Embark with us on a visual journey into the realm of artistic creation as we unveil the process behind some of the mythical animals in the Ylands universe. Today, we'll delve into the minds of our talented artists: Karel, Filip, and Jakub, as they created the fantastical beings that already inhabit your Ylands experience.
Wooden Golem by Karel
"Research is key to capturing the true essence of the Wooden Golem. I drew inspiration from my favorite Lord of the Rings movie, blending majestic and dangerous Ents with dumb and heavy Trolls. The challenge was to strike a balance between enchanting and mysterious, ensuring these creatures seamlessly meld into the forest landscapes our players will explore."
Stormfeathered Banty by Filip
"Creating the Stormfeathered Banty was a challenge. I immersed myself in the world of flying beasts, drawing inspiration from our animator Matej and his pet hen, as well as the old Mayan kingdom. It's fascinating how ordinary animals and tribal art can breathe life into these mythical creatures."
Emerald Scaleneck and White Burroworill by Jakub
"When thinking of Emerald Scaleneck and White Burroworill, I drew my inspiration from the movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail (easter egg) and the TV series Dinosaurs. Incorporating these comical ideas into these mythical creatures added an otherworldly dimension. It's amazing how a blend of fantasy world, funny animals, and artistic interpretation can create creatures that feel both cute and captivating."
A heartfelt thank you to Karel, Filip, and Jakub for offering us a glimpse into the creative process that births these mythical creatures! For a deeper dive into our artistic endeavors, don't forget to explore our art developer diary in the future. Share your thoughts on these extraordinary creations, and until our next artistic revelation...
Stay Classy!
Dev Diary #300 This is Ylands!
Ahoy Ylanders!
Welcome to Dev Diary number 300! The Ylands team is a cheerful bunch and we love any opportunity to celebrate and we wanted to invite you to celebrate the release of 300 Dev Diaries with us!
First of all, let us thank you because without you, Ylanders, there would be no need for Dev Diaries. Thank you for being here and for being awesome!
When Ylands was still a baby, Aleš and the team released sneak peeks every now and then, but eventually, they started releasing Dev Diaries. If you don't want to go looking for the very first one, we've dug through the archives and pulled up the link for you here: https://ylands.com/community/topic/285-dev-diary-1/
We've come a long way since then, which we touched upon a bit in Dev Diary #200. So it is only fitting that we look at what's happened since number 200!
Update 1.9: Ocean Odysseys took a deep dive, literally, into the ocean. Sharks made a big comeback after learning their place (which of course is not in the skies above but in the waters below), many new fish made Ylands their home and the underwater world became a much more exciting, but also dangerous place. To sail such dangerous seas, we added an entire arsenal of ship devices that help navigate the unpredictable waters, where ships might get damaged and even sink!
Probably the most important improvement of this update was the beginning of a larger scale Adventure balancing for the best possible gaming experience.
To continue the improvement of already existing features, Update 1.11: Crafty Crafts focused on crafting and Blueprints. The entire crafting menu got a much needed overhaul and Ylands creators could upload their Blueprints to the market so that as many players as possible can enjoy them! Many other pieces of the puzzle started to fall into place with a new gifting system, randomized loot, new monsters and many more tweaks and fixes.
And finally, the Classy Adventurers Guild opened its doors to adventurers young and old and welcomed them in Ylands Update 2.0! C.A.G. has brought one of the most important features into the game: Adventurer's Handbook and with it the very first mission: find Horation Reginald Elmwood, the adventurer extraordinaire! Handbook was such a big deal that even on its own, it would have been huge. But we know that you wanted more and we delivered! Ylands introduced sailing with wind, improved terrain generation, new main menu, better tutorial, new random encounters and soooooo much more.
Ylands also changed its visual identity, not significantly, but enough to be recognizable, unique and truly ours. Since this Dev Diary is written by the marketing department (remember when we told you that each Diary will be written by a different department to give you more of an inside look? ) we can only say how extremely proud we are of our entire team for making 2.0 happen and to give us something incredible that we are so excited to show the world every day. But we didn't stop there, of course!
In Update 2.1: Sunken Sands, inventory sorting was implemented and made all of our lives much easier and organized. If you're not the social type or simply enjoy playing Ylands in Singleplayer mode, pausing the game was likely a very welcomed upgrade to the experience. And you got your second big mission from C.A.G., this time in the Arid region! And as always, there were many more quality of life improvements and additions to the game. Which ones were your favorite?
So what's up ahead? We've already told you about the upcoming tremendous techtree that will make its debut in 2.2 and we really think that... wait a minute. Tremendous Techtree. Tremendous Techtree? Tremendous Techtree! Let's call it that! So in Update 2.2: Tremendous Techtree you can look forward to just that - an amazing feature, which will surely be helpful for any and all C.A.G. members! What else? You're gonna have to wait for that a tiny bit longer, but worry not, that info is just around the corner and we aim to reward you for your patience.
Once again, we are very grateful for your support and love that you show us everyday. Thank you and as always...
This is Ylands!
Oh... and Stay Classy of course!
Ylands Winter Festival 2023 is Here!
A ho ho hoy Ylanders!
A cup of hot chocolate next to you, a fluffy blanket around your shoulders, a soothing crackling fireplace in front of you and then... *SPLAT* a snowball hits you in the face! Well, not you, but your Ylands character!
Welcome to YLANDS WINTER FEST!
We hope that you are ready to spend this winter in the world of Ylands, exploring the lands and searching for 6 new Christmas themed animals and 10 different kinds of collectible toys, completing 3 new achievements, and throwing snowballs left and right!
So what have we prepared for you in this time-limited winter event?
New Christmas Animals
Six kinds of our animals have put on Christmas bling and can now be seen roaming around their respective regions. These can be tamed using a special Christmas bait which is found as a reward in random encounters. If you want to befriend these special animals and keep them even after the event ends, hurry up and go tame them now!
Toy Collectibles
Christmas came early and there are many wonderful gifts hidden within random encounters! Can you collect all 10 kinds of toys and earn a special new achievement? You will of course get to keep all the toys you collect even after the Winter Fest event is over. And then you can spread the joy and give them as gifts to your friends in the game!
Snowball fights
Who threw that snowball? Who was it? *brushes snow from face* We're just trying to peacefully explain all that's new and available during the Winter Fest and you go throwing snowballs at us?! Well, we can't really blame you, because throwing snowballs you discover in random encounters is sooooo much fun! We will even organize a snowball fight with the developers on December 21 at 5pm CET!
3 New Achievements
Tame all 6 Christmas animals, collect all 10 kinds of Christmas toys and throw at least 30 snowballs at your friends or NPCs - that's the way to obtain these special achievements, which will be available only during the Winter Fest event. Don't forget to show them off, it's no small feat to gather all three! And if you complete all of them, run to our Discord and let us know! The first three people to do so will win a free pet!
Time-limited holiday pet
Is Socky the Shark the cutest pet to ever come to Ylands for an exchange program? Definitely. Is the Santa's elf who went to the ocean instead of Socky struggling in the depths of the water? Who knows 😅. In any case, grab Socky from the shop before his exchange program ends!
All the new things that Winter Fest is bringing are just tools for you to shape your own holiday adventure and we love to see how you use them, so please join our Discord and let us know! Share screenshots, find friends to throw snowballs at, show off your toy collectibles and much much more!
Winter Adventure Awaits, Ylanders!
Stay Classy (and warm) this winter season!
Dev Diary #299 Navigating the Ylands Release Seas
Ahoy Ylanders!
In this dev diary, we will take a deeper dive into our programming and patch/update release workflows and we'll get a bit more technical, as our programming department shares the ins and outs of the job!
Since we just released the Winter Fest patch and Update 2.2 is on its way, it is a good time to peek behind the scenes at what it even takes for a new release of Ylands to get to you, our dear player!
Each new release contains a multitude of new features requiring new code and data. We toil on them daily, saving (or committing, as the proper lingo would go) our changes to a 'version control system' (VCS). A VCS helps us keep track of project history and lets us recover an old state on the off chance we ever mess up. Importantly, it also allows us to work on multiple versions of the project (called branches) at the same time, with work on one usually not disturbing the others. Daily changes are committed mostly to the trunk version (branch). On a busy day, there can be over a hundred changes made to the trunk.
One part of a programmer's job, on which we spend a great deal of time, is dealing with bugs. A bug is a term used for any issue with the game, whether it comes from bad code or bad data. The development of a long-term project like Ylands is fundamentally about adding or improving new features as well and as fast as possible while minimizing the number of new bugs we accidentally add.
The first line of defense against the insectoid menace is something called 'continuous integration' (CI). CI is a term for a system that automatically integrates and tests changes made to a project. It is important to say that 'integrates and tests' actually means specific things for specific projects. For Ylands it goes like this: several times a day, about every hour or so, a new build of the game is made with the new changes made since the last build (from only a couple to low tens of new changes per build). Before each build, we run set validation procedures that help us automatically check any rules that we can enforce without the need for human oversight. If validation passes, we build a new version of the game. A successful build continues to automated testing, where our in-house automated system simulates player input to run the game through a range of predefined gameplay scenarios to detect any regressions (a feature that worked but does not work anymore after a recent change). Recently, we also introduced multiplayer testing against dedicated servers.
CI, in our case automated building and testing, usually uncovers the most obvious regressions in existing systems. For anything more complex, we rely on our QA team, who know the game inside out. They test new features, to ensure they are the best they can be and also continuously check that our meddling did not break any of the existing stuff.
This process of daily development and CI continues merrily until the release of a new version draws near. We set a date of a 'datalock', usually about a month before release. A datalock comes when all new features should be good and done in the trunk branch and no new changes should really be required, besides the occasional bugfix. In theory at least. On the day of datalock, we copy the trunk version into a new 'release candidate version branch' (RC), so that it is not further disturbed by daily changes. We then proceed to test RC builds rigorously. The RC branch receives only as few changes as possible to avoid introducing any more last-minute issues.
In some cases, the RC build is made public as the Experimental Steam beta branch about two weeks before a release. We closely monitor player feedback and react to any critical issues that might be found. What is super exciting, is that starting with the 2.2 Experimental, it should be even more useful for us, as it will let players continue with their existing progress from the live version of the game (but not carry over experimental progress to live).
Finally, once the day of release is set in stone, we announce a maintenance window. On the day of the release, we flip the button, push the final build of the game live, and do a last round of checks to make sure that everything works. We celebrate, take a breather, and start the whole cycle anew.
And there you have it, Ylanders - the release cycle summarized from the point of view of our programmers.
Is there any topic from the development of Ylands that you would like to hear about? Let us know here or come chat with us on our Discord!
Stay Classy, Ylanders!
2.1.5 Patch - Winter Fest
⭐
Highlights
⭐
Snowball fighting - find stacks of snowballs in Random Encounters and use them in fun battles with your friends!
Christmas animals - you can meet new Christmas variants of specific animals on newly discovered ylands and tame them.
Toy hunt - Christmas came early and you can already find presents hidden in the world of Ylands. Merry Christmas!
New Assets
DISCLAIMER: These assets will be available only during the event. Once you acquire/tame them, you will be able to keep them even after the event ends.
New animals
(exclusively in new maps in Adventure) Festive Terrorbird Festive Rhinoceros Festive Tiger Festive Bear Festive Wolverine Festive Penguin
New items
Toy Teddy Bear Toy Doll Toy Robot Festive Bait Thrown snowball
New pet
Socky The Shark
New Achievements
Having a Snowball (throwable) Santa's Little Herder Santa's Little Hoarder
______________________ FIXES Fixed: The player's ship should no longer appear in the middle of the Elmwood outpost. Fixed: We fixed the problem with the safe in Ember Yland which did not unlock also Distant memory should no longer disable music for players.
ADDITIONS [YLD-48435] Added Anti Cheat sanitation. Multiplayer will be a safe place again. [YLD-48791] Added: Editor: Trigger On player created / On player spawned on Spawn point. Added: Three new Achievements - SANTA'S LITTLE HOARDER, SANTA'S LITTLE HERDER, HAVING A SNOWBALL
CHANGES Changed: All new festive items can be found in chests in random encounters, happy hunting!
TWEAKED Tweaked: Resource price for unlocking the Adventure region is reduced. Tweaked: Some recipes in Adventure were not obtainable, but now you can find them in random encounters.
Dev Diary #298 Big Technology Update Incoming
Ahoy Ylanders!
We are bringing you important updates from our design team this week!
For a while, the issue about discovering new recipes was weighing on us heavily, as the current situation was not optimal. But finally, after many iterations and changes, we bring your the final result!
We are introducing the TECH TREE!
What does it mean? Recipes should no longer be learned by picking up ingredients, but will have to be discovered in the tech tree. This will give you much greater control over your recipe pool and progression in the game. At the same time, many recipes that were previously hard to find or were undiscoverable altogether, will now be found in the tech tree.
How will it work? The main progression through the tree will include combat gear, vehicles and technologies. To unlock those recipes, you will need to provide resources found in the appropriate region. The side progression will be about optional recipes which include decorations like carpets or vases. And for these recipes, you will need not only resources, but also a small amount of Exploration Points. Each bunch of recipes is a so-called node, and all these nodes have dependencies between one another. So for example, to unlock the Junk Ship, you need to have already researched the node for the Primitive Ship etc. The tech tree is divided into 8 categories:
Survival
Vehicles
Combat
Manufacturing
Decorations
Apparel
Furniture
Building
What's handy is that when you encounter an ingredient that your character does not know a recipe for yet, clicking on it will link you to its location in tech tree. And when you're in the tech tree, to avoid unnecessary clicks, you can go directly to crafting when you click on a recipe in the node.
Another important point to mention is backwards compatibility. If you know all the contents of a node, that node will unlock automatically. And if you only know some but not all the contents, the node will be cheaper than a fully undiscovered one!
To make sure that it all made sense, we also looked into and adjusted the way you receive Exploration Points and recipes from Random Encounters, which, we hope, should be more immersive and make more sense in regard to the specific region and its theme.
What do you think about the first look at our tech tree? We're sure that you have many questions so please drop them in the comments!
That's it for this week! Stay Classy!
Dev Diary #297 Departments in the World of Ylands
Ahoy, Ylanders!
Sometimes you mention that you want more of an insight into the development process and how things are done. Thank you for that suggestion and we are happy to oblige! We agreed with the leads of our teams, or departments to be more precise, that it will be great to lift the curtain of the development process more often. And to get you started, let's take a look at the big picture and see an overview of all the departments the Ylands team has!
Production
How to make sure that the process actually works? How to make sure that everyone does what they need to be doing? Ask production or rather, they will let us know to ask them so we can let you know in some future diaries.
Game Design
Designers are the brain behind the operation. They come up with a vision, a concept, a plan, and then together with other teams, they make that play a reality. Or game reality, if you will.
Programming
From procedural generation of terrain and ylands, to game interface, throwing grenades, shooting from bows, free placing mode and yes, everything else. Programmers are the creators of the fabric of the Ylands universe.
Art and Animation
All the grenades, bows, ylands, terrains and yes, again, everything else needs to have some shapes, colours, and animations. The fabric of the Ylands universe needs to be shaped into the characteristic look of the game.
QA aka Quality Assurance
Then, the fabric's reality also needs to be tested. Otherwise it would be a world full of flying sharks, moving ragdoll bodies, weirdly shaped heads and in many other ways just crawling with bugs. That's where testing and quality assuring comes in.
Marketing & Community Management
And when we want the fabric to be used, we have to communicate it to the people. Which is where marketing comes in. Despite much less actual development happening there, it is still one of the parts that make a whole.
hat's all for today, and feel free to drop your questions for any of the departments into the comments or come have a chat with the developers on our Discord!
Stay Classy!
Dev Diary #296 Winter is coming to Ylands!
Ahoy Ylanders!
This winter we have a few gifts for you. As you can read in the last Dev Diary, the next update is going to be quite big, so we made sure to take our time with that one, but don't worry we ain't gonna leave you hangin'! What do we have in store for you? Let's see!
Thanks, Ruth1ess! Maybe not a Christmas update but you can look forward to Ylands Winter Fest! Or as we in C.A.G. like to call it P...P...P...P...P...PARTEYYYYYY!
Fun Activities and Achievements
Explore the world for unique toys and tame festive animals to earn new limited Christmas achievements. There is one more activity that won't be revealed today. Guess what the third achievement will be for. Let us know in the comments!
Sale and Gifts
As every year there will be some Christmas gifts for you. Let us know what you'd like to see on sale in store.
Also, there will be a small treat for anyone to pick up on our Discord. You just need to find it there!
Discord contests and stream
We don't want to spoil all the fun, but you can be sure, that there will be a full Christmas sock of it! You can look forward to opportunities to win some Christmas themed assets. Will it be a pet, a costume or even something completely different? We shall see...
In the meantime, you can get some coyns back if you send us a screenshot or a video of your Scarecrow costume on our Discord into #halloween_payback! So don't forget to check out the current Halloween sale in the shop.
Stay Classy!
Dev Diary #295 Ylands' Project Lead about Upcoming Plans
Ahoy Ylanders!
Ales, the Ylands Project Lead here. Today I would like to talk with you about the current state of the game, our plans for it and react to some of the feedback we've seen based on our Dev Diaries.
Let's start with the current status of the game. We've managed to improve the game a lot in the last couple of years, moving from around 40% average rating on Steam to around 80% (82% when writing this). Improving the game this much was not an easy task and it took us quite long, but it was absolute necessity for us to stay alive.
We would definitely like to move past the "fixing" stage to "hey, let's look at the amazingly cool feature we've added" stage or "hey, here's a ton of new content for those of you who already seen and experienced everything the game had to offer". You bet that it's what we all would love to do. But we're not there yet.
The biggest issue we have is player retention and we are dedicated to fix it - in other words, we want you to have fun as long as possible and having players returning to Ylands is our main focus now. Like that everyone can get the grasp of how complex the game is and experience all it has to offer.
Here are some reasons for it:
We fail to present to players what the later gameplay is like early in the game and what cool stuff you can find or do. As the ratings go up, we get more and more of "hey, this game is so cool - why aren't there more people playing it" - but it mostly comes from people who get past the "you are on stranded yland so go and grab X sticks and Y of grass, just like you've done a million times in dozens of other games".
Even though we fixed dozens of things that were annoying, unintuitive or didn't work as they should, enough of those still remain. Often tiny annoyances that add up and eventually lead to a rage quit.
Playing with friends needs to be easier - especially on mobile devices.
These changes will definitely improve the experience for everyone, both new and long-time players (actually many things in the planned update 2.2 come to mind), but indeed, there will be no "endgame" content added in the next six months, namely updates 2.2 and 2.3. If everything goes as intended 2.4 (Q2 2024) may finally see some major new world content.
As for release dates - update 2.2 will be released in January 2024 but given how many improvements and features it has, we plan to give players access to the experimental branch already before the end of this year.
What you can also expect is more Dev Diaries like this one to give you regular updates about what we're doing to make the game better and more popular among players.
We've come a long way in the last few years. We've turned the wheel away from the "Roblox-like" path, put Adventure back together, and will keep doing that. So, big thanks to everyone who stayed with us even through our failings.
Stay classy!
Dev Diary #294 Play and Win Prizes, Join the Halloween Stream!
Ahoy Ylanders!
...
BOO!
... did we scare you off? Hopefully not, since we are just about to invite you to our Halloween Discord stream where you can win glowing T-Shirts, new scary pumpkin scarecrow costume, meet us and other Ylanders and enjoy crazy-classy-funky-spooky time!
When:
31. 10. 2023 at 3 PM CET
Where:
Ylands Discord Server - Join the event! 👉 https://discord.gg/ylands?event=1164158412033106040
What:
Chatting about Ylands and various topics, playing scary Ylands minigames together and announcing the winners of contests! Yes, plural.
Contest n°1:
Fancy a Ghost Pirate T-Shirt? Create your own scary minigame which we can play on stream. First 3 contributors will win a glowing Ghost-Pirate T-Shirt! Submit your minigame before 29. 10. into #competitions_entries on our Discord once you are ready.
Contest n°2:
Fancy brand-new Scarecrow costume? Join other Ylanders in playing spooky minigame from player Mello. In case you want to assure your spot in the competition make sure to contact Anna, our community manager, and join the Discord event. Just in case there would be too many of us! 3 players with the highest score on in the minigame on stream will win Scarecrow costume.
It will be a blast! No doubt there, especially if you bring your own camera and join us in dressing up Halloween style.
