The Hayseed Knight
Chapter 5 delayed until December, and progress so far!
How were you these last few months? I had to endure a hellish July and a muggy August, but it's been going alright overall other than some health hijinks as usual.
My original plan was to release chapter 5 in September. That might have been optimistic, but nothing could have prepared me for how incredibly cursed the recording for chapter 5 would be.
I'm not talking cursed as in painful memes and laughing. I'm talking car accidents, near-death events, general sickness, people quitting voice acting, a hurricane, having to rerecord several parts because of recording mishaps... to the point that it still is not yet complete (there is very little left, but it is not complete despite having scheduled all recordings to be complete before July)
So yeah. If I can have at least all the audio ready this month, that'll be a victory. Then that will only leave my greatest enemy: scripting all the animation and each single scene.
Which will then leave my other greatest enemy: making all the necessary art.
Please wish me luck. My new self-imposed deadline would be 8th December 2023, my birthday. I don't have all the confidence in the world I'm going to get the game out before I turn 28, but I'll try.
If you happen to be headed to Indie Dev Days Barcelona next week, make sure to say hi! I won't have a table, so just keep an eye out for the short pale black-haired dev in a blazer with massive dark circles under their eyes trying not to perish.
Hope you have a lovely September! See you soon!
The Hayseed Knight 1.7.1: 翻訳総改訂 / Complete Japanese revision!
How are you doing this fine June? Summer begins today here in Spain, but I've been melting under the Sun for a couple of weeks now.
In my town, Alicante, we celebrate the night of summer solstice by going to the beach and jumping over bonfires where we burn stuff we want to cleanse ourselves of. Like notes and exams. Some people really just never want to look at their grades ever again in their lives.
Me, I celebrate by bringing you all a new update while working tirelessly on chapter 5 to hopefully have it ready by September!
The 1.7.1 update will be fairly minor to English, Spanish and French speakers (some typo fixes, updated credits, and little else), but it brings about a newly rewritten Japanese translation courtesy of THK's new Japanese editor, Chisato-san!
Chisato-san, Shion-san and I have been working tirelessly this last year to bring together a stronger Japanese translation. With the addition of Chisato-san's expertise with literary wording and attention to detail, the style of the Japanese translation has truly been elevated. Chisato-san is a freelance editor and translator, and you should definitely keep her in mind for your English to Japanese projects!
I am one step closer to fulfilling my pipe dream of having a Japanese dub of The Hayseed Knight, haha.
For now, however, all the budget is going to chapter 5, and I can promise you this: it's going to make you cry, laugh, and cry again. Even though it ended up being 70k words long, it's still not everything I wanted it to be, given that my budget is limited and it couldn't cover the expanse I originally planned.
There are still multiple endings, with one super hard to find Golden Ending™ that I'm not expecting anyone to figure out for a while, but I hope you'll have fun finding all of them!
Thank you so much for all your support as always! Have a lovely day, and a lovely summer!
Chapter 5 Casting Call (and a small delay to the updated Japanese version)
How are you all doing this April? I'm a little freaked out because I'm off to Japan tomorrow. It's my first time there, and it's going to be 30 hours of a journey. I'm very excited all the same!! すーごく緊張してますよ！
On the matter of Japanese, in fact: the next significant update, 1.7.1, has sadly been postponed until May. The update itself contained small fixes in English to typos and such, but the major update was on revising the current Japanese translation.
Localization QA is still ongoing and the Japanese editor, Chisato-san, really wanted to make sure it was in perfect condition before it was released.
日本人読者の皆様へ:お待ちいただいてありがとうございます。
Going back to chapter 5, though! The current casting call is now live until May 6th 2023! Check it out and take a look at a few of the characters yet to come!
Chapter 5 continues advancing, and I'll keep writing during my trip! Remember that you can help finance the voice acting for a faster release sending a tip on patreon.
I think that should be everything for now, thank you all so much for your time! Have a lovely rest of your month!
Chapter 5 tentative release date, and other bits!
Welcome once more to: episodic releases and the fear they instill within my very soul. If you've ever had a project that ran on updates, you know what that's like — the fear of keeping people waiting. The "oh no, what if I run out of energy", "this writing sucks, what am I even doing" and who can forget the eternal "am I allowed to take so much as a break?"
To everyone's surprise, and mine's first of all... Chapter 5 is pretty nearly written by now! Far, FAR faster than I expected.
You may have realized that, perhaps, slicing the original plan for chapter 4 in half and having nearly 20k words written by your past self would help in the process. If you did, you're a bit sharper than me, and I'm proud of you.
Be that as it may, I'm now sitting on the 50k+ word count for chapter 5 (I don't know what it is about that number but this keeps happening to me somehow) and facing three incredible facts:
- There's a new casting call on the way for the remaining characters
- I'm maybe two months away from recording this script (would be one, but I'll be in Japan in April making business contacts!)
- I only have two months to save for the voice acting
That's right -- if everything goes well, I'll be recording in May, and hoping to release chapter 5, THE LAST CHAPTER at the same time as the epilogues, in September 2023.
Let me zoom in on that last bit about voice acting first, however: with a large word count comes a large voice acting expense. Since this is the last chapter, I decided to go all out and make something I would be proud of for years to come!
The way things usually go, I would spend years saving for new chapters, pinching coins wherever I can from my day job and patreon, and then build a voice acting budget from that.
This time, however, I have but two months to save close to 5k USD.
In the immediate term, I should be able to face that cost. I've been developing the game for six years, and I've had time to learn not to break the entire bank for an update. In the long run, however, that's an incredible blow to my budget and therefore my ability to make anything after this.
If you'd like to throw some extra support at The Hayseed Knight, I'm currently passing the tip jar around and trying to gather some help on patreon. I don't have a whole lot to offer in return other than my gratitude and the promise that chapter 5 will be the strongest yet.
I'll update you all again when the update to the Japanese text for chapters 1 and 2 and the new casting call for chapter 5 are ready.
Thank you so much for your time and your support every time. It really does mean the world to me to see people enjoying the game.
CHAPTER 4, out at last!!
After two years of work, it's finally here. Finally done! 6 hours of all new gameplay!
Picture the Frodo LOTR meme gif here.
Originally, it was going to be just the one chapter to rule them all, but it grew so large I had to slice it in two! You can see it's still pretty large.
Among other things, Spanish and French translations are up to Chapter 3 now! And there's an update to the Japanese translation for chapters 1 and 2 on the way! Exciting stuff!!
And now for the full update list:
- Updated to Ren'py 7.5.3
- Switched to GL renderer, so now there are tints, blurs, and all sorts of cool new visual updates!
- Updated Eina's sprite majorly, plus a few other bits and pieces in others
- Updated a few backgrounds to make them clearer!
- I added a couple of new mini scenes around
- Added a new bad ending to chapter 3 (dundundundun)
- More tracks from Emilio Villalba
- Found a (potentially big on older machines) performance bug from the old versions of the diary
- The only way to fix it in a save game is to go back to the diary, see a memory and click the button "Skip memory" uh... 50-80 times.
- No I found no other way to fix it I'm so sorry
- OKAY THAT SHOULD BE ALL
- Updated a few typoes in the Spanish version! If you find any typoes in any other version, I would really appreciate it if you could notify me or send a screenshot thehayseedknight(at)gmail.com
After this, all that's left is chapter 5!! Hopefully shorter than this has been, so look forward to that!
Hope you all have fun! I'm gonna go lie down again and see if I stop screaming
(And if you do enjoy it, a review on steam would mean the world to me! Thank you!)
PS. AAAAAAAAAA!!
Chapter 4: Coming out February 1st 2023!
How is 2023 treating you? Mine has been: BUSY. I've spent many hours working on my computer and taken up boxing again, to help my back a bit. I've also organized a trip to Japan for spring! I'm very excited to see it for the first time, even though I've been directing voice actors in Japanese for a while now!
(Maybe one day I'll have the funds to actually have a Japanese dub of THK)
Chapter 4 will be coming out for real, at last, this February 1st. That's just about 12 days, I can hardly believe it. It's the result of two years of work, and I truly feel it's the best (an already excellent) voice acting has ever been.
I've been so busy developing that I haven't been able to do much PR at all, so if you're or you know any game press that could cover this, I'd really appreciate if you could send me a contact that I could mail the press release to at thehayseedknight(at)gmail(dot)com !
Hope you all have a wonderful rest of your day, and a wonderful rest of your week! I'll be screaming over here.
Chapter 4 to be released in 2023!
I hope November was a kind month to you! I spent practically all of it developing chapter 4, working day after day to get all the audio edited before sending it off to THK's lovely audio engineer, Natalie van Sistine, for levelling!
All the audio for chapter 4 is in the game now, but being that this is a Visual Novel, I still have a lot of art assets left to make, press to reach out to, old and new typos to crush in Spanish... Just the usual, really. And after 3 months of intense work since I first started recording with the voice actors, my back has really taken a toll.
If I continue working at this rhythm, I'm going to open up the hernia that had me go on hiatus after chapter 3 again. That's why, I've decided to delay Chapter 4 into early 2023, exact date TBA.
I really wanted to make it to the December 8th deadline and celebrate alongside my birthday, but more than that, I want to make sure I can give you the best result I can make and not hurry or leave things half done while I'm murdering myself.
Thank you all for all your patience, understanding and support, I hope you have a lovely December! As usual, you can keep up with the project and me more easily on my twitter account, @SandraMJdev
I'll go ahead and leave you with some of Ader's wisdom before I go:
Recordings Finished! CHAPTER 4: FULL SPEED AHEAD!
I hope you've had a lovely October! Mine has been a bit hectic (my own particular damage RNG has been so kind as to grant me heart issues), but other than that it's been fun and busy!
On to the meat of the announcement: tomorrow, all of the audio for chapter 4 will be completed at last! That means that all that's left is tons and tons of editing (I'm only about halfway through that), art (I can barely count the tasks anymore) and scripting (the bane of my existence).
That means I can tentatively say at last that I should be on time to make the release date I chose for chapter 4...
DECEMBER 8TH
That's my birthday! And all I'd love for it is for you to share the game with people you think would like it, if you'd be so kind. Maybe send them this cute new trailer I made?
Fingers crossed I can make it to the deadline without any other random bit breaking down in my body!
In other news, you can find me next week wandering around AdventureX, London! Say hi if you see a short pale Spanish nerd with grey eyes skittering from place to place.
And that would be all for now! I hope you have a wonderful day and a wonderful week.
Talk to you soon!
Casting Call for The Hayseed Knight Chapter 4!
How are you all doing? I just came back from Gamescom a couple of days ago and it was a lot of fun! Exhausting, but fun that's for sure.
So as I previously mentioned: Chapter 4's script is now complete! It's time to move on to my favorite part... RECORDING! But there are a few characters missing for that!
This is where you all come in!
If you are interested in auditioning for any of the characters that will appear in chapter 4, here's the link to the Voice Acting Boards! You'll find all the necessary info there.
I'm looking forward to hearing your auditions! And if you don't get cast this time, no worries: there'll be other opportunities for chapter 5 too!
I hope you have a wonderful day, and a wonderful week. See you soon!
Chapter 4 Script: DONE! See you on Gamescom!
How are you all doing today? Me, I'm exhausted from making a thousand preparations to take a plane tomorrow, but I come bearing super exciting news!
After a year and a half of hardships and many road (writer) blocks, I can unsafely say that chapter 4's script has been completed! I've sent the copy to my proofreaders, and I'm expecting to start recording early in September! I AM 100% NOT READY FOR THIS BUT WE'LL MAKE DO LIKE WE ALWAYS DO.
In other news, you can find me running around on Gamescom this week! I'll be manning a booth for my day job as co-creative director at Mars Vice in Devcom, and then just ambling from meeting to meeting in Gamescom.
It's my first time there, so if you see this handsome developer trying not to fall asleep at a booth or hurrying across the halls, say hi and tell me you played THK! You'll get a very exclusive, very rare, cute THK sticker of your choice for your efforts.
((Pretend the pic doesn't occupy 3/4 of the post))
And that's about all for now! I'm excited for all that's left to come to THK, and I'll make sure to keep you posted as the new chapter progresses. I'm much more active on twitter at @sandramjdev, if you want to stay tuned!
Hope you all have a fantastic week! See you soon!