Mar 10, 2020

Kynseed - Matt Allen 🦇

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Welcome to another issue of your friendly neighbourhood devlog, The PixelCount Post! We're keeping this week's Short Report extra short due to the lengthy update below of Matt's adventures demoing the game. Meanwhile, the rest of the team continues their work: Charlie's adding critical gameplay loops, Neal prepares a new haven, and Tice is busy making music for it. Read onwards for the full updates from the team and we'll see you all again soon!

Holy whack-a-moly, there's a lot of video games out there these days. Seems there's just about something for everyone, whether you're into classic genres like the good ol' RPG or whether your desires are more unconventional, like being a goose who harasses the British. There's so many games, in fact, that one of the hardest parts of playing games is wading through all those choices to find what strikes your fancy. (Shout out to page #2582, the charmingly final page of the Steam store which, I've no doubt, will have already increased in number by the time I post this.)

Here on the PixelCount team, we do our best to try to spread the good word of Kynseed in as many ways as our humble resources and time allow. Yet something that we've been holding off on was bringing the game to a convention or show. There's a few reasons why, but most of them can be summed up into one of two things: A) the game hasn't felt ready enough and B) attending shows distracts from development. Typically, these two reasons seem to be relevant to both big and small studios alike. On the AAA side of things, many a dev could tell stories of how development would halt in order to spend months on a custom 'presentation/demo version' of their game and yet commonly none of that work would be tangibly usable in the real game itself. (Indie-scale games aren't immune to this sorta thing either, of course.)

Granted, the above is a more extreme example of how a game show can disrupt development, but I suppose my point is that there are reasons aplenty as to why a game mightn't attend a show. So ever since the very start of this project, we've been leery of the distracting power that game shows can have. For us to ever consider attending one, we'd need it to be relatively (*cough* ridiculously) inexpensive and to fit easily within our schedules.

Another reason we've not attended any shows is because it's hard to know what kind of impact they'll realistically have in giving the game visibility. No doubt there's playtest and feedback benefits to demoing at events, but in terms of raising game awareness? That's difficult to gauge or predict. Many times I've felt that a well-performing tweet will gain you far more visibility than attending a game show. It's hard to argue, considering a tweet is free and can be composed in just minutes. Still, I do feel there's some benefits to game shows under the right circumstances - particularly if it's a streaming-focused event.

Yet despite our frequent reticence at the idea, the stars recently and surprisingly aligned for us to attend our first major game show! So in the interest of using these devlogs to chronicle all aspects of our development journey, I'm writing this pseudo-postmortem on how it all went.

Much like games themselves, there's also an overabundance of game shows. It's gotten to the point that I can barely keep up with them all. Of course, there's the huge shows like PAX, Gamescom, or E3 - the latter of which seems to be going through a midlife crisis. Yet there's also small to medium sized shows, many of which are a bit more accessible (and inexpensive) for indies such as ourselves.

One such show which I've heard of but never attended is called DreamHack. For me, it's always had a reputation as being predominantly esports focused, but in recent years its been widening its scope to include all of gaming culture in general.

So a few months ago, we received an email from DreamHack about a brand new show they were doing this year in Anaheim, California. As is the norm for shows, we'd have to fill out some forms and submit our game for consideration, as obviously space is limited at these things. Personally I prefer the game shows which have a submissions process because, if selected, that usually means there's little to no cost to attend! (The alternative employed by the big shows like E3 is that virtually any game will be allowed to attend so long as they pay a hefty sum for the floorspace.)

We've received similar emails from other events in the past, but we've always declined up until now. One reason is that the game never felt 'ready' for it. The other reason is that even though an event might be free, there's still associated costs that can (and will) come up. There's not just the monetary costs such as travel and print services, but there's also the time cost of spending time away from development.

Yet DreamHack presented a somewhat unique opportunity for us, which mostly can be attributed to geography. Anaheim is very close to Los Angeles (where I live) - a mere half hour drive most days. This made attending the show not only convenient but inexpensive. Though while shows like this do indeed offer their selected games a free booth spot, they also offer other services for a fee. Things like renting monitor screens, or printing banners, or even renting out gaming PC's. These services can make good sense for developers who, for example, might be travelling to multiple shows all across the country/world and don't want to be travelling with big expensive TV's and gaming rigs. However, with DreamHack being such a short drive away, I figured we could get by without having to buy a single service.

As for time costs, development would experience very little disruption, if any. With the show being local to myself, it meant that I'd obviously be the one to attend, thereby keeping the entire rest of the team free to carry on with development while I'm away. (Perhaps most importantly, this meant Neal could continue to code without interruption!)

So after some team discussion on the matter, we eventually decided to give it a go and submit our game for consideration. Thankfully it was a relatively painless process - just a couple pages worth of basic forms. We filled them out, hit the submit button, and within just a week we heard back: we'd been selected!

Time flew by over the next few months, if only because there's always so many other things to be juggling during development. Before I knew it, I was already a couple of weeks away from attending. Thus, it was time to start putting together my remaining plans and preparations. The event would begin on a Friday and run to Sunday for three days, from morning to 8pm.

My overall strategy was to have a unique booth while spending as little as possible. The fundamental question I kept returning to in my mind was, "How can I make our booth stand out against other booths who have more budget and more experience?"

My first port of call with this strategy was a simple one: what all can I fit in my car? Presumably myself, for starters. I'm only half joking though, because quite literally the driver's seat was the only spare room left in the end. All the other room was filled up with my own PC, speakers, all peripherals (keyboard, mouse, Xbox controller, headphones, etc.), two large-screen TV's, tools, cleaners (like sanitary wipes for peripherals), and a wide assortment of decorations/printing.

The decorations and printing ended up being the only things I had to spend any actual money on. For printing services, I decided to focus on only two things: a large-ish banner and some index cards with info that people could take. Thankfully, being in LA means that I have access to numerous inexpensive local printers and I was able to get a basic banner and a couple hundred index cards fairly cheap. The only major snafu I ran into was that my vertical-oriented banner needed a special easel stand to hold it up which, suspiciously, was about five times the cost of the banner itself. Thankfully my haggle stats must've rolled high that day, because I was able to talk the store into selling me their floor model of the stand so long as I returned it by the end of the week (which meant it'd cost me a whopping $0 in the end)! As for decorations, I was able to get most of what I needed by the grace of cheap Amazon products.

(I don't mean to keep going on at such length about the cost and how cheaply we tried to do things, but for indies such as ourselves - particularly self-publishing ones - the cost of attending even one show a year can have a huge impact on resources. So the fact that we were able to go to one so cheaply is a pretty big deal for us.)

Fast forward a couple of weeks and I awoke to my alarm on 4am Friday, which on most days would be when I go to sleep. It was Day 1 of the event and booth setup was scheduled until 12pm, in which the floor would then be opened up to the masses. Technically I could have come in Thursday and had the entire day to setup, but I (foolishly?) thought I'd have plenty of time to setup Friday morning.

I arrived early with ample time to spare, having parked in the middle of what seemed an endless sea of cars. My first order of business was to get my 'developer badge' so that I could be granted admittance to the floor for setting up. After standing in a rather long line and verifying my details, I finally had badge in hand and so off I went back to the sea of cars. From there, I had to make numerous individual trips carrying every item from the parking lot to our allotted booth space in an area of the convention called the 'Indie Playground'.

Unsurprisingly, this took a dozen trips back and forth. Never mind the fact that I had already made the same number of trips the night before carrying everything from my flat to my car, which involved a 7 floor elevator ride and a walk through my parking garage. Between it all, it was starting to feel like I'd agreed to help someone move.

After wearing myself out and being profoundly reminded of the fact that I have a desk job, all our booth's items finally lay strewn about the floor of our 3 by 3 meters of allotted space. Then came the task of setting it all up. I still had a few hours to spare, which seemed like enough at the time. To my credit, it would have been enough save for one little problem: our booth's power wasn't working.

It was a half hour before doors opened and I had just finished setting everything up, so I went to go turn my computer on and get everything running...only to find it wouldn't turn on. After a brief moment of panic, I checked to see if either of my TV's turned on and, somewhat ironically, I was relieved to find they didn't. This meant my PC was fine and that the booth's power junction simply wasn't working. So I hurriedly found some folks from event services and they were quick to jump on the problem and get it sorted.

The only downside was that it took about a half hour to get it all fixed, so eventually I found myself doing last-minute setup right as the doors to the event opened up! I still had a few final things to do though, so I quickly grabbed a sharpie and some paper and wrote "Our booth is in Early Access" and taped it to the front of our table. (Much to my amusement, a few folks came by to tell me they loved the sign.)

Though once that short bit of setup was done, I turned the TV's on, launched the game, and officially opened our booth!

Having attended numerous events from the gamer side, my experience with most indie dev booths is that they're typically utilitarian in function - a table, a monitor, a chair, and a few printed materials (banners, handouts, etc.). For our booth however, I wanted us to stand out as best we could and do something a bit different - all while spending as little as possible. So here's the setup I went with:

Kynseed's booth at DreamHack Anaheim 2020. (Click image to enlarge.)

For starters, I decided to use two TV's. One TV to put on our main table facing outwards towards foot traffic. Then the second smaller TV nestled further in the booth for players to actually use. The reason I opted for this setup was to create a sort of 'mini sanctuary' within our booth. Game shows like these tend to be an assault on the senses, with bright lights and loud music coming at you from every direction. We want Kynseed to be a chill relaxing sort of experience though, so I felt it was important to give players a pleasant little space to play in.

The drawback to this approach is that the game gets a bit too hidden in the booth. If folks can't see the game when walking by, why would they stop to check it out or give it a play? That's where the second larger TV comes in. I set that TV to mirror the main playthrough TV. When someone's playing, you can see what they're doing all from this TV without having to awkwardly stand over their shoulder. Also, for those moments when there isn't anyone playing the game, I had the TV on a loop of both our trailer and a 10 minute playthrough video I made for the event. As an added bonus, the outward facing TV is large enough that it creates a natural wall-type barrier which aids in providing that 'relaxing nook' I was trying to go for. (For added coziness, I also put a collection of my Fable books at the side.)

The cozy nook where players could demo the game, complete with a Fable book collection at the side. (Click image to enlarge.)

Regarding decorations, and as you've no doubt seen from the picture above, I decided to go for somewhat of a nature/garden aesthetic. Altogether, these items were surprisingly cheap on Amazon and went a long way in helping our booth stand out. We were the most vibrantly coloured booth there for sure. In total I purchased two plastic autumn trees, a bag full of a dozen green leafy vines, a bag full of individual autumn leaves, three different fake potted plants, and then a cheap arbor that I ran vines through and placed over the smaller TV. Oh, and yes: I tied a helium filled floating pig to the booth. Because of course I did.

(Each subsequent day I decided to raise the pig higher on its string. By Day 3, you could see our pig from a distance, floating proudly above all the other booths.)

As for my printed items, I customized a high-res version of some early concept art that the fabled Mike McCarthy made for us which I printed as a large vertical banner. The only other printed material was a couple hundred double sided index cards that had our logo on one side and some screenshots/info on the other. Then, of course, there was the DreamHack provided chair, table, and tablecloth. (The other table was just a cheapy from IKEA that I had tucked away in my closet at home.)

A close look at the info cards and the pig pens - not to mention my lovely ESRB Rating Pending mug. (Click image to enlarge.)

Something else I wanted to do with our booth was to have some sort of piddly 'fun thing' to give out. Almost every booth I've gone to over the years have always had little things they'd give out - usually stickers or button pins or some such. I figured I'd try to get in on the tradition with our booth as well, but I racked my brain for what it could be. Speaking from experience, most items I get from booths end up getting tossed or collecting dust in some drawer. However, I wanted our item to actually be practical or useful in some way. Thankfully, I found the pig pens. (Get it? Pig pens?)

They were just a few dollars per dozen but were surprisingly decent quality for what they were. They're gel pens too, so they make these satisfyingly dark lines when writing. They ended up being a surprise hit with players and I nearly ran out after the first day. Luckily LA has the benefit of Amazon 1-day shipping, so while at the booth I hopped on my phone and ordered another batch to make sure I had enough for the second and third day.

I suppose I should also take a brief moment to mention my good friend Chuck the Plant. Weeks earlier, when I was ordering the decorations, I began to feel mildly bothered by the fact that it was all 'fake'. So I had the thought that I should put at least one real plant in the booth, to at least keep our booth from feeling artificial and sterile. Only one plant came to mind. Chuck.

Chuck and I go way back. He's a pachira aquatica that I got 3 years ago as an office-warming gift to give to a friend starting a new job. I took the liberty of naming the plant Chuck when gifting it, a name which has stuck ever since. Poor ol' Chuck has been through a lot though. In the intervening years Chuck has been accidentally knocked out of his pot by coworkers, has had every leaf eaten by a visiting office cat, and at one point was mistaken by the building's management as the building's plant and was nearly thrown away. Yet through it all, Chuck survived. Somehow.

So as Chuck's self-appointed godparent, I asked if I could borrow him for the weekend. Thus, Chuck became part of the Kynseed booth. Sadly he's hard to see in the pics above, but you might be able to just make him out right behind the pig pens. (Look for his very stylish braided trunk.) Of course, I wanted to make sure visitors got properly introduced, so halfway through Day 1 I made a little name tag for him.

Chuck the Plant: Kynseed booth mascot. (Click image to enlarge.)

Overall, I feel the booth turned out pretty well for our limited time and resources. This was my first time attending an event as a 'proper' dev (whatever that means) and so most of this was brand new to me. Though thankfully, I'm no stranger to being on the opposite side of the booth. I've been attending game events as a gamer for nearly a decade now and over the years I've gradually formed some ideas and opinions on what I feel makes for a decent booth.

I've rambled on quite a bit about all the logistics though, but in a way that's just ancillary details. For me, the real fun was seeing people play the game in person. So often I'm watching YouTube videos of the game or, even rarer, having someone playtest remotely via screenshare for feedback/development purposes. Or perhaps I'll be watching a streamer play the game. They're all fun and exciting to watch, don't get me wrong. In particular, I love watching streamers explore the game with their viewers. Yet to see someone in-person just pick up and play, not for a channel or for an audience or for a playtest but just as someone casually checking out a game, was pretty magical.

Through that process you learn so much about the game and about players. Many of them had never heard of Kynseed at all, so seeing people have those first-time candid reactions was very cool. It was also a bit of a trip to talk to people in-person about the game. The sweeping majority of the people I talk to about the game are all online - including the team! So to have someone standing in front of you telling you how excited they are about your game is a hell of a validating and humbling experience. Also, the amount of Fable fans that I talked to was staggering. It's amazing how many folks out there are still so enthusiastic about that series. It warms the heart.

It's also worth mentioning the interesting dynamics that develop with the other indie developers. You have booth neighbors whom you get to know really well over the 3 days of the event. Every dev was very chatty and incredibly willing to share their experiences and advice. It was nice to see that although my true love will always be game communities, there's just as vibrant an indie dev community out there too. There's a certain sense of comradery that happens during the quiet moments of the day between players, when the devs are just awkwardly standing in front of their booths, waiting for someone to come by. (That is, of course, when they're not busy squeezing in dev work, fixing a booth issue, or manning their social media.)

At the end of the 3 days, I was understandably devoid of energy and ready to go home and get back to work. Though before I could, I had to basically do the reverse of everything I did at the beginning. Which is to say, I had to tear down the entire booth, pack it all back into its boxes and bags, and make another dozen trips to the parking lot. Then, after the drive home, lug it all back up the elevator and into my flat. Not to mention having to re-setup my entire desk and PC. (RIP my perfect wire management that I now have to redo from scratch.)

Still, despite it all, I'm very glad we made the decision to attend. It's hard to know what tangible impact it may've had on game visibility/awareness (as such things are hard to measure for game shows), but there have certainly been a number of other benefits. Things like watching people play, getting in-person reactions, and simply gaining the experience of running a booth from start to finish. I learned a lot and I had fun. Seems to me that if you can claim at least those two things when doing something, then it was worth doing.

As for Chuck, we've come to the mutual decision that office life just isn't for him. So in a rare move of me deciding to be responsible for another living thing, I've decided to keep him. He's now enjoying his new home nestled right next to my living room's window where he can enjoy the LA sun from 7 floors up.

Chuck at his new home. (Click image to enlarge.)

If a Proverb you should write,
Take all day and most of night.
Four hundred verses you must jot,
Yes, I know! That is a lot.
Then Star Rating chatter follows on,
500 plus! My brain is gone.
Every item in Havens three,
Times by 4, good gracious me!
The moral of this is clear not dim,
Make a game with no items in.

Despite what the rhyme says, it was actually a quite fun experience writing all the Proverbs for the edibles, plants, and ores of the first 3 Havens. We have a huge spreadsheet, all beautifully laid out, with colour coded spaces for me to fill with verses, NPC gossip, and item descriptions (as well as columns for stats, numbers, locations, etc etc).

We are currently working to add in this most critical of gameplay loops...where the player can get items, when they can get them, what they do, and what the various conditions are to improve them. These will become (hopefully) very addictive loops as the player tries to first find out the info and fill in the blanks, then put their gathering plans in to action.

Star Ratings can be improved in many ways, from the quality/material of the tool, to the weather conditions, time of day, doing an action to reveal the item, and so on. We will be making changes to the inventory UI to make accessing this info easier, plus some map functionality to help (some as Fairweather item upgrades).

When you see the spreadsheet, with the hundreds of items, recipes, monster drops, and so on...it becomes an exciting proposition. We hope that players will trade information, refer to wiki's, and whisper secretly amongst each other to not only fill in the blanks but to discuss things they discovered. Events, sightings, visitations, secrets, puzzling places, etc.

The game has the potential to span generations and offer hundreds of hours of play. So the desire is to try to keep things fresh in the long game, to keep that sense of discovery, and to keep the player obsessively hunting to fill in those blanks by experiencing all the world has to offer.

Another few weeks passed since the last entry written. This time has mostly been pretty filled with progress on the update for myself. The second week of the update mostly followed along the daily scheduling with progress on various areas. Reaching the end of this week came with the realisation of how although some good progress was being made it wasn't exactly clear what would make it into the next update. After a little though, we decided that the Mellowfields setup seemed like a good place to debut this update. Although it is technically our next roadmap update after the current one, it felt like there would be value in getting it in now. Partly that is because it expands out the area of gameplay in a nice way by adding new items/NPC's/music while also giving us a chance to reflect on the systems as they are in place to see how they can be improved.

With the three havens in place it feels like we have a good variety of areas to play with in terms of increasing the quality of the play experience, so although the levels will be in now there is more content to add into them as Charlie has been working towards. That'll likely lead into the subsequent few monthly updates being a lot more iteration on the existing content to fill in the details and take the experience to the next level so to speak.

To remain focused on what is happening on the current update though, there was a surprising amount of work needed to setup Mellowfields. We had never really formally organised a list of what composes the minimum requirements for a haven and kept discovering bit after bit that needed adding in (at a high level there's about 40 elements to do at a minimum). With that knowledge written down, subsequent progress should go a little smoother where we can start filling in a lot of that work prior to the levels going public at a more steady pace!

The amount to do meant I had to, for now, generally abandon the daily scheduling apart from Mondays/Fridays being more feedback focused. I feel like this is the push-pull that always happens with more concrete deadlines; once it is more established what needs doing then it is much harder to resist getting pushed into only working on those elements and then feeling like the rest takes a backseat. At the least, it still feels like maybe the first two weeks of an update can operate on a slightly freer basis which is definitely beneficial. The larger the variety of areas of the game covered by the daily schedule, the more chance there is of understanding and making the game (and game making process) better as a whole. Wishing everyone all the best!

For the past weeks I've been working on music for Mellowfields regions. There was one that I wanted to redo since I felt it wasn't as fitting for the environment as I would have liked. My first attempt at it turned out to be a bit too 'large' and 'grand' for the area. So I started from scratch and made something more befitting the farming theme that the landscape was going for. Plus, another track for Mellowfields was added to the list very last minute because we had first overlooked it.

So now I'm scrambling to get it done as soon as possible. It's for a landscape of beautiful gardens, and as reference material Charlie showed me "English Country Garden" as performed by the English Coronation Orchestra. It's got a very very sweet melody and harmony to it. Sickly sweet even. Lots of little flourishes make the orchestration come alive.

This is actually quite time-consuming to represent with a sampled orchestra. It requires a lot of micromanaging of each note. Frequent articulation switching, detailed changes in dynamics, and so forth. I'm trying to aim for an end result that, while still orchestral, feels light and fluttery. The English Coronation Orchestra version of the referenced song ends up getting quite 'epic' near the end, which I was asked to avoid so the trick will be to keep it light throughout while still remaining diverse. That's been a challenge throughout the soundtrack as I make tracks of around 5 minutes each, which mustn't move around too much as they are all meant to represent a single environment.

Next time we talk I presume I'll be working on Whisptrail again.

Feb 27, 2020

The PixelCount Post - Issue #76

Kynseed - Matt Allen 🦇

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This last week the team has been diving into an even mix of new design and new code (which, no surprise, typically go hand in hand on any given week). One such design is a new wheel-related mechanic, which Charlie has hinted at before and in which we'll reveal more info on in about two weeks.

Meanwhile, Matt made a (semi) surprise appearance by exhibiting Kynseed at a 3-day game convention called DreamHack over in Anaheim, California - just east of Los Angeles. We've technically exhibited the game before, as Charlie took the game to a local UK event just a few weeks ago, but DreamHack was the first time we've shown the game at an event of such scale.

Read on below for a recap of how it went as well as the usual team updates you've come to expect from these ol' dev logs. We'll be back with another issue of The Post just next week though, so we'll see you all again then!

Well, I read Neal's post (below) and decided that for your sanity, I should make mine readable in less than an afternoon. *wink*

This week I have been up to my scalp in Excel sheets. The first was a huge item sheet with column after column dedicated to the various proverbs and traits of every item that requires them. It is all about when and where they appear, and the conditions needed to find them. Then it was a sheet on shops for the first three havens. What do they sell? How does the supply and price change based on seasons? Barley and wheat are slower to restock in winter and more costly, for example. Apples may be cheap in the Vale but more expensive in other havens, and so on.

I have also started the intro dialogue for all of Mellowfields NPC's, which is always a fun thing to do. Also, I've been looking at star ratings, perks & boons, master skills, and the huge array of events that will fill the world. These are the most exciting as they will give more reason to revisit areas and let the player experience fun and surprising things. Some events occur once a decade, once every 50 years, and even once a century!

That's about the same time it takes to read Neal and Matt's posts.

Time flies as another 3 weeks passes! Week before last saw the latest update go live which I must admit turned out to be quite rushed on time. Between my last post and now, the intention got set of trying something a bit different and scheduling per day activities to try and freshen up the monotony of the single focus approach. However, it was shortlived when the realisation set in of how little time there was 'til the 6th Feb update that we committed to. So instead, I returned to the single focus approach and pressed on with improving what could be improved in that time.

There was a minimum viable bar for that of more noticeboard triggers, a few characters aging, an NPC trait, and a new recipe which we exceeded (albeit not by as much as I'd have liked). Partly that was due to the last minute addition of equipment experience which felt like a significant addition in giving players a greater incentive to repeat actions and get some benefits from doing so! The unforeseen flaw in doing this was how none of that data was actually set up to be saved, which meant a few days of head scratching to adapt the code to be both backward compatible while also thinking about the best way forward.

With the update out of the way though, this recent week was finally the chance needed to start getting properly into the daily scheduling of activities. So the current plan for myself involves a varied lineup of 5 workdays with the 6th day serving as a contingency to wrap up anything important for the next week. To go into more detail (perhaps too much but with 3 weeks away from posts I felt the need for an epic one):

Monday was 'Feedback' day. First off there were a few bugs to look into from the last update, but the main focus was on interaction. During the weekend prior, Charlie had been demoing the game at a show and found that a majority of players were struggling to interact with NPC's due to the relative precision involved and there being a deadzone if the players were too close to the target. So initially I made some internal visualisations and documentation of scenarios where this could happen, what next steps to take, and some ideas to experiment with. In the end, the combination of visualisation and an example video of the problem players were encountering (this was really key, because my understanding of the system made it hard to purposefully break it in a way that players might) helped pinpoint some easy steps to improve things by having a small inner area where an NPC in that area will autotarget. Additionally, I've put in a potential extra step whereby static NPC's could have collision to prevent the player walking through them as easily. The latter isn't on for now, as it is a bit risky a change that perhaps the player could get blocked in somewhere but does look like an interesting option to make the NPC's feel a bit more solid in the world along with making interactions look more presentable.

Tuesday was 'Roadmap' day, where the focus was on the relationship update directly. In this case, I've been working on the wheel that will facilitate the making of babies ingame eventually! I spent a fair while on this just trying to get the feel of the spinner rotating round right. Without a preset system of animation graphs like UE4/Unity provide, I'm having to make do with a sort of in-between method using easing equations and stages for spinning up/spinning down/etc. This is really reaching the limits of its practical use nowadays and I'm definitely considering looking towards some editor ingame to allow more control over these things...

Wednesday was 'Flex' day, where anything goes really. In the end I spent it writing some early drafts of text for a show application, a thread documenting some ideas about dealing with problems, and some debug setup partly for the next day for items.

Thursday was 'Future' day, where the focus is on things beyond the current Roadmap update to anything ahead. It didn't go that far beyond the current update this time round, delving into the setup of Mellowfields where I got to setup a bunch of items and look at the seasonal asset variants. In the past with new levels, it has often felt like this rush and piecemeal way of putting them in little by little for items, etc. I don't know if that way was quicker, but it certainly felt good to get all these items set up and start delving into what the next set of regions will contain at this pace. Thinking on the Mellowfields stuff also highlighted a few areas where some content is still needed, so it definitely proved useful as an earlier heads up of what will be needed soon. Depending on how these levels come together, they might even sneak in earlier!

Friday was 'Feedback' day as well. We had a meeting to catch up on an application form we're working on which is due very soon. Then additionally I've been looking at some more bugs that have cropped up. An interesting one this time was a bug where the Fairweather cutscene wasn't starting correctly. This was luckily identified by a user on Steam to be due to a lack of audio device. Fortunately, Windows allows disabling of devices so I could disable it and try and discover the issue. (It was waiting on a sound to start which never triggered due to the missing audio device!) If only all PC config issues were that easy!

Saturday, the aim is generally to wrap up a few things that didn't quite make it to start afresh the following week in delving further into each area. It feels like a good start has been made and, although it is more a scattershot approach, it allows more areas to get a look at earlier to be that much more prepared for what's ahead. Wishing everyone all the best!

My PC is back in full working order, just with twice the amount of memory it had before. I don't have to worry about putting too many instruments in my arrangements anymore!

Since my computer came back from repairs, I've been continuing work on the swampy areas of Woemarsh. The tracks I've been making for these places have been moving around a bit, as some of them worked better in other places than I had envisioned. This happens from time to time. Whisptrail is proving to be a tricky region to write for as well. It's swampy and there's wisps floating around. I'm trying to strike the right balance between the low bass-clarinet and contra-bassoon sounds that represent the swamp, and the playful and alluring sounds of the wisps. It mustn't sound too scary, nor too cheery. There's a sweetspot I'm trying to find. Another element that features in the swampy regions is the banjo, which plays a recurring pattern throughout Woemarsh.

On a different note, I've been working on making my own recording space as soundproof as possible so I can record foley for the game. There have been many times when the exact sound effect I'm looking for wasn't available within my network and I'd have to make my own. Well, now I can! I imagine quite some fun will be had figuring out how to create the sounds I need. Though foley can be rather counter-intuitive sometimes. There's famous examples of sounds from the movies that aren't at all what they appear to be. I came across this article of how some frequently used sound effects are created with foley.

Making a heartbeat with a trash can? Why not!

As The Short Report up top mentioned, I took Kynseed on a field trip and attended my first game show as an official 'exhibitor' at an event called DreamHack. Typically, I'm used to being on the other side of that proverbial fence. I've been going to various game shows for years now, but always a member of 'the public', as it were. As such, this ended up being a pretty exciting milestone for not just the game but also myself!

Overall the event was an exhilarating yet exhausting experience. One of the reasons we didn't overly publicize our presence beforehand was that we didn't quite know how well the game might demo publicly coupled with the fact that this sorta thing was pretty new to us. So we wanted to safely dip our toes into the pool rather than bite off more than we could chew. Those metaphors make absolutely no sense together, but I'm sure you get the idea.

Though as mentioned above, it was an incredibly exhausting affair due to being a solo dev responsible for setting up (and tearing down) an entire booth and manning it all day, three days straight. I feel like I learned an incredible amount though, not just from seeing people play and react to the game but also from talking in person to other indie devs.

However, I'm going to save my full post-mortem (with pics!) of how it went for next week's issue of The Post. One reason for this is I've not managed to catch a day off since about a week before the event and I imagine I could use some catching up on sleep! The other reason is that, having been recently inspired by Tice, yesterday I decided to upgrade my system's RAM and hard drives...yet I found myself missing a necessary cable.

So currently my computer is dismantled while that cable is in the mail, meaning I don't have access to my usual files or software. (That's also why the Steam version of this issue lacks the usual image-based article headers, which I'll have to go back and add in sometime next week.) In fact, to even put this issue of The Post together, I had to dust off my old PC which infamously experienced a huge GPU hardware failure mere days before we were set to release Kynseed on Early Access!

Luckily it has a dinky integrated graphics processor which I've switched it over to in order to get me by temporarily. But, suffice it to say, anything beyond basic text editing and a couple of Chrome tabs are about all it can muster. Come to think of it, this'll likely be the last time I ever use this machine before I set it to rest permanently. Using it for this issue of The Post felt somewhat akin to me having rung it up out of the blue and telling it I've got "just one last job" and then it's done. Still, it's somewhat nostalgic being back on this machine. It got me through some good years, including the entire prototyping and pre-production phases of Kynseed. Carry on, my wayward PC. Carry on.

Feb 13, 2020

Dev Update: Grinding for Flour

Kynseed - Matt Allen 🦇

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Welcome once again to another Dev Update highlighting some recent changes and changes yet to come!

Since we last talked, work has continued along in rolling out all the features and content needed for the game's relationship system which, as you might imagine, is one of our largest and most complicated systems we've implemented yet. One reason for this is the obvious sorta thing, such as all the art/animations required for the different life stages of every pet and person. But even moreso it's because we've spent our time filling in the gaps of gameplay to make building relationships more fun. We don't want the game's relationship systems to be a shallow transaction-based one where all you have to do is give someone enough gifts and presto, they're head over heels for you. We want it to have a bit more depth and meaning to it than that, which takes time to properly implement. (Shoutout to our one programmer, Neal! A true connoisseur of code.)

Though despite the immense task of it all, work has been continuing along quite well. The holidays always represents a slight disruption to our development schedule, which for any of you who follow our PixelCount Post devlogs can read about, but with it now being February the team is back in the proverbial saddle and we're firing on all pistons once more. (I know these metaphors are all over the place, but you get the idea.)

Speaking of devlogs, for any of you who recently joined our esteemed rank of supporters, we threw together a sort of crash course welcome message in Issue #74 of our devlog. Feel free to check it out for a catch up summary about the game, our little team, and how we're approaching our updates and milestones.

You may recall that in our last dev update, we put in many of the initial first pass systems for marriage and all that entails. Something we also mentioned in that update was how work had begun on the gargantuan task of creating all the aging art for the current batch of NPC's in the world. We're happy to report that we are now sitting on a small army of aged NPC's (with many more to come) and the next big task ahead is to start slowly but surely implementing them into the game.

A logical place for us to begin were with NPC's that start off as the same age as the player. That way, when the player completes the Prologue and ages to the next life stage, the appropriate NPC's in the world will age with them. For our first pass, this currently includes the infamous Wurzel twins, Jed and Ned. Consequently, they're also now marriageable for any of you brave souls out there.

This represents just the first step of many in slowly rolling out aging across the entire populous and for its generations to come. Of course, pets are not exempt from the relentless hands of time, so eventually even your furry (or piggy) friends will grow old and, contrary to pining for the fjords, will one day be quite dead.

As is our practice with these progress reports, we've included some early previews of content to come in future updates. Below you'll get a Work-In-Progress look at the aging cycle for one of the breeds of both cat and dog, as well as a handful of what some of your favorite NPC's will look like as they inevitably march toward their twilight years until eventually passing back into the eternal arms of nature. "Kynseed: A sandbox RPG with a side of existential dread."

CHANGELOG HIGHLIGHTS

Read on below for a general overview of what noteworthy items this latest update includes. Of course, these are just a few selected highlights from the full list of changes made, so be sure to drop by the full changelog to see the proper list. Lastly, for any of you players who enjoy getting more frequent yet experimental updates of ours, you might be interested in checking out our development branches.

New Noticeboard Trigger System
Work continues on balancing and fleshing out the Noticeboard task system. In this most recent update we've added additional noticeboard triggers and have balanced money rewards based on their worth (which should make some noticeboard tasks much more rewarding overall). Tasks have also been optimized to more likely target items the player may not have found yet.

Some Equipment Levels Up With Use
The more you use certain equipment the more it'll gain XP and eventually level up (all the way to "Legendary"). Each new level will include some sort of improvement to the piece of equipment. Such as the Fishing Rod, which can level up to gain a longer line, faster reeling in, and so on. Or the Sickle, which will provide greater rewards (including seeds) when harvesting.

Grinding (Flour!)
For all you fans of video game grinding, you can now use local windmills to grind to your heart's desire. Flour, specifically.

Jed & Ned Aging
As part of our gradual rollout of NPC aging, Jed and Ned now change to adults when they reach the right age (as previewed in our last dev update). This also unlocks dating/marriage as an option for them.

WIP Pixel Font Option, Initial Star Ratings, & Other Fixes
Further work has been done on an easier to read pixel font option, though for now it remains still Work-In-Progress. There's also new setup for items to have star rating changes based on certain conditions. (For now, fish are the first case of this where 2-star fish can now be found depending on certain time conditions.) Plus a good handful of general fixes for things like NPC gifting, inventory tab organization, and a few other things found in the link below.

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

That about does it for this dev update, but expect a good chunk more for the next one now that the holidays are over and now that we're starting to really sink our teeth into the code and content of having the denizens of our world grow old. Aging and marriage are definitely two of the things we feel help make Kynseed the unique game it is and so we're just as excited as you all are to see these things get added in. We're getting there step by step, update by update, with all you lovelies to keep us company by our side. Thank you all for continuing to join us on this great development journey. Onward to the next roadstop!

See you around the community.

Love,
PixelCount

Jan 29, 2020

The PixelCount Post - Issue #75

Kynseed - Matt Allen 🦇

ᅠᅠ

In stark contrast to our previous gargantuan New Year's issue, we're keeping things shorter and snappier this week, mainly for your sanity and also ours. So once we were done waxing poetic about the last year, we put our swimming trunks on and dove right back into the deep end of game development.

On the design side of things, we've been organizing and refining our ever-growing list of inventory items in a huge design document. We've also redesigned some of the functionality for Goddess Statues. Charlie gives more details on all that down below. As for the code side of things, a new changelog just went live of some small but important additions to how noticeboards work (along with some other small fixes). Neal shares more info on that in his usual spot further down.

Aside from those small additions, we've also got some bigger additions planned as we resume our regular schedule and drop the next monthly update on February 6th! As usual, we'll also be posting one of our monthly written progress reports alongside it where we discuss how development is going and how we're getting ever-closer to finishing that relationship milestone on our roadmap! (It's fast becoming our most packed milestone we've done yet.)

In the meantime, feel free to dive below for our usual stream of team member dev logs and we'll see you again next week with the monthly update!

Sometimes you design something and while the thought behind it is sound, in practice it maybe doesn't work as well as envisioned. This is the case with the Goddess Statue worshipping.

The idea was that players would get used to a daily routine of offerings and that this would strengthen their ties with the world and the lore. However, it was too easy to forget and was too easy to accumulate negative points. So this past week we've looked at how it can be improved, without straying too far from the original idea.

What we decided is that all worship and offerings will take place on Goddess Day, at the Festival Green region, using a dedicated statue. You will give offerings to a Goddess, but at the cost of getting negative points from 'adjacent' Goddesses. So you can keep giving to one Goddess to get a Blessing, but this will impact you more with the others, leading to Jinxes and Curses. You can also give to two different Goddesses and try to balance it out, but it all comes down to what you are needing from their boons and how far you're prepared to go.

Doing this also moves offerings away from the normal statues which were getting a bit crowded with functionality...so those will now just be used for travel and viewing your standing with the Goddesses.

Also this week, we have been sorting out our "Master Items" document and assigning every item new Proverbs, plus detailing out the Star Rating system. With Star Ratings, there will be various ways to add Star quality to each kind of item. We need these systems in fairly soon so that players have a reason to grow and collect, to improve things, and to have uses and rewards for the higher quality levels. It's an exciting time as we can get things like Recipes to now have a proper use and can give players more structure to what they are doing.

Tune in next week for more ramblings!

During the break two weeks back, I did indeed manage to get some thoughts down on writing. I started off with more about the challenges and overview of what remained, then started breaking down a little SWOT analysis (strength, weakness, opportunities, threats). These mostly still felt like things that had been circling in my mind already so while it was useful to get them down on paper (and especially good to be clearer about the strengths, which perhaps get pushed to the side by worries at times), it was only the next page where I started to go beyond the surface level to think about what to change and to actually daydream about 'what if' type scenarios of what would really make a big difference to how we go about things. That led to some good thoughts which really opened my eyes back up to possibilities and how fixated I'd become on just the surface level of what gets noticed on a daily basis. I feel like I'm probably repeating myself again here - these realisations come and go because I haven't properly got them locked into my habits or fundamental feelings, but it feels like they are cycling 'round quicker and with more purpose lately which is hopefully a good sign.

Something I've been working on this month (mostly in the first five days of the year but also a bit since, along with bug fixing and improvements) is a system for creating noticeboard triggers. So in the game currently we have these noticeboard tasks; the way they operate is each day a random assortment of tasks get generated based on some very broad unchanging criteria. This means that the task you get the first time you look is just as likely to be the same and/or more difficult than one you see the tenth time you look. It doesn't really stretch the player to challenge them, so it's very easy to notice the repetition and lack of progression...

With this new system, it's using a more comprehensive data based system where there's conditions (timing based, item count based, player activity based, etc.) that lead to a specific type of task with a more flexible reward at the end. I've combined this system with actually challenging myself a bit more on the code so that it uses reflection quite heavily to lower the quantity of boilerplate editing code that I often write. After the initial difficulties of this, it's really proving a remarkable improvement where now I can add whole new conditions/details/rewards within minutes and have them instantly editable. Some details/rewards might take a bit more effort to actually make use of in-game, but that's a big improvement from before. It's a process I'm hoping to expand out with future efforts and retrofitting to other systems to bring them more under control with reusable code that continues to make these big differences in the speed of additions and iteration.

So we get back to this past week which has been about fixing more bugs, testing out this noticeboard trigger system which just went live in a small way (with a bigger way coming in the Feb 6th update), plus filling in some improvements while taking the chance to look at where we are and what's next. Regarding what's next, we have a few shows that we're going to in February and then there's plenty of update work circulating around with both the relationship features themselves along with the supporting systems to work on. We're nailing down a schedule to the days, which will bring a bit more order to the chaos of our work. In short, there's a lot to be getting on with which I should be getting back to! Wishing everyone all the best.

Well, after a whole host of problems slowly stacked up, it's finally time to send my PC off for repair. My DIY PC repair just won't cut it anymore. That means having to use my laptop for a few days.

The last time I had to work on my laptop was when I was in Los Angeles visiting Matt, where I made a little bit of guitar music that was uploaded to the Dev Pub on our forums. Perhaps this time something similar might happen as my laptop's far lesser capabilities force me to compose small. Restriction is often the impetus of creativity though...

Something we've been discussing in our recent team calls is the importance of not just playtest feedback but making sure we effectively communicate that feedback. The benefits of playtesting one's game are no doubt obvious and likely need no explanation here, but it is curious how the feedback gleaned from playtests can sometimes fall through the cracks. Oftentimes I think this stems from the fact that the game is still so heavily in-development. There's such a large quantity of things that still need adding or fixing and it'd be a bit silly to incessantly list it all out every week. In this way, it becomes easy to assume that such problems will simply get addressed over time and need no mentioning. However, every team member is different and, thus, will each notice different problems when playtesting. So if each person notices different problems, but each person assumes certain problems are obvious and not worth mentioning, you can see how this could lead to certain areas of feedback blindness.

We often have to remind ourselves that the key to playtesting is to document and communicate feedback, even when some of that feedback may seem obvious or repetitive. That way, we can better weed out our blind spots as individuals and compare our notes with the team as a whole. Of course, that's only just one layer of it all, as there's also player feedback to be continually going through and taking on. (I was tempted to say that internal team feedback is as equally useful as external player feedback, but I'd wager that the latter will always reign supreme at the end of the day. Particularly for small single-digit teams such as ourselves!)

So playtesting has certainly been on my mind recently and I've been getting an over-growing sense that it's perhaps time for a deep dive mid-development playthrough. One where I put my phone on Do Not Disturb, route the PC to my living room TV, put a controller in my hands, and play the latest version of the game as thoroughly as possible with the available content - no dev mode or debug cheats. The idea is to play the game in the same way I would as if it were any other game I was excited about; aka, plopped on my couch and playing multiple hours in a sitting (and even overflowing into the following day depending). All with a laptop next to me so I can chronicle my playthrough and take notes as I go.

I'm rather looking forward to seeing what comes out of it. I'll probably also see if I can twist a few other team member arms into doing a similar deep dive playthrough of their own in the next week or two, as it's that sort of combined feedback that is ultimately the most useful. Though as helpful as these kinds of playtests are, they do inevitably take up quite a bit of time between not just the playthrough itself but also the organizing and collating of all the feedback. Still, it's definitely something worth doing at various intervals of development. Which is to say, it certainly feels like an apt time for one, what with it being a new year and having such a large roadmap milestone on the near horizon!

Jan 15, 2020

The PixelCount Post - Issue #74

Kynseed - Matt Allen 🦇

ᅠᅠ

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.

OUR 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.

OUR EARLY ACCESS JOURNEY

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.

THE PIXELCOUNT POST

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.

UPDATES TO THE GAME

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.

IN A NUTSHELL

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...

Dec 5, 2019

The PixelCount Post - Issue #73

Kynseed - Matt Allen 🦇

ᅠᅠ

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!

Nov 27, 2019

The PixelCount Post - Issue #72

Kynseed - Matt Allen 🦇

ᅠᅠ

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!

Nov 15, 2019

The PixelCount Post - Issue #71

Kynseed - Matt Allen 🦇

ᅠᅠ

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!