Oh, hello.
Good to see you again. Always nice to have another visit from you. Are you here to tell us that you're updating your privacy policy? Because the last person who did that was thrown into the dungeon.
No? Oh, good.
In that case, welcome back. As I'm sure you recall, last month saw a huge rush of visitors and it was a rather busy time indeed. But it's nice to once again be able to sit and talk over some drinks.
When we opened the gates of The Vale a month ago, we couldn't have imagined that so many people would come to visit this world that we built, unfinished though it may be. There were so many people visiting us here at the castle that our servers kept crashing into each other, spilling all manner of food and drink on the floor.
In the weeks since this initial rush, we've been hard at work refining Kynseed and its world. Systems were developed further, shoe polish was rigorously applied, and a number of bugs that were found have been relocated to a bug paradise where they may enjoy a life of retirement. (We hear it's a lovely place run by its caretaker, M. S. Bob.)
In addition to all that, we've also begun working on new sights and sounds that we'll be adding into the world at some point in the near future. So, as has become tradition by now, please rest a spell with us and we'll catch you up on everything.
Ye Ol' Updates
Last month was a very intense time for the PixelCount team. Perhaps you read of some of this already in
The PixelCount Post, our weekly development periodical. We try to always keep our expectations very reserved on how much interest Kynseed will get during its development, so it was all rather unexpected when so many people showed up during the release of that initial backer build on April 29th.
We were completely taken by surprise (in a good way) and it led to some incredibly busy days for the team. There were streams to watch, questions to answer, bugs to help with, and code to update. It was perhaps the busiest we've ever been on this project, but in many ways it was a big boost of encouragement for us to see such interest for this peculiar little game we're making.
Because the backer build of the game is still unrefined, we've intentionally not gone out of our way to market Kynseed more than is necessary. We're a bit weird in that we don't really do the traditional marketing approach. Instead, we just focus on making the best game we can, hang out with our community while we do it, and then let things organically take shape from there. Basically, we don't want the marketing to outpace the quality of the game, a mistake that we sometimes feel other games are tempted to make.
You may be thinking to yourself, "Hey, I'm on to you nutters. You do plenty of marketing. What do you call this development update, huh!?" Yes, it's perfectly true. We are fans of writing wordy updates. But we'd say that there's a big difference between 'marketing' verses 'building a community'. Something that we sometimes see happen in game dev is thinking that marketing and community are the same thing. But to us, they're wildly different.
All that to say, despite not focusing too much on the marketing, we've been very humbled by all the interest received thus far. We've even been surprised to suddenly find ourselves show up in a magazine or two, which was definitely a bit wild for us to see. Of course, this meant that more than ever we wanted to polish up the game and start refining things. So over the last month we've been incredibly busy pushing out as many updates as we reasonably could. More on that below!
Recent Game Changes
We've had
5 build updates in the last month. Many of the changes seen in these are thanks to all of you helping us find problems and little things to fix.
World Builder Charlie has had no shortage of tasks, especially given how many visitors the world was receiving. Some visitors were reporting divine behavior, such as walking on water. Thankfully, Charlie has now sorted out many of the water edges that visitors could slip past. Because, as we all know, you don't learn to swim until the sequel.
Master Linguist Neal has been sorting through many reports of bug sightings as well as feedback in general. Every day he improves things little by little as he works tirelessly to improve the engine. Well, perhaps 'tirelessly' isn't accurate, because every team meeting on Skype starts off with a yawn from Neal - though perhaps Matt's sultry voice is to blame.
Speaking of, High Oracle Matt ran out of midnight oil this month. He dispatched an order for replenishment and now his stockpiles runneth over once more. In addition to his oil crisis, he's been most busy with answering questions and processing new guests of The Vale as well as writing up
many questions and answers.
To see a long list of everything that we've done in the last month, feel free to jump on over to our
build change log and check it all out. But for a more summarized look at things, the list below should hopefully suffice:
- Save games made more reliable
- A first pass feature for quick travelling
- Keyboard and mouse control improvements
- Work on the blacksmith minigame presentation
- Monuments now have a small purpose in unveiling family info
- New animations (such as for when the player holds certain objects)
- Day 13 adjustments to make finding the way easier
- UI improvements
- Tons of crash and bug fixes
Trust us though, that barely scratches the surface of everything done in the last month. We definitely encourage you to check out
the full list if change logs are the sorta thing you're into.
Upcoming Updates
Now that many of the higher priority bugs and crashes have been fixed in the first month of the backer build, we'll be able to start sneaking in some more content here and there. We've been getting a fair bit of new art in lately and we're hoping to spend some time very soon in getting much of it added. Below is a short list of a few things on the immediate horizon, followed by some lovely images of more things to come.
- Revamp of cooking along with baking setup
- Some early building roof tests
- Initial combat tests
- First pass of tavern entertainment
- Some decent sized region improvements and changes
Dev Pub Streams
Ah, yes. The developer streams for Dev Pub patrons who backed at the Land Shaper tiers or higher. We know that you've all been eagerly awaiting news of this. These past few weeks we've been busy testing our streaming setup among the team and we're happy to report that we're now ready to do our very first developer stream!
Right now our plan is to do Thursday, June 7th at 11am PST/2pm EST/7pm BST. (Phew, that's a lot of acronyms.) Bear in mind that this first stream will be a bit loosey goosey as we get familiar with our streaming setup and as we find out what you viewers are most interested in seeing.
You won't get to see our lovely mugs, but you will get to see live feeds of our screens and hear us talk. This means we'll be able to play through the game to talk through things with you, you'll get to see the editor tools that we use to build the game, and you'll even get to see the actual code that's running everything. In addition to this, we'll be chatting with you all and answering any questions you may have.
This will be the first of many streams, so some of the fun of this first go is finding out what sort of things you'd like us to discuss and show. And, of course, if anyone's keen on getting access to these just feel free to take a gander at our
Piggy Backer page. We look forward to seeing you there soon!
What a crazy month it's been, but a very satisfying one at that. Having so many new faces come to look at what we've been working on has been amazing to see and it's filled us with even more drive to put as much heart into this project as we can.
If you find your heart growing fonder for us on a weekly basis, be sure to visit our forums to read The PixelCount Post, a weekly developer update that we've been running for many months now.
Also, we've been getting a great deal of carrier pigs arriving at our castle gates each day asking questions about various things. To relieve the burden on our poor piggies, we've taken the liberty of posting a detailed FAQ in the town square. If you have any burning questions, we first ask that you douse them in water using the FAQ.
Thank you again for paying us a visit. It's always nice to hear your knock on our door and I'm sure we'll see each other again very soon.
Love,
PixelCount
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