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Hello there! It's a brand new year here at PixelCount and, presumably, for everyone else on the planet. Recently our team did some holiday coming and going as we each took turns taking a week or so off, something we seem to manage only about once a year (typically due to it being hard to pry the team's fingers from their computers). Though by tomorrow as of this writing, our team will be nestled back in their respective chairs ready to clutch their computers once more.

Some of you readers may be joining us for the very first time, perhaps having arrived during the recent Steam Winter Sale in which we dabbled for the first time with putting a wee discount on the game. In which case, thank you! Or perhaps you've just arrived because, rather miraculously, your cat happened to walk on your keyboard in just the right way so as to purchase a random game you've otherwise had no interest in until now. In which case, thank your cat! But whatever your reason for joining us, welcome!

In fact, we figured we'd use this issue of our dev log as an opportunity to give a few of you new folks a rundown of who we are and how we're approaching Early Access. (Or for you old-time readers, this can serve as a handy refresher.) And don't worry, these dev logs of ours aren't usually this long, even with Matt launching into his random soapbox tangents. That said, we're kicking off 2020 with our longest issue yet of The PixelCount Post! So grab yourself a hot cocoa and read on for our welcome message to new players, followed right after by our usual updates from the Kynseed team.


We're PixelCount Studios, an indie team founded by veteran devs of the Fable series from British developer Lionhead Studios which shut its doors a few years ago, may it rest in peace. Of course the original Fable team was quite large in its day and we're a much smaller team by comparison, but a few of us here each have about 10+ years experience making those Lionhead games of yesteryear.

That's merely a small snapshot of who we are though, if only to assure you that we haven't just wandered in off the streets of the internet. Never heard of Fable or Lionhead? No worries at all. Not only will we not hold it against you, we also think you'll still get on just fine with Kynseed, so long as you enjoy whimsical sandbox RPG's with a quirky sense of British humor. Ahem...humour.


One of the things that we found most appealing about the idea of doing The Indie Early Access Thing™ was having complete freedom to be as open and transparent with players as we wanted to be. We've never been fans of studios that put some sort of wall up between themselves and their players. Our approach is to be a laid-back accessible team who keeps things candid, honest, and who're never more than a message away if you want to get in touch. These days it's become a pretty standard part of our workday to hang out in our community where we chat with players, give progress reports, and sometimes even go on rambling game-related tangents - as many of our forum and Discord members can probably attest to.

We view Early Access as an opportunity to help demystify the game development process, from beginning to end. To us, it's always felt like the game industry was this overly secretive and closed off place. But that's not really our style. Game dev can be a twisting turning journey and, like any journey worth going on, it has its ups and downs. Our hope is to candidly chronicle that whole experience. This Early Access is a journey we want players to go on with us.


Something that helps us chronicle that experience is this very thing you're reading right now: The PixelCount Post. That's essentially what we call our dev logs, which we usually release a handful of times a month (though a bit less in December). In fact, we've been chronicling our development journey with these dev logs since long before the game was even out on Early Access. (This here happens to be Issue #74!)

Each issue starts with what we call "The Short Report" where we give a brief overview of our recent progress. As the name implies, these are usually short and to the point, though this issue's is obviously a fair bit longer due to catching any of you new readers up to speed. Right below each issue's Short Report, you'll then find individual updates personally written by members of the team. In these we'll talk about what we worked on that week, or what challenges we're experiencing, or sometimes just our thoughts about game dev and the industry in general. It tends to vary from dev to dev and week to week, but the overall aim is always the same: to give an ongoing account of this game dev adventure we're all on.

Here are the names you'll typically see in a given issue:

Charlie, who does much of the game's design, writing, and level/world creating. Neal, our sole programmer who's created our game's entire engine and editor from scratch (using the excellent MonoGame framework). Tice, who has been composing the game's amazing (and massive) soundtrack as well as creating all sound effects. And Matt (that's me!), who aside from occasionally having to talk in the third person also juggles all the other areas of work that a small team like ours can't possibly cover - things like the game's graphic design, video editing, community management, sound production, making/running our websites, writing/editing all community updates, and other such production-related things. We'll also have other team members chime in now and then, such as our artists when they're not otherwise absorbed in their pixels.


Of course, all these dev logs are a bit pointless if there aren't frequent game updates to go alongside them! To that end, you can expect us to release at least one sizable game update a month (usually with some smaller polish and/or bug fix updates in-between). Here's a quick overview of how it all works:

There's three different 'types' of updates that we release. Going from smallest to largest, these are Development Updates>Monthly Updates>Milestone Updates. The smallest of these are the Development Updates, which we release about every 2 weeks only to players who have opted-in to get our absolute latest (but less stable/tested) updates. The next step up are the Monthly Updates, which are more cohesive stable updates that we send out to all players each month alongside a written progress report to the community. The final and largest type are the Milestone Updates, which represent a significant step forward in development and are released every 2-4 months alongside a large written progress report.

With this approach, smaller update types get combined to create larger update types. Or to put it another way: we release biweekly Development Updates, which we combine together to release as stable Monthly Updates, which are themselves combined together to release as large Milestone Updates.

To help keep track of it all, we have the Kynseed Roadmap which we add to and update regularly. The roadmap is divided into two sections: completed/upcoming Milestone Updates at the top and an Entire Journey section at the bottom, which offers a more granular look at where development is. We're certainly not shy about the fact that there's still a ways left to go on this Early Access journey of ours, but you can at least rest assured that we'll be keeping the community and the game frequently updated the whole way.


We always figure it's better to barrage players with more info than they need rather than not enough. So consider yourself thoroughly barraged. Our next issue of The Post will no doubt be back down to its normal size, so check back soon for those of you who enjoy this sort of development minutiae. Though for those of you more keen on just the bigger updates, we've actually got a Monthly Update planned to drop in about a week!

Until then, our normal batch of individually written team updates can be found further down below. (They might read a bit disjointed this issue, as each one was written a week or so apart due to holiday schedules disrupting our team's usual flow of things.)

Lastly, a big thanks to all of you just joining us on this journey as well as those of you who've already been here (and have had to withstand us repeating some of this stuff a few times now!). There's also some handy links down below that any new players might find useful. There's far more corners to our community than just those links of course, but they're good places to start with for now. A hearty welcome to everyone once more, and we'll see you all again soon in the upcoming Monthly Update!

Discord - Our Discord tends to be the central hub of our community and is where we can often be found during our workdays.

Roadmap - Here's an overview of our development plans which includes a look at completed and upcoming Milestone Updates as well as a broader section detailing our progress overall.

Twitter - Give us a follow if Twitter is more your thing, as we're known to post dev screenshots and GIF's there frequently.

FAQ - We have a pretty robust FAQ to help cover most Frequently Asked Questions, in addition to a completely unnecessary SAQ section for Seldomly Asked Questions.







It's been a little while since the last issue of The Post. Since then, I've mainly been occupied with wrapping up the build's Monthly Update followed by working on a further mini-update in preparation of the winter sale. After some downtime around festivities, I'll be picking up on the feedback and turning attention to what comes next in terms of refining the player experience.

December tends to be a trickier time for development work with a natural feeling of the end of year closing and the need to take a breath before the rush of the new year begins. The quick pace of doing Monthly Updates have meant mostly keeping to smaller targets of work that can be finished within several hours spread over a few days. I've also been trying to pace it a bit better to make safer changes and keep the stability of the game high.

With a small bit of extra time, I've been starting to play the game and make more exhaustive notes on exactly what needs improving to take the game to the next level. So far, from about an hour of play, I've got a list of 5 A4 pages worth of notes and am still scratching the surface in some ways. Some of these I have actually already started working on, but it's really getting difficult to know which parts are worthwhile right now - especially combined with all the info in our Trello, Discord, assorted documents, and past lists combining into new lists resulting in thousands of items.

To counter that glut of information, I've been setting up project tracking using something called Hansoft (which is seemingly free to trial for 5 users, similar to Perforce). Currently I've shifted over some 380 items for the backlog and about 80 bugs, but am sure those will get substantially higher by the time most of the info is accounted for. My hope in doing this is that the possibilities of properly organising this data will allow for some better decision making on exactly what filters out to the top of the work remaining. It already feels better to have that structure in place by seeing where the data can be broken up into milestones and then organised by priority and progress.

Perhaps it is tempting fate to say, but it does seem like we are finally hitting upon a decent stride to be able to make consistent progress. This past year has felt like an extended learning experience in some ways, where different approaches have come and gone without really feeling like there's a sustainable or satisfactory way of proceeding other than to keep trying until some other way presents itself. Now though, there feels a more steady path to follow where only refinements are needed to the process and that it'll be easier to carry things through as development matures towards a conclusion. It still feels like a long way from that conclusion, but the path itself is where we are aiming to grow the content and refinement of the game experience towards that elusive goal somewhere ahead. Wishing everyone a happy New Year and all the best for the future!



For the first week of January, I've recently been sorting out some bugs that still seem to be creeping around the game. There were a few mistakes I'd made recently when some changes turned out to be more impactful to gameplay than I'd intended. I've mentioned before about the balance of trying to ensure that all testing has been accounted for, but it can be easy to develop blindspots - especially perhaps when one feels a rush to get something released and is unaware of the effect a change might have. I've got a short trip planned 'til mid-January, so I'll be using that as a chance to work on paper to come up with some ideas for handling it better next time.

Over the Christmas period, I got the chance to look back over some old notes I'd made as a kid and on various older games and it surprised me to see how much I wrote down back then! Nowadays most of it goes straight on the computer, which undoubtedly has its benefits for organisation, but there is something about written notes that makes it easier to be more relaxed and to perhaps set off different parts of the mind than a keyboard where every letter feels pretty much the same to type. Tune in next time to find out the results of that experiment!







"Last year, I gave you my heart, but the very next day, you gave it away."

True words from an ancient songwriter of the 20th century. He actually gave his internal organs away apparently.

In Quill, the nature of sacrifice permeates everyday life. Whether it is putting some bread in a Brounie bowl, proffering some apples to Druida at a Goddess statue, or burning your loved ones in a giant Woodfellow in Spring...sacrifice is part and parcel of existing in such a land.

With the new year upon us, there are many exciting things to add to the game and we hope that your sacrifice of a few pounds/dollars/whatever-local-currency will be worth it and reward you with the blessing of gaming pleasure and many hours lost to distraction amongst the cheery NPC's, swaying trees, and books filled with references and terrible puns.

We wouldn't be here without the support of our initial backers and then the goodwill of those that jumped onboard after. We also would not be here without the amazing talent of our team. Each of them an absolute treasure and pleasure to work with.

So as we head into 2020, we are thankful of sacrifice. The sacrifice of the time and efforts of our wonderful community and the time and efforts of our wonderful team. Just don't go climbing in any tall wooden humanoid constructs or rip out your kidneys.







This month over in my country of the Netherlands, it's Sinterklaas time. That means juggling family events with work. Luckily the sound effects I'm doing are nice little bite-size chunks of work I can usually fit in-between other things. Lately, I've been doing a few sound effects for a minigame that involves digging.

It seemed pretty straightforward on the surface, but it's still a pretty precise thing creating a sound that's 'just the thing' we're looking for. A sound of tapping the ground could be just that: some light taps on ground. However, it also needs to be layered with a crunchy sound for when dirt is parted by the shovel. Plus, there's the sound of digging in the wrong spot. This needed to sound like 'failure', so initially I was asked to try layering in the sound of clay pots breaking. That sound can turn out in many different ways though. So it's always a bit of a search at first, followed by then layering multiple things to get the specific sound you need.

I still don't think it's exactly right, but you never know if you'll run into a better sound to layer into the whole that makes it just a bit better. In the end, the sound of digging in the right spot was a shovel hitting dirt layered with an acoustic guitar doing harmonics. Hopefully that'll be just the right combination to make you think, "Oh, whatever just happened must be a good thing."

Beyond that, at the time of writing this it's nearing Christmas time, and Kynseed just went on sale on Steam! I'm looking forward to seeing people play it for the first time over the holidays.



Fast forward a bit from my update above, and the new year is off to a good start! I handed in a new draft for an upcoming region of the game and we also determined a good placement location for some music I did a while back. The swampy areas I've been working on feel very different from the music I've done for the game so far. It's a lot scarier and much more moody. For me, it's a breath of fresh air.

With the new year I've also made myself a challenge to compose something every day this year, no exceptions. This means that if I'm unable to get to a computer one day, I'll have to compose by other means. I could write on paper, or record my voice into my phone for instance. What the challenge is meant to do is to create habit.

Previously, I hadn't paid much attention to strict scheduling for creativity. My general stance was that you can't force art. I still reckon that's true, but making a habit of daily composing is still useful for body and mind. Anything you do often, whether inspired or not, your body and mind get better at. Maybe you didn't create that inspired masterpiece on a day you weren't feeling it, but you did hone skills in orchestration, mixing, modulation, sound design, or a great many other things.

On top of that, the mind 'gets ready' for what it expects to be doing. This is why if you always eat at a certain time of day, your body will work up an appetite during that time. Your body is designed to adapt to habits to maximize efficiency. This also means I have to tackle the demon that's been forever my friend: irregular sleep cycles. At the moment I'm not all that confident in my ability to maintain a steady sleep cycle, but we'll see...







I always forget how disruptive the holiday season is to any semblance of a normal schedule. Not only is there the standard onslaught of society's near 3-month long holiday-induced mania, but there's also the added complexity of an entire year concluding followed immediately by the start of a brand new one. This probably makes me sound a bit Scrooge-ish about it all, but I actually don't really mind the holidays in theory. Rather, it all just makes me realize how much I appreciate and prefer the mundanity of the other months and how much easier it is to juggle work and life without all the added craziness.

I suppose it also doesn't help that I'm one of those people that ends up putting a fair bit of personal importance on the start of a new year. Yes yes, time is a human construct and all that, but I do think it's helpful (and healthy) to have a time in which a person can take pause and think back on one's actions, progress, or growth. So for me, these few handful of weeks tend to involve me trying to leave my year in a decent state so as to pave way for the new year and any aspirations I have in mind for it.

All that to say, I'm very much looking forward to things getting back to our usual flow in the next few days. In danger of making myself sound work-obsessed, I do sometimes prefer just being able to dive into my work distraction-free for weeks on end.

Though as it turns out, I did manage to convince myself to take a short bit of time away during the holidays. Part of my intention with that time off was to also take a break from screens a bit, as it does sometimes occur to me that I spend a staggering amount of my time behind them. However, this goal quickly fell apart when I realized that I could instead spend my time off finally finishing Red Dead Redemption 2, a behemoth of a game that my schedule has only allowed me to slowly chip away at since its original release in October 2018. (I'm sure my deeply incurable completionist tendencies didn't help either.)

It often seems that sleep is the one thing I frequently give up, either in the pursuit of game development or game playing. Doing the latter did make for a nice change of pace though, and I am happy to report that my save file is now finally reporting that magical triple digit number of 100%. I am missing a few compendium entries still, but for those of you familiar with the game you'll probably know that filling that compendium would test the dedication of even the most ardent completionists. So for the moment at least, I am at peace with my save file.

The main reason I bring it up though, aside from seemingly trying to humble-brag about a video game save file, is that I've often found AAA open world games to be a surprising wealth of ideas and inspiration for working on Kynseed. It's sometimes surprising to me how even these huge massively budgeted games with gigantic teams (nearly 2,000 people for RDR2!) still manage to have basic ideas and design principles that translate just as well to small indie titles as they do to these mammoth titles.

Though I suppose 'small indie' is subjective depending on the game. Sometimes it's easy for me to forget that Kynseed is functionally an open world game, particularly as we continue to add more and more regions and locations to the world. (There's many more still to come in that regard!) So while RDR2 is by all accounts a vastly different kind of game, I still found playing it would set off creative sparks for me when working on Kynseed.

Some of those 'sparks' were things like how you could take RDR2's treasure map concept and apply it to almost any open world game with unique and diverse enough environments. I could very easily see the player finding a crude map consisting of just a series of sketched environmental landmarks which, much like in RDR2, the player then keeps in the back of their mind as they go about exploring the world. Though to throw a quick asterisks on it: this is just me talking out loud as it were, not necessarily a confirmation (or even intention) of that getting added into Kynseed. Mainly, it's just an example of how much overlap there can often be with simple design ideas regardless of a game's size and scope.

Perhaps one of the more basic (and likely to be implemented) ideas that my time with RDR2 spurred was a newfound appreciation for the power of ambient music. RDR2 has a stellar soundtrack full of some amazingly memorable tracks, yet oddly I found that some of the game's most impactful musical moments were when the game was allowing its music to take a distant back seat with just simple mood pieces. These ambient tracks were all region-based too, so they'd differ greatly depending on where you were in the world.

In Kynseed however, with few exceptions the music itself is usually either playing a full-fledged thematic song for a region or it's not playing at all. (We don't always repeat the same region song per region load so as to avoid it getting too repetitive and, in many cases, we'll even have two thematic songs to alternate between for large or frequently visited regions.) Yet one thing we haven't done much of is merely having simple little background pieces purely for the sake of providing some mild flavouring.

Don't get me wrong, I think it's important for an open world game (or any game for that matter) to know when not to have music. Sometimes its those quiet moments in a game that can be the most pleasing. That said, I'm sure we could find some opportunities to sprinkle a few ambient tracks into the world, possibly even having them play persistently between region loads so long as it's in the same 'hub' of the world. Currently our music only starts or stops upon region loading. (Though in saying this, I can't help but wonder if something as seemingly simple as persistent cross-region audio tracks would actually end up causing Neal quite a bit of work with how our engine handles loading and caching audio! It's sometimes hard to predict whether a seemingly 'simple idea' might actually be fairly complex on a code level.)

Granted, I'm just talking a couple of flavour tracks here and there, and only if time allows between other higher priority tracks that still need to get made. RDR2 on the other hand consists of hours of just ambient music alone. Speaking of, I can't help but be reminded of how that's something I found very bizarre about RDR2's soundtrack. There's literal hours upon hours of recorded soundtrack in the game (much of it made by the amazing Woody Jackson), yet the officially released 'Original Soundtrack' is only 42 minutes long and the other officially released 'Original Score' is just a smidge over 1 hour. However, if one were to extract the game's raw music files, it apparently all adds up to a whopping 7+ hours!

I could understand wanting to keep the official soundtrack releases limited to just the more prominent tracks of the game's otherwise huge track list, but it's crazy to me that there's still a whole 5 hours of recorded and mastered music that's never been officially released. I say just do a third official soundtrack release titled 'Original Ambient Score', which seems a perfectly viable solution to me. All I know is that if I'd worked on a soundtrack that boasted over 7 hours of music, you can bet I'd want to make it all available somehow. I'd even want to put it up in FLAC - to hell with file sizes.

I suppose it's possible there's some behind the scenes component to all this that I'm simply not aware of, or maybe there's some strange licensing restrictions at play here. The music industry can be finicky like that sometimes. Still, it's a shame that around 70% (no exaggeration) of that game's stellar soundtrack isn't being released or shared in any official capacity.

Of course, all that pales in comparison to how much unused music Woody Jackson made during the entirety of the game's 5 year-long development. Apparently it's over 60 hours!

Anyway, I suppose that's enough soapboxing from me for one day. In the meantime, we'll keep tending to our own humble soundtrack, which the ever-talented Tice has been steadfastly working on for some while now. I'm not quite sure what our current soundtrack time count is at (2-ish hours I think?), but I can say that it'll definitely be longer than Red Dead Redemption 2's officially released soundtracks, heh heh. Perhaps Tice can comment down below with the latest count.

Speaking of, Tice recently popped in on video game soundtrack podcast The Sound Test and chatted a bit about making Kynseed's music. For anyone interested in giving it a listen, you can tune in to that specific snippet from the show here or check out the full episode of it here. Though for now, I'll pack my soapbox up and get back to work, no doubt with some game soundtrack or other in the background serenading me through my headphones...

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Hi there folks! It's been a month since our last Dev Update which means we're here yet again bringing warm tidings and progress reports. This game update is yet another one of our monthly incremental build updates bringing us one step closer to the next major milestone on our roadmap: the relationship update.

For this one, we've added a few first passes of some crucial features for growing and managing your own relationships in the game. Much of it is all still 'first pass', which is game dev talk for saying it's our first go at implementing the feature in the code but that polish, presentation, and quality of life improvements are still yet to come. We have specific highlights and a link to the full changelog a bit further down below.

We've also been gradually working on the gargantuan task of creating all the necessary art for aging the NPC's of the world. We're not quite sure when we'll have NPC aging fully implemented and present in the game, but it's been coming along very nicely week by week - thanks in no small part to the tireless efforts of Gary, our character artist! Below we have a few more early previews of some of the latest NPC aging we've been working on. The topmost preview even features the life span of a father and his two sons.

As Charlie described the family: "Wurzel's sons were Jed and Ned. They looked alike and their hair was red. One was sweet and loved his mum. The other pointed and laughed at your bum."

CHANGELOG HIGHLIGHTS

Below is an overview of some of the new systems and mechanics added in the latest build update. These are all highlights taken from the full changelog. Also, for those of you wanting to try out more frequent and experimental build updates, be sure to hop by our development branches thread.

Marriage & Wedding
First pass of week-long tradition of tasks before selecting a wedding date. You can also choose a venue (though only Loverwood is available right now). Failing the last step has serious consequences to your friendship rating. There's also a placeholder draft cutscene for the wedding ceremony.

Housekeeping Book
Like the other additions, the housekeeping book is a first pass implementation. With it, you can change and view settings related to the spouse (and eventually the overall family). Spouses can help around the farm with things such as watering crops, interacting with farm animals to keep them happy, filling the trough when necessary, and getting items from the larder to use as offerings. This book will be improved over time, as this is just an early glimpse of its setup.

New Region
New characters and the beginnings of a new haven...with new music and setting! Also includes some placeholder items to find right now.

Larder, Digging Minigame, & Fixes
There's a new larder for use by the player's family with limited stock which'll be upgradeable in the future. Additionally, there's a new digging minigame (first pass) that removes the luck in getting a reward. (Visual improvements are to come, as well as some variety based on the quality of the player's tool and skill level). Minor fixes have also been worked on, with some plans in the next few weeks to go over and add in even more fixes.

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




As always, a big thanks to all of you who've been tagging along with us on this game development adventure of ours. We look forward to getting ever-closer to checking the relationship milestone off of the Kynseed roadmap. If your appetite for dev updates is more than our monthly ones can satiate, we also do more frequent and laid back written updates in the form of The PixelCount Post, which you can find being posted regularly in any of our usual locations. Beyond that, you can also pal around with us on our Discord server, where we're easily found working on the game day to day.

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

Love,
PixelCount

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Another PixelCount Post, another Short Report! This one's going to be extra short in fact, because we've got one of our monthly build updates planned to drop less than a day after we post this. This build update will be yet another significant chunk finished as we work towards our next major milestone of our roadmap: the relationship update. We'll save the specifics for the written progress report that we'll be posting alongside the build update, but for your usual dose of firsthand reports from the team you can read on below. See you again soon for our monthly progress report!







Bit of a quiet steady one this week...mainly writing and readying the first Mellowfields level for public consumption. It was originally called Twanging Gardens as a placeholder, so a lot of time was spent thinking up a proper name. After 10 seconds thought, I went with Cunning Plots. The two NPC's that live there are fierce rivals. We have on one side, Veg Rarney (yes, a nod to Reg Varney from On the Buses). On the other side we have Ken Tiller (named after a Commodore 64 budget text adventure I really liked called Kentilla).

Both these men try to outdo each other (see if you can spot the Borat reference in their dialogue), but they are no match for the richest family in the Haven: the Lawns (Mo, Greene, and Goldie...each a pun to themselves). Mellowfields is a place of gardeners and giant vegetable competitions. It has clean cut water channels, greenhouses, and windmills where you will be able to grind your wheat into flour. The people there are friendly to outsiders, but inwardly very unfriendly to each other. They are also generally quite short and not the best looking. (They do have a bit of Hobbiton about them.)

We hope you enjoy the new regions as we unlock them one by one over the coming weeks.







This week saw more additions to the experimental build which is available in all good steam libraries now (subject to terms and conditions of game purchase and the selecting of the appropriate branch and with disclaimers regarding the quality of content and likelihood that problems may occur). Following on from the last post, I put in one addition that hasn't made it to the build to play yet which is a small minigame for digging. This was a relatively quick addition of only 100 lines of code or so but feels like it has a surprising amount of potential for such a small addition in the way it mixes an element of chance and strategy together. Hopefully a build with it should go out soon-ish but there are some definite things that 100 lines of code does not include in terms of niceties for user experience and presentation that will take another hour or more to get done.

The additions that have made it to the experimental build in some form are the larder in the player's farm where food can start to be stored which can be used by the player's spouse and a 'book of housekeeping' that plans out what the spouse will help with day to day. It's all a bit rough and early at this stage but starts to pull together on the strings of raising questions of how to make it work from a gameplay perspective and also answer questions of what use does the addition of the relationships in the game do to form up a more complete game experience.

Aside from those additions I've also worked on some NPC behaviours suitable for the farm level which have been nice to get in and get more purpose to things. There's certainly much more work to be done on behaviours and other aspects of NPC's which will slowly emerge in the coming minutes/hours/days/months ahead. Speaking of which, I better be getting back to it in further refining some of the aspects in the experimental build which should see some of the above improved (and the digging added) along with other new parts getting worked on. I'm trying not to trip myself up by being too eager but I have found lately a chain of events and realisations have made me feel more enthused with the path ahead with my thoughts a bit more in control. Again, wishing everyone all the best!








This week I did another playthrough of the game from scratch to make notes on whatever I noticed while playing. It leads to things like 'oh, that sound effect is too loud' or 'hey, that transition between different tracks isn't working smoothly'. I had wanted to immediately address the things I had noticed on the audio side but mental health-wise this hasn't been a good week for me. I get winter depressions coupled with insomnia around this time of year, and this year is no exception. I do my best to keep up with some good mental health practices but there's usually a point at which I have to admit 'defeat' for a while and just do what I can, rather than what I think I should.

Stubbornly continuing to demand the same level of productivity of myself during these times only prolongs the lack of it. And knowing that 'this too shall pass' means I don't go off the deep end. Adjusting what I demand of myself depending on my mental wellbeing means I don't go into the spiral of not feeling well, thus not working well, thus getting upset at myself for not working well, thus feeling even less well. If, like me, you suffer from winter depression then I wish you lots of self-love and acceptance this time of year. You're not 'bad' for being like this. You're unfortunate, but that's no reason to be harsh. Quite the opposite!







In game dev it often feels like making plans and schedules is somewhat akin to arriving at a buffet with a huge appetite. There's stars in your eyes and in that moment everything seems possible. It's only until plate two, or maybe even plate three, that you soon realize it was all hubris. Awful awful hubris.

All that to say, game dev scheduling follows a near identical trend. Last week I was putting together a list of tasks that I felt needed to get done before the end of 2019. A list that I finished right around the 1st. Of December. In 2019. Upon reexamining said list this week, it seemed that my list of things to do in 2019 was, in fact, a list of things to do in December. Rather than lament the fact that game developers seem to be absolutely awful at predicting time (they are) or lamenting the fact that clearly I'm part of the problem (I am), I'm instead comforted by the fact that this is pretty much part of the 'process' for me. My first laid plans always start from a place of optimism, but I make sure I revisit my plans a week later to see if they feel perhaps too optimistic.

What follows is a dose of healthy trimming - cutting a few items here, moving a few others there. Most of the time it's just a matter of taking very non-crucial tasks and moving them to a subsequent month - in this case January, 2020. In the end, what I'm left with is hopefully a list of tasks that'll still be a tight squeeze but not an impossible one. It's an important balance to strike, especially when concluding one year and starting another. Though it remains to be seen as to how well I struck that balance - I suspect I'll know one way or another by the end of this year and/or month!

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Another week of the team churning away at relationship-oriented features! Of particular note is that Neal has been making good progress on the code's road to marriage. Meanwhile Charlie has been doing quite a bit of writing for things like marriage/dating character dialogue as well as various books on the same subject to be found around the game world. Currently the very basics of the marriage features are testable ingame, which has been quite exciting for the team. In fact, the latest version is even available on the experimental branch.

In addition, work continues along nicely with the vast amount of aging art the game needs. We've even got another aging NPC preview to show you further down in this issue, this time showing how Tom Cowe looks through the generations. Music and audio is also shaping up well as of late, with a whole batch of new tunes being prepared for not just marriage and dating but also for the next major hub of regions that we'll (eventually) be adding to the game's world.

Read on below for more info on all that and other things. Also, if at the end of this issue you find yourself still itching for more reading material, Wireframe just released a recent issue featuring a huge write-up on the making of Fable. There's a downloadable PDF version available on their site for anyone interested in giving it a read (and a couple of Pixel Counts even pop in for a quote or two).







There I was, sat munching on dried mango (Forest Feast brand...so nice!) and watching a bit of Youtube in VR, when I suddenly came crashing back to reality like a meteor with ill-fitting pants on. "The Post! I haven't written my post!" I didn't exclaim, although I did think it. Probably in a Sherlock Holmes accent.

So I sat down and started to type. As I typed, I spent a good two minutes thinking of words to describe snapping back to reality, but settled on a meteor instead. To make it funnier, I added a bit about badly fitting pants. I then described describing things, and eventually got to where we are now, which is here.

So what work did I actually do, I hear you ask? Other than trying to pad out this post with some nonsense, I did some level design on Mellowfields and fixed up some Vale region stuff. I also had to write a bunch of marriage related dialogue for your spouse and NPC's, plus write some books on dating, marriage, divorce, and so on. Additionally, I tested the build and gave feedback. Was very cool to finally see marriage in and I married the first NPC I encountered - in this case, Betty Scrumpy. (By the time I married her she was 66. I must really be in to leather.)

During the week I received an email from the Yorkshire Games Festival, whom I had mailed expressing interest in attending to show off Kynseed. They were delighted to have us (me) attend and so in February it looks like I will be sat in the National Media Museum in Bradford for a weekend, hoping nobody plays the whole Prologue and ends up traumatised. There are some well-known industry names going, so perhaps some will pop by my little table so I can pretend I am cool like them.

And thus ends my post. I hope I managed to get my word count up to acceptable levels and give the illusion I had tons of interesting things to say. Now then, where did that bag of dried mango go?











This week the marriage feature has moved much closer to the main build with it now being available in the experimental branch! 'Til Thursday I've been focused pretty much exclusively on the road to marriage traditions, putting in a placeholder wedding cutscene, and starting on the spouse behaviour setup. The first two aspects are functionally there but the spouse behaviour setup still has much more to look into which will likely fit together bit by bit.

Putting together the wedding cutscene in a very 'functional' text-and-camera-only way has highlighted the dust and cobwebs covering the Cutscene Editor at the moment. Since the Early Access launch it hasn't had a whole lot of attention but that has to start changing with an increasing need for it. It's a tricky balance though to know which Cutscene Editor changes fall into the essentials and which are a luxury outside scope. Our current plan is to have a day or two focused on it in the next week while otherwise only giving it a passing glance in order to get what is necessary done.

I've also been feeling the urge to get in something new into the game after spending a relatively long time on the marriage feature without change, so hopefully the fruits of that will be in the next build. Wishing everyone all the best, see you next time!







As Mellowbrook opens up, players will experience its music for the first time. It often makes me take another hard look at the music that's to be unleashed and tends to make me just that bit extra critical of it - typically wanting to change things about it at the last second. This happened to the music for Mellowbrook, which I've just remastered after leaving it be for a while.

Whether or not that's good is not a given. Sometimes you can over-polish or change something that was already good. Sometimes a change is for the worst. And there's no facts that will tell you if it is, because it's all subjective. So whether or not a product is inherently finished is an unanswerable question. You can decide to stop working on it, but you can't know if it's finished. That's part of why creative expression continues to be so potentially scary.

What I can still do, however, is to let others in the team hear the new version and tell me what they think. So that's what I do. After that, once released, it's released 'for real'. (Whatever that means...) In other news, cutscenes are coming ever closer, and I'm excited to be working on them soon!







Last week I started to truly feel the weight of the impending close of the year. I think I start to always feel this way around mid-November, when the feeling of the year having many months left suddenly gives way to the realization that the amount of months remaining can no longer be measured in the plural. So I do what I typically do in such situations: I go on a short organizing spree.

In this case, I've created a document of high level tasks and lumped them into three different sections: things to do before the Relationship Update releases, things to do the week it releases, and things to do before the end of 2019 itself. Most of the items on that list apply more to a production-level overview and thus isn't burdened by having to list out all the tasks from other 'departments'. For example, it doesn't list out the minutia of tasks that code and art must do in order to get the Relationship Update done. This helps the document not get bogged down by such things and allows it to keep a much broader focus.

With this document in hand, I've now got a decent look at all the things I'd like to get done on the project by the end of the year. (No doubt another document will get formed at the start of the next year as I map out plans and intentions for 2020.) As for what's on the list? About half of it is for relatively unexciting logistics-esque tasks. One such task is that I need to update all our store page's text and screenshots to reflect all the new content we've added in the last half year. Another such task is that I need to also update our site's FAQ, which has become woefully outdated in just the short span that it's been up. And so on. Basically, these are all things that are important for any indie dev to get done, but as they're relatively unexciting it can be easy to push them off month after month.

Thankfully, the year's remaining work isn't quite as dry as all that. The main example that comes to mind, and as Neal mentioned above, is that our engine's built-in Cutscene Editor is getting some attention again. Making cutscenes is something I seem to have had a sort of love affair on this project with, where I've talked about making cutscenes before and have had every intention of diving deep into our Cutscene Editor for prior updates. Yet, as can often go in development, other priorities would arise and wrestle for my attention. However, attention has once again circled back 'round to cutscenes, mainly because of the Relationship Update relying on the inclusion of a few key scenes.

I'll be working pretty closely with Charlie on the scene's overall direction/pacing and then I'll be working closely with Tice on the music and audio cues. All the while, Neal will be helping to polish up the Cutscene Editor tool itself in the code. Tasks such as these are always fun to do, if only because it requires creative input from much of the team at the same time and this allows us to really play to each other's strengths.

Though for now, I'm going to dawdle off and get back to chipping away at that big ol' list of tasks. Catch ya next time!

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Howdy, and welcome again to yet another issue of our dev log. As you may've heard us mention before, we've been wanting to release incremental updates to the game on a more monthly basis which, as it happens, we did just last week! November's game update represents just the first step in getting us closer to the relationship milestone of our roadmap, so hop on over to the announcement to check out the details. Or if you prefer, you can jump straight into the first and second changelogs that went up last week.

After pushing that update out, the team then spent a bit of time finding and squashing any bugs that had arisen. Thankfully we made fairly quick work of it and in just a matter of days we'd already begun work on the very next update ahead. With some of the most preliminary aging and dating systems now in, our next area of focus will be adding in the basics of the marriage system. You can read on below for more details on how that's going and, as always, we'll see you again soon in the next dev log. Cheers!







Back to some level tidying and rejigging this past week. We decided to unlock the Mellowfields regions one at a time, so it has been a case of getting them in order. We have a set of assets that we use per haven, and some that can be used in any. Many times I have had to use assets not designed for that region, and they eventually need swapping out before we let the level loose on the world.

Mr Weekes, our wonderful environ artist, and myself review the regions and see what else is needed...from flowers to furniture, from weird landmarks to grass. At some point before release, we will go over all the levels and do a prettying pass to ensure we don't use old assets and to get the best out of the objects and tiles. (The more complicated tilesets are such a massive enigma to me that you need to work at Bletchley Park to be able to decode them. In fact, Benedict Cumberbatch would probably just give up and hide all the dodgy bits with rocks and bushes.)

Also got to do more dialogue for a new 'mini-system' that has spawned from the dating system, to solve a problem we had with teen player sprites. More will be revealed over time!







Last week saw the first of our more regular updates released. It has been a strange month anyway, but it has had the feeling of a possible turning point. The last week was a rush of trying to prepare things as usual but it felt a little more organised and manageable this time around. Since then, I've spent a few days working mainly through bugs that slipped by and getting a little obsessive over memory use in the game. I put some preventative measures in to allow more memory use for the released build, but it was still occupying my mind that I couldn't find any specific causes. Thanks to a more methodical investigation, I was able to actually pin down one specific problem with audio where entering and leaving a shop would use memory for the music each time and never dispose. (Funnily enough, this happened because it was held in a list to dispose at the end of the game session!)

I've not really had much experience with memory issues before, but it reminded me of some of the more obscure bugs I've worked on in the past where the place and circumstance of the crash rarely gives any hints on the issue because it was something done 30 minutes back in a completely different area that set the problem off! Really the only course of action for those types of situations is just to play the game as long as possible and hope that at some point debugging will lead to a bit of information discovered. It becomes hard at that stage to know when to quit and try again another time, because maybe you might see something if you try just this little bit longer! For now though, I have moved onto adding marriage to the game, having hopefully fixed the most serious case.

With marriage, I'm not one to particularly be good at hyping up a given feature so I won't try and do so here. Hopefully it'll be interesting to players the way there's a traditional process and buildup to it that gives a roleplay feel. Then there'll be the way the spouse moves in to your farm and the extra effects that'll lead to. Having children is still a ways away because of the extra art requirements on that, but it's starting to head in that direction. So far it seems to be going ok where I'm mostly placing the broad strokes of it to give a first playable version by the end of the week and, all things going well, something should be playable next week on the experimental build.

In other news, last week marked a year since the Early Access version of the game launched. At the time, I remember thinking that must mean things are getting closer to done and that perhaps a year would see the game completed (though typically our estimates have been off by a factor of two, so I wasn't entirely convinced we would!). Now looking at where things stand, it does feel like the game has come quite a long way in that time but there is still plenty more to go! There's a general rule of thumb I read recently that in life we overestimate a year's progress but underestimate longer periods of time, such as 5 years, so perhaps my new expectation is that the game will certainly be wrapped within 5 years but that each year is going to be making a big difference in the replayability and refinement of the experience.

Last year before the release, there was a constant flow of activity as we busied ourselves with a thousand different tasks in preparation for a near unmovable deadline. It's a time I look back at nostalgically to think of how productive I felt but then at the same time I realise what a burden it had been to cram for and how the months after that initial rush of excitement at the launch fell away to burnout and a general realisation of the long road ahead. That burnout does seem to have faded finally and, as mentioned, it feels like it could be a turning point of maturity on the project that we perhaps might finally be finding a stride at which we can go. Whether that pans out, I guess tune in next year to find out...

As often is the case when I'm in one of these reflective and pensive moods, I mostly feel a damn strong urge to overcome any obstacle. This is undoubtedly the game I'm most proud of working on to date and, as long as I am fortunate to have the ability to, I will keep working to find a way to make it fulfil its potential.







It's been a strange week for me. A few non-Kynseed things are pulling me in multiple directions, so I needed to realign my creativity with the Kynseed vibe. To do so, I browsed through the work I had done so far - including the rejected tracks. And then I found something...

A track I had written that was turned down, but clicked for me this time. There's a region not yet in the game that I suddenly realized this could really fit. I reuploaded it and asked Charlie if he agreed and he did. So a track that would otherwise have gotten lost in the forgotten crevices of fate managed to claw its way from oblivion to a hill overlooking a swamp, where it will be heard by players in the near future.

So I'm glad I took the time to look at all the drafts that didn't make it (yet). Sometimes you might find just the right thing...







After my tale of woe from last issue, I spent much of this week acclimating myself back into a normal work routine. There was a slight sense of jumping back into the deep end though, as I had quite a bit of work to get done with having to get November's update pushed out everywhere.

That said, it's good to be diving back into the work. Plus, now that we managed to make good on our first attempt at adhering to a new monthly update schedule, the team is in high spirits with a sense of confidence that we'll be able to stick to this release rhythm going forward. Monthly updates are something I'd been gently pushing for now and then on the project, but perhaps it's only until now that we've accrued enough experience with working on this particular game within this particular team to feel like we had enough handle on things to publicly commit ourselves to a monthly cycle. (Every game and team is different and the 'rate of development' can vary dramatically for any number of reasons.)

I'll be keeping my update this week a bit short though, as one of the natural side effects of being indisposed for a week or more is that the work sure manages to pile up in one's absence! All that to say, I'm slowly chipping away at a slight backlog of tasks. Thankfully though, whenever the team finds itself in high spirits, I've found this has a knock-on effect of making the work not only speedier but more enjoyable. So with that, I'll see you all again in the next issue!

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

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

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

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

CHANGELOG HIGHLIGHTS

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

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

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

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

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




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

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

Love,
PixelCount

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



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

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

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







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

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

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

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











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

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

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

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

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







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

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

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

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

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







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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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







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

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

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

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

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







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

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

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

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







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







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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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











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

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

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

Moonsday
Truthsday
Woesday
Turnsday
Freylsday
Satyrday
Solsday

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

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

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







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

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

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

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







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

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

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







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

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

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

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

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

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





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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Love,
PixelCount