks. We need to prepare all the 3D models for the area (all areas have bespoke assets and some shared ones). I then need to import everything into the game engine and hand place almost everything is placed by hand and into the environment.
While I do this, I switch to playing the game quite often to walk and jump around in order to make sure everything feels good. It's so much tweaking but it's really worth it when I can finally start taking these lovely screenshots! c:
🪑 Sitting!!! 🪑
You might've noticed it in the Wholesome Direct trailer and/or some of the screenshots already but you can now sit in the game! It's somehting I've been wanting to add for a while and was able to squeeze in just before we had to finish the trailer.
It all starts by animating the sitting. The animation is cut up into 3 distinct parts; sitting down, idling while sitting & standing up. That's so that I can play the sitting down once and then loop the idle until you want to stand up again.
Sitting down in-game simply happens by standing still for 10 seconds! That time can be adjusted in the settings to adjust to your liking (for example to shorten it if you want to go around sitting down everywhere for screenshots). The 10 second default will be adjusted as well based on the testing we'll do in the Beta together :)
You can stand up again by moving, very similar to how it works with the Animal Crossing sitting emote (if you know what that's like).
💬 dialogue icons 💬
I finally added a feature that I'd been thinking about for a while! The game already shows a character names in their associated color to allow you to easier remember who they are. However, I noticed while the demo was out for you all to play that quite a few of you still had trouble remembering who is who.
What I've done to negate this problem is add emojis! Now whenever a character is mentioned (and it makes sense in the context) a little emoji with their face will appear next to their name! That way you can know who is being talked about without having to remember 15+ characters! 😅
This is also integrated in the Handbook where you can keep track of all your deliveries!
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that's it for today! thanks for reading if you made it all the way here!!
bye bye! <3 ヾ(•ᴗ•๑)o
Kela
🌈 Make sure to join the discord to come hang out with the whole community
