Welcome to Issue #35 of The PixelCount Post, a periodically released update from Kynseed's team. In today's issue: Charlie adds a new addiction to his collection, Neal organizes tasks, Matthijs shares a 20 second snippet, and Matt enters into a new season.
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I have a new addiction to add to my addiction to cheese, yoghurts, Rocket League, and bubble baths. We received a bunch of assets for the first hub area, Rivermoor, and the next haven of Summerdown. At first I looked at the bewildering array of tiles and multiple variants of grass and foliage, and felt lost. These sprite sheets are like jigsaw puzzles, and for a newbie to 2D art like me, they can be mind boggling. However, once I started to use the scree and pieced together a few streams and ponds, it all clicked.

There is just something so relaxing yet energising about creating beautiful places, and you get lost in the process. Every blade of grass and sprig of heather is thought about. Every reed and lily pad is placed with all sorts of thoughts in mind. Is it easy to see? Does it make it too busy? Would this go here? Why is this here? Having an empty level is daunting but once a few things have been marked out and it starts to come together it is very enjoyable.

This used to be the case on Fable...I just wanted to get to the prettying stage. Having detail in your levels is a way of showing the players that you really poured a lot of love into it. I am no artist, and so anything I ever made look good is a testament to the artists and tools that allow me to slap stuff down and somehow get away with it.

I feel that is what made Fable so great and different - regions were a bit slapdash and higgeldy piggeldy. We want that same thing here. No RPGMaker tiled clones. Just organic, messy areas, full of life and nooks to explore.

For me, the world is what makes the game as much as story and characters and mechanics. We hope that Quill gives you as much satisfaction and adventure as the cherished land of Albion.







The week has gone by pretty fast, perhaps a consequence of a renewed focus with cogs turning and new exciting work under way! I think also three other things helped for me. 1) I did stop to reflect about what I was worried about at the moment and figure out what I could do to or what I should acknowledge as something out of my control (comparisons to past and an unknowable future). 2) I started streaming internally my work. 3) Putting together a task list to complete per day.

I think between them it helped me a lot to get more into a state of flow and be more conscientious in my work, realising how I could better it. The task list also showed how splitting up the larger tasks into less intimidating steps per day, combined with smaller ones, helped avoid the fatigue of working on the same thing too long.

It's interesting how I feel like this continues a cycle of rediscovering productive ways to work. In another few weeks/months I'll probably have forgotten these steps or find that once they became routine it no longer helps. There seems to be a constant requirement of either evolving or perhaps more importantly reminding oneself the actions that work best (as I do feel like my mind is very chaotic in flitting from one area to the next). Anyway, self-analysing aside, work has continued on the selling via 'stall feature' along with a few other improvements to the build as I go through bug reports and backlogs of work and art to import. I feel like I say it a lot, but it's still exciting to see the game shape up and slowly gain ground towards the intended vision!

In the further week since this was written, I had a few days off as a mini-break and have since then been reassembling myself again. I realised I'd gotten a bit stale in my habits outside work and that a shakeup was needed. I can already feel the benefit of doing so with new thoughts floating around and an improved drive around what needs doing. Aside from the usual build updates, I've been putting in a little time into some editor additions/improvements for Charlie. It's been a while since I've last worked on this but it has become sorely needed as the number of levels, and pieces to assemble them, increases. Getting that workflow faster will be a great help to keep the momentum going and leave time for iteration and all the other work to up the size and quality of this game.







Very recently (last night from when I'm writing this), we got to do something I think is really cool: make a little 20 second preview of an upcoming region and then post it on Twitter. It had the region's new assets, including music being shown off for the first time.

It was so early in development that I'm actually still working on that music now. But it also meant that I could see feedback really early on, accompanied by graphics from the location in the game it was written for. Since I am still working on the track, I can make use of that feedback immediately. It's a really cool way of engaging the community that I'd love to try more often!

The track has a bit of history by now actually. This is the fourth attempt at this track! Luckily that doesn't always happen to me, or I'd go slightly more insane than I already am. I'd love to brag that I have a perfect hit-rate in music, buuuut I don't. The thing that finally helped me get it right was Charlie telling me what real-life moor this region in the game is based on. It meant I could look up local folk music to that area and see what instruments were used. In addition to that, a video of folk music he shared solidified my ideas of what to try next. The result is what you hear previewed in that tweet.

Well, by now the track is at 2:20 minutes as of writing this. By the time you read this I hope to have it completed already. However, for the next couple of weeks I'm not going to be around! I'm going to Estonia to take a week long course on composing and conducting. But since I'm travelling by trailer, the journey there and back again will take a while also. It meant I had to try and anticipate on what music and sound assets would be needed in the next few weeks and deliver those as best I could before I go. Predicting things weeks in advance in games development is impossible though, so it's a guess at best. I hope that despite my absence nobody in the team will be waiting on assets from me.







It seems that everything comes and goes in seasons. The spring gives way to summer. A new hobby this week becomes next week's boredom. Life's happiness will be punctuated by sorrow. Today's good habits will trade places with tomorrow's old vices.

Here on the team, it seems that creative projects are no exception to that ebb and flow. At times, this project provides an ever present reminder that game development is occasionally unexciting. Usually this is due to working on necessary but relatively mundane tasks. A spreadsheet here, a bug fix there, a team call to attend, an email to write. But then suddenly the excitement sneaks up on us again, jumps out from behind a bush, and gives us a good slap. Such is the season we find ourselves in presently, because a lot of those mundane tasks have finally begun to culminate to an integral step in the game's development. In this case, that next step is adding monsters, attack animations, enemy AI, hit boxes, and brand new regions.

Combat is something that we've had planned since the very inception of the game's concept, long before we knew what to name the project or even ourselves. So the team has been anticipating this stage of development for quite some time. It all still has a long ways to go, but we're finally able to see visual evidence of combat manifesting itself within the game engine. It's just basic mechanics at the moment, but the combat systems will get refined and adjusted and mulled over many times. So much of a game's combat is in many ways intangible - it's more a feeling than anything. Either the combat exists in that sweet spot or it doesn't. So getting it just right will be an ongoing process, but the important thing is that this process has formally begun.

So now that we find ourselves in a period of exciting new content being developed, I get to start doing one of my favorite things: sharing it all. You've likely read about us talking about combat in prior issues of The Post, oftentimes with a certain level of vagueness, but we are now at the stage of things where we'll be able to start showing much of this new content in the weeks (and perhaps even days) ahead. Keep an eye towards Twitter, our forums, and possibly even Discord, where we'll be gradually revealing all manner of wild beasts and overgrown wilderness.

Welcome to Issue #34 of The PixelCount Post, a periodically released update from Kynseed's team. In today's issue: Charlie does world building, Neal goes running with swords, Matthijs is off drumming, and Matt makes feature highlight videos. Plus, Punch's puns!
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Well after last week's bump on the head (login problems and forgetfulness), I have finally got around to writing an update. I have been getting on with various design docs like the food and stamina system, combat and monster stuff, plus tidying up some older docs such as the world map.

Speaking of which, work has begun on the regions outside The Vale. The editor map now shows 3 havens and 3 hubs with 1 combat zone. That's pretty much half the world, although roughing out is only going to be done on the first hub and the Summerdown region initially. My favourite part of world building is actually naming places (and people). Used to love doing that on Fable. *sigh*

Sadly, this week has been hampered by the appalling heat. Being a pasty northerner, anything above 20 degrees melts me like an ice lolly up a dragons bum. I have no idea how that got up there. Perhaps he fell off a ladder onto it.

I feel the cogs are starting to fully turn again now and that the energy is returning to the team after the E3 lull. I have been getting in to Shadow of War, which was a tenner in Tesco on PS4, and am really enjoying it. It is definitely inspiring some ideas. So onwards and upwards!







Combat developed a bit further this week. There's a lot of bits still to pick away at. I mostly concentrated on the presentation stuff first so still have work to do to make it all editable ingame/editor. While setting up some 'run with swords' animations I did realise the setup for animations is a little clumsy right now. There's a lot of animations that have representations in 4 directions and each of them is set up independently. I could look at pushing them together into a bundle so that they can have some common properties and dial back a little on the manual setup that they require. On the other hand though, after doing that work (which I'd reckon to take at least a few hours), the difference noticeable ingame will ideally be none. It'll just be a little faster for setup and editing.

It's one of a few dilemmas I have when coding to expand or repeat actions previously taken. Which I guess comes down to: is it worth the effort? In this case, 'not worth the effort' is winning currently but perhaps I'll change my tune on the next new set that needs adding!

Other progress was made this week in getting up to date on art assets. There's still a fair few left but the basic pieces for the next set of levels has been imported, which will start our push out into new areas of the game (though it'll be a while before any of these is playable in the build). I've also started work on the player's ability to sell via a stall which should feature in the next build.

We've also been planning out the next few months work. There's a tricky balance at the moment in terms of what we can do to improve the current build vs pave the way to future releases (including eventually the full release build!) and it's been good to get it on paper and see the exciting stuff coming.







I'm not actually here. As I talked about last week, I'm abroad this week. Well, technically I'm writing this from the past when I'm still at home, just to make things more confusing.

Just before leaving I had some discussions on sword fighting sound effects that I'll be working on some more when I get back. For now I'm in Poland, doing some drumming! I'll predicatively say that Poland is amazing, but I look forward to seeing y'all again! You're such an awesome community that I can't but preemptively miss you. See you again soon!







My article this week will be short and sweet, like a tiny dog. The main reason for this is that I've found myself surprisingly swamped with a ton of tasks, but all of them ones I'm finding fun to work on.

One such example is that I'm making feature highlight videos. This involves playing the game and focusing specifically on a feature while capturing footage. The idea is to play the feature to its fullest conclusion - basically, go through everything that you can do for a feature in the current build. I then edit this together into a summarized 'highlight' video which will serve as a condensed video to show off the full gameplay journey of that feature.

However, these videos will be a bit different in that they're not being made to share publicly. They're for us to moll over and take notes on. The reason for this is that there's a surprising amount of little things you don't notice when actively playing the game, but when watching video of the game you suddenly find yourself noticing all sorts of little areas that need fixing.

That's just one of the things I'm working on this week. That said, I'm sure you're all due for one of my signature ramble-heavy articles sometime soon, so I'll endeavor to regale you with development tales in next week's issue.






This week, our friendly neighbourhood Fool, Punch, shares some of his best quips with us. So strap on your codpiece, grab your balls, and get ready to juggle your funny bone with these creamy crackers...


ᅠᅠᅠThey say a good invisible man is hard to find.


ᅠᅠᅠAfter my sword practice against straw dummies I hit the hay.


ᅠᅠᅠI had a hobby-horse.
ᅠᅠᅠHe loved board games, sewing and collecting butterflies.


ᅠᅠᅠThe best quality gunpowder you can’t hold a candle to.


ᅠᅠᅠI was going to open the world’s smallest tavern.
ᅠᅠᅠWell that was my inn-tent.


ᅠᅠᅠMy wife had a face that launched a thousand ships.
ᅠᅠᅠIt is shaped like a bottle.


ᅠᅠᅠAt the new pet protection home there isn’t room to swing a cat.


ᅠᅠᅠWhy do princesses sleep well?
ᅠᅠᅠBecause they always have a good knight in bed.


ᅠᅠᅠWhat do you call a wandering herb trader?
ᅠᅠᅠA thyme traveller.


ᅠᅠᅠWhat is a banshees favourite dessert?
ᅠᅠᅠIce cream.

Welcome to Issue #33 of The PixelCount Post, a periodically released update from Kynseed's team. In today's issue: Charlie bumps his head, Neal kills his first monster in the game, Matthijs heads to Poland, and Matt takes count of his accounts.
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We usually plan The Post ahead,
So why was this week's late and unread?
Well Charlie bumped his noggin,
And forgot his website login,
So Matt had to write this instead.







Following on from last week where I looked into NPC debugging, I started setting up a more general debug log whenever the game is played. This records relevant actions from the game in an effort to better understand what exactly led to a given situation. There's a difficult balance to be had from overload of too much info and too little either. So far I've tried to set the basics in place to cover when the player changes level or picks something up or when shops open or what NPC's are up to.

I'm also looking to make log viewer filter events based on either category or perhaps certain ID's that pop up (like a level/object/NPC). The hope is that this will help uncover reproduction steps for certain bugs which are otherwise hard to figure out. (Often it's hard to remember exactly what you may have done prior to a bug occurring because you aren't typically expecting it to happen and some connected elements may not be visible).

Apart from the debug log and pushing out the new build, I've started work on combat. It'll be a while before this is playable in the build as it is so early in development. First off is melee combat, where we've got some animations for the player and enemy to use. It took a bit of fiddling to get these setup, as I dusted off the cobwebs of code from the first few weeks of development (around May 2016 which is when combat was last looked at!). That code is not particularly pretty and is likely going to go through a few rounds of tidying and perhaps even an overhaul.

After a day's work or so, the basics were there but it really didn't feel quite right. After another day I added hit effects, removed some debug, and made them survive more than one hit. Now it's already way better. Next up will be starting to pull out values from the code that can be edited ingame/editor for quick changes. While this work goes on I'll be splitting time a bit to carry on with other work and keep the builds flowing.







So the entertainment system for the tavern is finally in the game! It's only the first iteration and I'm really hoping for lots of feedback on it from you all. Currently each verse of a song repeats identically to the last, except for lyrics. If I want there to be musical differences between the verses I'll need to include a music file for each unique-sounding verse. This wouldn't only make the game take up more storage space but it also makes the music system a little more complex. If verses also had different lengths, well that'd be a can of worms, I reckon. But I do love the idea of adding lots of music to the entertainment system.

In other news, I'm in the final stages of tracks for two places that aren't even in the game yet at this point and they couldn't be more different from one another. One is a really creepy one, the other a funny 'beer fest' type of track. I worked on them simultaneously, which I felt was a great way of keeping creativity going. If I got stuck on the one track, I'd continue with the other. I really like working in that way.

Meanwhile, I also worked on a new jingle for when you gain a new skill. The one currently in the game, which you can hear when Twig teaches you to hook objects with your fishing hook, is only placeholder. My previous attempt at it was too 'big', involving the entire orchestra. So I toned it down quite a bit and gave the guitar a more prominent role. This is more in keeping with the rest of Kynseed's sounds and music - the guitar plays such a pivotal role. I do occasionally leave it behind though, such as in the creepy track I talked about earlier. It's a subtle way of saying 'you're not in Kansas anymore', as you're away from the safety of your home. I think it's a neat example of musically describing something by omittance.

Starting next week I'll be abroad, so you may not see anything from me in the next issue. Don't panic, I'll return! I just have to annoy some Polish people with my drumming...







Here at Chateau Matt, which resides across the majestic but comically small pond next to Castle PixelCount, I've been busy getting our accounts in order. It's a bit surprising how many accounts a small indie venture like ours ends up needing. Not just social media accounts, but various email accounts and accounts for a slew of tools or services. At last count, I think we've got over 40 accounts in total.

These all require managing and organizing in some way which, if it sounds boring, you'd be right. But it's part of my semi-regular account Spring cleaning (he says while in Summer) where I verify and update the information on all these accounts and take inventory of everywhere we are on the vast internet. The more exciting part of this work is that the next step is to start updating various social accounts like our Discord, forums, and even Twitter to some degree. (Among others.)

This'll include various bits and bobs that users themselves will get to see, most of which I'll bore you all with in a future update. All in all, this has been one of those weeks where I'm doing the less than glamorous production work, but important work nonetheless. I'll see you all again next week I'm sure, probably with some interesting updates to share!

Welcome to Issue #32 of The PixelCount Post, a periodically released update from Kynseed's team. In today's issue: Charlie tries his hand at stand up, Neal stalks some NPC's, Matthijs unearths new wooden sounds, and Matt recovers from his E3 antics.
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A week off during E3 is probably what the team needed, but in some ways made things harder. The cogs need to start turning and the cobwebs need dusting away from the darker corners of PixelCount Castle.

I found the show to be pretty dull, with many pretty games but nothing that made me squeal like an excited piglet. The lull gave me time to get my quill out and write some terrible one liner jokes for the Juggler and songs for the Bard. I have no idea how stand up comedians get so much material that is actually good - it's tough!

I also had chance to do more reference research for our folklorish cast of monsters. The first creature animations appeared and combat is about to begin its tentative first steps, so it is going to be an exciting time. For me, this coming week sees us finally expand away from The Vale, although this won't be exposed to players for a little while yet. The adventure begins again!







Time flies with two weeks since the last Post! The first being the experimental E3 week, which didn't exactly play out as planned but still had benefits. Perhaps because of being more tired than expected from the constant build pressure (mostly probably a self-induced pressure) plus a slow start on the first few days of the week (watching the conferences and checking out all the pretty but not particularly inspiring games) meant things didn't progress much on my side.

Some progress was made behind the scenes on tools to aid the import process but a lot of the ambitions I had going into the week didn't get much further than thoughts. I did end up feeling renewed for the start of this week though and that time away has helped change perspectives a bit and led to digging into some areas that had previously been a struggle to start on.

Much of the work this week has been around bugs, in particular for the NPC's in the village and expanding on the tavern entertainment which will be the main new feature for the next build. I think the key thing which has helped with bugs is looking into the debug tools for understanding what the NPC's do.

There's still more work to do on them but it feels a lot easier to follow their actions with a combination of an overview that shows their position, current order, and a way to focus on one at a time only running their 'script' with the camera following them. These tools were mostly in there before, but thanks to perhaps a step back and change of perspective I actually looked into ways to make them better, providing a more friction-free experience. I think if I'd looked at the bugs before, I probably would have been too focused on trying to make the NPC's just work and solve the immediate problem without thinking of the benefits that debug tools have. I've started looking to apply that in a few other areas as well, which I'm excited to see the advantages that having a robust system will have!







North of The Vale there lies a forest. This forest, I have not yet seen. Currently there is no concept art for it. I have only had it described to me. I know what the player will be doing once they get there, and I've seen some of the excellent work being done on whatever it is that dwells within said forest.

Based on these things, and some references of other music, I set out to create the forest's music. Subsequently, I got it wrong...

But that's ok. Rewrites are a fact of life for a composer. One difficulty I often run into during this process is that if I get linked music as reference,
I have to still figure out what aspect of that reference music it is that they want me to pick out. In this case, there was talk of faerie-tale elements. But what I thought that probably meant was a wondrous atmosphere, especially since the trees were described as pretty. However, what I was meant to pick out was a much more scary version of faery tales.

So, back to the drawing board I went. And this time I got it right! The atmosphere is much creepier now. And there is a mysterious sound of tapping on the trees, somewhere deep in the forest. I had a percussive element in my collection of samples that happens to be the sound of tapping against redwood trees. Within the musical 'frame' I've set for it, the sound is quite creepy indeed.

It was a happy accident, really. I just happened to come across the samples in my collection of percussion while trying things out, and it worked.
At current, the track is still in an early stage and much more work needs to be done on it. But now that I know I've got the vibe right, the rest will go smoothly I suspect.

What's not so smooth is what my portion of our collective HDD storage looks like. Over time I've made a mess of it, and I need to restructure it. But I never take the time. Perhaps next week I can finally take it off my to-do list. Along with a few other items that have gotten stuck on there for too long.







As anyone who's ever attended a con can tell you, the week after a con is often spent recovering from the week of the con itself. Such is the way its always been each year at E3. I spend an entire week (if not more) making preparations for E3 logistics, then it's the entire week of E3 itself, and then the week after is typically spent trying to catch one's breath and recalibrate back to a work routine.

Here on the team side of things, we anticipated that E3 would be a distraction heavy week and that with me attending we wouldn't be operating as efficiently as normal. So we took it as an opportunity for everyone to work on smaller experimental things that we've simply not had time to tend to in prior weeks/months. As Neal mentioned above, some of that experimentation is for things like refining image importing systems (the process of adding new art assets and tiles into the game). This is the sort of change that is invisible to the player and so it's often hard to legitimize spending time on it, but for Neal it's a huge part of his workflow. Making such systems more efficient will save ample time in the long run.

Meanwhile, as the team was busy recharging and experimenting, I was off on various E3 related adventures. One of these adventures even included a roundtable discussion with Valve, a rare opportunity indeed. It was a small group, so we had the unique chance to ask Valve about various things and to share with them our thoughts and feedback on the Steam platform. At one moment during the roundtable, the conversation began to trend towards community and how to properly support it.

Apparently I've begun to get a reputation about constantly yammering about game communities, as one of the Valve employees specifically asked me about my 'community strategy' with Kynseed. In typical fashion, I had no shortage of opinions to offer on the subject. It was definitely nice to have the chance to talk directly to our proverbial Valve overlords about such things.

I'll perhaps share some of the interesting community discussions in the next issue of The Post, lest this week's article becomes an even bigger wall of text.

As for the games themselves, nothing particularly grabbed my attention this year - but that's fine. Every now and then there'll be a lull year for E3, where exciting things have already released but new exciting things aren't yet announced. As such, I suspect that next year's E3 may have some surprises up its sleeve.

As for this last week, my focus has been on getting back into the groove of my work routines as well as streamlining some of our support channels to make it easier for the team to use. As our community grows in size, we'll get more and more support messages across all our platforms (Twitter, email, Steam, Discord, etc.). Making sure we can keep it all organized and efficient is an unexciting but important task. Beyond that, I've also been spending a little time capturing game footage of various features. We've found that seeing little snippets of the game's core features in video form makes it much easier for us to notice little things that need to be changed or fixed.

This upcoming week will thankfully be a return to normalcy for the team. As Charlie mentioned, we're also starting to take our first steps beyond The Vale. Seeing the art come in for all this has been rather exciting, especially as it's so easy to forget that The Vale is just a small portion of the game's (much) larger world. Plus, combat is now within the team's crosshairs and we're looking forward to showing our progress on all this once it's ready. Stay tuned!

Welcome to Issue #31 of The PixelCount Post, a periodically released update from Kynseed's team. In today's issue: Charlie discusses making new monsters, Neal works on cooking mechanics, Matthijs defines each haven's sound, and Matt waxes poetic about E3.
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This week saw the first pixel concepts of our first monster type appear. These are the basic 'filler' creature that are the most populous. I had to write up a brief about them to Gary, our character artist, who came back pretty quickly with a few variants.

It was funny as I privately messaged him that we didn't want anything green / orc-like for them, but didn't see he had already posted them all in green. I am very keen to avoid high fantasy and anything remotely Warhammer, so one set of concepts were too goblin-like and were dismissed. However, the other set were very cool and one of them was a light grey-blue, which looked nice. We decided to do colour variants based on melee grunts, ranged grunts, and the larger elders who command them.

The creatures are slightly cute and a little comical (think Hobbes in Fable), so we will look to get concepts of the more dangerous folklore type monsters before we show them. Combat will be fairly simple in the easiest forest, but should ramp up massively for the harder places, making prepping all the more important. Some of the monsters are going to have certain criteria before appearing, so such knowledge will be essential - basically a cross between Monster Hunter and Witcher 3, but with a much smaller budget.

Another thing we are keen on is avoiding the usual array on creature types...so there will be no zombies / skeletons / giant spiders / orcs / high fantasy type trolls / flying eyeballs / lizardmen / big rats, etc. A refresh of the RPG is in order...begone treasure chests, health bars above heads, XP as we know it, traditional leveling, classes, instant health potions, chopping down trees for wood, magic spells, and so on.

It is a risky thing to take player's away from the usual crutches of the genre, but we feel it is necessary to realise our vision and try something a little bit different.







This week seemed a slower week though it was quite packed with work on the new build released 8th June (and then a little more was fixed the morning after for a crash and some cases of NPC's going missing!). Most of the time was spent working on the cooking and baking minigames, which are coming along quite nicely. The art is all in place and the flow has been adjusted to include a preparation step that feels a bit more natural. They do need a second pass in terms of refining the balance and presentation but already feel a more solid addition to the experience.

Other work included some fixes to mouse input problems which appeared on some monitors displaying at 4k @ 30hz. Not having one of these displays I was confused on the cause but eventually tracked it down to some screens accepting input during the draw phase of the game. By doing this (at 30 frames per second while the update runs at 60fps) it was missing the detection of mouse clicks. To solve this, I've made it so the draw detects mouse position over the different boxes but the clicking is now done in the update loop. It was good to finally understand the problem as it is something that has been frustrating Charlie in the editor too!

Another activity this week was our first Dev Pub backer development stream! It was the first time of live streaming for me and I found it a nice and interesting experience. It's odd watching the stream at the same time and led to me developing short term memory loss where I couldn't remember what I'd just said, though I hear that it gets better with practice! I'm keen to try doing some streaming in the future where I'll just be doing my usual work and see how that goes. With our company all working remotely there isn't the opportunity for dropping by other's desks, so it'll be interesting to see how a virtual setup for that might work out and lead perhaps to some extra ideas or more collaborative work.

With E3 next week we've decided to have an experiment and divert from normal build update work. The plan is to spend the time working on planning, behind the scenes code, and other activities that'll be beneficial in the long run for the game. I'm excited to see how it goes as it might offer a solution to this feeling of being somewhat trapped into a pattern of never-ending build updates which is very focused on the short term gains. There's definite progress being made week to week, but there's a tendency to not have the time to fix issues or improve workflow that might make efficiency that much better in the months to come. If successful, we might plan to do a cycle of 3-4 builds and then have another experimental week to see if we can figure out a good rhythm to development.







While The Vale has a lot of music in it already, it's only a relatively small part of the complete game world we strive to create for this game. And recently I got to see a map for all the other areas that we want to make. Believe me, we have lots of work left to do! But I also look at that map from a different perspective.

To me each area has its own culture and should have its own 'sound'. This means that I have to come up with ways to musically represent those different cultures for each haven in the game, of which The Vale is only one. The work has now started to determine the musical identity of the next havens. This is a balancing act between keeping an identifiable 'Kynseed' sound throughout all of them, and yet making each culture distinct enough to have its own sub-identity as well. We want you to feel the differences, yes, but not to the extent where it feels you're playing a whole different game.

To give you an example, a place called Poppyhill is a town of hard-working people who are known for their beer. For their music, I've drawn inspiration of German beer fests. But I'm still using the same orchestral 'backbone' to build that style on top of. I'm just adding some unique instruments to that backbone to give it its unique identity. In this case, the additions are instruments like accordions, which also feature in the mummer music you'll be able to see in the tavern later in development. I first tried a very different direction for Poppyhill, with banjo and marimba, which I had based on some of the concept art for their houses. But it didn't pan out. I have to keep in mind that there are plenty of other cultures left in the game that'll need their own musical identity, so I can't afford to use too many things from my bag of tricks on just one of them, lest I run out of unique things for the other ones.

Meanwhile, work on sound effects also keeps on going, which recently meant I had to make a new sound for when you first pick up an item. My first attempt was a completely new sound, but it didn't quite work. So for my second attempt, I used the basic sound of the normal pickup to construct a new melody. This way the two feel a bit more linked to one another. You'll now be able to hear this new sound in the latest build. As always, all your feedback is crucial in knowing we got it right. So by all means, give us your feedback!







For me, this was certainly a week full of preparation. Some of this was preparing for the developer stream, but there was also some pre-E3 planning to do as well. Every year I seem to always forget how far out the E3 craziness begins. The convention itself is only on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday of next week. But there's other events (press conferences and such) starting as early as Saturday. And even a week before that is often filled with registering for events and contacting people to coordinate various things.

Still, it's the sort of craziness that I find exhilarating. Before I lived in LA, I was a mere visitor in this city, attending my very first E3 in 2013. I've attended each E3 since then (making this year's my 5th in a row!) and there was always something magical about visiting LA in the summer to attend one of the largest game events put on. So whenever another E3 comes 'round, it always puts me back in those shoes: summer in LA, bright eyed about the games industry, hanging around downtown, and meeting many people I respect and look up to.

I'm still bright eyed, but now I live just a few blocks from E3. And yet, during E3 week I always feel like I'm from out of town again, seeing everything as if seeing it for the first time. So all that to say, I love the E3 craziness. I know it's a somewhat overinflated gaudy mess at times, but I can't help but find its garishness oddly charming.

As for what I'll be doing at E3, it won't be anything too terribly exciting I'm afraid. We had considered getting a small booth somewhere (probably over in IndieCade), but as anyone who's worked at Lionhead can tell you, you'd be amazed at how much a distraction making an E3-ready build can be. Typically these builds don't offer much in terms of meaningful development. Plus, the build simply isn't at a state where we think it's worth spending the time and money on a booth. But perhaps next year!

That said, I'll still be at E3 meeting with various folks (Valve, some occasional press perhaps, etc.) as well as taking some time to actually enjoy the event and play some games even! If any of you lovely Seedlings are also in attendance to E3 and want to say hello, send me a message on here, Discord, or Twitter! I also plan to personally give a full walkaround tour of the entire E3 convention center (both outside and in) over on my Twitch channel, so be sure to follow and enable notifications if that's something you'd be into.

See you all on the other side!

Welcome to Issue #30 of The PixelCount Post, a periodically released update from Kynseed's team. In today's issue: we discuss tons of region layout changes, coding tavern performers and building roofs, bard music, and testing the set up for upcoming developers streams.
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Something hit me earlier this week.

No, it was not a custard pie thrown by an irate baker. Nor a dagger by some shady assassin hired by a rival games company.

I was walking through Candlewych (in the game, not reality), when a thought whacked me in the face and left me with a bloodied imagination. "This layout is awful!" I said aloud, to nobody in particular. Yep, I always had dark thoughts towards the main village layout, but in the cold light of that day, I woke up and decided to do something about it.

So, mouse in hand (not a real one), I started to pull apart the region. It turns out that thousands of tiles, objects (those hand placed flowers and grass tufts remember?), collisions, markers, and group sections, take a lot of time and effort to move around.

Yet my creative energies would not let me rest, and like Dr Frankenstein I pulled the lever on my new monster (which he quite enjoyed). So what was wrong and what did I improve?

Well, here is my list of wrongdoings...

• Festival Green was a bad route and hidden away.
  
• The Goddess statue in the centre stood out from its surroundings and wasn't bedded in.
  
• The Apothecary was hard to find and awkward to get to.
  
• Some gardens were way too small.
  
• Icabod Moon lived away from the Goods Store.
  
• The west side run to Candlewych West was too long and dull.
  
• The main roads were too narrow.
  
• There were numerous navigation issues

So how did I fix all this?

• Blacksmith moved to where Toby Juggs house was.
  
• Toby and Mel Jugg's house moved to where Lucy Arrows lived.
  
• Lucy Arrows moved to North Gate, where she gained a new purpose.
  
• Apothecary moved to where the blacksmith's and John Bows' house were.
  
• John Bows moved to Cuckoo Wood, with a new purpose and personality.
  
• Icabod's house moved under his shop.
  
• Goddess statue moved and aligned with the henge below it to make it look purposeful and consistent.
  
• The waterfall area moved closer in to the main path.
  
• Road west shortened greatly.
  
• Road to festival green runs directly from a new village centre and is lined by bunting and poles (and double width path).
  
• Little abandoned hut moved to where Icabod's house was and area roughed up.

A new prettying pass was done and as much fixed up as possible before Neal goes in and sorts out the sim markers and layering on the moved houses. We hope you enjoy this new layout. And if you don't like it? Well, I have an assassin ready with custard pies...











Another quick week goes by! With the build update out on Tuesday, there was some last minute work done both that day and Monday to fix a few more issues and improve an existing feature. This left a shorter week 'til the next update which has mostly been about sketching out some upcoming features and improvements.

One of the worked on features is the bard for the tavern entertainment - I've setup a script system to play verses of music with accompanying text. This is coming along nicely, although there are some issues to resolve with the audio which might not get resolved by the next update (leading to a slight dilemma of whether it is worth still including or not 'til completely ready - though I am leaning to just including it as it shows the way features get 'sketched' and built up over weeks/months).

Next up is a first test for roofs on buildings. This is still very early days and probably won't go live in the build yet as it needs some fine tuning in terms of trigger areas where the roof disappears along with changing all the houses to work in this manner! The final one which I've not started yet is cooking, which we've got some new assets for as well as a change in design to make it more of a minigame. In addition to that, there's improvements and presentation work and Charlie's reorg of the village to work on and NPC issues!

There's definitely a lot going on and I've been finding it important to try and figure out ways to use my time efficiently and get focused where possible. One thing that seems to have helped is when I wake up in the morning I've been writing some notes about what I want to work on. This seems to be a nice way to get my mind directed towards the right things early on in the day! The third day I did this actually led to me thinking up a solution to a longstanding art importing problem, which I'm eager to get in when time allows!

I've mentioned before about the feeling of jinxes and curses when it comes to predicting work (even within the space of the next day) and that still seems to be the way. In part, I think it's the time lapse between being motivated to do something and then the relative urge at that future point (which might prove it wasn't the best thing to work on or that there is some other activity in need of time or that the time something takes is never predictable). So no real answers here. Still trying to figure this out but I think the one thing I have been finding is the way to give something its best shot is to clear the path of worries and other tasks to provide time to get focused and do your best in the circumstances.







I get to do bard music! It's so much fun to make bard songs! Charlie is writing the lyrics, and I write the music to them. Of course, actually making it work as intended in the game is not as easy as it sounds...

You see, we decided early on that there wouldn't be voice recordings in the main gameplay. All sound produced by NPCs' throats are text based. (So far with the exception of the yawn.) This includes the bard. So that gives us a problem to solve: We have to match text to the timings of the music. Or rather, our resident genius Neal has to match text to the timings of the music, as he has to code it all.

Meanwhile, I am battling some intense heat in my workspace. The last couple of days, the temperature in here soared to 104 degrees Fahrenheit at times! Today it was luckily a little less than that. (96 degrees Fahrenheit.) So it's time to bring out the trusty laptop again and work from that in a colder environment. My laptop doesn't quite have the same power as my main PC does though, but since I'm working on bard songs, which only need 1 or 2 instruments, that's ok.

I have yet to get the music right for the juggler we intend to include. I've made a few drafts for it, but none of them were quite right yet. The mummer track is pretty much done. Soon there'll be plenty to see in the tavern, which has been rather empty so far. That just won't do! Let there be music and dancing! I hope I get to make loads of tavern music, as I'm having a grand time with it!







Peace and order has returned to my building this week. (As you may have read in last week's issue, alarms were going off for days in building.)

This meant I was able to not only get caught up on sleep (a rarity for me), but it also meant I had a relatively normal work week for once! The week began with getting together with Charlie and Neal to test our streaming setups. The tricky part about all this is that I want to be able to switch between each team member's desktops mid-stream. Most streams only show one user's screen, but in ours we're needing to account for up to three - and maybe more depending!

There's a few ways this can be done, one of which includes each team member sending their desktop stream to a server that we've set up. That server then sends the feeds to my end and I could then switch between each desktop as I like...which would then get sent onward to the actual stream that the viewers can see.

The problem I ran into with this was that it'd introduce considerable delay between everyone's stream and it'd make conversation between us difficult due to reacting to things out of sync. (And the delay would end up being even worse for the viewers!)

So I decided that the best thing to do would be to find another service's screensharing that was reliable enough that I could then 'capture' using my broadcast software and output to the stream that the audience sees. As it turns out, Discord fit the bill rather nicely! There's still a bit more testing that I want to do (mainly with audio setup) but the initial groundwork is laid. This'll at least get us by for the first stream and I'll no doubt perfect our setup further as we go along.

In addition to testing stream setups, I also put together an FAQ to help answer a number of common questions that we get. I also plastered links to the FAQ around the site to help point people in its direction. I also did some minor updates to our Piggy Backer page to better clarify various rewards and how/when they'll be sent out.

Lastly, I put together one of our formal Development Updates. In fact, it got posted mere hours ago! Not everyone reads each lovely edition of The PixelCount Post, so it's still important that we do these larger flashier updates every once in a while.

Next week we'll be doing our first stream for Dev Pub members who backed at the Land Shaper tiers and higher. In addition to this, I'm going to be finally catching up with Matthijs on a good deal of audio work that I've been getting seriously behind on! I'll also be running support where I can to assist Charlie and Neal with testing and brainstorming the new content that we're getting around to adding in the near future (some of which is briefly talked about in the Development Update from earlier today).

It's definitely nice to be getting into a good rhythm with the build updates and with overall productivity. Next week is looking to be a pretty interesting one for sure. And then, the week after that...I'll be at E3...

*gasp*

Oh, hello.

Good to see you again. Always nice to have another visit from you. Are you here to tell us that you're updating your privacy policy? Because the last person who did that was thrown into the dungeon.

No? Oh, good.

In that case, welcome back. As I'm sure you recall, last month saw a huge rush of visitors and it was a rather busy time indeed. But it's nice to once again be able to sit and talk over some drinks.

When we opened the gates of The Vale a month ago, we couldn't have imagined that so many people would come to visit this world that we built, unfinished though it may be. There were so many people visiting us here at the castle that our servers kept crashing into each other, spilling all manner of food and drink on the floor.

In the weeks since this initial rush, we've been hard at work refining Kynseed and its world. Systems were developed further, shoe polish was rigorously applied, and a number of bugs that were found have been relocated to a bug paradise where they may enjoy a life of retirement. (We hear it's a lovely place run by its caretaker, M. S. Bob.)

In addition to all that, we've also begun working on new sights and sounds that we'll be adding into the world at some point in the near future. So, as has become tradition by now, please rest a spell with us and we'll catch you up on everything.









Last month was a very intense time for the PixelCount team. Perhaps you read of some of this already in The PixelCount Post, our weekly development periodical. We try to always keep our expectations very reserved on how much interest Kynseed will get during its development, so it was all rather unexpected when so many people showed up during the release of that initial backer build on April 29th.

We were completely taken by surprise (in a good way) and it led to some incredibly busy days for the team. There were streams to watch, questions to answer, bugs to help with, and code to update. It was perhaps the busiest we've ever been on this project, but in many ways it was a big boost of encouragement for us to see such interest for this peculiar little game we're making.

Because the backer build of the game is still unrefined, we've intentionally not gone out of our way to market Kynseed more than is necessary. We're a bit weird in that we don't really do the traditional marketing approach. Instead, we just focus on making the best game we can, hang out with our community while we do it, and then let things organically take shape from there. Basically, we don't want the marketing to outpace the quality of the game, a mistake that we sometimes feel other games are tempted to make.

You may be thinking to yourself, "Hey, I'm on to you nutters. You do plenty of marketing. What do you call this development update, huh!?" Yes, it's perfectly true. We are fan of writing wordy updates. But we'd say that there's a big difference between 'marketing' verses 'building a community'. Something that we sometimes see happen in game dev is thinking that marketing and community are the same thing. But to us, they're wildly different.

All that to say, despite not focusing too much on the marketing, we've been very humbled by all the interest received thus far. We've even been surprised to suddenly find ourselves show up in a magazine or two, which was definitely a bit wild for us to see. Of course, this meant that more than ever we wanted to polish up the game and start refining things. So over the last month we've been incredibly busy pushing out as many updates as we reasonably could. More on that below!




We've had 5 build updates in the last month. Many of the changes seen in these are thanks to all of you helping us find problems and little things to fix.

World Builder Charlie has had no shortage of tasks, especially given how many visitors the world was receiving. Some visitors were reporting divine behavior, such as walking on water. Thankfully, Charlie has now sorted out many of the water edges that visitors could slip past. Because, as we all know, you don't learn to swim until the sequel.

Master Linguist Neal has been sorting through many reports of bug sightings as well as feedback in general. Every day he improves things little by little as he works tirelessly to improve the engine. Well, perhaps 'tirelessly' isn't accurate, because every team meeting on Skype starts off with a yawn from Neal - though perhaps Matt's sultry voice is to blame.

Speaking of, High Oracle Matt ran out of midnight oil this month. He dispatched an order for replenishment and now his stockpiles runneth over once more. In addition to his oil crisis, he's been most busy with answering questions and processing new guests of The Vale as well as writing up many questions and answers.

To see a long list of everything that we've done in the last month, feel free to jump on over to our build change log and check it all out. But for a more summarized look at things, the list below should hopefully suffice:

• Save games made more reliable
  
• A first pass feature for quick travelling
  
• Keyboard and mouse control improvements
  
• Work on the blacksmith minigame presentation
  
• Monuments now have a small purpose in unveiling family info
  
• New animations (such as for when the player holds certain objects)
  
• Day 13 adjustments to make finding the way easier
  
• UI improvements
  
• Tons of crash and bug fixes

Trust us though, that barely scratches the surface of everything done in the last month. We definitely encourage you to check out the full list if change logs are the sorta thing you're into.



Now that many of the higher priority bugs and crashes have been fixed in the first month of the backer build, we'll be able to start sneaking in some more content here and there. We've been getting a fair bit of new art in lately and we're hoping to spend some time very soon in getting much of it added. Below is a short list of a few things on the immediate horizon, followed by some lovely images of more things to come.

• Revamp of cooking along with baking setup
  
• Some early building roof tests
  
• Initial combat tests
  
• First pass of tavern entertainment
  
• Some decent sized region improvements and changes

Ah, yes. The developer streams for Dev Pub patrons who backed at the Land Shaper tiers or higher. We know that you've all been eagerly awaiting news of this. These past few weeks we've been busy testing our streaming setup among the team and we're happy to report that we're now ready to do our very first developer stream!

Right now our plan is to do Thursday, June 7th at 11am PST/2pm EST/7pm BST. (Phew, that's a lot of acronyms.) Bear in mind that this first stream will be a bit loosey goosey as we get familiar with our streaming setup and as we find out what you viewers are most interested in seeing.

You won't get to see our lovely mugs, but you will get to see live feeds of our screens and hear us talk. This means we'll be able to play through the game to talk through things with you, you'll get to see the editor tools that we use to build the game, and you'll even get to see the actual code that's running everything. In addition to this, we'll be chatting with you all and answering any questions you may have.

This will be the first of many streams, so some of the fun of this first go is finding out what sort of things you'd like us to discuss and show. And, of course, if anyone's keen on getting access to these just feel free to take a gander at our Piggy Backer page. We look forward to seeing you there soon!









What a crazy month it's been, but a very satisfying one at that. Having so many new faces come to look at what we've been working on has been amazing to see and it's filled us with even more drive to put as much heart into this project as we can.

If you find your heart growing fonder for us on a weekly basis, be sure to visit our news page to read The PixelCount Post, a weekly developer update that we've been running for many months now.

Also, we've been getting a great deal of carrier pigs arriving at our castle gates each day asking questions about various things. To relieve the burden on our poor piggies, we've taken the liberty of posting a detailed FAQ in the town square. If you have any burning questions, we first ask that you douse them in water using the FAQ.

Thank you again for paying us a visit. It's always nice to hear your knock on our door and I'm sure we'll see each other again very soon.

Love,
PixelCount

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Welcome to Issue #29 of The PixelCount Post, a periodically released update from Kynseed's team. In today's issue: we discuss new game mechanics for cooking, audio memory leaks getting fixed, a new region's music, and Matt being saved by Judge Dredd.
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This week I have been looking at getting some design docs updated and features filled out, like a large pie.

One of the upcoming features we need to get going on (the list is very long) is the cooking system, plus how food works.
There are two ways to cook in Kynseed. Firstly, a cooking pot where you can make stews and soups, as well as a baking oven for pies, bread, and cakes. Each one has its own UI and 'minigame'.

I got together with environment artist Matt and we developed some ideas for both, building on the original idea. However, we hit a roadblock. We tried to think of a word to describe the different amounts of time ingredients take to cook, the ease at which the heat affects them if you will. Heat resistance? Robustness? Suggestions on a postcard please!

As for the food system: food will have an amount it fills you, a speed at which it fills you, a rate of burn off, and other buffs. It will be important to get a good breakfast or meal, but not to overeat (this can be drained off by visiting a toilet). If you are too full or too empty, it affects your speed and resistance to damage. We don't want the player to be constantly worrying about their food bar, but we want to make it so player's enjoy prepping and work out the best things to snack on or cook. It adds to the roleplaying aspect and gives a use for all those ingredients.

And you can sell anything tasty you don't fancy eating, of course. Is your bread the best thing since sliced...er...bread? Can your cakes cut it? Do your sausages come up to mustard? We look forward to baking with you soon!







This week went by quite quickly! I did manage to progress and perhaps fix one of the longterm issues to do with audio. It was one that had gone unnoticed until the backer build started, where slowly over time the SFX would corrupt with distortions. Initially I was reluctant to look into it because it was an issue that showed after a few hours and as such difficult to know the factors that might lead to it and where the problem might lie. When time was available though, I looked into it and found that by repeating the same sound every frame for about 2 minutes that it would cause the issue. After doing so, I started researching to figure out if others had encountered issues and where the issue might lie.

The default assumption I had was that it was probably in the MonoGame framework itself, so I prepared to get the source code and build that and start to step into the unknown (code that I hadn't written and wasn't all familiar with outside the calling functions!). This didn't turn out to be that easy partly because it seems I had an unusual PC setup and so it was correctly generating the projects and then there were all the dependencies to get to...

So I went back to my side of the code to see if there was anything there. It was then I made the discovery that I had been creating instances everywhere... To get a little more technical: in C#, typically memory management is handled automatically and when an item is no longer referenced and used the next garbage collect will clean it up. These instances though were a mystery box of code from MonoGame that could be doing anything and it turned out was likely creating unmanaged memory, leading to this memory leak over time. So after making sure to dispose of the instances when they were done playing, it just started working - after 4 minutes playing the same sound there was no sign of the corruption!

I think this lead to a few learnings for myself:

1) I need to know a bit more about what is going on behind the scenes in MonoGame. It's interesting to me that I could manage to have coded this game for two years and not have known this! I think the reason is in part that the setup in this game is a little different to the usual way it is handled. Other source code examples I've seen use the content pipeline more heavily for audio, whereas I have resisted this so far to try and ensure runtime reloading (for both audio and graphics, the files can be edited and when the game window is refocused it will reload them).

2) Tutorial based code (which is where I found out about how to play sounds in the game) often does not have the detail to understand the behind the scenes. I guess the purpose of tutorials is often just to present a simple example, but in doing so it hides information that may become important later on...

In other news, development on the game this week has been going well with a really interesting coder likely to help out next month which we'll probably talk a little more about when he's involved! I did find though, that after a few smooth days, there does seem to be this mad rush towards the end of the week. I think I've been finding that whenever a deadline is set for one day then it seems like the night before there'll be a tendency to cram for it (late minute homework syndrome perhaps!).

The odd thing I've also found is that because of being my own boss, choosing to spend one more day on it seems to be really productive in getting further along. It's like the pressure of that first deadline bottles up the work and the addition of just one more day relaxes proceedings enough to take all the prep work and thoughts on the tasks at hand and just calmly go through them! It'd be nice if I could figure out how to just relax and get it done without the mad rush.







What, it's been a week again already? Geez, time goes fast! This week, for me, meant getting some more smithy sounds into the game and testing them, as well as making a draft for a Poppyhill track. The track took a lot of time, but ended up not being fit for its intended spot in the game. This happens. There's another area that it may end up calling 'home'. But even if the draft was rejected entirely, it's crucial to realize that this is never a total loss. First of all, with every track, if you're pushing yourself to do better than the last one then you'll always be learning new skills as you go. And those skills don't cease to exist if the draft doesn't make it. But also, even small parts of a rejected draft can be used or can lead to other ideas that you'd never have come up with if you hadn't made this draft in this way.

Creativity doesn't go in a straight line. It curls, splits off into multiple directions, loops in on itself, and sometimes outright teleports elsewhere. Creativity is weird like that. For now, it's back to the drawing board. I have an idea of where to take this track from here and am currently writing short 'tests' where I experiment with groups of instruments, harmonies, and melodies, to see what sticks. This often results in very short demos of less than 20 seconds. It's just long enough to establish a vibe, and to see if it fits. It's an effective way to 'fail faster' (as Extra Credits once put it). That's a problem I ran into with my first draft: The vibe I wanted to try for that draft was so complex that I couldn't really make a simple version of it. I had to build the entire track to really see if it'd work.

Some ideas are like that; you can't reduce them to a 'core' because the entire thing in its full complexity is un-reduceable. You can't have a stargate scene at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey without pulling out all the stops on the visuals. It can't be reduced. Luckily, that's not always the case, and I'm now back to some rapid prototyping. Wish me luck!







Tuesday, 8am. There I was, sleeping quietly (I assume) in bed (I also assume - who knows what I do in the middle of the night). When all of a sudden...

ALARMS! ALARMS EVERYWHERE!

These were my building's alarms, coming from flush speakers within the ceilings. These were the worst kind of alarms. The kind with no snooze buttons. The kind that had bright flashing lights. The kind that could mean only one thing...

Fire.

Which was my first thought when getting woken up frantically at 8am. My instinct, aside from getting dressed, was to run to my desk and grab my computer and all my hard drives. Most people concern themselves with saving valuables like memories or pets or children. Me? I concern myself with saving the years and years worth of projects I've worked on.

But there's another possible meaning to these alarms that soon became clear. That these were, in fact, fire alarm tests. Which is what we were soon told as a voice crackled over the speakers. Upon checking my email, it seemed that my building was due for testing all alarms to make sure everything was up to code and to fix anything that wasn't. This would start daily at 8am and continue into the evening...for the next three days.

Lovely.

Downtown LA takes its fire safety precautions very seriously. Which makes sense, all said. But suffice it to say, it was a challenge staying productive this last week. What's more is that the building's water even got shut off on Wednesday. As I told Neal earlier this week, I felt like I was staying in some dystopian complex where alarms kept going off and strange voices kept talking over speakers and there was no running water. I half expected Judge Dredd to come rescue me at any moment.

The work that I did manage to get done was primarily to sort out a lot of organization. During busy times like earlier this month, things tend to get cluttered, ranging from project files to databases to support correspondence. So I've been doing some Spring cleaning while Spring was still in the air. I've also begun work on an extensive FAQ for the site and community. Not particularly glamorous work this week, but important work nonetheless.

I'm looking forward to next week being much more normal without any strange dystopiotic distractions. Because thankfully, as of Friday, peace and justice has been restored to my building. No doubt thanks to Judge Dredd, I assume.

Welcome to Issue #28 of The PixelCount Post, a periodically released update from Kynseed's team. In this week's lovely issue we discuss how work has begun on brand new regions of The Vale, the importance of smelling roses, and what's happening over in Summerdown.
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The gates have opened! Well, not literally, but the planning for what lies beyond The Vale is underway. A world map exists, but now is the time for mapping out more detail of the individual regions. Beyond The Vale lies a hub, and from here are exits to the next Haven - a not so dangerous forest and the way on to other places.

I like to use RPGMaker to map out a very basic overview of the regions, then will go into our own editor and flesh them out more. I have also been working on creating the NPC's for the next Haven: Summerdown, with the village of Poppyhill within. The people of Poppyhill are more prosperous than in The Vale, and healthy eaters (as in amount, not what they eat). Poppyhill folk are cheery and love a good party and a good pie. They worship Naida, the Goddess of Fertility. Naida is said to be a plump lady, of infectious laughter and love of fine beers. Once yearly, the people of Poppyhill look to the skies in the hope of the Ale Storm, where actual beer falls from above in sweet, delicious drops.

Each of the 6 Havens has their own Goddess, their own customs, their own events, and their own outlooks. The most fun part is naming each family and coming up with their little quirks. These are people you will get to know and see age and die. Their lives go on while you are living your multiple lifetimes, and they will remember you as long as you are relevant.

So, if you want to be remembered by the goodly people of PoppyHill, then maybe creating a legendary pie or beer is the way to go...







For week 3 of the backer beta, we got another round of updates made based on player feedback, bugs, and a few bits that hopefully help make the build more stable and more usable. I dared to say last week about looking into systems to work smarter and investigate rare system issues...

Because I said these, somewhat inevitably the flow of work didn't really allow anything of the sort! Or perhaps another way to look at is that I let myself be led by the flow of work rather than dictating it myself. I'm not sure if that's necessarily a bad way to work as it allows for a buildup of smaller results that help and will at some point surely allow other work to take priority! Though it does feel disappointing to be aware that issues still remain and that they need fixing. Perhaps by stating that my intention is not to work on them, fate will conspire for the opposite to happen...

Either way, I have put them front and centre in the task list to be there as a reminder of where progress needs to be made and, at the least, I'll now look to put in a few hours into them to get further little by little.

To continue the theme of talking about development and the way that it works for me: this week definitely saw a return to more of the traditional routine of development for myself. As the amount of people playing the game is staggered and the initial rush has quietened for now (likely awaiting larger updates), I was able to return to more of my usual routine of work through the day. This has been changed slightly because of requiring checking in on more community places to see what's new and react to, but I think it definitely feels more comfortable and natural.

At the same time though, this brings some unease to me. Perhaps because of the intensity of the initial week, the relative quiet leaves me wondering about what'll happen next and what could be done better next time. It's hard to not get too attached to those worries and ignore the many good things going on and the wonderful community that continues to amaze in their support and help. Thankfully by talking it through with Matt and Charlie, I feel like I'm getting to a better understanding and we're trying to grow and learn as a team and appreciate that it is truly exciting times for the project and it is perhaps time to enjoy that journey and gradually prepare for the future - whatever it may be...







So last week I talked a little bit about getting new instruments that I'd need in order to make, among other things, mummer music. This week I'd like to explain a little bit about how that music is being worked into the game. Where most of the music currently in the game is region music that doesn't need to sync up with anything very precisely, the mummer music will be different. There are actual NPC's represented in the world who will perform this music - and they have animations of dancing and playing their instruments.

To me, this means I have to try and match the music quite precisely with what you'll end up seeing on the screen. Trick is, I started writing the music way before the graphical assets were done. For the most part, I work off of whatever explanations Charlie can give me of what the music will be used for. This is much easier for regions than it is for a mummer dance. For instance, I used an Excelsior accordion as the main ingredient for the music in the drafting stage. This was in line with the research I had done into the genre of music. But when the graphical asset was done for the NPC that played the main instrument, it turned out to resemble a bandoneon (a much smaller accordion-type instrument), so I had to switch out the Excelsior.

It also turned out I had overestimated the size of the group. In many of the video examples I found, there were multiple pairs of dancers wielding wooden sticks and they would strike these sticks together to the beat of the music. But the game's mummers only counted 3 people, only one of them carrying sticks. This meant I also needed to adjust the sounds I had made to represent these sticks, as I had made too many of them. Another addition comes from the attire one of the mummers is wearing, which is adorned with bells. To represent those bells visually, but to not have an audio equivalent for them, well...that just won't do! So I'm currently in the process of finding the right sound for them.

Another thing I have to keep in mind is animation length, especially for the mummer with the pair of sticks. You see, I had made a percussive pattern for the sticks that isn't just a repeating 'bang' on the beat, but rather a more complex pattern. However, if Gary (our amazing animator) is to make an animation that fully matches that pattern, it'd be a rather long animation. Instead, if the sticks sound in a simple pattern that loops during the whole song then the animation to represent it can be much shorter. You could also make a separate stick beating animation and figure out how to play that in time with what I had first written, but that approach requires a bunch of code to be written for it.

In the end, rewriting this seemingly simple percussive part to something even simpler appears to be the most feasible approach. All this has meant that in order to write this track I have to talk to both the designer, the animator, and the coder, just to get a good result. I wonder if Russell Shaw ran into similar challenges when writing the sailor song in Black & White...

I suspect that he might've.







It's been a week of transition here among the team. In last week's issue of The PixelCount Post, we talked a great deal about the sudden increase of workload we experienced around the time of the backer build release. Yet this week, we had to remind ourselves to stop and smell the roses.

In some ways, I hesitated last week to even talk about our workload in such detail. I think my worry was that it might possibly get interpreted as boasting or, even worse, might make people worry we'd burn out! But I didn't want to entirely gloss over it either, as it was certainly an ever-present theme of those two weeks.

That said, I walk away from that busy period all the more encouraged by my teammates. Everyone was doing their part, staying in high spirits, and producing quality work. When chatting with the team, I often use a machine metaphor to refer to development. I'm not sure why really, but in some ways it's one of the more apt metaphors that comes to my mind. Certain things will make the machine run smoother, some things will lock the machine up, and some things will even increase the machine's output while reducing required energy input.

Reading that back to myself it sounds a bit managerial I suppose, but worry not. I'm not the type to throw around the word 'synergy' unless I'm specifically using the word to say that I'm not the type to throw it around.

Recently, this proverbial machine was tested and challenged; it had to run faster and longer than it ever has before. Yet everything went smoothly and nothing broke down. What's more is we've come out the other end having learned new optimizations for our work routines as well as learning how to work together even more efficiently.

Something that people don't often talk about much in game development is the sort of relationships you build with the team of creators that you work with. I've been working with Charlie and Neal in some capacity for a fairly long while now, but for the last year especially there's barely been a day that's gone by where we three haven't talked to each other. Imagine talking to someone about a project nearly every day for over a year. It's easy to imagine the sort of comradery that comes out of that.

Of course, our team has added new faces over the course of this journey with the addition of our composer, our artists, and so on. It's an interesting dynamic, because the lines of 'personal life' and 'work life' start to get very blurred over time as these people start becoming friends in addition to teammates. In that way, I think something we have to do is look out for each other as friends.

Something along those lines that came up this week was that we were all still working at the same intense pace we had been working during the backer build release, despite the fact that the initial rush had died down. When working at an incredibly fast pace for a hefty period of time, it's a bit surprising how easy it is to forget to return back to a normal speed afterwards.

So this week we had to remind ourselves that the craziness of the initial backer release had passed and that we should always be mindful to have fun with our work and to appreciate how far things have come. Indie game development takes a surprising toll on one's psychology and it can be easy to always focus on everything that still needs doing, how the journey ahead is still long, and how there will no doubt be unforeseen challenges. But it's equally important to appreciate the journey in the present and to stop and smell the roses. There's a good chance that each of us will look back on these days with a certain measure of fondness and how truly sad would it be if we didn't enjoy them while we lived them. It seems so often that people are always defining life's good times in the past tense, but by the very nature of 'past tense' it stands to reason that those good times had to first exist in the present. The only difference is that we seldom realize they're the good times until after the fact.

But that's enough of me getting pseudo-philosophical.

On the game front, things have been progressing very nicely. There's been 4 major build updates issued in the last 3 weeks alone. This last one is perhaps one of our larger ones in terms of fixes and polish (with a sprinkling of small new content tidbits as well). Meanwhile, our artists have been creating tons of new assets and we even began tentative work on art for completely new regions.

I'm personally excited to see the new regions start to come together. I've spent so much time running around in The Vale over the last year and, as lovely as it is, I do find myself getting a bit of wanderlust for the rest of the game's world. The music for the new regions is going to have a slightly different feel as well, I imagine. It'll still be thematically consistent with the entire Kynseed soundtrack of course, but it'll also have a slightly new flavour to match the aesthetic and personalities of the new regions. Already Matthijs and I have been holding discussions on possible ways to take the new music pieces.

All that is still a fair ways off though, as Neal understandably wants to get some core engine polish in before we start casting our gaze towards big chunks of new content. Which is certainly the sensible way of going about things, as we don't want to be building our castle on sand. Unless we're at the beach.

For now though, there's still a surprising amount of The Vale that players have yet to discover. I keep watching Kynseed videos on Twitch and YouTube hoping to see someone uncover a few of its hidden secrets, but thus far most of them remain thoroughly undiscovered. I suppose I could spill the beans on where a few of the secrets are, but where's the fun in that?























A travelling man was seen to be eating toast on the village green last Turnsday. As he was about to bite into those crumby golden depths, a butterfly landed on it.

He simply did not notice and took in the butterfly with his huge bite. For a moment he looked confused, then his eyes lit up and he chewed vigorously. Upon telling him what had happened, he exclaimed "I can't believe it's not butterfly!"

That didn't quite make sense, but for the purposes of a reference, it will do.






Making the most perfectious of crusted meat pots (a pie) is what drove local baker, Wendy Miller, to try using an ancient form of magic, called Mathematics, to try create the ultimate pastry.

Apparently, there was once a man called Pie Thagrus, and his measurements are said to be the secret of baking the most mouth watering mix of meat, gravy, and shortcrust. Sadly, Wendy Miller can't count past 10, so her pie was a soggy mess.

Her husband, Kenneth, said "I always tells her a wet pie full of meat is no bad thing. I would happily put my thumb in that!" Kenneth is known throughout the village for his bakery related innuendo, so his baking tips must be taken with a pinch of salt.






LOST CAT

Hazel Nutt of The Vale has lost a kitten.
If you have seen her p...OH GROW UP!

FOR SALE

Fertility Totem:
Have got enough kids now so not needed.
Definitely works as we only used it once!

Witch Ward:
Slightly broken. Previous owner now a toad.

Welcome to Issue #27 of The PixelCount Post, a periodically released update from Kynseed's team. This is the first issue being cross-posted to the lovely Steam community and covers such things as the recent build release, the temptations of overworking, and breakfast.
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Hello there wayward traveller.

This is The PixelCount Post, a regularly released periodical written by the Kynseed team in which we chronicle our development progress. We're also occasionally known to offer musings about the games industry, challenges that we're experiencing (project related or otherwise), and what we had for breakfast.

Many of you loyal readers already know all that, but there are no doubt some new faces among us since this is the first issue of The PixelCount Post being cross-posted over to Steam - something we'll be doing for all future issues! Some of you lovely Steam members may be wondering why our maiden issue on Steam is already at Issue #27. That's because we've been doing these development updates for quite a while! (To read the full library of prior issues, just hop on over to The PixelCount News Vault.)

Up until now, we've been publishing The Post exclusively on our own forums, but the Kynseed community has been growing a fair bit and we'd hate for any of you to miss out on all our horrible puns. So whether you're a longtime reader or a brand new reader, we welcome you to check back regularly for new issues. In general, we post each issue around the weekend. (Though we have been considering making it a more scheduled thing, such as on every Friday perhaps.)

Here's a very quick crash course on the faces you'll likely see in each issue. Neal is our programmer. Charlie is our trusty game and level designer. Matthijs composes the music and assists with sound effects. And lastly there's me (Matt), and I assist with all manner of community and production.

We hope you come to enjoy these development updates as much as we enjoy writing them. Our intention with each issue is to help demystify the game development process and to keep an ongoing public log of what we're up to. We're not mysterious developers silently working on some game in secret. We're real tangible people that you could poke in real life. (But please don't actually poke us. We're ticklish.)

We want to foster the kind of culture in our community where it's not weird at all to message one of us directly. We mean that. Send me a friend request on Steam and say hello anytime. Or drop by our Discord, where the entire team hangs out with everyone near daily. Or just drop a comment down below and we'll be sure to reply. As one reader has described these weekly updates:

"The PixelCount Post. It's like a parade and fanfare and confetti and business." - Lynn

Well said, Lynn.

It seems we've already been walking down the trail of this journey for some time, but in many ways there's still a long walk yet ahead of us. Since it seems our internet paths have crossed, we welcome you to come walk along with us. We can keep each other company.

P.S. For breakfast, I had yogurt and granola.







The week of the backer build release was unquestionably one of the most intense weeks of work I've ever had. It's been great to see people play the game and soak up some of that excitement to keep me going while sleep deprived. Crunch is never one of the popular topics about games and it's something I've generally tried to keep to my own pace after my first year or so in the games industry, which was relentless. I'm not proud of doing it or boasting about it, and I genuinely wish it weren't necessary...but sometimes there is no choice because a date is set and hopefully that week is worth it and there is time to recover after.

Now that we have got the build out there, it's hopefully going to be easier as we get the practice in making updates and learning more to avoid that kind of intense workload! After that rush though, the energy does fade a little and I'm glad to have been able to get a bit more rest recently. It was important to make things better that first week with some quickfire updates, but this is just the beginning and we've now got a marathon ahead of us rather than a sprint.

It was also great to be able to chat to people on Discord to share a bit of info on the game making process and find out about some of the bugs encountered and then pick and choose the more critical ones to solve ASAP. After two updates in the first week, the game (fingers crossed) should hopefully be quite a bit more stable, so now it's a case of addressing the smaller issues and starting to look at ways to be smarter on the work ahead!

Week two of the backer build was less intense but still very focused. We managed to get together another update that saw more issues fixed on saving, plus a bunch of common issues found along - with a small but useful feature too! It's continued being great having the community to talk to and discuss some feedback around control schemes, future work, and of course bugs. Some of the work to be smarter has been pushed back a little already as the third build still had plenty of issues to resolve, leaving little time for long-term code work.

Plans are coming together though and, dare I say it, work may commence on such things early next week?! There are a couple of rare system issues which are in need of investigation and resolving though, so it's a hard choice at the moment as to where time should be spent. I suspect the way to go will probably be to time limit each of these tasks so progress is made, as both will be big improvements to make.











Utter chaos.

That's what our Discord dissolved into when we released the backer build. We had 100 people singing in voice chat, mass violence, riots, earthquakes, meteor strikes. (Oh wait, that's Fortnite.)

We struggled to keep up, but one thing was for sure: it was very special. Since then I have hardly done any real work. It has been a blur of Twitch streams, YouTube videos, emails, and Discord chats with crazy, passionate, fun players. I have tried to pop in every one I could and it is fascinating seeing how people play. I often bite through my knuckles and scream "South, he told you to go bloody south!" at the screen. It's great fun.

We have taken a lot of feedback onboard and responded quickly where we could, and it is very useful. We are incredibly proud to have such backers supporting us. We even sold out of Legend tiers! Thanks to everyone who has joined our journey; lots to come!







Our backer build is finally here! The last few weeks have been insane in the best possible way. I've been all over our social media, and your Twitch streams, collecting feedback on the music and sound effects. Y'all have been super supportive of our game, and it warms the heart!

Things I look for in particular is if anybody feels volume levels are out of wack anywhere. A sound effect that is too loud, a piece of music you can't quite hear properly, and so forth. I also look for other aspects like transitions between music tracks. In the initial Saturday build, the transition to shop music was too abrupt, creating a jarring effect. We were able to change it in time for the second day, when the rest of our backers could finally play it. Similarly, things came up like waterfall sounds being too loud. (Should be fixed!) There's just a deluge of feedback like this to sift through and adapt to.

At the same time, there's bug hunting being done, which I helped out with. At some point we had to figure out why the pig on Willowdown Farm was disappearing - we spent quite a lot of time trying to figure that one out! It involves meticulously retracing your steps when the pig disappears and figuring out exactly what you did that caused it. And that's just one of many things that needed testing.

Further fine-tuning of sound levels will happen continually, as well as new sound effects being added. There's a ton of work left ahead of us, but from now on you can see the progress by playing these early builds! I hope everyone will keep feedbacking on the game. And on my end, the soundtrack and sound effects could use all the feedback you're willing to give. Without feedback, it can't become the best version of itself - we need you.

Furthermore, I dove into some newly acquired samples to get to know the instruments within. Instruments that are joining my repertoire are, among others, the cimbalom, several types of accordion, the bandoneon, a new acoustic guitar, and more. To get the most out of these requires practice. Getting a new virtual instrument isn't unlike getting a new real instrument, as in: you have to learn how to play it first. Learn how and where you can apply its sounds, what other instruments it blends with, what its technical limitations are, and so forth.

You may have noticed that in the current build, the tavern isn't getting much use yet. But that won't stay that way forever. That's where many of these new instruments will come in handy. Mummers, traveling bands, ritual processions, all forms of music that could happen within the world and performed by its inhabitants. But NPC's can't write music very well, so I decided to help them out with that. This also means researching these styles of music. I've had a go at it at a much earlier stage in development, but back then I lacked the instruments I felt the music really needed. With this new sample library, that's no longer the case.

Some old tracks left by the wayside will be revisited to see if this time I can make them work. It's definitely a great opportunity to diversify as a composer, since these styles of music aren't that common in games. So I consider myself lucky with the diversity that Kynseed throws at me. I hope I am up to its challenges!







That was...crazy. Releasing an early build of the game to our backers ended up being the absolute busiest few weeks I've ever had on this project.

I feel that there's a tendency for developers in the industry (and no doubt other industries) to glorify overworking, as if it's a sort of 'rite of passage' for game creators. I don't want to help propagate that view by back patting myself for overworking, because honestly, it's not good for you. But there is an asterisks on that: despite one's best intentions, crazy workload is a bit like Liam Neeson. It will look for you, and it will find you.

Let's rewind a bit. *cue the rewind sound effect*

It's a week before what's intended to be a small release of our latest build for backers only. In the announcements leading up to this, we did something that we don't commonly do: we gave a specific date. April 29th. That date was picked for a number of reasons. We'd have a build ready by then, there weren't other game releases nearby, it was eerily the same exact date and day of week as the opening of The Wicker Man (a film that influenced Kynseed), and it was the 2 year anniversary of the closure of Lionhead Studios...to the day.

So April 29th it was. The entire week leading up to this date was filled with heaping amounts of preparation. If I was awake, I was working. Neal was busy preparing the build, Charlie was polishing regions and text, Matthijs was engrossed with adding sound effects, and our artists were submitting new assets daily. I assisted everyone where possible but was otherwise busy organizing elements of the upcoming release.

Then Saturday April 28th came, which was the day we'd send out a small batch of early copies to a small group of higher tier backers. Yet within that small group of backers were individuals who were anxiously wanting to stream the game. Naturally, we anticipated that backers might want to stream the build and we were totally cool with that. But what we didn't anticipate was that just a few handful of Kynseed streams, all happening at the same time, would create a small ripple effect from our little corner of the internet.

The minute I sent out the build, our Discord began flooding with new members. We went from 200 online members to over 400 in an hour. Word began to spread on Twitter. Dangerously Funny began streaming and had over 700 active viewers. We began popping up on a dozen streams on Twitch alone. Emails were coming in left and right. My Discord DM's blew up in mere minutes. Our website crashed from the unexpected traffic. I was busily talking (aka, arguing) with our server provider to get things fixed. Meanwhile, my phone's notifications were going off every few seconds.

And this was just the early wave of backers. An even larger wave was still a day away.

Coordinating the team's schedules in the midst of all this was equally challenging. Most of the team is in European time zones and I'm the one weirdo who's in a North American time zone, so I typically stay up late to make sure our time zones align for big milestones. This meant that I woke up Friday, worked straight through Friday night into Saturday for the build release, and then finally went to bed late Saturday night.

It wasn't until the following weekend that the rush of traffic gradually began to get more reasonable again. It also wasn't until that following weekend that I took a proper day off to recharge.

All in all, the biggest thing that took us by surprise that weekend was the splash that such a tiny backer release caused. As a team, we've always kept our expectations very low for how much interest we think our game would generate at this early stage. The project is still very young and we make it a point to not over-market the game. So to have such a sudden spike of interest come out of nowhere was crazy for us.

Of course, I'm not sharing any of this to glorify overworking or under-sleeping. But it does show how situations can arise where it feels like there's little choice in avoiding it. It'd be hard to imagine just logging off in the middle of last week's rush - even to sleep. We spend so much of our time yammering on about being accessible devs, so it was important to us to make sure we were around when there was a large influx of new members coming in every hour.

The challenge is that we're all personally invested in this project and that can make it incredibly difficult to ever convince ourselves to stop working on it. (Especially since we enjoy the work.)

Thankfully, during it all, community members were messaging us with high fives and enthusiasm. I don't know that we'd have been able to work as much as we did with our sanity intact were it not for the community supporting us. And I don't mean financial support. I mean real support, in the way that you support a friend who's chasing after a ridiculous dream. It means the world to us.

As Neal points out in his above section, this is a marathon; not a sprint. There's still much ahead for Kynseed's development, especially for these very early versions. And as I've mentioned in recent announcements, we're not really getting too hung up on what to call the current build. We've sometimes been using the term 'closed beta' as casual shorthand for it being backer exclusive, but ultimately it's more of a pre-Early-Access work-in-progress sorta thing. But folks seem to be understanding the spirit with which we're sharing it, which is cool.

These days, there's an understandable amount of reservation about Kickstarter games and Early Access games. Which I totally get. I'm not a 'developer' so much as I'm a gamer who happens to be working on a game. As a frequent Steam user, I've been burnt by Early Access games before. It sucks and it makes you wonder why the developers got into games to begin with. So from the onset of this project, we've always wanted to make sure that we'd stay candid and accessible no matter what.

The fact that we've had so many people join our community and 'get' what we're trying to do has been incredibly encouraging. These past few weeks have shown us that when there's an unexpected rush of traffic, it can be challenging to still maintain the sort of accessibility we want to have. But despite that challenge, it still has to be a non-negotiable part of how we work. Being an open team has been the compass we've followed since the very beginning and, much like true north, that won't ever change. So for those of you who have been with us since Issue #1 all the way to those of you who've literally just started following the game, we look forward to this next chapter of our story together.

Feel free to message us any time, day or night. That's not some line we're giving - we genuinely want you to know that it's totally cool to do that. Have a question about music software? Message our composer. Not sure how to get started in programming? Hit up our programmer. Have a funny GIF you think I'll appreciate? You send that GIF my way, you GIF finding warrior you.

See you around the community!










This is our weekly dev log that we're now cross-posting over to Steam. Long story short: our small backer build release got way more interest than we anticipated, which made for a week as busy as it was awesome.

TL;DR2
We opened a lot of tabs last week. Some of them in browsers, some of them in bars.


(Kidding.)