Welcome to Issue #59 of The PixelCount Post, a periodically released update from Kynseed's team. In today's issue: Charlie designs shop reputation, Neal draws up testing plans, Matthijs gets cozy with coleslaw, and Matt sets the scene for setting scenes.
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This past week has been all about putting final touches on the Goods Store update as well as taking in feedback from any early players on the test branch. We've also spent some time putting together remaining plans for the update after this one called the "Growing Up & Going Out" update, which will add aging to the adult phase plus the pursuit of romantic relationships.

More on that later though, because for now we're ramping up the Goods Store update for a full release and can happily report that if all goes to plan it'll be heading your way this upcoming week! Keep your eyes peeled for a full announcement not long from now, complete with a big hearty changelog to go with it.







This week we hit a bit of a design brick wall. We tried to sort out the Goods Store Reputation system and to also ensure that owning shops has variety, that the Perks were good, and that their UI was clear. We had a lot of back and forth and it took some mock-ups, but finally we are getting there with only Perks remaining to sort out. We decided that there will be two types of Rep: Shop, which is for your local shop and Family, which is all your shops in all Havens. It may end in bloodshed but we will get there!

We got a bit more art this week as well: a new Master called Moon, who is an exotic archer and Master of Ranged Combat. She looks very cool with her shadowy hood and piercing big blue eyes. That leaves us with just three others to do (well, Gary). Gary will also be working on the final initial combat animations for the adults plus more monster idles. I also gave him a list of creepy characters that turn up at various times of the year, as is traditional. I can't wait to see Tickling Tom Hookfingers and Mag the Moghog, who in my brief I described as a "cat barrel chicken legged thing".

Weekes has been still working on the UI updates and I can't wait to see something we're calling 'the Wheel of Copulation'. He has also updated the cooking UI and we will be tweaking those mechanics to make stirring more useful. Tice is still cooking up secret musical sauces and Caz has her big item list to work through. Every day can bring us new treats and that's what makes working at PixelCount enthralling. Giant veg and strange swamps one day...gaudy boingy sex music the next...new features and mechanics the day after that...







It's been a slow week for progress. With the build up on the testing branch, player testing has commenced and a few blocking issues were found. These have been fixed and preparations for the update to go live continue. It did limit polish time, which is why we've set ourselves next Wednesday as the date for it to go live (barring any last minute twists of fate).

Bugs are an annoying but expected part of development. The usual reason for them is a combination of moving parts to a given process that makes exhaustive testing impossible. When you see the stats for a game, like say PUBG when it says there's been a billion hours played, then that's closer to an exhaustive test. Yet it still brings unexpected circumstances along the way because of a bewildering combination of computer drivers/hardware/internet connections/position of players at any given moment in the map/etc. So the dilemma of development for bugs is what is a reasonable amount of testing that can be done that gives as much coverage on expected problems as possible while allowing the game to finish some time before computers become obsolete to brain implants! Every time a change is made, a hunch has to be taken as to the extent of its effects. These can help to some degree, but can completely cloud vision on some problems as blind spots are developed to anything else...

The case in point for this was a few days before the test branch went up I made a change to the level temporary NPC's are spawned to. The change was a small simple one to make them associated to the level where they came from and was made so that when they buy something in a shop they are correctly counted for the region they came from for reputation tracking purposes. With our testing fixated on the Good Store, we checked thoroughly that it worked in those circumstances and were content it was all good. That left a blind spot though to the other places where temporary NPC's are spawned for events in say the Festival Green area where the NPC's were noticing their level wasn't their normal one and wandering back towards that to carry out their tasks!

Fortunately the fix in this wasn't too hard and lessons were learned about what to test. We're also looking to draw up more comprehensive test plans that cover all functionality and quick ways of testing. With that plan in hand, hopefully we can get ever closer to comprehensive checks prior to builds going live. Though there'll always be that lurking bug waiting to be uncovered, but as we improve processes and fix them there'll be fewer places for them to hide!







With work on my home studio still in full swing, it's been a chaotic week for me. I'm fully expecting to be moving my PC back into the studio next week though. Meanwhile, I've built up a collection of dry foley sounds to construct the background noises for the deepest sections of swamp.

It's a much more complex method than I've been using for the other background ambient sounds because it has to all be reverb-less. If I want the sound of a little rodent scurrying away in the bushes, I have to manually construct it from singlular sounds of russling bushes (or something that represents it) as well as any other sounds I feel it might need. Sounds that were captured in nature have a sense of space, and are accompanied by things like wind and other background noises. For this, it would be unusable.

That's why I'm going with foley sounds, recorded in a sound controlled environment. Often the sound you hear that seems like it'd be something like a footstep, or a clashing sword, they're actually recorded with entirely different objects. Who knew that the chopping off of a head sounds exactly like a person cutting coleslaw...







As the team starts wrapping up work on the Goods Store update, it's time for us to turn our attention to the next update ahead. That update is called the "Growing Up & Going Out" update and will bring some pretty exciting additions to the game. Namely: players aging to the adult phase as well as the pursuit of romantic relationships. (Among a few other bits and bots we'll be adding in.)

Game development tends to have periods of overlap like this, where part of the team is concluding work on one update while the other part of the team is beginning work on the next. Much of this is just the nature of how certain mediums of work are conducted, such as how design typically comes before art and how art typically comes before coding and so on. Thefore, the work on the adult player assets has already been well underway for a few months now (there's so many to make) and will be ready and waiting for when Neal begins programming them in - hopefully a couple of weeks from now.

However, this upcoming week is when we're planning to release the Goods Store! It's been quite a meaty update and I'm looking forward to seeing what everyone thinks of all the things that've been added. We'll be taking in feedback and sorting through bug reports the week of release, and then shortly after we'll ramp up work on that subsequent aging/romance update. I'm personally looking forward to that specific update, as I get to make a handful of new cutscenes for it using our engine's Cutscene Editor tool. I'll be sure to chat about how all that works in future Post issues and will probably even stream the process a few times. Should be fun!

Welcome to Issue #58 of The PixelCount Post, a periodically released update from Kynseed's team. In today's issue: Charlie manages chaos, Neal puts the build on the test branch, Matthijs plays mouth harp, and Matt is still talking about GIF's for some reason.
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This week the team has been putting the last bits of final work into the Goods Store update, with an early build now up on our Steam test branch! Assuming all goes well and there's no fires to put out, the public release will get pushed out forthwith.

Meanwhile, other bits of the team have begun work on assets for the update after this one, which we're calling the "Growing Up & Going Out" update. It'll be all about growing into an adult and pursuing romantic relationships. Both of those are things we've been really looking forward to, so it's pretty exciting for us to finally be at the stage where we're ready to start adding it all in.

Though for now, the forthcoming Goods Store update should give you some fun entrepreneurial adventures to get into in the meantime. If you're taking it for an early spin on the test branch be sure to let us know how you get on with it and for all you other fine folks keep your eyes peeled for the full announcement and changelog to follow shortly. Speak again soon!







This week I have been mostly playing the build, but other than trying to manage the chaos of my store at max Rep levels, I got stuck into some design and feedback.

Next update we have marriage, romance and...erm, nookie. So, how are we handling it? (wahey!) We're going to cover the act with an amusing mechanic that needs some of Tice's magic music to get the feel right. Mr Weekes had the unenviable task of creating the art for this most important of acts, and I had to deliver the system that dictates how it works. We will reveal all in an upcoming (wahey!) #ScreenshotSaturday on Twitter.

I have to write some flavour text for the deed, which should be fun, and just before I wrote this Post article Tice presented the music for it which, with a touch of mouth harp and tuba, made the whole thing golden. We look forward to players getting intimate, but it will need some planning! We have Matt ready to finally get in on the action as our cutscene man, so the marriage ceremony will be in his hands.

It's going to be a great update...and we are hoping possibly the best sex mechanic in any game. ;-)







This week: more Goods Store progress. Have finally today managed to get the build up onto the test branch of Steam!

Each day was a case of checking internal feedback from the last build, working on the list for that day, and getting another build ready in the evening to review. As the week went on, there did start to be less of the urgent 'must fix' items and more of the 'nice to have' polish work which I'll be getting started on tomorrow! It's nice to have the build up finally to start seeing new impressions of the overall setup, unclouded by us devs knowing all the ins and outs.

Pulling together the changelog showed there was quite a bit of detail that has gone into the update around shops and hopefully it shows to the people playing! I've been finding that this update definitely felt more packed from the start to its current state, and expect the next few will too. As more of the systems in the game come together and start to interact then there's more work to do linking those details, while hopefully the tools get more refined making it ever faster to setup new content.

It's not clear when the tipping point of that will be to make it so that updates are less code detail and more content iteration, but it is starting to feel tantalisingly close. I'm not going to dare predict it though, suffice to say it'll happen when it happens, but I certainly will be trying to get there soon!







This past week started out with me working on the ambient sounds for the more dangerous swampy areas where the fog hides scary things...

It's intended to nicely accompany the music I made for the area the week before. But my work was cut short when I was asked to switch gears all of a sudden and work on music for a game mechanic to do with conceiving. All in an extremely tongue-in-cheek way of course, and the music needed to reflect this.

The first thing I tried was far too serious and romantic; not at all what Charlie had in mind. But luckily, there was an old draft I had for when we tried to get the music for Tir Na Nog to sound as though it was being played by a terrible orchestra of gnomes. It turned out that was a great foundation to work from! I messed around with getting it to fit for this new purpose but it took a while to get the sheer levels of absurdness that Charlie had in mind.

We brought in a tuba to accompany the terribly played strings and glockenspiels already in the track, but it was still not absurd enough. The final ingredient that got us there? A mouth harp to represent the springs of a bed going up and down...very on the nose! But with Charlie happy, I ain't complaining.

With that one completed, I can now turn my attention back to super creepy swamp sounds, which is one heck of a gear change!







A few days ago I finished up a batch of GIF's intended for use in the announcement for when the update goes live. We've been making GIF's of the game since the old prototype days and whereas these are typically used for marketing purposes by most teams, it's something we've oddly come to depend on for development as well.

When playing the game normally, it's sometimes easy to overlook areas that need presentation polish. The game's still very much in development, so it's par the course that there's imperfections like that during our playthroughs. But when capturing a brief moment of the game in GIF form, it manages to narrow focus in such a way that even the smallest of presentation blemishes become readily apparent and impossible to ignore. A pixel out of place here, a shadow not working there, and so on.

In that way, many of the GIF's I capture compels us to go back and polish those areas up (typically adding to Neal's gargantuan list of things to do). Then once the necessary fixes have been made, I'll have to go back and recapture the GIF's from scratch.

It's one of those things where you'd think making a GIF for a community announcement would be a pretty no fuss straightforward thing, but seldom does that ever seem to be the case in game development! The text draft I've made of the upcoming community announcement has 8 GIF's in total, a number of them redone a few times now. One GIF, in particular, has a ridiculously long runtime of about 45 seconds and yet I managed to squeeze it down to 2.95 MB's with no perceptible compression. The glories of using pixel art!

I seem to have rambled on a bit about this sorta thing two PixelCount Posts in a row now, but I usually don't spend so much time fiddling with GIF's. So I'm looking forward to finishing up with the community announcement in the next day or two and then moving on to work on something I've been excitedly anticipating for some time: creating the game's cutscenes!

More on that in the weeks ahead. Until then, we'll see you all very soon at the Goods Store!

Welcome to Issue #57 of The PixelCount Post, a periodically released update from Kynseed's team. In today's issue: Charlie playtests the new build, Neal balances the Goods Store, Matthijs gets lost in a fog, and Matt whips up some GIF's.
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Progress continues along on the forthcoming Goods Store update. Neal has been chipping away at his list o' things for this update and it's all starting to come together. One of the trickier things with this update is that we've added in some new systems for overall world economy and balancing. Such systems will play an important role for any business owning player, but the challenge is we want non-player owned businesses to generally follow the same systems.

Ensuring that level of economic consistency is an involved task, but an important one. It's those sort of things that bring us closer to giving the world that 'sandbox' feel that we want. In this way, the Goods Store and its ancillary systems will be a big help in adding depth to the game's business ownership. We're getting so close to pushing the update out we can taste it. Mmmm...new update taste.







Been mainly testing/playing the build this past week, as well as getting ahead on future story stuff and clearing up some old design docs for the update after next.

We got a couple of new characters through from Gary: Marshtyt the Master Gardener and a Druidic wedding priest, who looks like he likes a sip of altar wine and longs for the old days of blood sacrifice. Weekes has been pumping out more environment art, with a lot of UI stuff including the Larder, which you stock to keep your family fed. I am looking forward to seeing him create the 'Wheel of Copulation'...something we will reveal on Twitter in the coming weeks.

Matthijs (Tice) has been making lovely sounds. Caz, our icon artist, has started on the Master Items list (there's a lot to do!) and Mr Allen has been busy prepping the update stuff for the stores and various social media gubbins. So it's busy busy....but my hat tips off to the mighty Neal who has been working through the complex nightmare that is the Goods Store and has done fantastic work.

Right then! Back to testing and trying not to get distracted by Antstream Arcade...







This week saw yet more progress on the Goods Store update. It's been a tough week to get everything all working correctly with all the needed items done. It is firmly staying in the single digits and in fact down to the last couple of items on the list today (but then likely a new playthrough will bring up more).

This week's big contributors to time (and also improving the Goods Store experience in general) is dynamic balance. Such as where the shoppers come from based on tracking the rep balance and getting shops to start working the same when the player doesn't own the shop. So progress is still happening and it's getting ever closer, but it has seemed like every build I made this week just had at least one little thing off that needed looking into and it kind of adds up into slowing down progress on the remaining items.

I think also nearly every day I've been predicting or expecting to get things ready the next day but then it doesn't work like that! Perhaps that's in fact the general rule: if you predict/expect a perfect outcome down to the day, the likelihood of it happening is pretty low. It will be a good feeling when it finally does happen though!







This week, other than the continuing effort to remodel my studio, I turned the draft I did last week into a full length track and I finished the ambient track for the swamp. I'm quite happy with how they both turned out, especially when played at the same time. The ambient track will be for areas of the swamp that aren't that dangerous, but also won't be for areas that are too populated. Both of those examples will be getting their own ambient track.

Rather than the many frogs and flies and winds of the current ambient track, the more dangerous areas of the swamps will be quieter. Charlie talked about how a thick fog would muffle the sounds and remove all sense of wide open space. If I manage to get it to sound like what I have in mind, every little thing that you hear will jump out at you because of how quiet everything else is. I'm a big fan of Frank Darabont's The Mist', and I can't wait to evoke the same sense of creepiness! Plus, I already know from what I've seen the art team do...'there's something in the mist!'.







I started capturing a few GIF's for the upcoming Goods Store update release. Whenever I write up an announcement for any new update, I always like to include a handful of GIF's to sprinkle into the text. Typically, the function of these GIF's is to highlight recent feature/content additions in the update.

However, whenever the meat of an update is still being worked on, this usually means there's a lack of presentation polish in the meantime. Things like placeholder UI, animations not always lining up, and other little things like that. Because of this, I have to wait to make GIF's until the updates are nearly finished. (Presentation and UI polish is almost always the last thing done for any given update.)

The Goods Store update recently reached this point and so I've been running around the game world capturing GIF's of the new bits and bobs. As I talked about in last week's Post, I employ the use of our engine's debug mode to help speed things along for GIF creation. (Namely, giving myself enough Brass to buy the Goods Store instantaneously.)

Capturing game GIF's is an interesting process, one that always seems like it'd be easier and more straightforward than it ever is. Sometimes I feel a bit like a Quill photographer, roaming the countryside in pursuit of interesting things to take pictures of. I've actually been meaning to start streaming during my workdays some more, so perhaps I'll do so the next time I go on a GIF hunt.

Welcome to Issue #56 of The PixelCount Post, a periodically released update from Kynseed's team. In today's issue: Charlie runs out of stock, Neal prepares the update for the test branch, Tice writes swampy music, and Matt is a dirty cheater.
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With E3 fading away as a distant memory, the whole team was able to fully jump back into update progress last week. Most of that work is falling on Charlie and Neal who are polishing up the final bits. Meanwhile, art and audio are working ahead by making all the assets needed for the next few updates (such as adulthood and relationships, which is what we're tackling in the update after this one).

As Neal mentions below, we're planning on releasing the update to our Steam test branch for any who are interested in taking it for an early spin. From there, we'll get it prepared for pushing it out to the public branch and then we're on to the next update!







I am always amazed by what our team comes up with. Other than marvelling at Neal the machine and his tireless engine, we have great artists and a superb musician. So this week we got the line up of all Mellowfield NPC's, idle animations for some of them, cool new caves, a bunch of nice UI elements for a better looking chat system, music concept for Woemarsh, and more!

I spent a lot of time playing the build and running my shops and loving it...then time passing and me realising stock was running short and that I hadn't paid my staff or looked after my farm and pets. We hope that when you play the update, you'll share some of your stories with us. Just who buys what, and what you did to make money. What did the window shoppers say about your wares? How did you run your business? We can't wait! Now, back to gazing at art and listening to awesome music...







This week has kept things rather busy on the update front. On Tuesday, we had a playthrough to establish what to concentrate on and I've been busying away on that ever since. That 60 item list from 3 weeks ago had gotten down to about a net 40 on Monday. (Scanning my completed list, I've done about 200 items of varying sizes in that time so you can see there's quite a bit of extra work getting figured out!) This was then pushed to one side with the playthrough for a new list of 15 essentials.

In the last few days I actually got that down to about 4 of the 15 but now even more items have popped up in their place to drag things back to about 30 (albeit, these are definitely the smaller kind fortunately). This might all seem a bit meaningless to talk about, but I guess it just goes to show the chaotic nature of development and how you never quite know what's around the corner.

I think one thing I've also found is how lists can degrade in value pretty quickly. What seems optimistically possible a few weeks back becomes a burden when you get down to it and slows things to a crawl. There's definitely items on my list that I actively push to the bottom cos I just don't want to get to them quite yet, but the drastic improvements often come when you finally get to them because they really complete the experience. In this update's case, it's been about me figuring out shop reputation levels and how to handle the frequency of customers. Both of those fall into this tricky category of balance and felt fiddly to get a handle on to construct, but now that they're in it really starts to tie it all together as a whole.

Next week should see the build up on the test branch once the list is finally down to the single digits again and then we get to start again with new lists of feedback and the next update to work on. It's a good thing I like working on lists!







Since being back from the US, my focus has become an entirely new region. It's swampy and I was asked to make its music less 'happy-go-lucky' than what has come before. So in the last week I've been experimenting with creating a new sound. I ended up using a rather jazzy acoustic bass, banjo, and fiddle on top of a soundpad made by mostly strings and woodwinds.

I want the overall feel of these places to be bordering on scary, but not really scary. I want them to be bordering on sad, but not really sad. Swamps can be pretty from time to time. I just presented a draft of what I'm going for to the team today, and they seemed quite happy with it so it's full steam ahead for the whole region. Other than the music, I also have to create an ambient soundscape for these places. I'm going to be looking for the sound of frogs, flies, and water...all wrapped in mist. It's going to take a while, but I'll have a lot of fun doing this!







We've been getting back into our usual groove this week and my schedule has thankfully returned to some semblance of normality. Lately I've been spending much more time just playing the 'vanilla' game - basically, the public version that's up on Steam and everywhere else. Typically I do all my playtesting using internal dev builds. Which is to say: typically I do all my playtesting as a dirty dirty cheater.

Usually I do this purely for time saving reasons. A fair chunk of my work involves making a lot of our screenshots and video, so if I need to quickly take a screenshot of the player running the Goods Store, it's a whole lot easier to give myself unlimited Brass so I can quickly purchase it in a few seconds. Playing the game as normal would mean it'd take me hours just to get a single screenshot set up.

However, the biggest disadvantage to this is something that happens to a lot of teams: debug becomes a crutch and they can end up playtesting almost exclusively with dev tools enabled. All that to say, it's wise to still make time to playtest the game as it's intended to be played. I've been making more time for those kind of playtests as of late and they've been a really nice change of pace. Perhaps it's a good sign that as more of the game is put together I find myself more inclined to play it without debug.

Personally, I'm most looking forward to our current update and the next ( with aging and relationships) get added. I can't wait to start a new character from scratch to playtest it all. Perhaps this time I'll play as shop owner who sales delicious pies that become famous across the land.

Welcome to Issue #55 of The PixelCount Post, a periodically released update from Kynseed's team. In today's issue: Charlie gets carried away prettying, Neal whittles down his list of tasks, Tice copes with E3 jetlag, and Matt gets chummy.
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Welcome back readers! We've been rather busy these last couple of weeks due to some team members traveling and attending E3. This led to our virtual office being a bit more quiet than usual, so the other team members used it as an opportunity to dive deep into update work. As of earlier this week, the whole gang is now back together and we're running at full capacity once more as we get the "Song of Price and Hire" update prepared.

You can read accounts of E3 adventures in the individual dev updates below, some of which include double updates to make up for not having a new issue of The Post in recent weeks. (As fun and worthwhile as E3 is, it does make for quite the development disruption!)

Earlier this week, the team did a catch-up meeting to play through progress on the update. Goods Store ownership is coming along nicely and its various mechanics are all starting to fit together into a cohesive gameplay experience - placing items, setting prices, bartering with customers, managing staff, and so on.

We've still got a bit of UI presentation and economy balancing to do before we push the update out (both of which will continue to evolve during development, of course). With E3 over and the full team back in place, we're back to firing on all cylinders, so keep an eye out for update news very Soon™.







I got a bit carried away recently. I was meant to be starting on the next haven, Mellowfields, and the plan was to block all the levels out roughly. However, I got carried away with the first area and ended up prettying it.

This was mainly due to the lovely art assets provided by our very own Mr Weekes, and the fact that as I built it, it was looking nice. Then I got onto the next region...and did the same. Then the next...

There is just something very relaxing about prettying and detailing everything. I would often step back and look at the layout, then change chunks of it, which is why you shouldn't pretty until layouts are done...but I don't seem to care apparently!

I have also been utterly addicted to the Goods Store ownership. It's enthralling seeing who comes into the shop and what they buy. Your brain fills in the story. It was great building my reputation and seeing more people come from further afield.

The balance still needs to be done this weekend, as currently everybody is happy buying strawberry pies at 99,999 Brass. Now excuse me while I go dive into my gold pile like Scrooge McDuck...







7th JUNE

Following from the first week on the update, I've been carrying on filling in the main areas of Good Store ownership and business reputation. As mentioned before, I've been trying to front-load the work a bit. I went through my list of things to work on and started labelling all the different types of tasks as gameplay/strategy/immersion/presentation/UX followed by concentrating on the gameplay/strategy ones first (such as reputation, blacksmith ore stock ordering, regional preferences, and customer price preference).

Now that those bits are in place, I've started moving into the other categories to improve the feel of it. I suppose I shouldn't be too surprised that these tasks are spreading out in volume to fill up the rest of the update (in fact, I'm pretty sure my list is bigger now than when I started the week).

On the plus side, I'm hoping it'll feel like a comprehensive new addition to the gameplay and it won't need revisiting much in the future. At the moment, the list is up to about 60 items which probably also need more breaking down, so I guess my challenge now will be to see how quickly I can get through them (without breaking anything) while also finding time to prepare for the next update!


23rd JUNE

About 2 weeks on now and am still whittling down the list. It took a while, where the list seemed to consistently expand as I picked up extra bits that needed doing and each item itself turned into a 10-15 step process. Thankfully, that is finally quietening down.

Mostly left is balancing and presentation tweaks which, in theory, should be self-contained. The only challenge is that the recent team playthrough with the shops has revealed a few intermittent issues which are proving hard to repeat and debug. The difficulty is mainly coming from the random chance aspect, where it would seem like some specific combo of events leads to issues.

Though I had it happen once this morning, I've not had it in a few hours of trying since. That leaves a dilemma: A) to carry on trying to figure out that issue or B) to get back on the tweaks. So far I've been on the 'A' choice but, without much to show for it, 'B' is starting to look more tempting.

Maybe stepping back from it for just a little bit will bring up some new angle to work on it as that is probably what is needed. That angle might just be a bit of extra debug that helps navigate the random chance. However it works out, it does seem like we're getting closer on this update. Still not sure exactly when it'll land, as we want to make a good solid build, but it's definitely getting there!







7th JUNE

In the past week, between packing and other E3 trip prep work, I talked to Matt and Neal about the future updates and when more music and sound assets might need to be done by. This allows me to plan and leave for Los Angeles without worry of being late on anything.

When I return, I'll know exactly what to get started on so that there won't be a slow start. (Except for jet lag, maybe.) Now I'm off to add the last few items to my bags and then I'll leave for the airport. E3 has never been as exciting to me as it is this year!


23rd JUNE

Soooo, the past two weeks were pretty epic...

I flew to Los Angeles a few days ahead of E3, but that didn't mean I got to take it easy. Matt and I went to the Bethesda press conference, held in a huge theater. It seemed Bethesda had spared no expense, making sure everyone in line had water aplenty, and when we got inside there were open bars to be had.

This was shortly followed by the press conference itself, which I'm sure many of you saw as well via stream. I particularly liked their GhostWire reveal. Afterward, there was more open bar and free food while people from Bethesda walked the crowd - including Todd Howard himself, whom I was lucky enough to briefly speak to.

In the rest of the time before E3 actually began, we met some familiar faces from communities past and present, sharing drinks and stories. The convention center itself, a huge complex, was adorned with many a giant poster of the latest games. They even painted the side of a whole building to depict Doom Eternal's cover art on a truly massive scale.

Like peacocks, everyone wanted to be seen by creating the largest and flashiest displays they could. Once the convention actually started, the lines to enter were as massive as the displays. An entire parking lot floor was filled with people wanting to be the first gamers to get inside. Once you do get inside, it's truly mind-bending how much visual information you get bombarded with. Companies did things like bringing in monster trucks, a modified school bus a la Fortnite, life-size dragons, elaborate water fountain displays, giant screens everywhere, obstacle courses, augmented reality gardens, huge gate structures, and even entire buildings were constructed inside the massive halls of the convention center - all to be the biggest and flashiest of them all. So many peacocks.

Almost hidden among massive titles like Cyberpunk 2077, Pokémon Sword and Shield, or Watch Dogs: Legion, was a small section of relative calm. Quieter than everywhere else, but filled to the brim with passion and hope, was an area for games of a smaller scale: IndieCade. This is where a dense collection of indie studios could be found, many of them single-person dev 'teams'. While sequels and nearly-guaranteed hits were being flashy like lives depended on it, these small indie devs humbly displayed their games and ideas. There were curious abstract ideas aplenty, like escape rooms that you could take with you in a small box and games that blended programs with real tangible objects.

There's still a wild west left to discover in game development, and many of these folks were the settlers traversing it. Sure, seeing a big game like Lone Echo 2 blew me away, but I'll always remember the time I spent playing curiously inventive and sometimes bizarrely abstract games like Ascend, Infinite Children, or Neo Cab. Or that time when a small augmented reality game called ARBox had me scanning the real world for a magic seal. No flashy stands, just interesting ideas with a lot of heart.

As 3 days of buzzing conference ended, followed by a magnificent Ludovico Einaudi concert as a cherry on top, I couldn't help but wonder if Kynseed might ever find its way to that cozy corner among the peacocks.







E3 has once again passed by in a blur, and already the week-long extravaganza seems to be fading into memory. This marked my sixth E3 I've attended and it seems like each year feels distinctly different than the ones that came before.

Not long ago the Fable Anniversary team was there, crammed into the Microsoft area right next to Sony and Nintendo's area - each as equally crammed as the other. A couple years after that the Fable Legends team was there. Fast forward to 2019 and suddenly Microsoft's area is gone entirely, having moved down the street to the aptly named (and owned) Microsoft Theater. Not to mention Sony's notable absence this year.

It's all an ever-present reminder that the game industry is a constantly evolving thing. Yet there does seem to be one constant that I've noticed: the people. Maybe the real treasure was the friends we made along the way. *Jim Halpert looks at camera*

The industry might change at breakneck speeds but the family of friends I've made over the years does seem to be the one constant thread throughout it all. This E3, I met up with industry peeps (ex-Lionhead and otherwise), new PixelCount friends, and even folks from the Fable community whose friendships span over a decade. In many ways, E3 serves as a sort of annual reunion for both dev side and player side. It's easily my favourite aspect of E3.

That said, when not gallivanting around with chums of yore, there was still work to be done. We didn't have a booth or anything (we feel the game's not quite at that point yet), but there were meetings to have, panels to attend, contacts to contact, and even the impromptu laptop demo here and there.

I'm sure I'll have more E3 tales to regale you all with in the week ahead (likely in our Discord server), though for now I find myself still recovering from a bit of 'post-con fatigue'. I'm very much looking forward to settling back in to my normal work routines this next week. As much as I enjoy E3, a part of me always just wants to get back to working on the game.

Welcome to Issue #54 of The PixelCount Post, a periodically released update from Kynseed's team. In today's issue: Charlie falls in love with the new haven, Neal continues down the dusty road, Tice lends an ear, and Matt revels in organized chaos.
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Starting earlier this week, the team began work on the next features-focused update: "A Song of Price and Hire". This one will mainly expand upon shop ownership gameplay by adding the Goods Store as an ownable business as well as fleshing out staff hiring and the ledger book. We're also adding in shop reputation, which will help reflect how succesful and famous your business is.

One advantage we have with this update is that there's some basic shop running systems already in place from when we added blacksmith ownership a few updates ago. This essentially means that all the game's ownable businesses will share some underlying code, including the Apothecary and even Tavern. Though for this week, we're keeping our focus primarily on systems for running the Goods Store and building on what's already there.

We've also begun work on formally nailing down details for the next batch of updates on the roadmap. This current batch will end just a couple of updates from now and so it's time we start deciding on the specifics for the updates to come. We'll of course share details for that next batch sometime before this current batch is done - in fact, the next batch has some new gameplay additions that we're very much looking forward to getting to! Though for now, we'll be ensuring the Goods Store is primed and ready for all you would-be shop owners wanting to make a brass or two.







My work this past week has been finally getting back onto levels, with Mellowfields imminent. For now though, I am putting the finishing touches to Loverwood, a region of Summerdown. It is a place for romance, rumpy pumpy, and one of the places you can choose to have your binding ceremony (marriage).

There is also a rather dashing chap living there, and he is a bit of a love guru with plenty of wise advice for those seeking love and woohoo.

I'm looking forward to getting stuck into the next haven, with its idyllic fields and gardens, trickling brooks, and giant vegetables. Am sure there will be plenty of innuendo in there, as is tradition...







The Long Road continues...

This week almost went to plan! Well, apart from the first few days being taken up with editor and initial Festfield event work overlapping from the last update. Work is also getting underway with the Goods Store and business ownership work. As several of the pieces like the ledger and bartering system already exist, it's not as hard fitting it all together for this second player job activity but there are equally a lot of details to sort out. Such as how workers will be handled, dealing with stock, customer tastes, and how reputation will affect visitors to the shop.

My aim is to do a better job at frontloading this update to sort out the details early, potentially leaving a bit of time to get ahead this update. We've been going over the plans for future updates and there's certainly a lot to pack in so any chance to get ahead is handy!

It feels like the groundwork has been a long time coming (and still has some ways to go) but is coming together nicely and increasingly feels solid and ready to start bedding in the details that'll make the game fulfil its ambition. Still a long way to go, which just needs to be taken one step at a time...







For the last week or so I've been delving into the art of mastering. And let me tell you: mastering is HARD! It's where all the elements of a track have to come together perfectly balanced against one another.

Consider that a track can sometimes consist of literally thousands of elements and you'll get a pretty solid idea of why this is so hard to do. You can get help from tutorials and master classes and all those good sources of information, but at the end of the day you have to rely on your own ears. If you can't hear a minute problem, you can't fix the minute problem.

You also have to take good care of your ears if you want to keep doing this job. Monitor the dB (decibel volume) you're exposed to and how long you're exposed to it. And take breaks! A big problem is that when you're composing something that has a sense of big scale, odds are that this sense of scale won't come out until you play it loud. But do that for too long and you'll damage your ears. Don't do it at all and you won't hear some very important things.

I've had a habit of composing and mixing on low volume. This has meant that some things will slip by me. You can look at graphs for additional information but that's not the same as being able to tell what the experience of listening to it is. So it's always a balancing act. I do know this: if you don't spare your ears, you'll be out of commission forever.







It's been a bit of a helter skelter week as I tried to balance getting game work done with getting E3 prep done. We won't be doing any sort of booth/demoing at E3 or anything, but E3's convention center is quite literally two blocks from where I live so I generally end up attending each year anyway. And even though we're not doing any 'official' game presence there, I'll still be meeting up with various industry folks for an equal mix of work meetings and friend meetings.

There's a surprising amount of prep that goes into everything though, both for the event itself and also because I'll be having so many guests in town. Since I live so close, my flat typically becomes a 'base of operations' for many of my attending friends and industry peeps. It makes for a bit of a madhouse week, but I always kinda enjoy how hectic it all gets. It's 'organized chaos', but in a good way.

Plus, everyone's favorite Kynseed composer Tice will also be attending this year, so he'll be palling around with me for much of it. It's actually quite rare indeed to have two PixelCounts together in the same place! Our little team is so remote and geographically removed typically. Perhaps one year, if we can get the full team together, we can combine our forces and...I dunno what. Turn into Megazord, or perhaps summon Captain Planet.

Welcome to Issue #53 of The PixelCount Post, a periodically released update from Kynseed's team. In today's issue: Charlie looks for bad apples, Neal dives into details, Tice goes off on a mission, and Matt humble brags about puns.
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Welcome to another issue of The PixelCount Post! As it happens, we just released a dev announcement mere hours ago for our optimisation update. So we'll be keeping today's issue short and sweet, like a small puppy. Preferably a pug.

This was our first optimisation update and it's really helped clean some things up on the back end of the game. You'd be surprised how much spring cleaning is needed when working on the same engine since the prototype. This proved to be a very useful update for us, so we're glad that we've made time to sprinkle a few into our roadmap. Next stop on our development journey will be a features focused update with an emphasis on running your own Goods Store, managing hired staff, and accruing shop reputation.

We'll be jumping on that first thing Monday, after we tie up any loose ends and bug reports for the current update. If you come across any bugs yourself, feel free to give us a shout or write us at Bugs@Kynseed.com. Thanks folks, we'll see you again next week!











This past week has been document catchup and trying to finally get a good pass of the "Items Master" list finished. I was working 'til 1am on it the other night, then realised I didn't like it so started the "Recipes and Traits" doc again and made a lot more order out of it. I'm much happier with it now.

I was also testing the build a bit and just playing around. The seasonal items caught me out and I forgot that some ingredients go missing in certain seasons so I was complaining to Neal about the lack of apples in Spring. It turned out we ended up enabling apples in Spring anyway, so players have fast travel options still.

We also received some more excellent art from our artists: new UI, environment stuff from Matt Weekes (excellent as always), and monsters from Gary. I just saw a composition of all the latest monsters, and we really do have a fantastic line up. Colourful, detailed, and dripping with character. In the case of the big ones, their teeth dripping with your character most likely!

Next week I am back on the new Loverwood region and then I'll make inroads into Mellowfields, our third haven! Let's just say, I'm continuing a theme from a level I made for Fable Legends...







This last week I've been getting back some of my focus. It's a difficulty on a long project to maintain a consistent pattern of work and intensity. Oftentimes it comes with deadlines and this week was another update deadline. I feel like it's more than that though, where I've been trying to think about the work in a different way. Such as being more disciplined about working on detail instead of holding things off for some unknown future point.

It sounds simple and sensible when put like that, but I have found it easy to stray from and so it does feel like a big backlog exists to work on which I'm never sure when I'll get to. The details can be a problem as well when they mean too much time is spent on something that turns out wasn't necessary, but I think generally those things have tended to be rarer on this project at least.

Anyway, to get away from more general ramblings about process: I've been working on keybindings, skills in-game, and some editor screens. The keybindings took a good two days but am quite pleased with the general results. It was a nice standalone feature to get into the zone for with lots of details which seemed to keep popping up as I looked through the code. Skills in-game I had some trepidation about doing, but I think it's starting to turn out nicely in presentation.

One area I have held off for later is standardising the UI presentation more so that it's easy to reuse visual/audio flair without having to code it each time, but that did seem like a step too far in the circumstances so will have to wait 'til the next optimisation update. The editor screens are to help assist level design and placement of items/fish/growables, which have started to reach a quantity of data that would benefit from improving and, again, to avoid relying on code so much.

The rest of this week will be fixing any bugs with the new update along with more editor screen work and setting up more events in Festfield. Then it'll be on to the next major update with the Goods Store and business ownership. I'm looking forward to introducing more of the gameplay loop and getting stuck in their details!







I have to write this a bit sooner than usual because I'm about to go away on a mission to play percussion at a festival abroad. On the one hand it cuts into what I'm currently doing, and on the other it's a breath of fresh air. Literally, as it'll be out in the open air.

On the game front, the themes for all the shop purchases are done for Candlewych and Poppyhill. At the time of writing this the current update is pretty close to done, and after it releases it all starts again with the update after that. There's shop tunes still needed for the next town beyond Poppyhill, which will keep me busy for a bit.

All in all, we're going through the items on our roadmap pretty quickly. It's great to see things getting crossed off the list as 'done' over time. There's also only 2 weeks left before my trip to LA begins and, believe me, I'm counting the days!







Welp, that's our first optimisation update done then! It was the first update of this kind that we've tackled, so part of the challenge was determining exactly how flexible we wanted the update's focus to be. For the first week or so of the update we started off very flexible. The idea was that we'd give ourselves an opportunity to do some freeform collaboration on things that we've been needing/wanting to do but never found time for in other updates.

Though after a while, we found ourselves preferring a bit less freeform and a bit more balance - a sort of 'structured' flexibility. We've had a long time to work together as a team and learn what keeps us motivated and efficient. We like to stay pretty agile and reactive, but we also like to have a generally structured plan at the same time. A sort of underlying compass to follow behind everything we do.

That balance ended up being the special ingredient for making these optimisation updates pack the most punch. Plus, now that we've found that balance, we'll be able to hit the ground running even harder for when the next optimisation update rolls around. Though personally, I'm looking forward to getting back to focusing on features and content. I'm sure it goes without saying that back end optimisation is one of the least sexy parts of game development, despite being critically important.

For our next stop on our roadmap we'll be adding in Goods Store ownership, deeper staff management, and shop reputation. We're calling the update "A Song of Price and Hire", and I'm far more proud of that title than I should be.

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Hello there Seedlings! We've just wrapped up our recent optimisation update and have dispatched it straight your way, primed and ready for downloading. These optimisation updates are focused more on behind the scenes background work for the engine so, unlike our prior updates, this one won't contain quite as many visual changes on the surface.

That said, we still snuck in a few surface additions here and there, including a new farm mailbox as well as some initial keyboard mapping options. As such, we've come to refer to this as the "Keyboard Cartography" update. Apparently our lack of shame with bad puns knows no bounds.






One of the more noticeable additions for this update is a quaint little mailbox that we've added to the farm. Over time this mailbox will likely intertwine with gameplay, but for now we're just using it as a quick and easy way to give you brief summaries of any recently released updates. This way players won't have to wade through these lengthier announcements if they don't want to and can instead get highlights of new content right in-game. So anytime you see a red ribbon on the mailbox, that means you'll have a new letter straight from us. (Each one is handwritten, so long as you count keyboards.)

This update has a few other bits and bobs as well (like keyboard remapping!), but the primary focus for our optimisation updates is making sure our engine stays nice and well oiled. Primarily this included work on a few of our developer tools to make them more efficient and streamlined. Tools like a new Skill Tree Editor as well as existing tools like our Cutscene Editor, the latter of which we'll use to add events and story moments into future updates.

For a more in-depth look at things like the Cutscene Editor you can check out Issue #51 of The PixelCount Post, which is our series of weekly dev updates written by the team. Though for a more cursory look at today's update, read on below!

• You'll receive a letter from us for each major update
  
• Look for the red ribbon to see when a letter has arrived
  
• (May break fourth wall)

• Set new keyboard bindings for both Primary and Secondary controls
  
• Also set shortcuts for hotbar items

• Initial 3 items on new cooking skill tree (first pass)
  
• Improvements to some internal dev tools (Cutscene Editor, items, & navigation)
  
• New internal dev tool: Skill Tree Editor
  
• Spring cleaning of unused textures & assets
  
• For a complete look at all changes, check out the full changelog

Next week, we'll be turning our attention back to working on some meatier content updates, starting with an update we've cheekily named "A Song of Price and Hire". That update will feature things like owning the Goods Store, managing hired staff, and a shop reputation system. We'll be pushing this update out the week after E3, so as to avoid releasing it during all that E3 hustle and bustle. As always, don't hesitate to check out our roadmap for a full rundown of what's to come.

Thanks to everyone who's been playing and providing feedback along the way, even for these less flashy optimisation updates. Speak again soon!

Love,
PixelCount

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Welcome to Issue #52 of The PixelCount Post, a periodically released update from Kynseed's team. In today's issue: Neal dives into details, Matt interfaces with interfaces, Tice mellows out in a field, and Charlie speaks of an ill Quill wind.
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Another week rolls by and we're one step closer to finishing up our current optimisation update. Which as we've said before, isn't so much about 'optimisation' per se, but rather it's a flexible update to give us time to tend to longterm engine work - such as perfecting our developer tools like the Cutscene Editor discussed last week.

On that front, Neal has continued work on polishing up more Cutscene Editor bits in addition to doing some work on our UI Editor, which also received attention this week. Art has been pushing through some amazing things as well: Weekes has been preparing beautiful field tilesets for an upcoming region and Gary has been making adult sprites as well as a few horrifying monsters. All to come in future content and feature updates of course, which you can read about on our roadmap.

Though currently, we'll need to start winding down work on this update so that we can get it ready for release. Although there won't be as many flashy obvious changes on the surface, there's still a good deal of work that's gone on behind the scenes, so we'll be sure to share a full changelog when the update gets pushed out to everyone. For those of you anxious to check it out, you can expect the update to go live middle of this upcoming week!







This week I've improved some more on the Cutscene Editor, which turned out a little tricky. I've been trying to convert the Fairweather appearance sequence to use the Cutscene Editor because it was done via code originally (quite last minute to a deadline!) and so has always been a little painful to work with.

To do so required some new abilities for the Cutscene Editor (scaling objects and animating non-character sprites) and these turned out quite intricate to set up. I've also been working through Matt's feedback on the system which has been helpful in guiding the work. Otherwise I've been working on the setup for acquiring skills ingame with cooking (recipes) being the next one to get in. This went reasonably smooth, but does need clarity in its presentation.

The next step I'm taking a look into is keyboard mappings as an often asked for feature. It does feel a little like I'm getting buried in the details lately, but they do need filling in, so slowly the big picture will emerge...







Over here at Chateau Matt, my humble home across the pond from Castle PixelCount, I've been keeping busy with various odds and ends in support of the current optimisation update. Last week I focused on our Cutscene Editor tool, so for this week I switched over to focusing on our UI Editor tool.

The UI (User Interface) Editor is, as you imagined, an editor for UI. Shocking. However, there's a surprising amount of depth to the tool, if only because a game like Kynseed has literal thousands of individual UI elements across the entire game - with more to come even! There's the game's menus, item inventory, player toolbars, combat elements, dialogue interfaces, all the jobs, all the job ledgers, and so on.

Having a quick and efficient way for the team to make changes to these element's appearance and positioning is crucial for keeping the team's efficiency well lubricated. (Everybody likes a well lubricated dev team.) This is where the UI Editor comes in. Much like the Cutscene Editor, using a tool opens up the creative process to the entire team rather than having it all remain housed deep in the code where only Neal can find.

For now, the biggest difficulty with the UI Editor is that not all UI elements are linked to it. A number of elements were added before we had the UI Editor in place, so many are still hard coded in. This means we've got to go through and identify which elements aren't linked to the UI Editor and make note of them. From there, Neal will track them down and get to work on linking them up.

It's a fairly tedious task at the moment, but once done it'll make for modifying UI as we go much much easier. Kynseed is a game with lots of moving parts and new parts are getting added constantly, so the gobs of UI we have tend to be in a very constant state of flux during development. That'll continue to be the case for some time, but with the UI Editor we'll soon be able to polish it up as we go with far more efficiency.

Though for now, it's back to the grindstone. Literally. I'm working on the blacksmith UI.







Another week flies by. Does anyone else feel time is speeding up?

As I had hoped, I was able to hand in a couple of iterations of the leitmotiv I talked about last week. It won't be until the corresponding scenes can be made in the new Cutscene Editor that we can really test out these themes within the game itself, but even outside of the game you should be able to get a feel for what they're trying to communicate.

Meanwhile, I'm trying to get the most out of my MasterClass pass before it runs out. I'm learning a lot of technical things that should be transferable to many a situation. I'm also eager to get to work on additional cutscenes that can now be made with the new editor. I've also made a list of little adjustments I want to make to some tracks in the Mellowfields region.

The more I listen to previously made tracks, the more little things I notice. It never stops, and I don't think it ever will. But I take it as a sign that my ears are getting better at picking up tiny details.

Next weekend I'll be off to a medieval festival to do percussion. It'll be a nice change of pace and hopefully some fresh musical influences. Not too long after that it'll be time to get on a plane to LA! I'm SO excited about E3 this year!







This week I was on a bit of a dietary change to try and get myself back on order and it had the effect of giving me more energy. I waded into design docs, doing new ones and tweaking old ones.

One of the designs still not there was for the ailments the people of Quill can get. When you own the apothecary, you will get customers coming in and you can sell them 'off the shelf' items or go craft them there and then. However, the system was a bit of a mess and the shop side was lacking. So now, NPC's will come in and you ask what the problem is.

They'll give you between 1 and 3 symptoms. If just one, we call it a 'PickMeUp'. And if 2 or 3, it's a 'Malady'. Maladies have a visual effect to help identify them and add some amusement, and more info on them can be found in Medical Tomes and Proverbs. Each symptom has a cure and the player can select these in a notebook and create a prescription. This acts like an order book and can be passed to a staff member to mix or make yourself.

NPC's may also just want to buy a dye or perfume, and you can craft anything you want and the Traits will take care of it. Want the perfume to make them fart? Mix in ingredients with Flatulence Trait to one with Scent. You can make powders, creams, and potions, then store them in the shop cabinet or even take them with you.

We're hoping the player will get a lot of fun from the system and get a nice feeling from crushing, grinding, distilling, and mixing. "Oh hello sir, seems like you have a touch of Flamefart. I have just the thing..."

Welcome to Issue #51 of The PixelCount Post, a periodically released update from Kynseed's team. In today's issue: Neal notices nagging notes, Charlie gets ideas, Tice uses flashy vocabulary, and Matt has a keen scene machine.
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Issue #50 is still lukewarm off the presses, but we're back to our usual pace of things this week with another issue on your virtual doorsteps. As planned, work is happily continuing along on the optimisation update. The team's been keeping most busy with preparing new art assets and UI improvements. Meanwhile, Neal has moved on from working on bits of Prologue polish and is now sorting through team feedback on our developer tools, such as the Cutscene Editor and UI Editor.

Polishing and enhancing those tools will make a world of difference for speeding up development across the entire team. The more the whole team can use and access such tools, the less burden it will be on Neal having to do everything code side, thus freeing him up to work on higher priority systems and features. As a result, new cutscenes and UI tweaks are being worked on as we speak, though it might be an update or two before these actually show up in-game.

Lastly, for anyone who may've missed it, you should check out the recently released Special 50th Edition of The Post. It features a few extra appearances (like our character artist/animator and our icon artist) as well as a neat look at old Kynseed prototype screenshots. Though best we get back to work for now, as there's new sprites to make and new cutscenes to edit. So we'll see you all again in another issue soon!







For Week 2 of the optimisation update, I managed to get further into the little bits and pieces of nagging issues that affect the making of the game along with working on a skill tree editor and trying out the adult anims which are starting to come together. In our situation where the engine is custom, the editor is also custom. So it's effectively two engineering projects for the price of one! As the project has gone along I've been slowly iterating on the functionality for the editor to fill in shortcomings and improve the process of making the game, but there's always more to be done.

Often this leads to me making a mental or physical note and then trying to ignore it - which works to an extent. But it always leaves that question of how much time might be saved by improving the editor, both for iteration speed and for the removal of such thoughts needing to pop up and be ignored! That question can hopefully be answered a little after this update is complete, but it certainly feels satisfying to knock down some of those issues.

One aspect of it that is a bit of a crossover for editor and game is that I worked on improving text input. I've done some work to make the cursor movable to edit the text at any point, which turned out a little less straightforward when having to factor in how the DEL key works and using the CTRL key to jump between words. I've also been looking into fixing leftover placeholder images from changes in tiles over the last 2 years. That has proved a time consuming process but is coming to an end (down from 1,000 tiles to 100 or so left now).

It's tricky making changes like this because of having a live data set to work with. One which encompasses some 20 odd levels, meaning mistakes are quite costly to track down. If I was going it again I'd definitely look to plan for these kinds of situations more.

All in all, a better week than the last one though with more variety of work and the feeling of tidying up loose ends - all of which will prove handy in the coming months. For now I better get back to work on some bugs, along with the Cutscene Editor and a dozen other useful bits!







Games. We all love 'em (or we wouldn't be here). So many to choose from over a wealth of platforms. So many stores touting their wares and throwing super cheap or free games at you. Humble Store, Game Pass, Games with Gold, Epic Store, Steam, GoG, PlayStation Plus, itch.io, GameJolt, Uplay, Origin, and so on. My backlog grows and my desktop grows ever more full of icons. (Matt has a meltdown over my chaos.)

It really is a flooded market out there. There is good use to be found though, amongst this sea of games, for a developer. You can find inspiration even in titles that disappoint. Example: I have been playing Forager this week. It is quite moreish to start with, then unravels itself to be a glorified clicker game with no real point to it. However, the game gave me two huge jolts of inspiration.

The game is made with such love and the developer has his own story as a cartoon for you to read. There are also warm messages and a constant sense of it being a passion project. Secondly, it has lovely popping menus that feel lively, look colorful and clear, and even function well. We can learn from these things and one of our eventual aims is the UI to look, feel, and sound nice.

So many games, yet we can take something small from each one, even if it is not how we do things. Now excuse me, I just noticed a few more free games on Game Pass...







With the current optimisation not requiring new assets from me (so far), I've been able to focus on some prep work for E3 next month. Quite a bit of work goes into traveling to the states and making yourself ready to meet the developers of the world. There's also some music related to the shops that I hope to get done before I go state side.

There are two important themes in the game's soundtrack that I want to put in numerous places around the game. The thing about themes, or rather 'leitmotivs' as they're called, is that you need to repeat them quite a bit before the brain makes the right connection between the theme and the thing the theme represents. It then subjects it to memory. So I'm looking for all the places in the game where these themes can be repeated and associated.

The acquisition of shops is one such place. The theme I want to put there represents personal growth and development. I want the acquisition of each shop to have its own iteration of that theme, using the instruments that I also use in that shop's music. In turn, each shop is influenced by the instruments used in the region's music they're based on. So just from the music alone, you'll be able to hear what shop you're acquiring and where the shop is located. Plus they need to give you a feeling of personal accomplishment. I hope it works in practice as well as it does in my mind!







Dang, just thought of a better name for 'The Short Report'. I could've instead called it 'In a Nutshell'. Ah well.

Aside from lamenting missed naming opportunities, I've been busy spending time in the game's Cutscene Editor. This tool was initially put into the engine earlier this year, but there's been so many spinning plates for me to tend to in recent months that this is the first chance I've had to really sit down and sink some time into it.

Though for now, the goal isn't to create the cutscenes themselves. Not yet, at least. Right now the goal is to note down any problems, bugs, or quality of life improvements that the Cutscene Editor needs. I've already compiled a first pass list of feedback notes and have sent them on to Neal, who'll be sorting through them over the next day or so.



Here's how the Cutscene Editor currently looks. There's still work to be done on it, but soon I'll be able to use it to create scenes and story moments in the game. (Click here to enlarge.)


Something that I'm particularly fond of with the Cutscene Editor is that Neal and I worked together to make it behave and feel like a video editor. Specifically, Adobe Premiere Pro. It's the video editor I personally know best and I've been editing videos with it going back as far as when I joined the Lionhead community, if not longer. As a result, I tend to handle any and all video work needed on the team - our current trailer being one of the most recent.

So what this meant was that when Neal and I began the initial groundwork for the Cutscene Editor, I was able to give him a rudimentary design to follow which was, at its core, a very simplified version of a video editing interface. This included things like: a project timeline at the bottom, a moveable playhead marker to denote which frame the editor is on, timeline blocks/objects with expandable in and out points, a properties window on the side to alter the behaviour of timeline items, and so on. It also shares many of the same hotkeys as Premiere Pro, so I'll even be able to use all the little video editing shortcuts that have become muscle memory over the years.



Everyone does their layouts differently, but here's how my Premiere setup looks. You can see the basic similarities when compared to the Cutscene Editor above. (Click here to enlarge.)


There's still work to be done polishing up the Cutscene Editor for regular development use, but the recent round of feedback notes compiled this week will likely take care of the brunt of it. Once that happens, I'll get to start making some new cutscenes to be included in future updates!