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Last week we pushed out the "In-Between" update. For those reading these weekly dev logs, you'll know that this update was a slight detour from our intended roadmap destination. Instead, we went back and polished up some existing features before pressing onward into new update territory. This resulted in a sort of 'in-between' update, though we still managed to pack in quite a few new bits whilst polishing old bobs. So head on over and read the update announcement for all the details.

Since pushing out the update, the team spent the remaining time last week focused mainly on two things: addressing feedback/bugs for the update and planning out details for the relationship update. For the latter, something we've been considering is releasing smaller incremental updates as we work towards the bigger 'named' updates (aka, the ones specifically listed on the roadmap). So rather than waiting for only the big updates, there'd instead be a more consistent flow of smaller updates that will lead up to the big updates. We're still working out the exact timing we want to commit to, but think something along the lines of monthly updates, with our development branches being more frequent than that even. Alongside each update we'd share a changelog like usual, plus a brief progress report on how the next bigger update is coming along and how development is going in general.

No doubt one of the benefits of being a small team is the freedom to be agile and make small course adjustments like this as we go. The first few days of this next week we'll pin down specifics on the above as well as put together our final plans for the relationship update. By Wednesday we'll be kicking off work on the relationship update proper, and we look forward to letting you know how it all goes when we talk again next week!











Rather than fill in another 'I worked on the same stuff as last week' post, I thought I would share out some lore, facts, and such from in the game. So here are 6 Goddesses that watch over Quill. These are:

Druida - Goddess of Orchards
Naida - Goddess of Fertility
Freyl - Goddess of Fields
Morwenna - Goddess of Beasts
Hyalis - Goddess of Death and Rebirth
Aurore - Goddess of Seasons

There are also 2 other deities that are revered: Solnir (God of the Sun), and Luminos (God of the Moon). Additionally, the days of the week in Quill are:

Moonsday
Truthsday
Woesday
Turnsday
Freylsday
Satyrday
Solsday

Each of these days will eventually affect certain actions done on those days. (Crops have a better chance of having an extra star when harvested on Freylsday, for example). There are also 4 Fae realms accessible from Quill, which are:

Tir Na Nog - Home of Gnomes and Fairies
E'ergreen - Home of Dryads, Mossmen, Pucks, and Green Children
Briar - Home of Fel (hare and fox tricksters/shape-changers)
Voide - Home of the Shimmerkyn

That's it for now! More next week, unless the ransom is paid.







A continued theme of odd weeks following last week's eventual completion of the recent "In-Between" update! Releasing an update tends to be a rather busy time with game development (or at least it is with our style of development which is to be working on it until the last hour or so before release). Trying to finish any last minute improvements while fixing bugs and in some ways hoping and praying that any changes will not create new issues that slip past testing due to a much tighter window 'til the release. We are, I hope, getting better at this with practice and trying to adjust based on learnings from update release to release!

With the update released, there's then the nervous anticipation of what reactions will be. Will it all be good or will something not work? Will there be a blocking crash? Will players be happy with changes or prefer the old version? It's a scary and exciting situation to be in because the possibilities are endless and you can never be quite sure what will pop up. Nor when it will pop up, because sometimes you might catch players at the right time to try an update but other times (like perhaps now) there's so many new games appearing that trying an update for our game might be lower down the priority list of some players.

Then once the aftermath of the release is done and any immediate issues get fixed, then attention starts turning to the next update and starting the cycle all over again. I've been trying to use these moments as a point for a bit of more reflection lately. Moving back from the details and figuring out what went right or could go better next time is a very valuable piece of information that oftentimes gets a bit lost in the flow of whatever that next urgent pressing task is. I think what we're coming round to is looking at ways to have more consistency in our process, to find ways that control this cycle a bit better when previously we've let it be dictated by the size of the roadmap update. By focusing more on delivering updates at a consistent pace in time, then we have more opportunities to release fixes to issues as we go and more times where we can reflect and adjust our aim as necessary.

I dunno if the above makes that much sense or not from an outsider perspective and, in a way, I'm writing it to try and understand more myself! I guess I'm just trying to share how releasing an update feels and how the feeling comes up of wanting to continuously improve based on it. With this game there is lots more to learn right now because there is lots more of it to make! So with that in mind, I'll leave it here for now to get back to that work and wish you all a good week!







The relationship update is coming next! I have tracks waiting in secret aching to become part of the public build. Tracks I've been wanting to show you all that can now finally be implemented! I see goals listed on our Trello board (aka, our task manager) referring to the regions I've written for already and I get all excited!

It doesn't happen often for me that I have to keep work secret for a long time. It's quite a grueling experience to be honest! Once I've finished a track, or often even long before that, I want to share it with everyone! I want to get feedback on it and to know what people think of it! But often now I have tracks sitting on my hard drive for quite some time before most people ever hear them.

So if in the future you're running through a place called Mellowbrook, or the Whispering Path, or Outlane, and many more, you'll know that the music there has been waiting patiently to be heard. And right then and there it finally gets to do what it was made to do: to reach you, and possibly affect you. Which I hope it does!







I spent the majority of last week getting caught up on all manner of things that had been piling up. One was getting these issues of The Post current, as we'd developed a backlog of issues that needed posting due to changes around the Steam site (which I share more info on in the last issue). The short version is that the new Steam site has a different way of formatting news text and images, so I had to reformat the text I'd been using for these issues as well as all the theming images I use. Thankfully by Tuesday I had gotten all caught up on that.

The next thing I had to prepare was the announcement for the "In-Between" update to get pushed out on Wednesday. These are generally quick to write up, but they still require a handful of images and GIF's to give them some flavour - all of which take a bit of time to make, of course. Plus, I have to format the announcement three different ways as I post it on three different platforms (our forums, our Steam news page, and Kickstarter). That doesn't include all the supplementary places I post as well, such as our Twitter or our Discord.

Remainder of the week (Thursday and Friday) was spent taking in feedback on the update and forming next plans with the team (the latter of which is mentioned more in The Short Report above). All said, it feels good to have gotten caught up on those and other tasks that had been piling up. This'll give me a slightly clearer schedule for this upcoming week when we kick things off with a more frequent incremental update release schedule as well as beginining exlusive work on the relationship update, which I imagine I'm probably looking forward to just as much as the rest of you! Drop by again next week and I'm sure we'll be happy to ramble all about how it goes.

Howdy there Seedlings. Things have been stirring in the depths of the castle, as we've just completed work on a sort of 'in-between' update!

For those of you who've been following along with us in The PixelCount Post (our weekly dev log), you've likely been reading about how we recently found ourselves taking a step back to look at the game thus far and realising some elements we added in the early days were in need of revisiting. Namely: improving player purpose, better pacing, refined feature introductions, and overall quality of life improvements.

This was a bit of an unscheduled stop on our roadmap, as originally we planned to dive straight into the relationships update next. No doubt our first pass of relationship features will be an important leg of our journey, which is why we wanted to make sure we had a solid foundation to build atop it first. In fact, some of the things we improved in this current update were things that had been relatively unchanged since the prototype days, and the game's done quite a bit of growing since then!





Those of you lurking around our forums may have noticed the presence of a Developer Branch thread. For those unfamiliar with 'branches', they're a bit like a specific game update channel you can subscribe to and change at any time. There's our main branch of course (which is the default everyone starts with), and then we have two development branches. The main branch is reserved for only our more cohesive and stable of builds, but the other branches are good for anyone wanting to follow development more closely.

Development branches do get updated more frequently as well, but the caveat is they'll be less stable. We recommend development branches for any players interested in getting their hands dirty with ever-changing builds while working with us closely to give feedback. Just hop over to the thread above to read all the details.

On a similar note, keen-eyed community members may have also noticed that our roadmap has been updated with new subsequent updates to come. We've also begun putting general status indicators into the 'entire journey' section to give a feel for where various elements of the game are at. Though there is undoubtedly much work still ahead, the game is continuing to get ever-closer to that point of shaping up and fully blossoming.

Speaking of, we look forward to updating that section of the roadmap in the days ahead to reflect today's new build. For being an impromptu update, there's a fair bit that's been packed into it. Read onward for a casual overview, or click the changelog link down below for the big beefy list of everything.

• Further developed Goddess offering with an updated system, UI, and SFX
  
• Gift to each of the 6 Goddesses during the week and on the last day of the week you can assign 'grace' (which can offer boons)
  
• Failing to give sufficient offerings over time will incur a negative grace, which will lead to curses if not careful
  
• Not all boons/curses are added as yet and are marked 'TBD' if not yet implemented

• Many tasks can now be set as 'active'
  
• Where applicable, this will mark it on the world map with a location
  
• Pressing F1 or Clicking Left Stick will trigger the 'Thatterway', a magical sparkling trail that'll point the way to go
  
• (Though this might not always be the shortest route, as many shortcuts are hidden all over the world!)
  
• Using the Thatterway is of course entirely optional for those of you who prefer exploring without such aids (looking at you Fable gold trail)

• The beginnings of the noticeboard are in place
  
• Delivery box to drop off task or gift items for each household
  
• Initial setup to start receiving letters via mailbox
  
• Pet whistle to summon or dismiss owned pets (very handy!)
  
• Added the 'Wottyzit', a small faery that draws your attention to new interactive elements and then flies away
  
• Reworked the game's Prologue to provide additional tasks and to better pace out the introduction of new features
  
• Nearly all tasks carry over after the Prologue to make for a less abrupt transition
  
• Various UI additions and polish
  
• Additional engine improvements and bug fixes of all sorts (see link below)
  
• For a complete look at all changes, check out the full changelog

A huge thank you, as always, to all our supporters for helping make this impromptu update happen. We hope you are as excited as us to continue along this game development journey together, with our sights set firmly on the relationship update ahead. Though for now we must raise the drawbridge, hole up in our laboratories, and begin cooking up our next concoction (aka, update). Talk again soon!

Love,
PixelCount

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Hello there! We're finally back to our regularly scheduled programming this week. As some of you have likely noticed, over the last couple of weeks Steam pushed out some updates to its site and desktop client which introduced a brand new way of posting news items such as these. Steam libraries on the desktop client have been undergoing some changes as well. However, this did have the effect of breaking all our images and formatting for issues of The Post as well as our roadmap on Steam, so Matt's been spending the last few weeks getting everything fixed back up for the new Steam layout. So today you may be seeing a small backlog of a couple of issues posted at the same time, as we wanted to make sure we didn't skip any - due diligence and all that.

In fact, you may want to keep your eyes peeled for another news item to get posted within mere hours of this one. That's because we're happy to report that there's a new update now available! For those who have been following along, you may remember this was a bit of an impromptu update that we felt was important to sneak in before we began dedicated work on the relationship update. We've been casually calling it 'The In-Between Update' and it's allowed us to do some important work that had been piling up on the side.

Although this update wasn't a planned pitstop on our roadmap, we're pretty happy with the amount of polish we've been able to add to existing systems and we've even managed to pack in a few new things while we were at it. All in all, this update will help give us a nice solid foundation to add atop for the relationship update and well beyond. So be sure to look for the proper announcement to drop a few hours from now with all the details!







A slow week really that was up and down, mainly due to my acute sinusitis playing merry hell. When I managed to get going, I started writing piles of dialogue that NPC's may say in various situations. So these are things like: player riding a pig, player owning a shop, player with high rep, weather related comments, reactions to tools, pranks, player absence, age, and so on. (With variants for unfriendly and friendly NPC's.)

We want the game to feel full of life and get away from the RPG cliche of NPC's stood in one spot repeating the same lines. This is where the Fable influence and our Lionhead heritage come in. Neal and I dream of PixelCount having that same Lionhead spirit and eccentricity - and maybe even one day attracting that same amazing talent (we would love to work with some old Lions again). Lionhead was a home to me, but without its death Kynseed would never have been born.

So here we are, fulfilling our dream with the incredible support of our backers. We may fail (hopefully not!), but it would not be for lack of effort. We're pouring everything into this project and we're eternally grateful to have the chance to do it. And best of all, I get to write a stupid amount of references and daft jokes. Lionhead lives on within those words.







It's been an odd week again where the first half was flipped in an odd direction (too much concentrating on polish details of the UI) compared to the second half from Wednesday with the team chat being a pivot point. This time around though we made sure with the team chat to actually come up with a plan that covered the next week! It sounds common sense but it is remarkably easy to get trapped in trains of thought and patterns that stop common sense taking hold. So the plan is to finish the build this week, whereas last week was spent on final polish and additions (plus leaving a few days to bug fix and polish as time permitted).

I had a similar common sense revelation the next day when I was in the midst of the remaining work. So part of the current update is about improving the Prologue with additional content and improving its flow - this had been written up into multiple design documents to go through. On the day while I was working through it, I was still caught up in the details and working in a linear fashion through those docs. Luckily I managed to pause myself for a quick break before diving into the Prologue's Day 4 work and on coming back to it realised how I'd completely forgotten to actually break down what work there was left!

After spending an hour and a bit on that, I then had a list of the exact specifics remaining to do and could start rearranging it to be more efficient (grouping together similar tasks and seeing where I might need to ask questions). Within the next few days, I've been able to work much better without having to jump my thoughts around as much because I can just pick up where I left off.

As I'm still in the midst of work to wrap up the build update while typing this, I'm going to leave it at that for today and wish you all a good week!







I'm escaping modern life this weekend! I cast out technology! Be gone, mobile phones! Away, computers! Leave my sight! I'm going back to the way things were in the 15th century!

As it happens, I've got a weekend coming up where I play percussion at a medieval festival. It's a great way to get my head into a new space and gain some inspiration. I usually come back both tired and refreshed at the same time. Plus lately, a couple of non-Kynseed things have been pulling me in several directions at once. Some Gregorian music here, some brass band music there, even some voice work.

I don't consider them distractions though, as they come in quite handy usually. A different angle of looking at things that come back in ways I don't always expect in whatever other project I'm doing, Kynseed included. You can see this quite clearly with the bard's music in the tavern, which is very obviously inspired by medieval lute playing.

Though for now, I say goodbye to the internet and delve into a time when video games did not exist!







While the rest of the team put the finishing touches on the latest build update, I spent the last couple of weeks working with the new Steam update and creating new images for it. You'd be surprised how many assets are needed to make up a store page for a game, and with the new Steam look rolling out this meant that I had to go back and remake many of our store assets from scratch to fit the new store page requirements and dimensions.

Sometimes this meant something as simple as cropping an image to a new or different resolution. Other times it meant creating brand new assets that we didn't have made up until now (such as our Steam library image, which I think turned out rather nicely). Working with pixel art is all the trickier too, because many times it's not as simple as resizing an image to fit a new dimension requirement. With pixel art, if you're not careful, resizing the image can lead to a sort of blurring of pixels and they'll end up losing that pixel 'crispness'. So it's sometimes a bit of a dance trying to resize pixel art while always maintaining a crisp resolution.

When not reworking our media assets for Steam's new look, I've been reworking our text. Things like our roadmap use some pretty elaborate formatting and some fancy trickery to get it to all look how I like. For example, Steam doesn't have any way to center items in a news post. However, I do know that Steam's maximum width for news posts was 622px wide. So if I had a 500px image that I wanted to center, all I had to do was add 61px of transparency on both sides and this would create a sort of feaux-center. Yet with the new Steam changes, news posts have gone from 622px wide to 800px wide, meaning that anything that I centered previously is now just a little off-center to the left.

In danger of boring you all with pixel-based math, the short version of all this is that I had a fair bit of tedious media asset work keeping me busy as of late. There's still more to be done, but the brunt of it all is complete at least. Thankfully my role on the team here is precisely for times like this in which I step in to assist with production-based matters such as these (among other things) so that the rest of the team can continue to work uninterrupted on the game. That said, I'm rather looking forward to a change of pace next week with a bit of video editing and soundtrack work!

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Well hello again! Things have gone topsy turvy over in Steam land, as they've just rolled out some preliminary changes for an upcoming site and platform update. As a consequence, formatting (and even posting!) announcements is a bit wonky at the moment. So for now this issue of The Post will be going up on our own forums and then we'll get it posted over on Steam once a few of those issues get sorted out. (Which as it happens, appears to be right now!)

Because of all that, we'll be keeping this issue short and sweet, like a newborn pug. The most significant item of note is that the latest batch of polish and fixes that we've been talking about is now up on our Preview branch! Want to take these updates for a spin but not sure how to access the Preview branch? Head to our Branch thread to read about our different branches and how to access them. Our roadmap was also recently updated and added to for anyone curious. As you'll see on it, proper work on the next relationships focused update is very nearly underway. Read on below for more detailed updates from the team and we'll see you again soon!







Well, it is that time again. I sit at my desk looking out of my window and wistfully gaze at the clouds. That one over there looks like a hedgehog on a bicycle. Drifting past the rooftop opposite is a balloongoosespannerthing. The wistful gazing is distracting me from putting some serious thought into what to write for this week's Post.

I could jot down a few words about design, but the energy to do so evades me. I could scribble a few funny jokes, but I can't think of any. Perhaps just keep it simple with what I did? Feels like it would be underwhelming. Who wants to hear about testing the build, giving feedback, writing new books, and editing old ones?

Maybe I could engage the reader with some gaming reviews...I have after all played a few new games this week. Such as Gears 5 (fun but more of the same), Atomicrops (colourful but messy), Dicey Dungeons (it's not too bad), and more. I could tell the amazing tale of my first go on Fortnite since Season 3, and that I fired 1 shot, got 1 kill, and gained a Victory Royale. Nobody would believe that though (it is bizarrely true...I hid in bushes the whole game). Ah bugger it. I think I will go back to looking at the clouds. Oh! The hedgehog fell off his bike!







This week continued the theme of balance. In the first half of it I'd started off slowly getting a bit distracted at times with seeing what was going on in the world. Then in the second I got a fair bit more focused not on work but on doing my best at what was at hand. It's funny in that respect, that say the first few days felt frustrating in not doing what I wanted on the game but then the latter ones felt so much more alive and purposeful with much more achieved on the game. Counter-intuitively those first few days were when I really sought to control what I was doing and in doing so didn't really acknowledge the important work to be done. The latter half was much more about getting into whatever seemed important at the time and that all started with a team chat on Wednesday.

Although we've had regular chats between myself, Charlie, and Matt, there's never been any full chats with the rest of the team. There's only been the occasional one with a couple of the others just to concentrate on one particular thing or other. So this week we just set a time, made it optional, and gave it a shot. In the end 6 of the 7 total team managed to make it! It was nice to finally have a chat and get some discussion going on what was on everyone's minds about the game and where it's going. From that meeting there were two items that came up that had been in the back of my mind but never quite urgent enough to do: 1) roofs for buildings and 2) some form of analytics. Wednesday being a 'flex day' and seeing the interest in those items, I just went straight ahead and spent a couple of hours working on each of them to see what gains could be made.

For roofs, I found that the underlying tech was already setup with a test case but then in starting to progress them further started to discover issue after issue:

• The roof was hiding objects underneath in the editor.
  
• the objects under the roof were also hidden in editor as it draws objects different than ingame.
  
• There's a separate editor for buildings that makes it all more tricky to work with as there are lots of buildings to convert.
  
• The building editor isn't as developed as the main editor and doesn't share code leading to bugs and differs functionality.
  
• If something for the building isn't in that building editor, then placing it becomes trickier to check it is as intended.

All of that to show it's not something I can quickly turn around but that without checking now it could be weeks/months before these issues came to light when it would be more 'urgent'. My new plan with the buildings is to break them up into simpler components of just a single wall/floor/roof and make them editable in the main editor if possible. I think this'll solve the above issues and be more flexible for future challenges.

For analytics, I started putting together a stats page (this is accessible in the preview branch build right now, tho not much to show in there!). The initial plan I have is to make it track where time is spent in the levels, money accumulation over time, and number of items acquired. These will be visible on the stats page which then anyone can screencap to share with us on Discord/forums as appropriate. Later on, we might look at more automated ways of getting these stats (subject to various data protection laws) but for now it's mainly about putting something in there quickly. I've always been interested in the stats side of things and feel like it should be something the player can look at themselves in more depth too, as it can be an interesting summary of what they've done or not done as the case may be!

After the above work was done (but still with plenty to do as time permits!), I felt a resurgence of energy because of doing something new and potentially useful to someone else. So in the following days I've tried to harness that in working on suggestions from others where possible or noting it down for future reference. I think it seems to be working...though I don't pretend to have it fully cracked and have got several tasks by the side in need of attention. In some ways, perhaps the answer is that of attention; that everything needs its own time of attention and that as it is rare that anything can ever be done in one go (especially in games development) there needs to be a firmer bounds to how long each activity is given uninterrupted and a bubbling up of activities that fall into the important category.

To abruptly conclude, as my time limit on writing this post is nearly up, the preview branch is now finally available! I've still got plenty more to do with it but it feels like a reasonably stable point has been reached. We'll see in the coming week how the balance shapes up of fixes and improvements before it can go live on the main branch.







This week I had to figure out what it'd sound like if a Goddess gives you boons or curses you. There's a mechanic being made where you can assign points to a Goddess, and if you do right, you'll be rewarded with a boon or blessing. If you don't play by Her rules, she'll jinx or curse you.

I wanted the sounds for this to have a bit of gravitas to them, especially the most powerful effects a Goddess can subject you to. These sounds comprise of quite a few different elements. Four different sounds for boons and blessings, four different sounds for jinxes and curses. I'm also contemplating the possibility to even make them all unique for each Goddess.

There's six Goddesses in total, so that'd be quite a few different sounds. Plus, it wouldn't just be me who has to spend time on that - they'd also have to be implemented in the code, adding to Neal's workload. So that's something to consider when deciding if we're going for unique sounds per Goddess.







After last week's curious tangent into game development etymology and with Steam's recent platform restructuring, I'm forgoing my usual temptation to ramble and will instead keep this week's update relatively brief. As Neal mentioned above, we recently had a chance to do a coordinated team wide call with everyone which proved to be fun and helpful for us. It's not that our team doesn't already communicate or conduct calls frequently, but between time zones and individual life schedules (plus the fact that there's 7 of us to coordinate between), it's surprisingly rare to wrangle us all down to have a talk within the same window of time.

In other news, with the new branch setup/thread out of the way, in addition to the roadmap updates being out, I'll soon be turning my attention to the relationships update - both from supporting it on the production level but also on the content creation level (such as with cutscenes). It's an update we on the team have been rather looking forward to and so it's nice to have a bunch of the Prologue polish and onboarding work out of the way first. All of which is available on the Preview branch, so for anyone giving it a try we're keen to hear what you think!

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Hello there Seedlings! It's been another week of progress here at the metaphorical towers of Castle PixelCount. Of particular note is that we've updated the roadmap with the next batch of updates to expect from us. We'll be posting a more detailed rundown of the new roadmap bits when we share some build news soon, but here's a quick summary in a nutshell: we added the next updates, the 'optimisation/flex' type of updates are no more (instead we're making time for this stuff more as we go), we added in some branch info, and we've updated the big 'Entire Journey' section with status indications. So hop on over and check it out.

In other news, our artists continue to work their pixel whispering magic and have been churning out asset after asset. Caz has finished making the Wottyzit graphics, she also made some stellar looking Goddess tokens (more to be revealed soon), Weekes has updated our dandelion UI from vector placeholders to new pixel versions (been meaning to do this for a while!), he's also revamped the UI pop-up for when you get new items or tools, and Gary has been making multiple concept pieces for a new Fae pet called the...*checks notes*...Bumbabloopfnoop.

In fact, we're a bit unsure of which concept we like the most and could use your help in deciding! Drop by this tweet to check out the concepts and let us know which one you like. (And if Twitter ain't your thing then feel free to let us know at your nearest comment repository, such as right here!)

For other tales of development from last week, read on below for the individual updates from our team. Cheers!







It was a week where I got back to a bit of writing amongst the usual tasks. With the introduction of the Wottyzit and some other features, we needed some new books to place around your farm. I also took it upon myself to tweak some of the existing books and NPC dialogue. The hardcore players may notice some changes, but some are subtle.

There is more helpful text around too, such as Twig telling you the controls to focus the Darklight and so on. We are also working on a Prologue 'Redux' as we call the document. It is a Google doc we have access to where I receive feedback and alter the design according to what we feel adds benefit, and then Neal highlights the new stuff when it is in-progress, in-game, or not achievable. We add comments to it and resolve the issues as we go.

Also this week saw a flurry of new art: the incredible Jabberwock now has an idle, the Wottyzit got a new look, the Goddess Statues got new UI art being developed (hoping to squeeze it all in very soon), and some concepts for the Tir Na Nog Fae pet, the Bumbabloopfnoop. The other 3 Fae realms will also have buyable pets - cute, cool, and wtf are what I would describe them as. Which basically sums up our game. It's cute. It's cool. There's a bit of wtf.

Wtf means What the Fae, probably.







It's difficult to find a word to describe this week with its highs and lows but I think my main thought of it is with the theme of balance and aiming for a better balance than exists right now...

To keep this about the game this week, I've been working on a few different areas including the Prologue (the internal name for the first season as a kid), goddess offerings, and preparing the build towards the preview branch. Early on my balance was swung towards the Prologue refinements. Charlie has made a full doc of updates for all 13 days to work on and so after initially looking it over from a few angles it was time to get to work on it. Initially I was thinking to perhaps focus on key aspects that would uplift the overall build but decided in the end instead to take a more thorough approach in doing it day by day.

So far I've got the first 2 days updated. The benefit of this approach is that I'm going through things at a pace such that I can double check everything is working as intended. My past habits have always meant rushing in work at times or fixating on it to the detriment of other areas. Being aware of that, I've been trying to break down the actions I do and the testing that follows into smaller chunks - it's all balance! To go into the actual changes, they are all about giving the player a little more direction and understanding of the systems along with giving a bit more dialogue for the key characters. We'll also start to use the mailbox as a way to get letters from NPC's to give another place to add more immersion to the experience (still really early days on this).

Part of the Prologue doc included the setup for Goddess offerings, which although we do have design for (along with nearly all of the game features) we'd only really had a basic incomplete setup so far. It's funny how a lot of these things seem like common sense looking back at it (that if you want to make a game, implement all the features early!), but often the tide of development is such that you get pulled away from them with all that is going on. I remember back at the start how I was rushing to code in all the early designs which was a lot of the groundwork for the prototype. Now though, the team have so many ideas that my backlog has grown a little high!

Digressions aside, I have managed to further this setup to begin to cover the full scope of the feature. Having it in place helps test the intended game experience and bring a little unique touch to the experience. Caz is doing a great job on the art to make it look pretty as well soon! Similar to the Prologue, I've been taking a more balanced approach to this by spending an hour or so a day to make improvements. This slows the initial implementation but I'm finding it avoids getting lost into the details too much.

With the usual Wednesday flex day, I mostly ended up a bit more involved in discussions than code but did make a few improvements including finding a fix for one cause of why player owned dogs were getting lost in the game. I also took a look at a problem that's been bothering me a bit lately with text setup. When text is edited outside the game and into the text file it sometimes ended up including ASCII characters from Microsoft Office. These characters are different to the regular standard versions and because of that they don't render correctly as they aren't included in the minimal characters included in some of the fonts we use.

So on loading in debug it'll detect this and now try to correct it, which is handy in reducing some manual work. Maddeningly I found sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't! I still haven't figured that out exactly other than Notepad++ seems to always work whereas regular Notepad works intermittently. On reflection, now I'm almost wondering if I'm looking at the problem the wrong way round. If the fonts could draw the right characters then I'd not need the workarounds! I guess it's about my perception of the problem in some respects and often writing about it brings a balance in releasing it from the mind to be studied afresh. At any rate, I think my solution for now should be more optimal than before and so I can see how the experience is with that before rushing into further work.

Finally to mention this week is the push for the preview branch build of all the player experience refinements that have been added. Between all the goings on it hasn't had as much attention this week as I'd have liked, but we are getting ever closer. I'm hoping to have a version up a little later today without much fanfare, for any eagle eyed readers of The Post to take a look at. Tuesday is what we're targeting as the more public unveiling partly as we're wanting to refine bits a little more for that. It's all in the balance and to keep trying to get better at it!







This week a curious thing came up:

Long ago, back in the prototype days, I would name my music tracks in whatever way I felt like. This is how one of our very first tracks came to be named "Dreamy Day". I imagined the player character resting on the pier in the opening shot of the game, lazily daydreaming. Essentially that's what I based the track on.

Then as the number of tracks grew and Neal had to keep them all organized within the folders and code of the game, we decided it'd be better to name them according to where they were to be placed in the game. Fast forward to now and we're releasing some of the tracks to our Youtube as part of a 'Soundtrack Sampler' playlist. However, the funny thing was that "Dreamy Day" had since been turned into "[REGION] Willowdown Farm.mp3" as part of our new file naming structure. But pretty much the whole team still remembered it and referred to it as "Dreamy Day", even after all this time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgsJcU5DyB4
Basically the old title had stuck. It had ingrained itself within the team as the 'true' name of the track. So after some team deliberation, it was decided that we'd keep an internal document that listed all the tracks in the game by both the filename they'd have in the folders and code as well as the 'flavor' name they'd have anytime it was shared somewhere public facing. In this way, "Dreamy Day" would regain its original 'true' name while not sacrificing a structure for Neal to know where to assign tracks.

I'm having quite a lot of fun coming up with flavor titles for the tracks, something I had stopped doing when we decided to name them just according to where they'd be used in the game. So far I'm keeping to tracks that are already implemented in the game, but I've found I really enjoy doing this so I actually look forward to coming up with titles for all the remaining ones. It's sometimes funny where I find joy in this profession. It's not always in the obvious places.







As the writer/editor of most every piece of community news we put out, I often grapple with how to tell everyone that something is close to being ready but not so close to being ready that we know when it'll be ready. Inevitably, the way things can sometimes go in game development (and life in general!) is if you say something will be done in a week, it'll most assuredly take two.

Our approach to that sorta thing has always been to just shoot straight when talking to players, so at the very least you can know that if we say we don't know exactly when something will be ready it's because...well, we don't actually know when it'll be ready. Which isn't to say deadlines aren't helpful for keeping things on track and for spurring motivation in pursuit of a clearly defined goal. For bigger things, we will typically have more concrete dates to give. But the smaller week to week tasks that we often talk about here in these issues? Those tend to be more fluid. Oftentimes asking 'when' can feel like asking 'how long is a piece of string'.

So as a result, I find myself having to throw around the word 'soon' incredibly often. Though at least the games industry has come to view the word as a bit of a trope, evident by it now being very common to see people add a trademark symbol to its use. (Soon™) Interestingly, this seems to have originated in some form all the way back to 1984 (the year, not the popular George Orwell book...) in an article by Jerry Pournelle in an issue of BYTE magazine in which he used the phrase "Real Soon Now".



A snippet from the article in question. (Click here to see the whole article.)


Around this same time (which was all 'before my time', mind you), a network discussion system called Usenet was popular and as a joke its users would frequently add trademark or copyright symbols to just about everything. In fact, Usenet is one of the earliest forms of internet discussion and is where we get many popular words still in frequent use today, such as: "FAQ", "flame", and "spam". Then during the 90's it became popular to write it as "Real Soon Now (TM)" and then slowly the short form of "Soon (TM)" started to become the standard use. Still, this was largely a user used phrase and was very rarely ever used in official communication by companies.

This started to change a bit in the early 2000's of the games industry, as you can chart some of its use even as far back as an old Bungie org post about Myth. It was also around this time that you can start to see developers sneaking it into official communication - namely by the Blizzard community team on the World of Warcraft forums and also occasionally in the Eve Online community. Though nowadays it's become a bit more common to see game developers use it - I've certainly used it frequently myself. Valve even has their own version of it: Valve Time.

Clearly I spend too much of my spare time going down Wikipedia and StackExchange rabbit holes about games industry history. And I haven't even mentioned the popular counterpart phrase "When It's Ready", but that's a different rabbit hole for a different time.

All that to say, it's with a certain self-awareness that I use the word "soon" so often when writing to the community. For us, it's a genuine reflection of how sometimes we don't know when 'when' is, so I appreciate you all being good sports with us about it. I do at least take solace in knowing that whenever I say it, I'm taking part in a longstanding tradition for development updates.

Oh, right. Development updates. *ahem* I did a buncha work this week. Production was produced. Community was communed. And roadmaps mapped roads. Specifically, the roadmap has been added to and now shows which new updates are coming...Soon©®™.

Welcome to Issue #64 of The PixelCount Post, a periodically released update from Kynseed's team. In today's issue: Charlie talks of lore design, Neal works on three new features, Matthijs gets new lights, and Matt prepares for game content.
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The game's Prologue polish and onboarding improvements that we've been tackling in recent weeks has been coming along nicely and is very nearly ready to be pushed out onto our preview branch. Shortly after that we'll be taking a proper dive into the "Growing Up & Going Out" update, which focuses on relationships and becoming an adult (which will primarily just be a visual player sprite change for now).

Also coming ahead this week are some new threads and info that'll be getting posted 'round the community. This includes the roadmap update, which previously we thought we'd get up this weekend but we decided to go back through the "Entire Journey" section of the roadmap and start categorizing the completion level of each item. So we're spending a few extra days on that, but we figure it'll be pretty helpful to have that there in the long run.

The other threads going up this week will be all about our different update branches, what each is used for, and how to access them. Branches are something we've been using for a while, but we don't really provide much info about them in the community and so most folks probably don't know about them. So for any of you interested in dabbling in the non-main game updates (like this week's upcoming preview branch update), keep an eye out on our forums and Discord later this week.

Of course we've been working on more than just that this week, so to hear more specific game progress from the team read on below!







I thought this week I would talk about a design, rather than waffle on about what I did or didn't do, what I ate or didn't eat, the weather, or the team's toilet habits.

I had been doing some house decorating and reorganisation this past week and found my fave reference book: Folklore Myths and Legends of Britain. It is a thick tome packed with amazing true customs and superstitions and is incredibly inspiring. One thing we haven't really got into on the game yet are those customs and superstitions.

Gary, our character artist, will be working on some of those quirky characters soon...and some are deadly! It is the other elements of superstition we want to get across though. Most of these will be through lore and old books you can read. Some will be told by NPC's around the fire or when drunk at the tavern. The main thing though, is that all superstitions in Quill are real...

Iron will ward off bad spirits. Throwing a certain item in a certain pond at a certain time will do a special thing. There may be a way to make a long-dead family member appear for a chat. A way to summon a Fae that can do something for you if you do something for them. We can have special locations with interesting backstories. Or weird stones that have a legend attached to them.

Quill is a place packed with such old customs and stories. We want to start slowly bringing more of that to the fore to augment the lore we have sprinkled around already. This way we can present to you a rich and interesting world that feels lived in and that was lived in. Every corner and nook should be splashed with the stains of ancient myths and every tree should have witnessed legends wrought real. So don't forget to carry your sprig of parsley, toss a bone in the pond, and wear your red shoes and cheese hat. Am talking about in real life. We just wanted to see if you would do it.







This week also flew by quickly! On the game development side of things, I've been working on further improvements to the noticeboard including a third type of task (item wanted, so pretty similar to the other ones but allows an extra means of directing player gathering or emptying of their inventory!). I also worked on three new features:

The Wottyzit, which is pretty much functional in-game as a flashy pointer to first time users of interactable objects, but needs some polish in how it leaves when the player gets close to it. Dialogue on interest points for NPC's, still very rough and not ready but I've started to put the structure in place (which relies on additional editor support for setting the many context sensitive text ideas this and other features might involve). And the pet whistle, which allows summoning pets and sending them home and telling them to stay (and also gives a better sense of where the pets should be for debugging as they do still have a tendency to wander right now!).

Apart from the interest point dialogue which is disabled, all the above is in the experimental branch now as I continue to try and update that branch regularly with the latest developments.

To diverge into other news, I've found a resurgence again of energy in the latter half of this week. It seemed to unleash from taking what is usually unexpected action by myself in the face of a situation (e.g., by letting go or seeking understanding). The mind likes to fixate or distract whenever a situation occurs that it has strong feelings about. When it fixates, then it loops again and again without really ever going anywhere. When it distracts, it is deliberately trying to quiet the situation so it doesn't have to deal with it.

It's not easy to deal with it, but a lot of the time we intuitively can feel deep inside what needs to be done - or a positive step that could be taken that is often quite simple, if only we can overcome that mindset of past habit. When that step doesn't happen, then not only is the situation left in place but energy is also expended to fixate or distract it (and sometimes even more energy in recognising that is what is happening but feeling trapped in it anyway).

In a way, talking about this is part of a step for me in the hopes it might be helpful to other folks or give me some additional ideas on how to handle it. That's probably enough introspection for two weeks though, so next one I'll try getting more into detail on the game development again!







Yet more sound effects were made this week. Flying helper Fae, pet whistle commands, an eerie wind, and there's always more. Sometimes I get it right the first time around, other times there's a lot of feedback to incorporate, and many versions of the same sound effect are often made. When that happens it gets easy for things to get lost in the chaos. But Matt just added a feature to our Trello that allows me to list assets that are yet awaiting approval. So rather than scroll through our team chat's Discord history to find out which file is the final version that needs ok'ing, we'll now be able to quickly see what's still waiting to get approved at a single glance.

Of course I do have to keep the list neat and updated, but that's far less of a hassle than sifting through old messages. Not to mention that the number of audio files on our server now numbers in the hundreds! On my own disk there's over 1,000 individual audio files in my personal Kynseed project folder. This includes older versions of tracks and sound effects as well as drafts that never made it past approval. So if you don't have a good indexing system, you'll regret it!

I recently also installed new fancy lights in my studio, and just being in this room is now a cool experience. I say 'do whatever it takes to be inspired', and for me cool lighting is part of that.







This week I spent a fair bit of time tying up some remaining tasks on the production side of things. This included roadmap work, branch work, Trello organisation, and some preliminary setup/testing for streaming (which I'll be doing more of soon). It'll be good to have all those tasks completed and in a good state for when I begin on more game content related work once development on the relationships update kicks off properly very soon.

One such area of game content that I'll be working on is adding a new cutscene or two as well as going back and polishing some existing ones (like the one that happens at the end of the Prologue). This'll all be done using our Cutscene Editor dev tool, which Neal has made. Something else I'll be doing during this process is working closely with Tice on the music and audio needs of the cutscenes.

I've been trying to get back into the habit of helping out with audio direction as I find the time, as it's something I've generally helped with throughout the whole project but recently production stuff seems to be taking the lion's share of my focus. In fact, thinking back to the super early days of the game, I was working very closely with Tice on establishing the 'sound' of the game's soundtrack. So I'm rather looking forward to dipping a toe back in audio again for the upcoming cutscenes and, of course, I'll be sure to share how it's all going here and around the rest of the community.

Welcome to Issue #63 of The PixelCount Post, a periodically released update from Kynseed's team. In today's issue: Charlie scatters items, Neal does delivery boxes, Matthijs gets equipment, and Matt finishes the roadmap.
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The team's boost of energy from a week ago has certainly carried on into this last week as well with all manner of things being worked on. Charlie's begun churning through the mega-list of 500 items and redistributing them across the world. On the code side of things, Neal's been working on a new system that'll help players get pointed in the right direction towards a task or goal. Additional work has begun on a delivery box feature to help give NPC's items for when they can't be found at their home.

Meanwhile, Matthijs has been enjoying a rather good week of working on some new sound effects as well as getting a bit of new equipment to begin playing with. Over in the land of production and community, Matt has put the final touches on the new batch of roadmap updates to go over with the team this Monday and, from there, to get posted and shared across the entire community likely by the end of that week. Additionally, he'll be sharing more information on how to access experimental update branches, which we'll be using more frequently going forward. Read on below for all that and more in today's issue of The PixelCount Post!







Well, after last week's epic post by Neal, I felt like I should match him for effort...but thankfully that feeling was fleeting, so I will keep it brief as always.

This week I have got back into the levels and been fixing up some Vale annoyances, plus starting to redistribute collectible items. Our Master Items list has all the 500 plus items listed with columns for if we have icons, in-game versions, stats, descriptions, and locations.

There are some Vale changes afoot as well. Out go Poppies, Nightberries, Whistleroot, and Bowing Nancy. They will enjoy their new homes to the north. The flowers of the Vale are Bloodfew, Primrose, Grave Lilac, and Cuckoo Dew - with Basil and Thyme as the local herbs. I bet you can guess where the poppies are native to...

Also been just carrying on with design docs and mockups in Visio. Having Trello organise us has been great and creates a much better sense of immediate professionalism. Let's see if we can keep it up! (we will)

I have also been getting more and more obsessed with board games and card games. I need Kynseed to be a huge success so I can afford a proper Crokinole table. The steamed Beech and Cherry is just so gorgeous.

This weekend I have a bunch of dialogue to do while dreaming of Kynseed monsters being made into hand painted miniatures. Thanks for setting me off on that dark road Gary (our monster artist)! The team really seems pumped at the moment, so let's hope this momentum carries on, as it is nice to see Neal cheery for a change! Zing!







This week flew by pretty quickly. After last week's talks unlocking a lot of stored up thoughts, this week has been one of action and enthusiasm. It's funny how easy it is to actually bottleneck one's actions by not giving the space to have fun. It wasn't like I specifically set out before to not have fun, but in keeping myself locked into this mindset of only doing the most important thing and being critical of everything, not allowing breaks and not really communicating except to talk progress, it really blocked up my ability to actually enjoy things.

With the rush of communication reduced a tad from having covered most of the unspoken ground (and the lack of further water encroaching into my room), I've been getting on with various code and other tasks. Since last time that's included two new additions to make the playing experience that little bit smoother.

The first is a way of setting one in-game task as the active one. Where a specific level is known for the task, then the world map will highlight which level to go to and in-game you can use F1 to have a pointer appear briefly on screen that leads the way to a level closer to your destination. While doing this I found out that I'd kind of missed out previously in properly setting up a route grabber between levels. So instead, if it wasn't a direct connection, then it would choose the first exit which is usually wrong!

For this it did take a bit of time to ponder the right way (and a little procrastination) but eventually I ended up taking some code of an old unreleased game I'd been working on around ten years ago and converting that to this new setup (using Dijkstra's algorithm as the basis). We're deliberately intending for this to only direct you to the general level and not the specific location in question so there's still some challenge and exploration required, so will see how this works out...

The second is a delivery box that means even if you can't locate an NPC out and about, you can still stick a requested item in the delivery box by their home for them to find (and each whole household has their own). The reward in friendship rating will be a bit less for doing so given the impersonal touch. It's a feature that Charlie's been pushing for a while and like the noticeboards of last week have similarly been held off a bit too long. It actually only took around a day to implement (thanks in part to recent efforts I've made in refactoring the gifting system for reuse), which seems like pretty good value! Hopefully players will like it too.

Apart from those two new additions, we're trying out the more flexible approach to development with Wednesday being a day where we intend to not work on the essentials if possible. In my case, I managed to get a bunch of accounting done (which always rolls up quickly), started organising and reducing my to-do list of 1,500 lines (that doesn't represent all of it by any means, just it's my latest scratchpad of notes), and get back underway with the setup of development notes in-game so we can share feedback at the place it happened and bypass the need for a task system on the hundreds of polish items to be found.

It's been a good week and hopefully just continuing to keep working on the things we're passionate about and keeping communication open will let that continue as we expand out this ambitious game of ours!







Things truly have been exciting around here since last week's surge of energy around the team, and I'm enjoying every minute of it! Positivity really is contagious, and I'm infected! This week has been a great one for me personally. New studio equipment trickling in, a composer I look up to complimenting a track of mine, and No Man's Sky in VR making me feel like a child again. Suffice it to say, this week has been treating me well!

Our renewed efforts on Trello to get more organized are also paying off. It's not only much clearer to see my task list now that I've added it all to Trello, but the other team members also get a clearer picture of what I'm up to because of it. And I've been enjoying quicker communication than ever before. I can't tick anything off of my to-do list that Charlie hasn't OK'ed and before he does, assets can wait in limbo. But with the increased organization, that's all being smoothed out. The extra energy and positivity seems to have permeated into everything.

Before our next update I still have some sound effects to finish, but for that update there is no music left to do. After I complete these sound effects I can return to the swampy music of regions yet to come in the game. I rather like how doing a sound effect is a relatively short project, and it gets very diverse. From a jingle signifying that your friendship with an NPC has improved, to the spinning of a 'wheel of fortune-esque' Wheel of Copulation (you know that ticking sound it makes as it's being spun?). It's almost like a palate cleanser, in a way. Something to put your mind on that's fresh, when you've been composing in the same style for a while.







The team's recent energy boost has certainly spilled over into this last week and has had everyone getting a fair bit done as a result. The trick, as always, will be to keep that energy going so it can spill forward into yet another week ahead. Keep it up enough and suddenly that 'energy boost' will become an instilled habit!

On my part, the last week has involved a variety of work on a spectrum of different things. The main thing I wanted to get done was a proposed draft of the new roadmap, which will include the next batch of updates you can expect from us as well as a few other tweaks. This 'next batch' is something we've talked about for a few weeks now and so it'll be good to finally get it properly finished and posted everywhere. I've got the final version that I'll run by the team on Monday and assuming all look's well it should probably be going up by end of the same week.

Something else I'll be doing this upcoming week is posting around info on how to access our more experimental branches and how we're going to approach these branches in the future. We've had experimental branches available for some time now, but we've never really talked much about how to access them or exactly what they are and how they're different from the main branch. As a result, folks that might've been interested in getting access to our more frequent (but less stable) updates may've not really known anything about them this whole time. So expect some more info on all that to get posted around the community in various spots, likely in tandem for when the new roadmap updates get posted.

In other news, and as Neal briefly mentions above, we started experimenting last week with dedicating a bit of time on Wednesday as a sort of 'flexible' time to allow us to work on things that we may otherwise not always be able to make time for. It's a tricky balance to strike, because every week we always have a list of high priority items that we all need to get done. Yet over time, it's easy for each of us to accrue a list of smaller items that would be 'nice to have' type things or even 'just for fun' type things. The challenge is finding time to do these things, because the higher priority items often take all our attention and all our time.

However, if you never spend even a tiny bit of time doing 'nice to have' tasks or 'just for fun' tasks, then that can lead to a bit of a dry development that feels like a trudge. Perhaps on a more subliminal level, it can even lead to a game or community feeling a bit soulless. Oftentimes it's the little things that can have the biggest impact.

One of those community 'for fun' things that I worked on this last week was setting up a small feature on our Discord where players can drop into a channel and listen to a stream of the game's soundtrack on shuffle (which is already about 2.5 hours long!). There was no real practical reason for me to add this, but I figured it'd be a fun and relaxing thing for members to join in on and listen to. The soundtrack stream isn't something I'll be leaving on 24/7 though. Rather I'll probably turn it on once every month or so (with new tracks added as we go), just as a fun thing. Though interestingly, this did spur talks on the team about how we don't have much of the soundtrack uploaded on our YouTube channel. So I spent an hour or so making some simple videos for a handful of our favourite tracks and I'll be uploading those to our channel every Monday for the next couple of months or so. In the end, we'll have a nice little YouTube playlist that folks can check out as a sort of 'soundtrack sampler' of the game.

All in all, it's been an incredibly packed and busy week, one that struck a nice balance between making progress on big priority work as well as progress on smaller tasks that can otherwise get neglected over time. Be sure to check back next week for more info on the next batch of roadmap updates, on how to access the experimental branches, and on how progress is going with the upcoming relationship update. See you all again then!

Welcome to Issue #62 of The PixelCount Post, a periodically released update from Kynseed's team. In today's issue: Charlie makes a Wottyzit, Neal talks about talking, Matthijs hums a tune, and Matt's keyboard breaks.
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It turned out to be a rather packed week for the team between working on some new assets, roadmap planning, new sound cues, lengthy team discussions, and the set up of a new Trello organisation board. Many of the new assets in question have been coming in from Gary, our character artist. These include some animations for a new brounie character as well as early drafts on animating the Jabberwock creature - one of our much larger (and frightening) monsters based off of a similar creature as seen in Terry Gilliam's amazing film Jabberwocky. Charlie talks a bit more about all these new assets in his article below.

As for the lengthy discussions, the team has recently been diving into some fairly deep talks. We've found we tend to have these bigger conversations on the project every once in a while as a sort of 'checking in' with each other and seeing how we're all feeling about development and things in general. These sorta talks aren't really ever planned outright. Rather they seem to crop up organically, usually when we've reached a certain tipping point where we have a bunch of thoughts and ideas that we want to share that we've otherwise been holding on to internally so as to keep focus strictly on development and roadmap progress. So although we hadn't necessarily planned for having such in-depth team discussions this last week, they always turn out to be incredibly useful and productive.

We also ended up setting up a Trello board in the midst of these talks which, for those unfamiliar, is basically a project organisation platform that easily allows for multiple team members to collaborate on. We had a Trello board set up in the pre-Early Access days of development but since then have been largely depending on internal project organisation of our own (spreadsheets, documents, etc.). However, as of late we've been greatly preferring the particular format and ease of Trello. Between the team discussions and the new project organisation, we've got a fairly packed week planned ahead with finalizing details on new roadmap bits as well as progress on the next build. So see you again next week with updates on how it all went!







There has been a lot of chatter and organisation in the team as we try to make ourselves more efficient and organised. Personally I am about as organised as a jelly tornado, so for us to start using Trello properly is a relief and you can feel the upbeat auras coming from the others (especially Neal). We feel much more happy about where we are and the future, and are more determined than ever to make a special game.

This week I have been looking at the game's Prologue and improving player tutorials. I am always against hand holding and reams of text explaining the most basic concepts...but I do recognise there are ways we can keep the sense of discovery along with gently guiding the player. New UI boxes, improved info presentation, better tasks, plus explanation of tools and controls. All of which will go alongside new features such as Pott the Brounie and The Wottyzit.

But what is the Wottyzit? What is it exactly? The Wottyzit is a small wisp-like faery that hovers near interactive objects of interest, and when you get near will fly away. It will only do it once per feature to draw your attention to them. So this would be things like the oven, baking kiln, mapstones, lemonade stand, pig auction trigger point, etc etc.

Then for after the Prologue, we have Pott the Brounie: a sharp tongued goblin who will live on your farm and look after things. He likes to keep things tidy and ensures your kids are looked after. He can be talked to for advice and guidance on things to do, the status of things, and even tell you stories about the Fae realms. Fail to feed him offerings though, and he won't be very happy and let you know it! We feel that by making these things 'in-world' and part of the lore, they will add a rich character that really ties the room together.

The only other news for you this week is that the Jabberwock has had its idle animations begun. It is a bit of a challenge for Gary, but so far it looks amazing, with the best eyelids/blink I have seen on a huge dragony thing. I am so excited by our menagerie of denizens. The few we have revealed so far (around our forums and on Twitter) are our smallest and weakest. We can't wait for you to see the Barghest, Fachen, Banshee, Ogyr, Spriggan...and they are just some of the mid-sized ones!

We are blessed to have such incredible artists - Gary, Matt Weekes, and Caz are just brilliant people to work with and I am insanely jealous of their talents. I couldn't draw the curtains, never mind a world full of fabulous beasts, colourful environs, and tastily detailed items. Onwards and upwards!







This week has been an interesting one and I'm going to ramble on in a stream of consciousness type way about it. I've made some progress on the noticeboards, typed and chatted what feels like far more than the past month, and had a mini crisis of sorts when the living room started leaking water from the ceiling (for the third time, but in a different place!). I think the theme for this week for me has been coming to some revelations of a sort about self-imposed limitations. Maybe these were triggered from having a break last week and that gap away from the normal routine really gave me pause on what was actually going on. I think it had begun before, but especially the last day or two felt like finally getting a better sense of what is up...

Aside: Sometimes I wonder with these posts how many people read them or what they're expecting to read about (feel free to leave a comment below on that!). For me, I've taken them as a way of giving some insight into the very human process of development and perhaps also the cycles that my mind will often get locked into. When I write these I often quickly look back at our last issue but have never actually gone back to read older ones from being a little embarrassed in some ways about what I might have said. So I have this sense that maybe I'm repeating myself in slightly different ways, but then immediately a few weeks later I forget and get caught back up in the cycle of whatever is going on at the time...

With a long-term endeavour such as this project, I think it is inevitable that the excitement rises and fades and that we struggle to actually consistently keep going in an upward spiral of momentum, as there's always distractions and past habits to deal with. Weeks like this though give me more optimism about it when I feel like I've got a real buzz going on from stepping outside my comfort zone and laying out more of what I'm actually thinking (while trying to be humble that it is only my very limited understanding and experience and that I'm open to change).

Anyway...to get back to what I mentioned in the first section, the revelation (or perhaps just a return to sanity and common sense) that I realised is how often we impose invisible limits and boxes around what we do. Biases and habits reinforce us going in a certain direction without a chance to stop to think if it's the best way to be going.

To go into a little more detail, my work on code has for a long time been about ticking off features on the roadmap. The general aim has always been to get everything to a 'first pass' level and then we can start refining it and putting it together. That approach is definitely in large parts what my previous developer experience has been like on the Fable games...right until near the end the game is very rough and there's little sense of the solidity that eventually emerges. I think it could be argued they released too soon where another 3 to 4 months at that solid stage would get the refinement right that really hits the mark, but that's hindsight for you! It is undoubtedly a reasonably sound strategy for many games, especially ones developed in private, but not all games are the same.

In our case, we have an incredibly ambitious game and limited resources (no publisher, a small but talented team where each person has a lot of responsibilities, and limited time due to our budget). It's true that there is a lot of pressure/risk in that situation, but we have experience and boldness on our side to make it work. We are doing our best to mitigate the risk and we still have contingencies and ways to keep going as long as possible while the game continues to grow. So it's not a bad situation we are in, but it is one where the bias and focus has limited us and started to box us into a corner where it seems like there is nowhere to go. Code is still the bottleneck right now where I've been constantly trying to catch up with the myriad of ideas/art/sound/bugs/improvements being thrown around. In doing so, I've limited myself a lot because of focusing on the checkbox approach of mostly sticking to stuff on the roadmap. That's not to say that focus is a bad thing, but when it becomes obsessive (filling all waking hours of the day) to the point of ignoring other options, then it lacks the common sense to take a step back and see what the real problems are and what to do about them. I guess what I'm mainly trying to take on-board from this is to split time up so the focus has a daily chance to shine but that other tasks are not left behind, including the need to be communicating with the rest of the team - and to get in some time to relax and enjoy life as well!

To tie this into the week itself a bit more, the noticeboards were something where until we had a meeting I'd been holding back continuously on them (maybe because they aren't on the roadmap, maybe because I had so many other things to do, maybe because no one else pushed me on them, but for whatever reason it was only when I started on it that it began to unveil the impact that I knew was there but didn't act on). The very basic implementation of them only took maybe an hour or two, but I just could not stop procrastinating/holding back on getting something in there. Now that they are there, it's a massive relief and I can see how much they are going to add to the game. After the basic implementation, I've been refining them in a further few days to have two initial types ('cook wanted' and 'lost item'), to set one noticeboard up per haven, to get them working with save/load, and to refine the random generation of them to feel a bit more natural. For now they are in our experimental branch on Steam (for anyone interested in trying it) and we're looking at getting them put into the main branch in perhaps a couple of weeks, along with other efforts to address player feedback on the game.

The water leaking incident of this week was interesting too. I almost felt like I'd set myself up for it by talking up how it often seems that crisis pop along one after another that disrupt our flow. Luckily it wasn't too serious and I saw it as soon as it started so nothing really got permanently damaged. The interesting part of it for me was recognising that feeling of how that crisis just took over all thoughts and actions. I pretty much dropped everything else I was doing to handle it and get it looked into. It made me remember how when something unexpected needs to get done, I can just focus immediately onto it and decisions suddenly become easy because you want to get it sorted above all else. To tie it into the limiting factor of our actions, sometimes things like that need absolute attention but when we're talking about things carrying over days/weeks/months trying to focus on on one thing unrelentingly then that just ends up wasting time. The mind wanders and rebels against that level of focus because it just weighs down creativity and inspiration. My plan is to try and mix things up more. Namely, we've talked in the team about having a fixed day where we are deliberately not working on the roadmap/update work. Letting things wander for a bit before diving back into focus. I'm additionally thinking to take that further within a day where I try to concentrate for around 4 hours on the main priority and then to be content then to dip into what I feel like doing rather than what I've tried to make my sole focus...

I guess I'll go a little into the team's recent typing and chatting, which maybe other posts might cover as well. What it boiled down to is another case of each of us having our limited box of what thoughts we'd allow out. Holding back from saying anything because we felt like everyone else was too busy or not really open to suggestion. Also perhaps that even when things are said, the other person isn't actually listening because of their own strong feelings on the matter. When you impose that limitation (of not listening, not asking questions, not putting out thoughts), then what you're really doing is passively accepting the status quo and biding time for a point which probably will never come.

That's not to say that all thoughts are welcome or are good ones to say, because there has to be some empathy/trust and mutual understanding there! The question though, is if you feel passionately about something why is it better to hold back on it? Surely if you feel that strongly about it you want to speak up and test if others agree, learn from the experience, and let the mind move on? It's a case of reading the room as to how/where to do this but it could even just start with a simple question of "Is there some way we can talk about X, as I have some feelings about that?". For myself (and I believe other people too), there's a lot of irrational fear at times about opening up because it exposes something in your mind and has a risk that you're wrong. But is it a good thing to just hold on to a thought to the point where it becomes permanent yet gets no outside scrutiny from people with vastly different experiences? Is it not better to test your limits and evolve your understanding by taking that step? I guess I would just stress again that my understanding/experience is limited and perhaps the position I'm advocating is too extreme where some limits are necessary. Food for thought really and something of an experiment!

Looking back on this post it has become quite an epic and I've still got thoughts flowing about connections that I've just realised in writing this. For now, I think I might leave it there and see what folks think of this. I know it's probably a lot to take in and perhaps not that much talks about the game itself but I do feel like it captures a bit of the way our development is going and some thoughts that right now really have me fired up. I definitely think I need to keep looking back on this particular post to remember it when I expect otherwise it might fade away in memory as more new unexpected developments take hold and as my mind wars a bit against being so open. Anyway, thanks to all of you who read this and I wish you all the best!







Another week goes by! This week I worked on the sounds for the smithing mini-game. In places, it's still a bit quiet as some sounds still need to be implemented. I also did sounds for the rating system on items you've crafted. There's 4 different levels of quality per aspect of the item, ranging from bad to perfect. I've divided the theme I use for personal growth into 4 individual segments for this so that the first tone in the theme is the bad rating, the next tone the ok rating, then good, and finally perfect to finish the theme with a flourish. (The full theme is more than 4 notes, but the first 4 notes already form a recognisable abbreviation to the theme.)

This theme can also be heard when leveling up certain skills or during other moments of growth for the player character. It can even be heard when you wake up on the pier at the start of the game. It also makes an appearance in an as of yet implemented track for the main menu. Sometimes I hide it a little by giving you the theme in a slightly altered or subtle way. Other times it's front and center. This set of rating system sound effects would definitely qualify as a hidden iteration of it though, as you won't likely hear all 4 sounds in fast succession (or in the right order). But subliminally, it's there.

Another thing I did this week was to alter the main melody of the track I worked on last week. The feedback the team gave me on it mentioned that this melody needed to be easier to hum along to. One way to facilitate how quickly you can absorb a melody and hum along to it is to make the melody consist of repeating patterns. The more something repeats, the easier it gets to memorize. But a repeat doesn't have to be identical each time. A pattern with a deviation can still feel like it's the same general pattern. This allows you to walk the fine line between keeping it easy to memorize and keeping it from being boringly or annoyingly repetitive. And oh boy, is that a fine line alright! If the team approves of the new melody, I still need to fix some other little things in the track before it's game-ready. But it'll get there...







I'm going to keep my article a bit brief (brief for me), partly to avoid this week's issue from getting overly long but also because I feel I've been typing a short novel's worth this week already! As mentioned above by my teammates, alongside our normal development work we also found ourselves deeply engaged in all manner of discussion. It's become something the team does semi-regularly on the project to help keep things going smoothly and to highlight any areas we want to make course adjustments on.

Above all, I think these talks tend to have a cathartic effect where it allows us to just dump a bunch of thoughts and ideas that we each have been meaning to bring up yet never really finding time to do so during the busy bustle of working on the game directly. Not being someone known for their brevity, I tend to dive pretty deeply into these talks and contribute paragraphs and paragraphs of my own. So it all makes for quite a bit of writing after a week's worth of these discussions.

Rather amusingly, the very first day these discussions kicked off I had just bought myself a new keyboard. So I picked one helluva week to start reestablishing all my typing muscle memory that I'd obtained over the last couple of years with my last keyboard. Sadly that keyboard had become broken and thus it was time to get a replacement. Whenever discarding one of my PC's peripherals like that, I always get a slight tinge of weird attachment over it. That was the keyboard which was by my side from the very beginning of this project all the way to now. It was the keyboard I used for basically every development update, every Discord message I've ever written, and every issue of The Post up to this one. We'd been through a lot together, that keyboard and I. So farewell trusty keyboard. May it type away happily in the text fields of keyboard heaven.

Welcome to Issue #61 of The PixelCount Post, a periodically released update from Kynseed's team. In today's issue: Charlie adds a new character, Neal branches out code, Matthijs digests gassy music, and Matt tackles tiny tasks.
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This last week was spent sorting through the usual: fixing bugs that had cropped up, designing a few new things, getting a bit of new art in, and chipping away at the gargantuan soundtrack. Specifically, Charlie and Gary have been working on a new character for around the farm. Meanwhile, Neal's been looking at utilising a branching approach for the code. Then over in audio land, some new gassy music is slowly being digested.

In addition to this, we've been slowly circling in on our next planned steps for the relationships update as well as the next batch of roadmap updates to come. We'll be sprinkling in a fair bit of onboarding improvements as well, which we go into a bit more detail about in last week's issue. This upcoming week we have a couple of team meetings planned where we'll be nailing down all these specifics for good and, from there, getting it all prepared for sharing with you lovely folks!







A slow-ish week with Neal away, but it let me mess with some ideas for Mellowfields to expand the exploration and to get on with the onboarding designs among others. To help give your farm a bit of character, Gary (our character artist) and I colluded on a new character: Pott the Brounie!

All those offerings you have been giving or not giving? They go to him. After the Prologue, the idea is that you can now see him (and all other Fae) and he will hang around your farm. He will take care of the little things while you are away and be a source of advice and direction. All this delivered in a grumpy, sarcastic little fella who we modelled on Albert Steptoe from the old UK TV show, Steptoe & Son.

He is going to whine and complain a lot, and if you don't give your offerings he won't take it kindly! We hope he will be an endearingly enigmatic character who you grow to love. Let us give the little guy a chance to say hello...

"Nice to meet yer, I be Pott,
I sweep n' clean and wairk a lot.
Give me grub and be a friend,
Sweets make me loyal to the end!
About your house I will creep,
Mendin' things while you're asleep.
Scrubbin' muck and dustin' cob,
Polish wood and shinin' hob.
So feed me good and treat me fair,
Or I'll put spiders in your hair!"







This week was a little short for me as I was looking after some cats for part of it, which I used as a minibreak of sorts. The time I have spent on the game has been about figuring out some reported bugs on loading saves along with an unintended setup for fishing where they'd respawn every level load. I've uploaded a build with the fixes to the experimental branch which is where I'm aiming to put builds more regularly in the coming weeks. There's a few smaller areas I'm looking at for the next week, with the chat system getting UI tweaks along with the noticeboard as a source of new tasks (which should make it into the experimental build).

Something that I've started doing with the code is making use of branches for source control. For those unfamiliar, source control is a way to track changes to files (mostly code) over time and then branches is a way to have multiple simultaneous versions of the files for different purposes that can be merged as necessary - say one branch for releasing the game, one for fixing bugs, one for working on future features, etc.

It's quite a powerful feature, but at the same time can get complicated to figure out what's going on (as there's no longer that guarantee of consistency that a feature/bug in one version will work the same way in another, as the code is no longer the same). So I've been easing into it to see what benefits can be gained there.

The main benefit seems to be the ability to easily experiment without affecting the stability of the build, but the struggle I am finding is in then being aware of what the state of any other branch is like and knowing when to cross over. So definitely a new learning curve for me to figure out, as I can see it being very handy soon as we continue looking at improvements from player feedback while the next update is also starting to gear up!







Another week flew by. This week I spent working on a track for an upcoming town later in the game. It's in the swampy area I've worked on previously and from what Charlie told me, there's copper pipes everywhere and the town is being lit by gas.

I've tried to incorporate this into the music by using metal percussion instruments and some big bass trombone and tuba 'bwaaps' as a sort of 'fart' in the music. It gives the whole thing a tinker-ish vibe. The banjo and acoustic bass ground it all within the same soundscape as the other swamp music so that, even though it is considerably cheerier than the surrounding swamp tracks, it's still distinctly the same overall atmosphere. I deliberately chose working on this task first rather than going right back to the ambient track I was working on before because I just really needed to get some composing out of my system.

I've also been shopping for some new gear, mainly a synthesizer and MIDI keyboard. So far, whenever I needed an instrument to have very free 'human' timings, I've had to emulate that sense of timing even though I'm drawing in each note with the mouse. This is very time consuming, but it means you get to micro-manage every single note. For the sake of efficiency, I need to bite the bullet and learn to do this with a MIDI keyboard instead. The one I want needs to be ordered though, so it'll take a while to get here. The somewhat jazzy timings I'm adding to the track I'm already working on will just have to be done with the mouse, like always. Though once I get plenty of practice with the keyboard, it'll do a lot to improve my ability to perform live, as a nice bonus.







Something that's always been a challenge for a team like ours is how to implement some basic project management/organisation that fits the size of our team. Oftentimes, it seems like these sorts of things are either geared more towards much larger studios or they're more for one to two person teams and thus feel far too simplified. So it's been a challenge over this project to find a balance that works best for us. Typically, this means making our own solutions to fit our own needs, which generally does the trick but it is something that needs revisiting now and then. So with us charting the next batch of updates for the roadmap, it seemed a good time to tweak some of our organisation solutions as well (stuff like spreadsheets, Trello, and so on).

In addition to this, I was able to also set aside some time to get caught up on an ever-growing pile of 'little' things. It seems that there's always a whole slew of small tasks I'd like to get done, but when compared to all the other work that needs doing it's easy for these smaller tasks to get pushed aside for a later day. The problem is, this can really start to pile up if not careful!

So it was nice to dedicate a handful of days last week to getting caught up on such things and marking them off as complete. This included things like researching info on future game events and their submission process, implementing some extra spam protections on our site, and even adding some new features and updates to our community Discord. It's good to have many of these smaller tasks finished, as it does give one a sense of relieving a burden and freeing up some mental bandwidth - all with the intention of being better focused to tackle some of the higher priority tasks ahead!

Welcome to Issue #60 of The PixelCount Post, a periodically released update from Kynseed's team. In today's issue: Charlie works on more design, Neal battles a crash (and wins), Matthijs studies studios, and Matt boards onboarding.
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This last week the team pushed out the latest "Song of Price and Hire" update to all channels! Contained within is the Goods Store as a new ownable business, managing hired staff, and the initial framework of the shop Reputation system.

This proved to be one of the more complex builds we've done, as it contained lots of 'moving parts' on the engine level. For those following along with development, you'll also recall that we had to rework how NPC-owned shops behaved, mainly to ensure there was some consistency between how customers and inventory worked across the world. It's an update that took a bit of extra time to do right, but all that work will help pave the way for future business updates and make it all that much smoother when it comes time to add the Apothecary and Tavern business.

We won't bother getting into the finer details of the update here though, as the official announcement is the best place to go for that. Be sure to give it a read for a fuller look at everything packed into the update.

We'll continue to take in feedback and bugs this week, but otherwise now that the update is out we're moving on to the next one ahead: "Growing Up & Going Out". This is an update that a fair number of you have told us you're keenly looking forward to and we're pretty excited to begin work on it ourselves. Its main highlights are progressing to the adult phase and pursuing romantic relationships. Bear in mind this won't include the full generation aging loop, but rather just the next age phase. Our tireless character artist, Gary, has been meticulously recreating every player sprite and animation, but as adult versions instead. In fact, he has to do it all twice to account for both playable siblings!

Something else we're wanting to tackle in the next update is taking a look at what's known as 'player onboarding'. This essentially refers to how players are introduced and taught the game's concepts and mechanics, oftentimes extending beyond just tutorials. Now that we're a handful of updates in, we've felt that the onboarding process has been getting a little left behind. So we're going to start spending a bit of this next update looking for what we refer to as 'cheap' wins, which is basically game dev talk for adding an improvement that doesn't take much time to do and doesn't necessarily require brand new bespoke assets to be made (which can often slow up development).

We're actually still hammering out a lot of those details, as this upcoming week will be a bit of a transitional one in which we tie off loose ends from the last update while nailing down the exact specifics of the next. Plus, on top of that, we're also going to plan out the next batch of updates to be put on our roadmap, which you'll note only goes so far as the "Growing Up & Going Out" update currently. You can expect that next batch to get revealed in a couple of weeks.

There's definitely a sense of excitement here on the team, as it feels like development is really starting to hit a stride. We're happy to be able to mark many of our initial updates as complete and are looking forward to kicking things off with a whole slew of new ones - many of which will begin to take individual game components and connect them together into a more cohesive gameplay loop. No doubt the adult phase and romantic relationships will be a big step towards that and will help to really tie things together, not unlike Lebowski's rug.











Lots of appalling weather this week...stupidly hot one minute, constant downpours the rest of the time. Been getting into some design work otherwise - looking at shop specialisations, tutorial stuff, map stuff, noticeboard requests, and special character bios.

Lately it's been great to play the new Fire Emblem game as well, as it has many things that we're also doing so it is nice to see how they approach it. They have a wonderful UI and there's much to learn from it. Of course, we'll never match their resources, but there are still cheap wins we can utilise.

Was also good to finally get the Goods Store update out and it has given us food for thought. Mr Weekes had an idea to do with the currency, and we got some great feedback from the community. We love getting ideas, so keep them coming!

In my other spare time, I entertained myself by attempting to design a Kynseed board game. Maybe we should take it to Kickstarter and make 10 million pounds like all the other board games seem to do!







The Goods Store update is finally out! It ended up taking a few more days to get through some polish and deal with one last minute problem. In this case, the night before, I'd made a change to avoid a crash I'd seen in a cheat debug state where I owned the Tavern. All seemed well for a few hours and then Charlie started noticing customers huddling outside the Goods Store and not going in. It took a bit of investigating to put two and two together with the previous change, as I couldn't immediately get the issue.

The cause I eventually found out is being out of the level and time passing enough that NPC's in other levels were going shopping and, without the shop data around, were creating blank versions of it with the wrong info. This didn't result in a crash, but it meant when you actually went to the shop in the level, they were looking at the completely wrong shop data to choose where to go. The fix was just to remove the small change from the night before, but then it actually revealed that without the fix it would actually crash the game in the same situation where it went wrong!

Thankfully that was easier to deal with and the build went out after a bit more testing. I guess the moral of that tale is don't fix cheat debug state bugs on the night before an update (and there would have been a high likelihood the out of level crash was spotted and diagnosed/fixed a lot quicker).

With the update out, it's been a chance to reflect a little on the progress of the game and catch up on our next steps while eagerly eyeing to see any feedback or bugs lurking around. Just round the corner is the relationship update and with it comes a large focus on NPC's, where I'm looking to improve my debug capabilities. I've started compiling a list of 'nice to haves' for this and have already begun implementing a special view where you can zoom out and follow all the sim activity in the map.



Here's a very early look at the sim activity map, a handy debug tool which will allow us to track what any sims are up to at any given time throughout the day. (Click here to enlarge.)


Though what we've started to realise with this update is how focused we've been to sticking to the roadmap ever since it came out and how it has led to the player experience being a little quirky or clunky (depending on how polite you want to be) outside the chosen area for the update. With the relationships update on the way, which seems a big draw for many, we're feeling like we need to level up the player experience a bit first. There'll likely be a little crossover between the two as say, improving the process of relationships will help for when the player can get married, but it probably will mean the relationship update takes a little longer while we make those changes. We're hoping to provide these player experience updates in much smaller chunks as soon as possible, so although the relationship update may be a while away, there'll still be improvements in the meantime!

I'm quite excited about it as it'll feel good to actually address the known issues that we've seen or heard about and then unwrap the next layer of fresh impressions based on the changes made.







I'm so happy with the reactions I've seen to the new update! I've watched some streams of people playing it and they seem really excited with what the team's put out.

In other news, I get to experience my home studio slowly taking shape. It's a wild ride, and a far bigger project than I had ever thought. I do start feeling guilty though. The studio project has been taking up so much time that I hardly got to compose throughout it all. That's tough for me, as I always want to be well ahead of schedule if I can help it. However, the psychological effect of being in a cleaner, more spacious, and prettier studio is undeniable. It had to be done sooner or later.

Meanwhile, I get to look forward to the next update, which I've already written some music for. Charlie tells me that he's been listening to it on repeat, even though it's a relatively short tune that was very tongue-in-cheek. I can't wait to see the full sequence it was written for. I also still haven't finished the ambient track for the dangerous swamp areas you'll encounter much later in the game, which is adding to my sense of guilt for lack of progress. But come Monday (which I'm guessing is when this text is published), I hope to be back to a sense of 'normalcy', as far as that exists!







Phew, what a busy last week! As you've no doubt seen us banging our drum about above, we released the Goods Store update! Though in the midst of juggling its release, we've also started work in earnest on figuring out some very important next steps for development - ranging from preparing the next update ahead as well as charting out the next phase of our roadmap.

This next update, which we (I) chat about in more detail in The Short Report, is going to be a fairly important one. It'll feature the next aging phase (adult) and the pursuit of romantic relationships (courting, marriage, and moving in), which will be an exciting step forward in fleshing out the sandbox and role-play experience. Granted, it's still just a step, but it's one we've been rather looking forward to.

As also mentioned in The Short Report, we've recently been having a think on player onboarding and how we can tighten it up a bit. This next "Growing Up & Going Out" update is probably going to bring in an influx of not just brand new players but also some returning players who've been letting the game accrue updates before diving back in again. So revisiting the early portions of the game experience and seeing how we can better communicate the game's core concepts and goals is certainly on our minds.

I suppose that's the catch-22 of getting an influx of new and returning players. Obviously it's a good thing, but it can also bring with it a feeling of urgency to make sure the game is adequately prepared for it. Oftentimes, I feel it's akin to being halfway through the first draft of a novel and letting everyone read your writing as you go. It can be a little scary letting so many people look behind the curtain while things are so work-in-progress, but in the end, that can be half the fun of it if you let it be.

All that to say, we've decided to expand our next update to also include some time for looking at that whole onboarding experience. This might result in this update taking a slight detour on our roadmap and will no doubt impact how long it takes, but something that's always been important to us is making use of the freedom that being an indie team allows by staying agile and making these small course adjustments as we go. We also have an 'optimization update' planned after this next one, but perhaps it'll just be a matter of borrowing a bit of time from that one to give to this one. It's all still an ongoing team discussion for now though, with more solidified plans to be shared in the weeks ahead.

We've also found watching streams of the game to be indispensable in helping us learn what points players begin to feel a bit aimless with which goals they should be working towards in the game. We tend to have a habit of randomly popping up in stream chats as well, ever-anxious to take notes and learn from different play styles. If you do end up streaming the game, feel free to mention it to us on Twitter or drop a stream link in our 'Community Videos' channel on Discord, as we'd love to pop in.

The tricky thing with all of this is that for a game like Kynseed, we've got to strike a certain balance for how we approach onboarding (and tutorialising in general). We don't want to handhold to the point that we override player autonomy or restrict the sense of freedom in what is essentially an open world sandbox. Yet at the same time, open world games can sometimes suffer from having too little guidance and can result in the open world feeling daunting if not aimless. A GDC talk I recently found myself checking out on this topic is The Freedom Fallacy, which I recommend to anyone interested in taking a deep dive into the concept of open world player autonomy.

(As an aside, another GDC video I've recently been soaking in is Chris King's talk on Early Access, which I found myself emphatically nodding my head to throughout.)

By the by, if this type of game dev chatter is something you find interesting (or if you're even pursuing games as a career), I'd recommend popping by our Discord, as we pretty much spend our entire workdays there and are known to frequently chat about this sorta stuff. Though speaking of workdays, it's probably time I get back to mine! Definitely be sure to check back soon for more details on the upcoming "Growing Up & Going Out" update.

Random thought: I'm half tempted to name the eventual Tavern running update "Throwing Up & Flowing Stout." Let's hope more sensible minds prevail by then...