Over the past year, you gave us so many amazing ideas, constructive criticism, and encouragement. Thank you!
We notice everything you tell us. Many of your suggestions have already made it into the game (like the fact that you wanted the FPS camera back!) We discuss your ideas on a regular basis in meetings. Of course, if you tell us about a bug, we immediately jump on it and do our best to fix it. We always appreciate both positive and negative feedback as long as it is constructive, which helps us make our game better.
An example of constructive feedback:
When you tell us something nice, we notice! Once a week we share positive vibes within the team by sharing some of the nicest messages we get from you. Thank you, you motivate us to keep working hard. It is a pleasure to work for a Community like you! Some examples of our Monday Motivation:
Last but not least we would like to remind you how to send us feedback. The best way is always to send us an in-game message (especially when it comes to bugs). When you do that we get your logs (documents with technical information about your last session in the game). Logs help us determine where the issue is. Other channels:
Thank you again for all the support in 2022. We are excited to work with you another year!
Stay Constructive and Classy!
Dev Diary #255 Welcome to 2023!
Ahoy there, Ylanders!
Welcome to the first post of 2023! We're all back at work, discussing various features and improvements planned for 1.12, but there's still one thing we need to do first - release a patch that will fix and improve various aspects of Update 1.11. Those are either some smaller improvements that we were not able to test thoroughly enough in time, as well as fixes for issues that you've reported. You can expect this patch to be released before the end of January.
Before the end of the year, we had a really nice holiday-ish live stream where we looked at some of your creations and, boy, were there some truly magnificent pieces! We also realized that it's been some time since we did a specific Q&A stream so you can expect one in the near future.
Also in the upcoming weeks, we'll start sharing various pieces of information about the 1.12 update with you, as well as info related to Creators Club.
By the way - Ylands EDU, an alpha version of Ylands specifically suited for use in schools has gained quite a large momentum here in the Czech Republic, which we use as a testing ground for the education version. The feedback from the teaching community has been absolutely epic, and it's very likely that this year will see many schools here using our game.
Why should you care about EDU you ask? Not only will this eventually lead to a bigger Ylands community, but it will result in Ylands becoming a more tested and stable product, that will be with you for many years to come.
And that's it for today. You stay classy, Ylanders!
Dev Diary #254 Happy Holidays and the New Year!
Ahoy Ylanders!
So it's that time of the year again. The unmistakable, unavoidable sound of Mariah Carey's "All I want from Christmas" announces that time when overworked devs finally get some rest leaving you, the players, with the latest update to play with.
We believe that 2022 was a good year for Ylands players. For a few days, every team here in Bohemia Interactive was supposed to say three words that summarize their project in these. For us, it was really a no-brainer.
Back to roots.
In the last year, we added a lot of things you asked for. Returned things we temporarily removed. We fixed several ancient annoying bugs. And after all that, Adventure (aka Exploration) is now close to what it used to be and, in some ways, even better.
Since in 1.11 we introduced way more content even for those who don't own the DLC and fixed issues we found to be annoying, especially for the new players (with more of those fixes coming in 1.12) we are looking forward to something we could call restarting Ylands. A game that is engaging and accessible to new players, with improved systems and game mechanics that experienced players will be able to enjoy for dozens of hours or more.
But even though we are looking forward to introducing these things in 2023, life is not about Ylands (or any other game for that matter :) ) and this is the time to remind ourselves of that.
Whether in Ylands, another game, or away from computer or mobile, our whole team would like to sincerely thank you for your support and wish you all the best in the New Year 2023. May you and your loved ones be happy, healthy, and safe so we can meet in a couple of weeks. Time flies fast and so we'll be back before you know it. Or, as a great man once said: "Smoke Me A Kipper, I'll Be Back For Breakfast".
You stay classy, Ylanders!
Quote Edit
DLC Gifting Hotfix
Changelog
FIXED
Gifting of Exploration DLC in Ylands Shop.
Dev Diary #253 Browsing through Blueprints
Ahoy Ylanders,
One of our favorite new features of Update 1.11 is definitely the Blueprint Market. This special place in our in-game shop enables you to buy awesome buildings, ships, or anything else that comes to mind, made by other players in the game. So if you want to support fellow creators or just don't have time to build such crazy builds like them, this is a place for you!
It took only a few hours for the BP store to kick off with amazing and complex creations. We have been watching with excitement how fast you filled the store and started giving us positive feedback about this feature. One of our favorites is a quote from comments on our Forum:
"WOW! There are more blueprints available today than yesterday and some of the builds are so amazing! Thank you for making this change. It will be my pleasure to purchase some of these blueprints that other players have spent so much time building and I'll be able to give back to them a little. I can tell right now, that I'll need to buy more coyns - there are so many I could use! A question though, will we still be limited in the number of blueprints we can have? I keep a separate folder on my desktop to keep the blueprints that I'm not currently using due to the limit allowed in the game. Just wondering if that has changed also. Thanks, again!"
- Sandy T.
These very good questions led us to create Blueprints FAQ, which we update regularly so if you have any questions, have a look. https://ylands.com/community/topic/32180-111-update-blueprints-faq/
We have of course encountered a few issues. Some of them are already fixed with the latest patch, and some will be fixed as soon as possible. Thank you for letting us know.
Thank you everyone for being so creative and making the market what it is today.
Stay Classy
1.11.0.2 Patch Changelog
Highlights:
💙 Blueprints can now be finished after the player uses the "Stop building" functionality. 💛 Entity "Any" does not break blueprints.
Changelog
Fixed: [YLD-41816] Fixed: Blueprint does not build correctly when you use "Stop Building" in some cases. [YLD-41822] Fixed: Any rope with entity "Another rope" can break blueprints. [YLD-41871] Fixed: The download number shows a number of openings, it should show the count of purchases. [YLD-41805] Fixed: EDITOR: Logic storages are not initiated.
Update 1.11: CRAFTY CRAFTS
Ahoy Ylanders,
Here we go with Update 1.11! 🙀
With every update we bring to our players, we get craftier! Get it? The update is called CRAFTY Crafts! 😁 We gave some much needed love to our core systems, namely Crafting, Blueprints and Visual Scripting. This update also enhances the RPG experience by giving you randomized loot drops from enemies, new monsters (did someone say ghost pirates?!) and a brand new gifting systems allowing you to show love for your friends! Now let's get to the good stuff!
List of features:
Crafting overhaul
Blueprint market
Gifting system
Randomized loot
New monsters
New visual scripting
KNOWN ISSUES
Ship Blueprints - Ships made from Blueprints can sometimes bug out. We advise either avoiding building them or using a workaround. Workaround: To build them all at once not part by part.
Coyns on mobile - Coyns can't be purchased on mobile devices. Workaround: Buying them on PC.
We are working on a hotfix at the moment and it will be out soon.
Crafting overhaul
Crafting is a crucial part of our game. We listened to your feedback on our forums so this update brings an overhaul to Crafting. Changes to UX/UI of a key part of the game might be a risky move, but we have done our best to combine your feedback with our design to bring a smooth experience backed by focus tests. New Crafting should be much easier to navigate and for newer players, it is much more user-friendly. As with any major change, it might take some getting used to so please send us your feedback along the way!
Blueprint market
Since last update, you have been creating Blueprints in the Editor and bringing them to the Adventure mode, which is great! What is even better is the fact that this update brings the ability to share them with the world. You can either make your friends happy by sending them your creations as a gift or you can upload your Blueprints to the shop, where others can purchase them with coyns. This is only the beginning of what the shop is capable of and we can't wait to see it booming with your crafty creations!
Gifting system
Do you have that special someone in your Ylands life? They deserve to know! And the best way to make sure they find out is sending them an in-game gift! Want them to sail the seas with you? Get them the Exploration DLC! Their ship isn't the best? Gift them a Blueprint of a cool ship! Want them to look sharp? They need a new costume and a new pet! Bonded while picking up sticks and crafting sails? Send them the Proposal emote ;)
Randomized loot
Adventure awaits and so does randomized loot! As you explore, you may be surprised by the variety of loot that is dropped by enemies you slay and chests you discover in your journeys. Now be on your way into the unknown, adventurer!
New monsters
BOO! Did you get startled? If you didn't, wait till you see the new monsters roaming the lands of Ylands! They're dangerous, they're mean and they're sooooo cute! We love them and we hope that you will too! But make sure you have the right equipment to face them because they can be tricky to take down!
New visual scripting
Adventure is not the only part of the game getting our love and attention! Lots of hard work went into the Editor and here's what's new! Visual scripting underwent a major change in this update. Mostly in the user experience sense, where we for instance gave more room for the scripting canvas by reducing the size of Instruction palette. Canvas itself also underwent improvement, sporting a new grid system which is automatically snapping scripting blocks to the nearest cell, making the script looking nice and neat. Also, the main header is now redesigned to be more consistent with rest of the editor and is now ready for new features planned in future updates. Last but not least, a player requested feature: the new Favorites category, where you can store your most used instructions and categories!
Toolbox
The Toolbox allows users to create and share Editor-side scripts that will help them with their specific problems or fill in the gaps in the Editor's toolset. Generate objects, create specific selections, modify the terrain, and more! Ideal for those projects that require a copious amount of round stairways!
Of course, there are lots and lots of fixes, additions and tweaks to make playing Ylands much more enjoyable. The whole team is super excited about all that's new and improved and we'll be waiting for your feedback about the update. To kick off the feedback, the Project lead of Ylands, Aleš, shared a bit about how he's feeling about Crafty Crafts: "I am really excited about the new loot mechanics. What you get from slain monsters is now more randomized and rewarding, and once again pushes the game a bit closer towards the RPG genre."
We're now very close to releasing update 1.11 and are getting closer to 2023 with every passing day. And because of that, I would like to use the Dev Diary to tell you what some of our plans are for Adventure in the next year.
In 2023, if everything goes as planned, we would like to release three large updates - 1.12, 1.13, and 1.14.
We've been working on Dungeons for some time already and based on their current "fun factor" (or the lack thereof) decided not to release them with 1.11 but to keep working on them until we're happy with the result. They may be released in 1.12, but because there is another feature that we definitely want to release with that update, Dungeons may appear as late as 1.13.
That "must-have in 1.12 feature" I mentioned is something we've been thinking about for about two years (and even mentioned it once or twice during that time :) ) and now it finally feels like a good time to add it to the game. We'll provide you with more detailed information in one of the January Dev Diaries, but - in a nutshell - we want finally to give players a stronger incentive to explore both the game world and various features. Make every game you play a bit less generic and a bit more of a story. And, finally, give players more goals to achieve.
As much as it would be cool to start naming cool future features the very important thing to say is that we still feel the game is not in the state we want it to be. After roughly two years of making wrongs right and getting back to the roots we believe we are now back on the right track... but there are still far too many things that need to work better, and, more importantly, be more fun.
Sailing and ships are a major part of the game and yet there is still a ton of work before we utilize their full potential. With the Energy, we barely touched the surface. Crafting, even with the UI improvements coming in 1.11 is still something that needs a lot of love. And we could go on.
Long story short - even though the next year will see new features coming to Ylands, our priority will be to take the things that you already like and make them better. All this is based on your direct feedback, just like the last two years.
That's it for today, so stay classy, Ylanders! Aleš
Dev Diary #251 Focused feedback
Ahoy Ylanders,
With the update release coming closer, our work is focusing on polishing all the details and quirks. This week we held an event called a focus test. What is a focus test you ask?
"Focus tests help us find out information about our game through the eyes of new players. While working long enough on one project your view of the game can become subjective (you know how everything works, where to find everything, and what to avoid doing). It essentially prevents you from seeing the game the way a first-time player does. We try to follow how people understand the main menu, and user interface, if the player knows where to find everything in the inventory and other screens and if tutorials and hints are helpful enough. We have had a great experience with focus tests in the past in our Ylands team and I find them an important part of game development."
- Michaela Bódi, QA Lead
We invited some of our friends to come to play the game in our office and give us honest feedback. They have never played the game before. This time we wanted to know what a new player thinks of the tutorial, progression, and overall feel of the game. We had designers and marketing there to collect all the information and after 2 hours of playing we sat down with our testers and they told us what they think of the game.
How did it go?
Everyone loved the day, our friends had fun exploring a new video game and we got pages and pages of valuable feedback. We already had a first meeting where we discussed our notes. You will see some changes regarding clarity and simplicity in the future, that came from our focused feedback. Huge thank you to everyone involved!
Stay Classy!
Dev Diary #250 There be ghosts!
Ahoy Ylanders!
Update 1.11 is just a few weeks away so it feels like a good time to remind you of some of the cool things you will get to experience in the Adventure mode when the update comes out.
Let's start with some good news and bad news. The dungeons we told you about some time ago look great, and we're very excited about them. Originally, we hoped we would be able to release the dungeons in the upcoming update, but we decided to delay those until 1.12. All the systems needed for it are ready and working. We are generating random dungeons filled with both easy and sophisticated random encounters. It is possible to enter those with your friends (similar to traveling somewhere with ships), fight enemies, and solve encounters leading to the final ones you might call "boss fights". A lot of pieces have already fallen into place with the exception of one - the gameplay is simply not as smooth and fun as we would like it to be. It simply needs more time to tweak. And after far too many hits and misses with other features in the past we rather delay a feature in progress (or even entirely scrap it, if need be) than release something that we are not happy with. So, no dungeons in 1.11. On the other hand, working on dungeons made us give more focus to fixing issues related to combat and pathfinding. The first minor fixes are already present in 1.11, with more coming in 1.12.
The rest of the planned features ( and a bit more :) ) is coming out with 1.11. You can expect a reworked crafting UI that lets you easily find what you're looking for and utilizes some principles and ideas you proposed. On top of that, we are discussing ways how we can open the recipes more gradually in the future and for this to feel more rewarding.
We have a brand new loot system in place so that things that mobs drop will be more varied in numbers and objects and specific monsters and hostile characters will drop rare things or parts of armor sets. There are a whole lot of things to look for and look forward to!
Many new players have told us that the initial yland wasn't enough to decide whether to buy the Exploration Pack or not, so newly for those without the Pack the whole tropical region is now open and we've also added options to unlock the regions one by one instead of opening them by only getting the Pack (which, however, remains the most efficient way to experience all of the Ylands content as intended).
As the night falls, cool ghosts (with some really, really cool stuff they can drop) may appear at various random encounters. Just beware - destroying those can be difficult without the right equipment ;)
Ghosts are, however, not the only new inhabitants of the world of Ylands. Scheming pangolins or colorful morays are nothing compared to the epic tamable creature, that can be acquired only by those who have tamed all the other mythical creatures.
As usual, you can expect more than just these bigger features plus a ton of fixes and smaller improvements. Hopefully, you'll like that!
