🌱 New Community Forums and Prototype Update!
Greetings Seedlings!
It's been a little while since our successful Kickstarter campaign ended and in that time we've been very busy behind the scenes getting things as prepared as possible! For today's update we have three exciting things we want to share:
The Forums Are Open!
We've been busy building our shiny new forums, testing everything out, and making sure they're all ready for use. There's further polish work to do on the look and feel which we'll be getting to in the coming weeks but, all in all, the community floodgates are officially open! If you're a backer be sure to register with the same email as your Kickstarter email so that we can verify your account. Once you register just head to the
Backer Verification Thread and read the instructions there.
We encourage everyone to
join the PixelCount community and say hello! No, seriously. It's pretty awesome over there. The development team is
very active on the forums and we love chatting with the Seedlings in our community. Plus, all you Chicken Chasers who miss talking with your peeps on the ol' Lionhead forums now have a place to hang out once again. Happy days!
New Prototype Update!
This is mainly a minor update to 'lock in' the prototype so that we can move on to working on the core areas of the larger game (the patch notes can be found at the bottom of this update). This patch is primarily minor tweaks and improvements so if you have played previous versions you likely won't see anything new - just a slightly more refined experience for the UI, controls, and other small fixes. This also might be the last update for a fair while or perhaps even until the early access build planned for a half year from now. We want to make sure that the early access build is as good as possible and to do that we'll be giving it our complete focus. Worry not though, we'll absolutely still keep you all up to date and suitably tantalised with progress on the game as it develops via updates like these as well as over in the PixelCount community.
Other Game Progress
Additionally, we've been extremely busy behind the scenes having plenty of lengthy meetings sorting out details about the game and our full plans for its development. We've also been having early discussions with some artists (concept, UI, and character) which should hopefully lead to some exciting new art to share in the coming weeks and months. The game design is also being fleshed out further to map out different features such as festivals, lore, and the different skills in the game. Plus, now that the prototype update is done, proper coding work has begun and new features are officially getting added into the game! One of the first features we've begun to lay the framework for has been the AI setup for NPC's and the notion of them having houses and places of work. With this in place we're hoping to be able to have the Vale populated allowing us to playtest sim behavior. Another aspect on code is the UI setup which we're pushing to a more data driven setup allowing very easy tweaking of the layout.
Prototype Patch Notes
- All music has been rebalanced and sound quality improved
- A whole bunch of invisible editor work on resizing levels, moving/copying/cutting, and pasting selected game objects and tiles
- Toolbar adjustments to have highlights when mouse is over something and to allow unselecting by left clicking on the current active item
- Cooking has a filter option to just show ingredients for the current recipe and to show red for any you don't have of the current recipe
- Fixed a situation where you could get stuck in the minigame when going into a menu
- Intro and outro text adjusted
- Bit of a tidy up on the right side of Dreamer's Nook tiles as well as removing some unused objects from the level
- Fix for inventory flickering with controller (had to do with mouse overriding the position)
- Mouse wheel for toolbar works better at cycling through options if there are multiple of the same item or gaps
- Individual bottles and buckets are now visible in the inventory and equippable if you are lucky enough to find multiple - it shows the contents of them in the picture as well
- Mouse wheel can now change tabs in the inventory/calendar screens (this is just a test - in the future we might make it more sensitive context as to what scrolls)
- Gift giving wheel now has a more consistent border
- Changed some messages over to use the newer warning system (the old ones are banners that fly across the top)
- Query option filters to Any, Queried, To Query
- Improved book presentation a little to match other menus (note it's all still placeholder that will change but making it consistent for now helps ease the process of changing it over later)
- Pigs no longer show 'dead' status after they come back to life
- Adjusted the position of UI elements slightly and made them configurable for future tweaking
- Fixed bottom left icons so they can be mouse clickable
- Insects weren't correctly cleaned up from the jar on collection
- The tool pickup menu selection with mouse and keyboard are slightly improved with highlights over where the item will go and equip or close options if you want to switch immediately
- Various minor UI tweaks in particular to calendar/inventory so that it is formatted a bit better and to also fix a few minor issues found
- Started work on a system for internal and external feedback where you can add notes ingame - will look to show this in a dev video when it's ready
More Updates to Come!
Things will be kicking into high gear in July and we can't wait! Our initial development and business plans are done, work on the core game has begun, and the community doors are now wide open. Buckle up everybody, the Kynseed train is officially leaving the station! Choo choo!
Love,
The PixelCount Team
