Hello everyone!
Things have been exceptionally busy for us here at Castle PixelCount and we'd like to take some time to update you on all the latest going-ons. We've had an insanely busy past few weeks getting dozens upon dozens of pages written for new design documents, numerous lines of code for NPC simulations, preliminary work on concept art, new features and areas of the community, final budget and business chats, not to mention working closely with a new character artist who will be joining us on our journey! In short, it's been an incredibly packed month building the initial foundation for making this game come to life. Now that all of that important groundwork has been laid, the game's development has now hit its full stride!
The Developer Pub!
One such development that we're particularly excited about is that for £25+ backers, the developer forums are now open! Referred to in the community as the Developer Pub, these special forums will be where we show unpolished work-in-progress game content that would otherwise be unpalatable to the sensibilities of the masses. In these forums you'll also get to help us brainstorm the nitty-gritty areas of the game and you'll essentially be our guinea pigs for new content.
But worry not, we'll still be just as engaged as we've ever been with all the forums and we'll not only keep everyone updated on development but we'll also continue to read suggestions, discuss ideas together, and share cat GIF's. Which reminds me, if you've not had a chance to drop by our shiny new community forums you should! It's a really fun corner of the internet and it houses a rather stellar collection of Kynseed fans and devs, Lionhead fans and devs, and also a few drunks who stumbled in off the street.
Click here to check out our forums and feel free to register and say hello while you're there. And if you're a £25+ backer and want in on the Developer Pub just head to this thread here to confirm your backer account and we'll get you all set up to access those most illustrious of forums.
And worry not: if you're currently wishing you could access the Developer Pub by increasing your backing amount (or if you didn't get a chance to back at all), know that we've currently got some things brewing behind the scenes that you might be most interested in. More on that later though!
Character Art
One of the most frequent areas of feedback we received during the prototype phase was that the character art needed a little love and attention. In fact, character art was one of the items at the very top of our list for what we wanted to dedicate any extra funds to if we exceeded our asking amount. Which, as it happens, we managed to do thanks to all you super people. So with that in mind, we're pretty darn happy to announce that we are now working with a lovely chap named Gary, a very talented character artist with a specialized niche in making delicious pixel art.
Over the last couple of weeks we've been busy going over different ideas and concepts with Gary on the sort of look and feel that we're wanting with Kynseed's characters. In that time he's been sending us new drafts almost every day and over the course of the last week we've managed to get some brilliant looking characters, villagers, and animals. It's honestly pretty amazing how big of an impact that this new art has had on the game's look already.
If you have access to the Developer Pub then you can head there now to see all the different character drafts that we've been working on and to let us know what you think. If you don't have access to the Pub then fret not, for we'll be sharing character art with you all just as soon as they're more polished and ready.
Feel free to also follow Gary on Twitter and say hello. In addition to lovely pixel art, he also creates some rather superb voxel art on occasion. And once again, a big thanks to you backers for believing in this project enough to allow us the resources to invite Gary along for this journey. We can't wait to show you what he's been working on.
Design & Code Updates
On the development front, Charlie has been making great progress on fully fleshing out all of the design documents in order to pave the way for Early Access and beyond. For those interested, some details of this have already been posted on the forums. We're intrigued to get your feedback on these as it'll give us very early insight into what players are after in the game. Charlie will also be taking to the forums very soon to ask all of you what you want to hear more about from the design documents. So if there's an area of the game's design that you're particularly interested in then just hop over to the forums and ask.
Despite time for programming being a bit restricted in the last few weeks due to all these other things going on, progress has started to pick up on aspects currently missing from the prototype. In particular, the focus has been setting up and populating the Vale with sim characters, converting the player to using character animations, preparations for the female player, character customization, as well as speedups/optimization for the engine that will improve our iteration speed significantly.
The next programming focus will be the various job minigames that the player can do which will play a part in the initial Early Access build. This times out rather nicely as Charlie is just now finishing up all the designs for the jobs and we're looking forward to seeing these designs go from a document to something more tangible in the game itself.
In our next few updates we'll dive a bit deeper into discussing how the game's code and engine is coming along, so for those of you interested in the technical aspects of Kynseed's engine be sure to stay tuned.
More to Come!
When it comes to making a game, laying a good foundation to work from can often be one of the most important parts of development. These past few weeks have largely been about doing just that. The business and budget side of things is taken care of, we've searched for and found a new character artist, making the character art itself has begun, important design documents have been completed, programming core elements of the engine has begun, we've nailed down how we want to approach UI, our concept artists are poised to start making some great art, and our community forums are getting new sections and features regularly.
With all of this groundwork out of the way, you can expect for these development updates to not only get more frequent but to also dive a bit deeper into showing what we're working on. This is a pivitol moment for Kynseed: now that we have a solid foundation it's time for us to start building atop it!
We'll be talking with you all again very soon. In the meantime, we hope to see you around the community. The entire PixelCount team chats and posts there every day and we really enjoy hanging out with everyone. See you back here for another update very soon!
- Your friends at PixelCount
