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These new monthly reports are a result of us wanting to tweak our approach to game updates a bit. In the past, we've only written one of these anytime we've had a big game milestone release (as listed on our roadmap). The only problem we've found with that approach is that the size and complexity of these milestones have been increasing as we go along, meaning that it can take a couple of months or so to get one properly finished. So rather than make everyone go that long without hearing from us or getting their game's build updated, we're going to now start pushing out game build updates and written progress reports once a month. Many of these updates will merely be incremental stepping stones toward the larger milestones and then other times these updates will be for the release of the larger milestones themselves.

(We'll also be updating our development branches every few weeks for those of you keen to try out and give feedback on early developer builds.)

The next major milestone we have ahead is called "Growing Up & Going Out", which we've been casually referring to as the relationship update. Since we last talked, the team has been making some nice strides towards getting this milestone ready. Neal has been adding in many of the initial systems necessary for romancing NPC's, such as new friendship rating parameters as well as programming in specific locations across the world that players can take their dates to. Meanwhile Charlie has been working on NPC dialogue to cover all these new situations and activities that characters can be found in. Plus, he's also been creating the next number of regions in the game world that we'll eventually be opening up. Of course, our environment artist and composer have also been working steadfastly to help with all this as well. Lastly, character artist Gary has been churning out an impressive number of new aging art for not only the world's NPC's but also the playable characters!

Below we have some previews of how all that's been shaping up. Bear in mind much of this is still work-in-progress and isn't necessarily included in the latest build. Rather, it's a fun early peek of some of the new content you can eventually expect in future milestones.

CHANGELOG HIGHLIGHTS

As mentioned above, we're going to start pushing out incremental build updates more frequently as we work towards the larger milestones listed on our roadmap. This month's build update includes a decent handful of new systems that help lay some foundations for the larger elements of the aging and dating focused milestone ahead: "Growing Up & Going Out". Read on below for a few brief highlights taken from the changelog of this month's build update.

Adult Player
After turning 20, you become an adult giving a taller and slightly faster perspective on life.

Dating
Unlocked with adulthood, some of the earliest preliminary dating systems are now in. Eligible NPC's with a friendship rating higher than 'Friendly' can be gifted a 'Rose of Romance' to initiate a date the next day. These involve a few steps that have to be completed before midnight where you get bonus friendship points for doing so. You can expect further changes in subsequent updates as we get feedback and have a chance to refine the experience.

Various Fixes/Improvements
With the above taking a fair share of the last four weeks, the other additions are more general. The 'create task' option has a few more additions for repeated tasks, some new SFX were added to fill in some gaps, and a few areas of UI have been polished for monuments and the end of year screen. There's also been some behind the scenes work encompassing Monogame 3.7 (our engine's code framework) to hopefully resolve a crash, plus there've been ongoing investigations into some reported 'out of memory' issues. (This is a speculative improvement to allow the game to use more memory but if there is an actual leak going on this won't be effective.)

Full Changelog
Jump on over to the full changelog to check out the entire list of additions and fixes.[/indent]




That's all from us for this month's development update! For those of you wanting to follow development even more closely, be sure to check out The PixelCount Post, which is our more frequent week to week dev update from the team. Or give us a follow on Twitter to catch screenshots and GIF's of much of our work-in-progress content. As always, we also welcome any feedback and bug reports you have from playing the latest build update.

Thanks folks, we'll see you again next month!

Love,
PixelCount

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Hello once again and belated Samhain blessings to you all! Just as the rest of the team was recovering from being sick, it seems that your humble editor for The Post was the next to get afflicted. So alas, for the past couple of weeks there was nobody here to write up these development updates. But in the words of Monthy Python:



In that time, the rest of the team has been working along without skipping a beat. Of particular note is that the test branch of the game has been updated with our latest progress as we march ever closer to the "Growing Up & Going Out" update, which we casually refer to as the relationship update. We've also revealed our first glimpse of character art for the adult versions of the player, brillianty drawn and animated by character artist Gary. You can check them out yourself further down.

Lastly, as we've mentioned for a few issues, we're going to start releasing monthly game updates (and changelogs) alongside written progress reports. We'll be posting these in the usual places of course, with the next one being later this week if all goes to plan.

Though for now, feel free to read on below for a look at what the team's been getting up to these past couple of weeks, and we'll see you again soon!







Bit of an up and down week or two with days of struggle then bursts of creative energy. I find I am energised when art and music/sound come in, or when I see new features getting into the build. My focus has been on mapping out Woemarsh in Visio to get it ready to start blocking out ingame. I've also been sorting out Mellowfields, tweaking the Goddess Statue design, and starting to do dialogue for NPC backstories to add more depth to their characters.

I find a lot of time is also spent on our various forums and Twitter, checking for questions or feedback and trying to drum up support. As a little game with a little team, we need to raise every sail on the ship and even use our handkerchiefs if need be to catch every breeze to help us move forwards. The wishlists have been steady and pretty good every day for a while now, so it is very encouraging. A couple of new reviews have really bouyed us up too - so if you havent done one, we'd appreciate it!

As mentioned, I've also been doing a ton of dialogue for every NPC. The reason to do this is to give them more backstory/personality that you can unlock as you gain friendship with them. Each NPC currently has 3 chunks, and on top of that they have a reaction to a family member passing away. These will last for a season to give you a chance to read them. Some NPC's may also comment now and then when a bond was particularly strong.

We want the world of Quill not to be a dark depressing place, so death is treated as just a stepping stone to a new life. Quillians may miss a loved one, but they are mostly upbeat about it and death holds no fears for them. They are united and strong in their beliefs and live a life where the biggest worry is if an apple has a worm in it. Although in Herbert Lemon's case, he thinks it's a bonus.











These last two weeks has been a strange tale of ups and downs with a side order of pondering how to know what the best thing to do is. For instance, knowing when to check messages or websites when it is all too convenient to do it all the time or not at all. There is a choice at times of when to connect and communicate where it turns out helpful versus the alternative where that information derails plans in unexpected ways. As best as I can work out it's all about control and good timing, but also making sure to not let external events unduly influence plans that typically serve a greater long term purpose!

Anyway, to keep it mostly game related I've been continuing work mainly on the dating side of relationships while also working on a separate branch that upgrades us to Monogame 3.7 to attempt to resolve some crash issues. The latter is now available in a test branch with the known issues taken care of! The former has proven a bit of a struggle because it is straining the existing systems for NPC's further than before. In particular, there's the system of how their behaviours work which for now I've just kept relatively simple but do feel like it might be a future source of concern. The other aspect of it is the way following works in the game...

There have been ongoing issues with following for a while and while it wasn't too large a problem to gameplay (like having a following animal get stuck or act strangely), NPC's following for a date are a much bigger concern because the whole gameplay centers around them being there! I've spent a good few days investigating issues and attempting some fixes with varying success. Oddly the most effective fixes seem to be the simple ones where just a value tweak can somehow make the difference between them following in a straight line and going all over the place! Interestingly, looking at how other games do it shows how often the solutions employed are to simplify the action (such as the way JRPG's have characters follow in a conga line or even hide them from view).

Bringing this back to the idea of 'the best thing to do' in this case, I've realised that what I most need to do is put together a test level along with various scenarios that can be automated to replay and allow me to see the issues play out and compare how different solutions work. Getting to that idea wasn't easy and didn't even come about from sitting at the computer working on it! Instead, it was more something that played out in my subconscious to later appear a couple of unexpected times (appearing in my mind while half asleep at night and then after waking in the morning and while out on a walk).

I suspect the pattern to take here is one of needing to research a problem as much as possible, then take a breather from it, and then provided it is embedded in the mind enough it'll get processed in the background to pop out later on. The next step is then acting on that plan which I will be getting started on today!







Having rejoined the modern era after another medieval festival where I did percussion, the constant barrage of social media hits like a ton of bricks. During the festival I had no internet access and honestly, I rather liked it! It's so easy to overlook just how much time and energy goes to keeping up with social media. So I've decided to try a social media diet of sorts, only allowing myself access to things like Twitter at set hours of the day. It definitely helps. Keeping a rigid schedule in general is very useful too.

So now it's back to creating sound effects for me, which remains a very diverse thing to do. From the sound of opening a letter to the sound of discovering a new proverb. There are now a lot of sounds in the game that essentially boil down to the player gaining something or growing in some way. Thus I'm trying to create patterns among them that are consistent, so I incorporate leitmotivs into them. It only works with abstract sound effects though - sounds that represent something that doesn't make an actual sound, like discovering something new or exchanging a gift. It does mean that I have to keep coming up with new ways of orchestrating the same leitmotif. Luckily, there are literally countless ways of doing so.

Recently, I also had to redo a sound effect I did a long time ago. What happened is this:

Ages ago I made a sound for when you complete a task, back before I upgraded the samples I was working with when I was still using an older program. Back then tasks were only ever automatically given to you at the start of your day. But things keep changing in the game and one of those changes is that you can now also accept a task elsewhere. I wanted the sound for accepting a task and for completing one to sound 'related' in a way, so I examined the sound for completing a task and discovered I had never updated it to the new samples. Since the file it was made in was using an older program I essentially had to make it again from scratch.

That's not the worst thing in the world for a 3 second sound, but it showed me how things you do at the beginning of a project can still come back at any time later on. So it's good to future proof things. It also shows in little things like how the file was named originally: "Task Complete.wav". Since then I've been using a different guideline for naming files, so the new one is named "TaskComplete.wav". Now the sounds for both accepting a task and completing it form a harmonic progression together. Two aspects of one larger thing.







My goodness, what a crazy past couple of weeks its been on my side of things. In a nutshell, I ended up getting hit with a particularly weird sickness which resulted in me actually deciding to go to the doctor, something you'd normally have to twist my arm to do. (Though as Charlie reminded me earlier today, breaking my arm would probably do it too.)

Long story short, the vision in one of my eyes took a surprising and rapid turn for the worst, to the point that I was almost unable to see out of it! It ended up being a particularly rare eye inflammation of some kind, which thankfully got treated and is now back to normal. But essentially this meant I was pretty limited in what work I could do, as any work I did required squinting with one eye closed.

Naturally I asked what could've caused the weird inflammation and frustratingly the doc said it could happen for any number of reasons. They said one potential cause could be excessive eye strain due to too much uninterrupted screen time. *cough* And another potential cause could be going too long without sleep. *cough* (Maybe I should get that cough looked at while I'm at it.)

All that to say, I don't have much to report on from my end of things for this update, but I'm back in the saddle as of this week and anxious to jump into work again. That's something Neal and I were talking about a few days ago, in fact: it's one thing to take time off from working on the game, but it's quite another to be unable to work on the game. With the latter recently being the case for me, it's made me really itching to get back to work with some renewed focus (no pun intended). So in a way I guess that's a silver lining of the whole thing, though perhaps I'll try to squeeze in a few more screen breaks now and then...

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It's been an unorthodox past couple of weeks for us here on the team, but things are slowly returning back to some semblance of normalcy. About a week ago Charlie was suddenly hit with a bout of sickness, leading the rest of the team to insisting he take some days off to recoup (and mildly chastising him when he still snuck online to do work). At the same time, our illustrious musical maestro was off helping out with a fun side project at a medieval music festival in which there's no internet connect for miles. (The horror!) So we figured we'd wait to do a new issue of The Post 'til there was more of us around, hence us being a bit off schedule with this issue. Thankfully Charlie is back in action and although our musician is still away, we expect him back very soon.

Regarding game progress, things have been clicking along despite the above mentioned schedule wonkiness. The most notable bit of progress to mention is that in recent weeks Neal, our programmer, has had laser focus adding in the adult player art into the game as well as preparing the game's dating systems. This is a rather large undertaking in fact, as it means that Neal has to go through and replace every instance of the current player's assets and animations of the twins as youngin's and swap them all out for their adult counterparts - all whilst ensuring this doesn't break anything along the way. The team expects we'll be doing quite a bit of testing in the days and weeks ahead!

Also, as mentioned in the last issue, we're looking to tweak our approach to game updates a bit. In addition to the more frequent written updates of The PixelCount Post, we've also been doing larger written updates anytime we release one of the major milestones listed on the roadmap. The only problem we've found with this approach is that, depending on the size and complexity of the roadmap milestone, some may take a couple of months or so to get finished. So to help keep the pace up and to make sure folks are adequately updated in the meantime, we're going to start pushing out game updates as well as written games-focused progress reports once a month. This will mean that some game updates will be incremental in nature - aka, a stepping stone toward one of the larger titled milestones of the roadmap (like "Growing Up & Going Out, which is the next milestone ahead).

If any of the above seems a bit rambly, the main gist of it is this: The Post will continue to be our casual week to week devlog, plus we're now also doing monthly game updates and progress reports. Sometimes a monthly update will be for a big roadmap milestone, while other monthly updates will be a stepping stone toward a big roadmap milestone. Long story short: your game will be getting updated a bit more frequently now.

(We'll also be updating our development branches every few weeks for those of you keen to try out and give feedback on early developer builds.)







Been a huge relief to get back into the levels this past week after having a couple of weeks of a bad throat and being generally unwell and tired. A good rest and time away from the game helped and once the creative juices got going again, things flowed pretty well.

As I was making the Mellowfields levels, I realised that a couple of them were quite small in regards to exploration, and Neal confirmed that. Sometimes it is easy to lose sight of where you are, so it is good to identify issues and solve them. I often create a rough layout and will chop and change it until my instinct tells me it feels right. I have no real pre-planned maps, but I do have the game stored in my head and work off that. (Making maps on paper often feels to me like a falsehood...it is fine for rough layouts, but you need to be in and walking around to really experience the feel.)

It maybe doesn't sound like a great way to work, but my levels have always been organic and 'messy'...quite amateur in many respects, but because I live and breathe in them, they come to life with detail and character. I would hope our artists go over the levels later and tidy up where assets were badly used and so on, so they will still be subject to changes right up until the end.

The creation of the levels was helped by some great new assets coming in and they can often really tie the room together. During the making of Fable 2, Brightwood was stopped and started 9 times before it became what it became. Wraithmarsh, arguably my favourite region (tied with Snowglobe and the intro level for Fable Legends), underwent 6 iterations. If I had my time again, I would make it way better.

We can always look to improve, so I'm just glad I am back in the hungry mood to mess around and get my hands dirty giving form to the land of Quill.







The last two weeks have been a bit of a blur. In stops and starts, work is progressing on the next update as life happens, as I get to grips with the next update requirements, and as I also play catchup on issues in the wild. Something I've been thinking about lately is the method to madness that comes about in that process. Especially in the last week where I've had productive spells that very freely come and go.

I've been sticking with my aims for each day by quantifying the outcome in terms of more achievable results. So instead of expecting to have completed a whole section of a feature, I'll split it up to spend a few hours on it to see how it goes in parallel with other important aspects (so results measured in focused time spent). This leads to some days that feel full with little to show as conclusively done, but that there is progress made and it is slowly reaching that point where it comes together. Little by little it should all add up to something good!

This also ties in with last time's mention of a new plan with updates. Our new intention is to have a more regular pattern that allows builds to come through at a faster pace than 'when it's all ready' for a roadmap milestone, while still allowing some quality control. At this moment I've been working on UI bits, workflow, importing the adult player character art and how that fits ingame, along with dating for relationships and looking into some intermittent crashes and out of memory problems that seem to finally be getting somewhere in the investigation stage.

This bubbling pot of activity, if looked at right now, might be a bit mad with how unconnected they are - but there is method to it in that it genuinely allows more steady progress than the straight path of one at a time might! As usual, I better head back to that assortment of ideas and advance them all that little bit closer. Wish you all a good week!







Note from the Editor: Our musician friend is currently away on a medieval festival adventure, providing his services as a merry traveling drummer. He shall no doubt return soon with tales of his travels. - Matt







It's been a bit of an unusual past couple of weeks between team members being out for various reasons (Tice being away for a project and Charlie being under the weather). When you work on such a small team, it's a bit surprising how noticeable even one team member's absence can be, let alone two. Things get a bit quieter around the virtual office of our team's Discord server and there's fewer voice chat meetings to be had. Though one obvious benefit to this is that it gives the rest of us an opportunity to bury our heads into the work and focus exclusively on our immediate tasks, completely uninterrupted.

I feel like this has been particularly handy for Neal, who's been slowly going through and adding in all the adult player assets into the game. Hearing Neal describe the work makes it all sound a bit tedious, as there's simply so many player asset tiles to add into the game for all the various situations. As always, I continue to be impressed with the myriad of things Neal has to tend to in the code. It boggles my mind to think about how Kynseed's engine is the work of a sole programmer.

Meanwhile, art has been churning out quite a bit of new content in recent weeks. Gary has moved on from making adult versions of the players to making different age versions of NPC's, which are shaping up very nicely. He's also been creating a number of side characters, ranging from a frightening monster to the more friendly (if not occasionally grumpy) Pott the Brounie.

That said, when it comes to game development, it's very typical (if not necessary) for the creation of art to outpace how quickly code can implement art. This makes logical sense given the nature of these two departments, but it does unfortunately mean that many times Gary will be working on something that won't be ready for implementing until quite some time from now. We still like to give sneak peeks as we can though, so every now and then I'll create a GIF like below to give a glimpse of what's to come in future updates.



This is Pott the Brounie, a sharp tongued goblin who will show up sometime after the game's Prologue to live on your farm and help look after things. He'll help keep things tidy and will even make sure your kids are looked after. He can also be talked to for pieces of advice, to check on the status of certain things, or even to learn about different stories of the Fae. Just be sure to feed him offerings now and then, cause otherwise he'll get unhappy and he won't be shy in saying so!

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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!