Wild Season - Episode 1
Major Bug when starting New Game
A Few people have gotten back to us about a critical bug that occurs when you start a new game, that causes the camera to get stuck at the general store when you are getting the town tour. Rest assured we're working on a hotfix to resolve this ASAP. In the meantime could we please ask that you play in QuickStart mode while we get this resolved. We're very sorry and will hopefully get back to you early in the week!
Wild Season v.0.4.0.5 Patch Notes
It’s finally time for that long awaited update! So what can you expect in this update? let’s have a looksie! The good news is entering 0.4.0.1 Means we’re technically feature complete for all the start of game components! Now they just need to be spit polished…thoroughly and we can begin work on the mid & end game features while we work on content, improving and stabilising year one!
It’s available nowwwwww!
For those of you feeling lazy here’s a video summary:
https://youtu.be/1mknLBgfBRc
WHAT’S NEW?
– Story until Summer 18 Firefly event. (this event’s a whooper!)
– Windowed Mode (buggy – see below)
– Added “leave blank for default” text in text input window.
– Added gift giving
– New Camera
– Faster movement (let us know what you think, we’ll be making time faster to match this in the next build)
– Added star quality logic. (back end only)
– Updated SFX.
– Animal shop now works
– Female intro video when starting a new game
BUG FIXES:
- Fixed Shipping bin (You can now make money!)
– Fixed minimap.
– Selecting female is now less buggy
– Animals can now be carried (just farm ones not town ones)
– Consumables can now be consumed (effects/mileage may vary)
– Fixed missing item quantity in inventory.
– Fixed in inventory when selecting stacked items.
– Fixed quantity display bug when buying more than 1 item from general store.
– Fixed missing seed and deed in quickstart option.
– Fixed getting stuck in plateau entrance
– Fixed couldn’t input anything in the main menu
– Fixed music in game scene is muted on start when you started a new game. (can be fixed by adjusting the volume on the pause menu)
– Control are now remappable in options and in game pause
– Fixed visual bug in the HUD of the season icon
– Fixed cats and dogs movement
– Fixed camera sometimes won’t follow the main character
– Fixed Volume so its not SUPER Loud when you start
– More feature fixes.
KNOWN BUGS:
– Some SFX are off.
– SFX are still being developed. Current SFX are placeholder
– Mini map not appearing in all screens
– unable to proceed when using “K” during the new game introduction with Dr. Haze. Use mouse click instead.
– there are known issues Gift Giving: When giving Alice gifts. Proceed with caution
– Although you can use Cmd + F / Crl + F to switch to windowed mode, this makes the game highly unstable – proceed with caution
– movement speed may ocasionally revert to the old one
– some NPC’s may accidentally use the wrong DA
– Eating the pancake Roselyn gives you will make you sick for 1 second
– The calendar is still blank
– Buying the dog animal – it doesn’t do anything – no functionality yet
– We’ve disabled events forcing as its buggy, but typically you wouldnt be able to miss key story events
This brings our total implemented features list to:
– Farming
– Mining
– Fishing (old rod is in your chest. Buy bait fromt the general store)
– Animal Care
– Story up to Summer 18
– Horse Betting
– Minimap
– Worldmap
– Partial mouse support
– Gift Giving
Furthermore for those of you wondering what we’ve been up to and why the update doesn’t feel particularly substantial compared to the amount of time compared to the last update – allow me to explain:
As mentioned previously we shifted over to a monthly release schedule rather than bi-weekly. This gives us an opportunity to more thoroughly QA test our builds to better catch & fix bugs. However please keep in mind that some fixes may take longer and may take several sprints to fix. But at least this way we can get to them faster. As such we’ve included a list of what we’re aware of so you guys can avoid it, or if you encounter it you know we’re aware of it and working on it. So that means the build you are receiving today, is still approx two weeks worth of work, but more thoroughly tested with any immediate fixes we could do already applied (and any not done scheduled for the next update or an intermediary hotfix).
We just had a minor one week push back this month due to E3 and the Steam Sale. The benefit of this is you guys just need to wait two weeks for the next release (yay!)
What are we working on & when can you expect it?:
What’s in QA (expected release: July 10(subject to change)):
- Daily Dialogues
- Partial new UX/UI
- improved/polished Horse Racing Testing
- improved/polished Fishing Testing
- Bux Fixes not in the current release
What’s in Production & Initial testing (Intended for Aug 7 – not all items in production may be ready by then)
- Quest System Guts
- First part of UI/UX Redesign
- Unity 5 Upgrade
- Code Restructuring
- Performance Enhancements
What’s in Planning/Design
- Redesigned UI/UX (redesigned quest system, story adjustments, adjusted controls
- Farming re-balancing (debris layout, stamina consumption, pricing, etc)
- Quest System UI/UX
- Relationship System Balancing/Script adjustments
Development Pipeline
- Cooking Rebalancing
- Mining Rebalancing
- Fishing Rebalancing
- Marriage
- Babies/Children
- Property Upgrades
- Helper / Assistant Ai/Logic
- Extreme Weather/Disturbances
Wild Season .0.4.0.3 Update Video
https://youtu.be/1mknLBgfBRc
Podcast #35 Report
What we had mainly did during this podcast was show off winter outfits for our lovely characters in Wild Season. You see, every season our characters will change to fit that theme.
I do have the images, as that was all we really did during that podcast! I am uploading them in an imgur gallery for your viewing pleasure.
You can find the other podcast with winter outfits that may have been shown off a 3 weeks or so ago too on our Youtube channel.
You can go here for the Imgur gallery!
Comments
It was mostly to gather feedback on the winter and summer outfits mainly, and anything the fans have said are being considered.
People wish for Frank to be a dateable character, everyone loves Frank.
Claude and Linda are being fought over, silly enough!
May 14th Weekly Digest!
Dear all!
Apologies for the late weekly update. Since we were unable to put anything out last week, we’ve decided to bundle last week and this week’s updates, so there’s a lot to cover!
Let’s start out with the most important part:
QA & Controls
We’re well aware that our first two releases were somewhat disastrous with many users experiencing a wide range of bugs. While Early Access is partly to help with this, we did not intend for it to be so widespread since we’re hoping for more input on the design.. So with that note, I’d like to introduce two new members of our team!
Our last line of defense, meet the QA Team; Hannah Palabay and William Dionio!
We have brought them on board with the sole purpose of providing a more thorough QA run through as builds come out.
The other major change is we’ve decided to change our release schedule to monthly instead of every two weeks. This gives the development team more time to entertain QA feedback and will hopefully result in more stable builds. The team will be split between feature development and polishing/bug crushing, meaning each update will have both new content and lots of fixes.
Regarding controls, we’ve been working hard at trying to improve controls and have absorbed a lot of feedback, as well as watched video playthroughs for more ideas. Here are the proposed changes (you can actually try these out by going into Options when you start the game and rebinding the keys)
E – Action Button / Pickup / Throw
F – Use tool / Eat
TAB – Switch Menus (Left/Right)
L + Crl – Switch Menus (Up/Down)
We’re also adding full mouse support to all the menus, including back & close buttons to improve mouse navigation (Yay!).
We are also playing around with a few other ideas but I’ll save those for when they’re more concrete and when the development team tells us that they are doable.
So please keep sending us control feedback, especially for the keyboard.
Bangkok
The last two weeks have also been extremely hectic as the senior team went off to Bangkok to attend Unite. As mentioned in our last update, Unite is a conference held by Unity, the makers of the engine we’re using.
We have attended lots of talks, but most importantly, we got to sit in a code review with some of the senior engineers. All in all, the trip was highly educational, and expect to see the learnings gathered applied to the game over the coming weeks.
Particularly, as we gear up for a code overhaul & Unity 5 Upgrade which will bring with it many performance enhancements (we hope) and resolve many of the ongoing bugs.
After Unite, the team returned to Manila. During our time there, we discovered that a digital content festival is happening with Bangkok Toycon, Comicon, AFA Thailand & the Thai Comicon all happening simultaneously! Our CEO, Sharan & Producer, Gwen decided to go back to explore and network. It was a fantastic trip as well. We were able to learn a lot about the Thai market and cemented our decision to localise the game in Thai (you may have noticed, some of our posts are now also available in Thai!).
During our time there, we were able to make many connections, promote Wild Season and also find some interesting suppliers! We’re hoping through them, we’ll be able to provide merchandising options soon! (once we sort out logistics!)
And that’s been our last two weeks at Quickfire Games!
Tune in next week for more!
0.3.0.4 - HOTFIX
New Paths information from previous update
For those of you looking to try out mining, head on over to the mountain
To get back to the plateau try going south of the beach!
Wild Season v0.3.0.x Notes
WHAT'S NEW?
- Added mining feature!!!
- Added street sign post names
- Story is now up to summer 16
- New paths opened
BUG FIXES:
- Fixed couldn’t input anything in the main menu
- Fixed music in game scene is muted on start when you started a new game. (can be fixed by adjusting the volume on the pause menu)
- Control are now remappable in options and in game pause
- Fixed visual bug in the HUD of the season icon
- Fixed cats and dogs movement
KNOWN BUGS:
- The notification of the amount of the item obtained is always 1
- Visual bugs in mining caves
- Removed controller support
Quick Update on Game Versions
So it seems there has been some confusion regarding the latest update with the game having rolled back to 2.16. Its actually 2.16.10. The game has been rolled back as we have hotfixed fixed the keyboard/mouse - not working functionality & returned keyboard mapping in the 2.16 version of the game. This will revert back to 2.17 by the end of the week when the full update comes out.
Weekly Update April 27
We’re back again with another weekly update, and what a week it has been! But before I get into that, we have some important housekeeping announcements to make regarding the game:
- CONTROLLER SUPPORT IS CURRENTLY LIMITED TO XBOX ONE CONTROLLERS - Going through the bug reports and watching the Let’s Plays have been extremely helpful to us as we’ve been able to pinpoint a fair number of issues. At the moment, it’s causing a lot of issues that includes the main menu being disabled. We are now working on a more extensive controller support to solve this current issue. So if you were using a controller and are unable to play the game, please disconnect it.
- LOSS OF CONTROL WAS FIXED AS OF VERSION 0.2.17.6. IF YOU ARE STILL EXPERIENCING THIS ON OR AFTER THIS VERSION, PLEASE REPORT IT AGAIN.
- LINUX USERS EXPERIENCING WEIRD GAME SIZES WILL NOW HAVE THE OPTION TO SET A NEW GAME SIZE IN THE COMING HOTFIX.
We’re working hard to fix the many issues that have come up so please keep reporting them, as we roll out new content in each update. A full list of fixes will follow along with the full build update this coming Friday.
Now onto our regularly scheduled blog post:
As I mentioned, it’s been a crazy week! The senior team found themselves in Bangkok for Unite Bangkok 2015.
What is Unite you ask? For those who are unaware, Unite is a conference organized by the makers of our game development engine, Unity.
Unite is where Unity shows off new features in the pipeline, and offers a variety of tutorials & talks to help developers get into speed with them. Developers also have the opportunity to meet the Unity team and offer feedbacks, wishlists and of course, code reviews.
The talks were of course, fantastic, and Unity showed off many features and upcoming upgrades to the newest iteration of their engine, Unity 5. This has been incredibly useful, as the new version of the engine brings many enhancements that improve and streamline the game development pipeline, as well as provide access to new levels of performance & rendering.
Unfortunately, because the engine is such a big jump from its predecessor, upgrading games to work with the engine take considerable amounts of time and resources. Fortunately, the talks will help us get up to speed faster, but upgrading our project to Unity 5 is not something that will happen for at least 1-2 months. We are presently prioritizing our Early Access build to stabilize the game, and get feature feedbacks.
We also got to sit down with some of the senior Unity engineers and showed off Wild Season to them. That was great as it gave us an opportunity to validate several theories and ideas we had to optimize and restructure the code which will improve performance significantly and fix a handful of bugs along the way. We just needed to validate everything before we put hours of work into a fix that may or may not work.
Speaking of bugs, our bug reporter has been off the hook!
You guys have been absolutely fantastic! We’ve been receiving bugs daily since the Early Access went out and we couldn’t be more thrilled! Our team has already started working on them (as you may have seen at the beginning of the post), and will continue to do so as they come in. So please keep them coming, particularly when we roll out an update! (Next one’s this Friday!)
Finally, Bangkok was such a fantastic trip, that our CEO and Producer Gwen are going back! During Unite, we discovered the Bangkok Digital Content Festival was happening this week. So Sharan and Gwen are heading out to promote Wild Season and look for new partnerships that will help Quickfire Games continue to grow!
And that’s what happened last week, tune in next week for another update!
Weekly Digest - April 20th 2015
Hi guys!
This week, we have quite a bit of more news than last week! As we mentioned before, we finished a sprint last Thursday, April 17th, and that build went out to the backers the same night. It’s a pretty packed one too, filled with updates which you can read about in the most recent dev diary. Assuming that everything goes to plan, we should have launched early access on Steam! (yay!)
This week also sees the senior team travelling to Bangkok for the Unite conference. As many of you know, we’re building Wild Season on Unity3D, one of the hottest game engines right now, who recently made a significant update the the system. The update brings many fantastic and awesome bells and whistles (which we can’t wait to use in our upcoming titles) for both 3D & 2D. However, it also means that to take advantage of this newfound power, we need to make some significant adjustments to the project. Going to Unite will hopefully provide a crash course in expediting this, as well as an opportunity to meet the game engine engineers who can help give us additional tips and insights on developing and optimizing the game components. Tune in next week for a full update on Unite. Don’t worry! Despite being there, we’ll be spending our evenings working away on the game!
Last week, our family both shrunk and grew a little. We were extremely sad to see one of our founding members, Paulo Sebrero, depart us. He is moving to Cebu to deal with some personal matters, but we sincerely hope we can welcome him back to Quickfire Games in the near future.
However, as one door closes, two new ones open. We are thrilled to welcome two new interns to the art department and one to our Game Design Department. :) Welcome to the team!
We’re also thrilled to announce that we finally closed our most recent round of funding! Teaming up with our new investor means we now have a little more resources to pour into Wild Season to get us to the finish line a little faster and closer to the quality we want to put out!
It also means that we can now start pre-production on another project we’ve had planned for a while. For those of you wondering why we might be wanting to start on something else before finishing Wild Season, is because we think we’ve built a fantastic team. We’re passionate about what we do, and for us to stay together, that means we need to stay busy. I’m sure you know, as a project nears completion, some departments ramped up and some ramped down. Instead of letting these people go (or havin’ them twiddle their thumbs), we will begin shifting them into the new project, so that by the time Wild Season is finished, we’re able to transition into the new project with minimal down time.
That’s pretty much it! Stay tuned over the next few weeks as various things going on reach maturity and we can tell you about them! It’s going to be exciting!