🌱 The Fellowship of the Spring
Hello friend, welcome back.
Spring has come to Castle PixelCount in the intervening weeks since last we talked. Our snow-capped towers have shed their winter crowns and now glisten in the warm sunlight. Our windows shutter no more and neither do we. Off in the courtyard, we can hear the sullen murmur of bees shouldering their way through the long unmown grass.
It's also time for the team to take their annual April showers, because nobody likes a smelly game developer.
As always, we invite you to rest a spell and enjoy a brief respite from your weary internet travels. We've been positively engrossed by all our recent progress and there's much to update you on!
Ye Ol' Updates
Games are like metaphors. There's too many of them and most aren't that good.
No, wait. That's the wrong metaphor. Hold on, let me go find the one we were going to use for this update. Here it is.
Games are like jigsaw puzzles. The more of it you put together the more you can see the big picture. Kynseed has no shortage of puzzle pieces, but over the last month it's been incredibly satisfying to see many of them fitting together and starting to create a cohesive whole.
World Builder Charlie has been, quite literally, placing down individual blades of grass in the game's regions. Where once were barren fields are now lush pastures teeming with foliage and wild flowers. Charlie has also been doing a great deal of writing, particularly when it comes to the various books that you can find around the land.
Meanwhile, Master Linguist Neal has recently concerned himself with the challenging task of putting the layers of the land in proper order. Until not long ago, the player would display on top of various items like tables, doors, and the like. Since standing on dinner tables is considered rude by most people, Neal thought it best to work on sorting out such things in the game's code.
As for High Oracle Matt, he continues to be afflicted with writing development updates in third person. He claims this is because development updates are actually a team effort, but we suspect it's because he likes giving himself attention. In addition, he's been busy scheming on a number of soon-to-be-revealed community plans as well as working closely with Musician Magician Matthijs on the game's audio.
Recent Game Changes
Here at PixelCount Studios, we like lists almost as much as we like unnecessarily wordy development updates. This isn't a proper change log mind you, as we prefer to not cut down change trees, but it should still give you a nice look at some of our recent progress:
- Numerous game layering fixes across the board
- New tiling techniques for placing building chunks
- NPC AI routines
- NPC walking and idle animations are now in
- Most NPC sleeping animations are complete as well
- Sprites and animations have been made for the enigmatic Mr Fairweather
- The User Interface has been reworked to look crisper and fit the game's pixel density
- Work on toolbar icons for all inventory items is well underway
- First pass selections on sound effects made (implementation to follow)
- Mastering of the 90+ minute soundtrack for The Prologue is complete
- Copious amounts of region updates and fixes
- Text updates for things like books, proverbs, dialogue, and more
- General game design refinement in various areas
- First pass of assets have been made for the in-game map system
Building a game of this nature is no small feat, but every day we work hard to make sure that our determination matches our ambition. The next steps of this project are going to be some of the most important ones that we take, but we have a secret weapon: you.
Our goal from the very beginning was to give every backer a chance to get involved with this game's development and to be able to talk directly with the developers. Now that the foundations and support beams of the game are in place, it'll soon be time to let you seedlings have a go at playing it. Putting something playable in backer hands is the next big goal on our immediate horizon.
Postcards from The Vale
Perhaps the only thing we like more than lists is GIF's. And bacon. (Mainly bacon.)
A Calendar Date with Destiny
Every morning, we wake to find a drove of carrier pigs at our castle gates. This parcel of pigs tends to have the same message attached each time: when will Kynseed be available to the masses? That, and a few spam letters telling us we've won free iPads.
Revealing a date of any kind is a momentous occasion which warrants an announcement all its own. So we'll be revealing that exciting bit of info in its very own community update that we can trumpet from the mountaintops.
We know that the word 'soon' has become elevated to near-mythic proportions in the games industry, but that's not entirely without good reason. The nature of a calendar date is so terribly specific that we don't want to take its reveal lightly. That said, all our soothsaying tells us that a shareable date is very imminent. Which is to say: we'll soon say how soon soon is.
(More like soonsaying, amirite?)
In fact, you're going to be getting an unusual amount of announcements and updates from us this month. None of it will be spammy though, as we suspect that you backers will be excited by what we have to say in each one - no free iPads here.
The scholars of this land have a saying: Winter is when one plans and Spring is when one does. It seems that this holds true for us here at Castle PixelCount, for many of the seeds that you all helped us plant will soon be bearing fruit.
More updates are surely to come, so don't stray too far from the castle grounds. Perhaps even come visit the halls of these discussion forums or our delightful Discord to help pass the time. Those of us crafting the game can be found there both day or night and we're always happy to answer questions or receive flattery.
Maybe while you're here, you can help us figure out the mystery of what that strange jangling sound in the east forest was. With the arrival of Spring it seems to have inexplicably stopped. Most curious.
Love,
PixelCount
