These videos will go out every month to show what new content was worked on. This won't showcase everything that goes into the game just some general direction and specific changes. If you want to follow the team you can find us all at the links below. Hope you guys enjoy!
Starting from January 27th until February 3rd, Heartbound will be 20% off. Happy Lunar New Year everyone! ːHBHeartː
When is the next update?
Really soon actually. I just finished all of the timelines for the end of Avocado's section. This includes a ton of tie-ins to the other chapters so it was a bunch of work to get finished. This stuff will be good to go for the translators soon.
What else is going on?
Planning to release a monthly video update of everything we've worked on to keep everyone updated. Was originally going to be a text post but video carries better on all the socials out there. First one should come out in the first week on February as we get the pipeline for that to handled.
Where can I follow the development?
I stream Heartbound dev Monday to Saturday every week over on Twitch. You can also come hang with the community on Discord or Guilded!
As always, thanks for being awesome. You guys rock.
Starting from December 22nd at 10:00am PST until January 5th, Heartbound will be 20% off. This is our first sale ever for the game and something I was pretty hesitant about before. Hope you all have a wonderful holiday season and this brings some cheer to you and yours!
Heartbound is still in Early Access why are you going on sale?
I think the last patch really set up enough content that I feel comfortable finally engaging in sales like this. Last year a number of people were upset that we didn't put Heartbound on sale so I thought it would be best to do it this year. With everyone being hit financially by the pandemic it felt even more appropriate to do so.
Why were updates slow this last year?
No easy way around this one, I had Covid. As a small team we can't really adapt to illness and injury as well as larger studios. It took me a little over a year to recover and I am finally back on track and making the game at the pace I feel happy with. For everyone who was upset about the release cadence... sorry. As far as we can plan it won't happen again. Some stuff is just unavoidable.
What's next for Heartbound?
We have a ton of stuff we're working on for Animus right now. Avocado's storyline is roughly half-released and the other half is finished internally so I'm pretty confident in getting the rest out to you in the next few months. After that, we're going to be focusing on The Mossbacks storyline which is a lot of family dynamics and dating related stuff. It's pretty heavy, might hit some people harder than others, and something I'm pretty happy with in terms of writing.
When that is finished Animus will have it's final battle and we will be working on Jotunheim. Going forward we will also be putting up monthly development updates here as announcements as I have really only been leaning on the stream to distribute information.
As always, thanks for being awesome. You guys rock. ːHBHeartː
After a long hard year of recovering from Covid I'm back working on Heartbound. It's super nice to be able to just hammer out new stuff and keep making the game. Sorry for the delay but it was absolutely unavoidable.
This patch has a ton of secret route content and a small amount of main route content. The next focus will be on main route content to finish off Avocado and The Mossbacks storylines.
Thanks for all the feedback and support. You guys rock. ːHBHeartː
Known Issues
Russian and Japanese have some missing translation files.
Due to the pandemic we had to hire new people for some localization positions.
Missing translations will be fixed as soon as we can get the new team members set up.
Language updates will be made as micro-patches and updated here.
Sorry for the inconvenience!
New Content
All save files have been reset due to structural changes.
A number of new achievements can now be obtained.
Emelio, Fern, Rhode, and Avocado can now judge you for your actions.
Avocado can now teach you about fishing.
There is now a path best left untraveled in Animus.
There can now be a fishing rod in Lore's bedroom.
Things have changed dramatically in the void between chapters.
New facial expressions were added for Lore, Fern, Rhode, Emelio, and Avocado.
Added more facial expressions to Fern and Rhodes home scenes.
Lores combat sprites are now animated for every mini-game.
The mouse cursor now centers on the screen whenever it activates during combat.
The mouse cursor now fades in/out whenever it activates/deactivates.
Lores weapons now fade in/out whenever they activate/deactivate.
Lores weapons now change polarity based on your actions.
Losing to the Barghest is now a path forward.
The ARG has progressed to the next stage.
Surprise Pirate detection is now funnier.
Two talky animations can now be played at once.
Textbox borders can now fade out.
Fixed After Launch
These are issues we've fixed after launching this patch. Thanks for the reports!
Lore now says his proper dialog when fighting the Barghest.
Text regarding a specifically colored beard no longer breaks out of the text box.
Updated text in the Iron Mines to reflect the proper state of The Artifact.
Fixed a repeating sound if you beat The Barghest fight in the middle of the dodge game.
Raging Shadows now plays correctly during combat again. Thanks GMS *finger guns*
The Artifact now makes sense when it appears in The Mines.
Misery and Mania now know which one is the brother and which is the sister.
French has now been released.
Linux builds can now be run from the Steam Library. libcurl.so.4 is cursed
Heartbound will no longer run at reduced framerate on some monitors on Linux.
OScars face now matches his dialog on all large monitors in The Tower.
Lunch Rush can no longer cause duplicate text to appear in the room.
Dillohome introduction cutscene no longer has a chance to softlock.
Going to lunch with Rhode and then doubling back to talk to Fern no longer softlocks.
Bug Fixes
Machines running on Integrated Graphics should no longer turn into a visual blender.
The continue arrow is now half the animation speed it was before.
All characters now preload into texture memory on room load to improve performance.
All room dialog now unloads from memory when leaving that room.
Removed a number of redundant flags in the dialog system across the entire game.
Buttons on the keypad in The Tower now display correctly.
Surprise Pirate mode will no longer trigger if you run Heartbound directly from its folder.
Ferns hair has been fixed on her sad face.
Combat textures were pruned to remove redundancy.
Combat no longer continues if the enemy hits 0 health in the middle of a round.
Rhodes aggressive stance was updated to remove minor pixel errors.
The game client will no longer run at reduced framerate on some monitors.
The Barghest health border is no longer duplicated during The Boss fight.
The Observer is now the default talky expression for all dialog.
Broken glass is no longer on Dads head after fighting The Boss.
Logs will no longer improperly stop looping when pushed to the right or down.
Thrown weapons will no longer briefly appear outside of the arena.
Enemy healthbars no longer have missing pixels on either side.
A number of effects will no longer be cut short if Lore loses during The Barghest fight.
Shaders will no longer cause the screen to distort.
The collision model for weapons is now more precise.
Lore's really nervous face no longer has mouth movement.
Fixed some art inconsistencies on Lores Pajama Darksider talkies.
Fixed a doorway in Binders Trial.
Lore can now wear a hat in his pajamas.
Language selection buttons now have larger text.
Internal Changes
All of the games sprite sheets have been updated for improved performance.
All internal references to characters have been changed to ENUMs for easier tracking.
All FR language files have been updated to FRFR.
All RU language files have been updated to RURU.
All JP language files have been updated to JAJP.
There are now more debug tools for the Wiki Warriors.
It's time for the Steam Awards again and this year Heartbound is up for the Labor of Love award! Over the last several years we've worked every day on the game and we're not stopping until it's finally completed. If you haven't caught the development streams then that's a great way to check out the progress or reinforce that Thor really hasn't died and the game hasn't been abandoned. ːHBHeartː
Outside of that, it's been a heck of a ride getting to where we are today and it's all thanks to you. We wouldn't exist without your support and love as a community so thank you for being there for us and for making Heartbound possible.
The next major update is coming soon (or it's already out depending on when this post automatically launches) and we're really excited about it. Thank you again for everything you've done. You all rock so much.
A number of reviews lately have been saying that we've abandoned Heartbound or are no longer working on major updates. Not only is this not true we actually stream the development of Heartbound for 6-8 hours a day every day except for Sunday. This is my full time job and I literally don't do anything else. The last major update was around 3 months ago and we're almost done with the next one. In terms of completion Animus has 92% of the needed tasks finished for a full launch of the chapter.
Animus has a huge number of routes for Avocados storyline.
I've been working on hammering down every possible route through this section and adding dialog and cutscenes for all of it.
Avocados section splits off dramatically and can lead to the end of the chapter under some circumstances so it needed to be completed along every route at once.
The cutscenes in this section used a ton of new art, audio, and writing assets that needed to be built as they don't exist anywhere else in the game. Much like the mini-games for Fern/Rhode these assets are unique and used only for this scene.
Unlike other areas these all need to be completed together because they can all be reached based on different things done in Animus. Waiting on any of them would lead to a terrible experience and ruin stuff for a lot of people.
We've updated the scene between worlds.
Quite simply this cutscene didn't fit the narrative.
It now has a ton of dialog and interaction with The Artifact.
I also removed the chapter plates because they didn't look or feel right.
We've started releasing a ton of backstory content on Ko-Fi.
Patreon was taking 8% of every transaction and Ko-Fi takes 0%.
As a small studio this was a pretty big deal so we migrated over to them.
Our Ko-Fi stuff has tons of physical rewards and write ups for each character every month.
I hope that clears up some rumors or perceived lack of work ethic. All we do is work on Heartbound every day, all day, and we do so very publicly. Come hang on stream and watch it come to life!
Heartbound has now been fully updated to Game Maker Studio v2.3. This was a ton of work and really delayed adding new content to the game. Now that the conversion is finished we can get back on track.
Thanks for all the feedback and support. You guys rock. ːHBHeartː
Known Issues
Integrated graphics cards can sometimes cause incredibly wild graphical glitches.
We are working on a fix for this but it will take some time and new assets.
If you have this problem please reach out to Thor#5264 on Discord.
New Content
You can now have multiple conversations at the same time.
The keypad in The Tower can now be used with your numpad.
The keypad in The Tower now directly reflects a keyboard numpad.
A new achievement can now be obtained.
Avocado is now more emotionally consistent.
The fishing rod can now appear in Lores room.
A name has been added to the credits.
You can now finish Avocado's storyline in a terrible way.
Seriously, don't do this.
What are you doing?
Oh no...
Performance Upgrades
All compatability scripts from the GMS 1.4 > 2.3 conversion have been removed.
A memory leak in the lighting engine was fixed.
Duplicate text boxes under the primary textbox were removed.
A memory leak in rainbow text was fixed.
Compiling the game now takes seconds instead of 10+ minutes.
Bug Fixes
Gizmo no longer talks from very far away.
Lasers in Binders trial no longer appear on top of their targets.
Hitting accept and decline at the same time no longer causes a softlock on questions.
The drawing depth of hundreds of objects have been manually fixed.
A ton of text no longer escapes text boxes in many different languages.
Fern and Rhodes storyline no longer has a softlock.
All particle systems were rebuilt to fix an issue with GMS2.
Text no longer suffers from floating point errors caused by GMS2.
All animated sequences were rebuilt to fix an issue with GMS2.
All alarms have had their timings changed to fix an issue with GMS2.
Every environment was rebuilt to work in GMS2.
Shards now appear during the portal cutscene.
Rainbow text no longer appears red for a moment when skipped.
Breaking lightbulbs in the Dark World now show sparks above the shadow layer.
( and ) have been added to the Heartbound font.
Hundreds of broken textboxes in Spanish have been fixed.
Multiple crashes in Spanish have been fixed.
Camera flash in The Tower no longer displays under everything.
The standard mouse cursor no longer displays on Linux.
The answers for who to think about during Rhodes cutscene have been swapped.
The answers to Rhodes question about Fern were updated to be more direct.
A bird is no longer able to fly under Avocados house.
Footsteps in the dark no longer happen during a breakdown.
Avocados music now only fades out if you leave the bridge.
Lore no longer stands on top of the save point in Binders home.
The final screen in PTBR no longer says "Things".
Rotating text now takes longer before it begins.
OST
There are now 94 songs in the OST.
Bug Reporting
Please report any issues via DM on Discord to Thor#5264.
Include a screenshot, it makes it much easier to fix!
Upcoming Content
The rest of Animus (Chapter 3) is being actively developed.
Despite numerous engine bugs and a whole lot of lost sleep, Heartbound now works in GMS 2.3. For many of you this means that it now runs at 60fps with a VERY small CPU cost again. On my machine currently it's running at 1.4% CPU and around 150MB of memory.
Going forward this also gives us a ton of other rad things like Mac build coming back, console releases, etc. Stay tuned for that in the future.
That being said there is still a ton of work ahead of us to finish the full update. Right now, things work correctly for you but the environments on the editor side are a complete mess. We have to go through every room in the game and manually update it all. It's gonna be a bit and take a lot of long nights. Until then you may see weird layering issues in-game. Please report these to us so we can fix them!
Thankfully it's not difficult, just time consuming. We will get there and have it done as soon as possible.
While this is going on feel free to come ask questions on Discord or tune in to the Twitch development streams. Thanks for your patience and hope to see you there!
