Greetings Seedlings!

The Apothecary Update is finally out and budding healers are getting their eager hands on their pestles, and giving things a good mash.

The update was a little bit slow to appear due to a large re-design of how parts of the apothecary worked...poor Nick was up to his eyeballs trying to make sense of our documents and discussions!
The team pulled through with a fantastic base we can build on, and with your valued feedback we can shape this very unique business into er...shape.

What is also very cool to come from this is that the UI developments, and the minigame mechanics made for the various apothecary stations, can now be utilised elsewhere, especially in regards to the cooking minigames.

Eventually you will be able to chop up your carrots, stir your stews and juice your berries like a regular Gordon Ramsbottom.

"Hey! PixelCount team! What's in the next update?" you shout, while keeping one eye on your boiling cauldron. Well we have a whole new section of intro to add, which will give a more exciting and mysterious start. The Prologue is having a fine tune, with brand new dialogue, character edits, story tweaks and tasks moved about etc.

We also want to set Nick and Mr Weekes free on the lighting and weather systems to bring our visuals and atmosphere bang up to date, to increase your immersion and make the world feel even better. Going beyond that, NPC stories to add depth, a spanky new top secret combat system, having kids and nurturing their little minds are all in our development sights.

As always we thank you for your amazing support and patience, and now in this latest update, patients.
Below is a little look at some of the treasures you can find within the game right now...

PATIENT DIAGNOSIS

Open your Apothecary and the NPCs of the world will come in with a variety of ailments.
Listen to their problems and try to work out how best to counter those bad Traits that are afflicting them.

THE MEDICAL TOME

Use your own knowledge or if wanting to speed things up, you can refer to a fine book that will tell you some of the recipes needed to cure various maladies.
Powders, Creams and Potions are available to view with any unlocked knowledge.

CRAFTING POWDERS

You can mix a nice Powder by chopping and grinding your ingredients and then mashing them with the pestle. Try and find all the crunchy bits to ensure a fine powder that will soothe your patient's problems in no time.

CRAFTING CREAMS

If it is something superficial, then perhaps a Cream will suffice?
Turn on the Bunsen burners and keep stirring to check consistency.
On the left, the extract seeps from your ingredients and emerges as concentrated drops of healing goodness.
On the right, wax to thicken. Don't make it too runny or too thick!

CREATING POTIONS

A more magical malady plaguing your patrons?
Then you need a fine potion.
Stick your ingredients in the crusher to extract that lovely juice.
Pour into the pot and watch the reaction.
Ice forming? Turn up the heat. Bubbles? Turn down the heat.
Check the colour chart and find the correct reagent dispenser of the opposite colour to the smoke to neutralise the reaction.
Grind, pull and squirt your way to success!

MR FAIRWEATHER'S NEW STOCK

As well as the Apothecary, there are some nice new items from our Fae friend to consider.
Below are three such items, Mirror Mirror, Waterman's Reminder, and the Vase of Forgiveness.
You can also buy Forget-Me-Yet seeds, Judith's Charming Charmer Charm and the brilliantly useful Turdis.
Just don't use the latter one if someone else hasn't flushed.



That's it for this update. For full details of the changelog check here and if you want reach us try our Discord!

We hope you enjoyed your peek inside the world of Kynseed and its ongoing quest to become a game we can be proud of and that players will cherish.

To all who have already jumped aboard, we thank you deeply and await your bugs, feedback and bribes with an excited trepidation. If that's such a thing. Feel free to join us here

Til next time, friends.

LOVE,

Hello there seedlings!

Within the update you can now buy any Apothecary and diagnose the local populaces problems.
As always, these things are an ongoing development, so expect bugs, balancing issues and an overwhelming urge to sprinkle herbs on things.

We appreciated any feedback at our usual channels on Discord, our forums or in the Steam Discussions.

🔷 Apothecary is now open for business
ᅠᅠ🔷 Serve patients to cure 22 ailments (these unlock as your reputation gets higher)
ᅠᅠ🔷 3 minigames to help craft powders, creams and potions
ᅠᅠ🔷 Discover branded and off-brand cures that can be made and stored for future customers
ᅠᅠ🔷Order stock of common ingredients
ᅠᅠ🔷Send your spouse to gather rare ingredients from ‘Other’ as a temporary measure
ᅠᅠ🔷Fob customers off with a placebo that has a 50% chance of helping them feel better
ᅠᅠ🔷Hire a worker to take over running the shop (but remember they need premade items or ingredients to craft with for the best results)
ᅠᅠ🔷Help is available on most screens with F1 or pressing the left stick in on gamepad which will give both text instructions and an overlay showing controls
ᅠᅠ🔷Rework of the Clockwork Clock visuals and functions
🔷 Major reworking of the texture system in progress. Game currently uses more graphics memory but that should be reduced soon.
🔷 6 new Fairweather items are available, up to 3 appear per year
ᅠᅠ🔷A lovely vase to keep your spouse sweet
ᅠᅠ🔷A pendant that lets you buy gossip from those who don’t like you
ᅠᅠ🔷A magical mirror that increases your charm
ᅠᅠ🔷A Reminder system that attaches to your clock
ᅠᅠ🔷Forget-Me-Yet seeds that grow a flower that makes any opinion neutral
ᅠᅠ🔷Introducing TURDIS – Get around the world from outhouse to outhouse via a quick flush
🔶Several books rewritten
🔶Additional items available from shops/traders and gathering for the apothecary
🔶Gossip and proverbs from apothecary owning npcs has a bias towards relevant items
🔶Changed logging to show attempted resolution and current resolution
❌Fix for keybinding crash
❌Fix for unresponsive characters in tavern levels when there were no spaces to fill
❌Further navigation and AI upgrades to fix current issues
❌Fix for rare crash in racing event levels when the event closes
❌Fix for Willowdown Farm map screen not drawing correctly at the start

🔷Additionᅠᅠ🔶Improvementᅠᅠ❌Fixᅠᅠ➕Internal

Steam Sale

Seasoned Greetings Seedlings! Christmas is nigh and as always the Steam Winter Sale has begun.
PixelCount Studios is glad to be part of the sale again, and Kynseed is available with a humble 10 percent discount.

So, get thee hence to the market (Steam) and grab yourself a copy before Herbert Lemon gets there and scares you away by offering you one of his seasoned walnuts.

Price Rise

To give fair notice, once the next two updates are in place in 2021 we will be raising the price of the game a little to help with maintaining the castle. Those cobwebs won’t clean themselves and the castle Broonies eat a ridiculous amount of food from our larders. No wonder Old Mother Hubbard’s dog is always hungry!

Upcoming content

What are the next two updates you might ask? Well the first is the exciting Apothecary Update, and after that a new intro and more story being written by none other than super talented Fable trilogy/Assassins Creed and Sackboy writer, Mark Llabres Hill (Mark is locked in a small room with a large supply of candles and writing supplies... we should maybe consider actually giving him some food too). Along with the new intro we'll also be doing a lot of spring cleaning on the game to make it even more entertaining.


Have a great Christmas all and stay safe. Things are not easy but by pulling together and escaping into our favourite hobby, we hope you can all get through these tough times.

See you in the New Year!

Love,
PixelCount

Hello there seedlings!

While work continues on the next larger update including the Apothecary, here is another small update of fixes and improvements!

A big thanks to all of your support whether by sending in bugs, leaving a review letting us know what you think, hanging out in the community, or even by simply playing the game.

🔷 Npcs will occasionally now have mini conversations with each other
🔶 Npc navigation has had some further upgrades for avoiding one another and correctly positioning
🔶 Various level fixes for layering and navigation
🔶 Mouse scroll works for changing time on the sleeping UI
🔶 The sack on the farm groups items from gathering and orders them to see all star rating versions next to each other if there are any
🔶 Adjustment to npc talk range to be a bit closer to the player
➕ New npc behaviours setup with state machine to gradually replace and simplify the existing system
❌ Fix for sequence triggering early on day 13 meaning the sibling wasn't at North Gate
❌ Preventative fix for crash related to npc dates
❌ Fix for crash around closing time for certain events on festival levels
❌ Fix for possible cause of partner delay after gathering
❌ Fix for Fine Fayre and Fest Field navigation around stalls
❌ Fix for Marshtyt getting out of position rarely
❌ Fix for pets stuck on sale when they shouldn't be
❌ Fix for create custom task task only working on the player farm level
❌ Lower left icon set is correct for all seasons
❌ Teleports in Candlewych West/Loverwood/Naida's Glory now work as intended
❌ Fixed an issue where having a certain item would unlock all portals!

🔷Additionᅠᅠ🔶Improvementᅠᅠ❌Fixᅠᅠ➕Internal
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Hello there seedlings!

While work continues on the next larger update, here is another small update of fixes based on player reported issues!

A big thanks to all of your support whether by sending in bugs, leaving a review letting us know what you think, hanging out in the community, or even by simply playing the game.

🔷 Original dog now ages ingame
🔶 Some menus and the shortcuts for gamepad have changed
🔶 Map is on the back button now
🔶 Status is now on dpad left and contains the overview of npcs
🔶 Skills is now on dpad right on its own separate to npc overview
🔶 Lute is back as a minigame prize but has lost its power to make people sleep
❌ Moved eat marker for Boots/Winters house so they should appear in different spots
❌ NPCs will no longer buy items for crazy prices at the Good Store if you are out of the level and have a worker
❌ Reduced instances of landfish and made fish move a bit more often
❌ Fix for animals resetting opinion after loading a savegame from now on
❌ Adjust throwing position for adult while riding
❌ Fix for goddess offering stacking items disappearing
❌ Fix for left mouse down facing direction not working correctly while in a fixed camera position such as the Good Store
❌ 2 preventative fix for potential navigation crashes while changing levels
❌ Fix for extra exit appearing on Burial Grounds map
❌ Reduced player snapping out of position from riding and dismounting. Some cases of issues may still persist
❌ Reduced player wall glitch on leaving bed potential
❌ Preventative fix for crash on trying to go through a level exit to a level id that does not exist

🔷Additionᅠᅠ🔶Improvementᅠᅠ❌Fixᅠᅠ➕Internal
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Hello there seedlings!

This is just a quick patch to followup from the recent Relationship Update based on player reported issues!

A big thanks to all of your support whether by sending in bugs, leaving a review letting us know what you think, hanging out in the community, or even by simply playing the game.

🔶 Switched dog in Vale to be a puppy
🔶 Aging version of villagers used in preference to old version. Initially sleep anims will be missing due to this.
🔶 Options on options screen a bit more spread out so you can't select two at once
🔶 Adjusted some nav in Candlewych Village to get the npcs moving around more
🔶 Some debug to help figure out screen freeze problems
❌ Various nav fixes to improve overall navigation positioning, erratic movement paths, one frame character flickering and an occasional crash caused by threading
❌ Fix for softlock on level changing while alt-tabbing
❌ Fix for dates in Mellowfield not working for the go to show step
❌ Fixed missing Pott greeting text
❌ Fix for normal apples sometimes acting like gassy now that the two are separate, apples on trees show as normal apples
❌ Fix for extra exits showing in Mellowbrook
❌ Fix for Rosie Crust animations being the wrong way round
❌ Fix for Roger side idle sprite size difference
❌ Crash fix for pinning invalid task in the calendar
❌ Crash fix for wheel with certain stats
❌ Can remove tasks of noticeboard/gift item/delivery type in the prologue
❌ Can no longer gain milk at random locations on the levels

🔷Additionᅠᅠ🔶Improvementᅠᅠ❌Fixᅠᅠ➕Internal
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Hello again purveyors of fine gaming. While everyone else is celebrating scary things, it seems we're over here celebrating...*checks notes*...love! (Unless you find commitment scary, I suppose.) Witch which is to say, the long awaited Relationship Update has been released!

Here at Castle PixelCount we have been stewing this very large update over a very long time. At long last, we are pleased to finally pour the contents of the cauldron into the phial, ready for you all to have a sip of. Along the way we also recently hired not one but two passing Tinkers (colloquially known as programmers) and their expertise has added some extra special froth to the brew.

The amount of people now milling about our castle is growing. The excitement in the dusty corridors and damp, gloomy vaults is palpable. You could palp it if you wanted. So as the sun rises over this latest update, we are all filled with a new energy, inspired partly by our new helping hands but also by our amazing, growing community. Without your little faces peering at us across the moat from your little cottages, we wouldn’t even open the shutters. We look forward to you joining us on the next stage of the adventure and to enjoy the fare we cooked up in the Cauldron of Development.

Though for today, we shall give you a highlight of some of the changes you can expect to find in this latest update concoction of ours. The Relationship Update has been a long time coming and is actually many incremental updates combined into one. (You can check out all those incremental updates here if you like.) So feel free to peruse the highlight's delights below.

CHANGELOG HIGHLIGHTS

Building NPC Relationships

You can now befriend NPC's through your actions (or, you know, make a few enemies too). Much like in real life, it'll take more than just gift giving to build lasting relationships with those around you.

• Players can reach adulthood where you can date and marry suitable partners if your friendship level is high enough
  
• All the mortal NPC's in the game fully age, so you can find the perfect someone among the 60 or so villagers currently in the game
• Many newly added NPC reactions to the player's actions
• A collection of noticeboard tasks to help raise your friendship level and earn you some rewards
  
• NPC's will react to things like the weather and sometimes gossip

Marrying NPC's

The land of Quill is one of tradition and the process of marriage is no different.

• After building up to love in friendship, there's a seven-step tradition for marriage culminating in your wedding day
  
• After marrying, your partner will live on your farm and carry out tasks as organised in the Family Ledger (which can include helping out with feeding the animals, cooking, farming, and gathering fruit on the farm)
  
• You can send out your partner on gathering trips to find resources and return home with them
  
• Your spouse will comment on the state of your marriage, farm, and wealth (or lack of it)

Item Improvements

Another area that's seen a fair bit of improvements are the plethora of items in the game.

• Many of the items now have multiple star rating versions to obtain based on conditions that can be discovered or uncovered from NPC's
  
• Higher rated items help with better boons from offerings, fulfilling tasks, earning more money, and a better friendship increase from NPC's
  
• Proverbs also help to locate the many growables and fish out there in the world
  
• A multitude of delicious new recipes added to the game
  
• Many properties for items are now in place

Continuing Improvements to Presentation

Visual polish and presentation work is a constant process for a game in development. Here's a handful of areas we've recently turned our attention to.

• Minimap now shows locations, dating spots, and homes
  
• A plethora of UI improvements, especially within the inventory and chat boxes
  
• Upgraded to MonoGame 3.7 (the framework our engine is built on) which brings with it a more elegant handling of different screen aspect ratios

Full Changelogs

As always, there's vastly more additions and fixes made than we can list here. So jump on over to this recent changelog of ours to check out the details or just drop by our changelog repository thread to see the myriad of smaller incremental updates over recent months that have gone into this Relationship Update.

OTHER BITS AND BOBS

Family Brounie
Pott the Brounie will offer guidance and insults in equal measure, while helping keep your farm tidy.

Skin Customisation
The player can now choose from skin tones to add to their hair colour choices. (This is just a first pass at this, but more customisation options are still likely to come.)

Goddess Offering Rework
A cool, strategic new system for gaining boons, blessings, jinxes, and curses!

Gift Mails
NPC's will send you gifts if they are particularly fond of you.

Family Secret Boxes
Discover the codes to unlock a variety of heirlooms, from secret recipes to valuable information.

Fertiliser
Scoop the poop to enhance and speed up your crop growing.

Equipment Experience
Your tools can be levelled up with use, bestowing extra bonuses.

Milling
Not enough grinding in the game? Use these stones in a windmill to grind to your heart's content.

Marshtyt the Master Gardener
Meet this cheeky chappie who can teach you how to sow your seeds effectively.

UNTIL NEXT TIME

Next on our game development journey we'll be moving on to more exciting and long-awaited features such as combat, Apothecary ownership, having children, and a plethora of other wonderful delights.

As always, a most heartfelt thanks to all of you for your support and the myriad of ways you give it - whether by sending in bugs, leaving a review letting us know what you think, hanging out in the community, or just by simply playing our game. This community genuinely means the world to us and all this would be quite literally impossible without each of you. Take care friends and we'll meet again further down the road.

Love,
PixelCount

Hello there seedlings! While everyone else is celebrating scary things, it seems we're over here celebrating...*checks notes*...love! (Unless you find commitment scary, I suppose.) Today the Relationship Update blossoms onto the latest version of the game.

This update has been a long time coming and is actually many incremental updates combined into one. (You can check out all those incremental updates here if you like.) Below is the changelog for everything included in this most recent game update, so feel free to dive in and check it out.

A big thanks to all of your support and the myriad of ways you give it whether by sending in bugs, leaving a review letting us know what you think, hanging out in the community, or even by simply playing the game. We hope you enjoy this update and look forward to seeing how you all get on with it. Much love!


🔷 Switch to Monogame 3.7, this should hopefully bring improvements to game compatability and stability
🔷 Game can now handle different aspect ratios. It currently stretches the image at 720p as before but keeps 16:9 with a letterbox effect round the outside
🔷 Game window is resizable (as above this still keeps the game at 720p)
🔷 All Mellowfields villagers aging
🔷 Initial pass on context dialogue system which will reduce repeated lines and provide more dialogue for npcs
🔷 Minimaps rendered in the game, this has a slight load on going into the map but brings with it always up to date maps, different season versions and accurate coordinates within it
🔶 Cunning plots music has been updated
🔶 Improved presentation of npc opinions and a few more cases where they will display them
🔶 Mailbox archive handles scrolling
🔶 Level transitions using new system
🔶 Mouse input using hardware mouse which should be more responsive
🔶 Adjustments and improvements for letter presentation
🔶 Some additional letters or variants may show up
🔶 Gift letters can contain items from additional loot tables
🔶 Calendar events should show their region now whether they are first in the list or not
🔶 Loot table balance allows weighting towards common and rarer items (initial use for apples vs gassy apples)
🔶 Fireplaces in various homes including the players should now function and be turned on by npcs in the evenings
🔶 Some farmable areas added to the greenhouses
🔶 Adjusted the balance for the blacksmith shop
ᅠᅠ• Less reputation loss for declining an order
ᅠᅠ• Shelf orders more common based on having items on the shelf
ᅠᅠ• Orders soft capped for the blacksmith at 10 if you have shelf items (for further balance later on)
ᅠᅠ• Blacksmith crafter will make items with the mould least used for the shelf
ᅠᅠ• NPC owned blacksmith shops have a growing pile of ore per day to buy
🔶 Message for spouse return from gathering
🔶 Some minor level improvements to collision/navigation/layering across several levels
🔶 Housekeeping book adjusted layout similar to the ledger
🔶 Some text fixes for tasks/dialogue
🔶 Shelf/stock for blacksmith control prompts made clearer
🔶 Calendar task screen has indicators for the different filters which shows which have items in and skips ones without for quick selection
🔶 Completed tasks have their own section filter
🔶 Larder UI is clearer on the gamepad controls to select and remove items from the larder
🔶 Several more screens have help for them using the help key (f1 and clicking the left stick by default to access)
🔶 Improved chat boxes for showing task items npcs are waiting for
🔶 Recipes in the inventory show the item and description
🔶 Rebalance of prices for newer items and blacksmith crafted ones
❌ Improvements to the spouse pet behaviour where it could often get stuck if a pet was near a collision
❌ Fix for some npcs disappearing on hit while shopping
❌ Fix for blacksmith customers staying around after being server by a worker if the player is in the crafting minigame nearby
❌ Fix for Homestead pub inactivity
❌ Gamepad thumbstick deadzone added for player movement and the switch to gamepad controls
❌ Date setup improved to not teleport to location if already in the level
❌ Cats now should follow after the player when holding items when they are after food
❌ Fix for incorrect count of star rating items on first viewing in the offering system
❌ Adjustments for the butterfly task to make it easier to complete
❌ Fix for wheel UI being broken depending on stats
❌ Fix for out of season crops still looking like they grow
❌ Fix for collect/store/let go prompts not being mouse clickable
❌ Fix for let go with insects not resetting the glass jar state properly
❌ Fix for performers not staying on the stage
❌ Fix for peggy soup recipe listing the wrong ingredients
❌ Fix for certain recipes resulting in the wrong result due to not properly checking ingredients
❌ Fix for repeated shop region popups after loading a save
❌ Fixed tile issue for cliff pieces on a few different levels
❌ Adjusted post eating toilet delay to be random 1-6 hours to avoid entire families going to the loo at once
❌ Player shouldn't understand babies and they also no longer give favours


🔷Additionᅠᅠ🔶Improvementᅠᅠ❌Fixᅠᅠ➕Internal
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Hey there you rascals. We've got another update for you fresh out the update oven. For this one we've added in a number of new and improved recipes for you obtain. We also took care of quite a few UI quality-of-life improvements and bug fixes that we've been wanting to check off our to-do list for awhile. If you run into any bugs or simply have some brilliant feedback to share then don't hesitate to let us know in the community or you can even drop us a mail at Bugs@Kynseed.com. See you all again soon, cheers!


🔷 Quite a few new recipes added to the game
ᅠᅠ• These are obtainable from exploring, spending, and some are unlocked rewards as well!
🔶 Burial Grounds in the Vale has undergone some reworking (some assets awaiting custom replacements)
🔶 Stove/baking interacts work differently so that a recipe is required and random ingredients cannot be used
ᅠᅠ• The star rating of items can be picked and affects the result quality
🔶 Show known likes/dislikes in the gifting screen
🔶 World map has bounds and scrolls when the cursor is close to the edge
🔶 Added a "Return to Title" menu option
🔶 Region name now displays when entering a level
🔶 Options menu rearranged into sequential order with sections
🔶 Choosing a volume on the SFX slider should play a sound to test audio levels
🔶 Some small changes around the early game tasks to not require home offerings in the first season and dandelion task until after the father is spoken to
❌ Fixed a few infrequent issues with shoppers getting stuck
❌ Melee combat skills now acquired the same way as other skills to fix recent issues with them
❌ Prevented lost items in Simplewood
❌ Wedding spirit benefit is random rather than appearing to come from the top
❌ Prevent exploit of levelling slingshot from hitting permission locked bushes/trees
❌ Prevented slight exploit of cooking involving multiple items of the same type where you previously could get away with only one
❌ Fixed bug where skill progress wasn't shown in the skill menu
❌ Fixed attempting to drag proverbs in the inventory causing it to hang until a different tab was chosen
❌ Fixed issue loading a save game taking the customisation options from another save game onscreen
❌ Cutting wheat shouldn't sometimes give apples
❌ Fixed multi-line intros only showing one line in the chat system
❌ Fixed old gate in Willowdown for old saves
❌ Favours in the first season limited to available items in that region
❌ Fix for Hazel not giving out a task due to recent changes with intros going via the chat system
❌ Poops no longer magically appear at a location in the current level if the animal actually isn't in that level


🔷Additionᅠᅠ🔶Improvementᅠᅠ❌Fixᅠᅠ➕Internal
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Well hello again and welcome back! There's been some interesting developments since last we talked.

Regarding game developments, Charlie has been busy doing another pass over the Evergreen and Woemarsh regions. He's also been working on some new Reputation systems that'll determine how the player accrues Rep for not just their shops but also their family. As usual, check out the individual updates below for the details.

Regarding other developments, we're rather excited to report that we've recently begun looking to add another coder to our team! Doing so will no doubt have sweeping benefits to the game's progress and we're both happy and humbled to have reached a place where we can expand our small team. So read on below and we'll tell you all about it!







It's been a bit of a full-on time since our last posts. As Neal will go into detail about, we set about trying to recruit a coder and conducting some interviews. It was really interesting, though sometimes a challenge for me to understand what on Earth they were talking about with all their coder jargon.

What is clear is that there are many really talented people out there and I am jealous of their skillz. I was part of the meetings as a 'gauge of character' and to see if they would fit into the team as a whole. We have a very close team with great camaraderie and that does need to be considered as well as coding prowess and a bit of flair.

Aside from that I have been finishing up a pass of Evergreen, starting Woemarsh, and finally trying to sort out the Reputation system. It was a challenge as we don't want to force the player down certain paths. In summary, we have two Rep systems: one per shop and then one for all shops, friendships, and deeds (called your Family Rep). The former will unlock Perks that help your shop and the latter unlocks benefits beyond just shops. Both Reps come with tiers of renown, from Unknown to Legendary. The UI for this then needed mocking up in Visio, which was slow going. I find I always forget one thing here and there.

Got potentially exciting times ahead and hoping we can get the coder onboard and get more features out. We appreciate your patience with this game. There is lots to do, but lots of good stuff, and you will only benefit from more updates. Stay safe everyone!







Another month zips by with a slower pace still as we start on the process of hiring an additional coder. It's a decision we've been thinking on for a few years now where we actually came very close to getting somebody prior to Early Access but timing just didn't work out. Though in connection with recent business developments, it has become a possibility again and so we opened up applications and were pleasantly surprised to see such a large response compared to our expectations!

There's also been a bunch of feedback requests from candidates which I've been trying to go through one by one to give specific advice to each person's submissions. That said, it feels like maybe there are some common threads I could mention here on the off chance anyone is reading and interested. (A small disclaimer that this is my first time recruiting a coder so my experience is limited to what we are specifically looking for, but hopefully there is something of use still!)

Note from the Editor: For any non-coders who want to follow along, I've added explanatory links for some of the terms used below.

#1 - GETTING TO THE GOOD STUFF
The first important bit is about presentation and minimising the time it takes to get to the good parts. While most applicants did include portfolio or itchio links, there were quite a few that relied on links to web games to play rather than any video reel or brief articles describing the work they did. Chances are that people hiring aren't able to play most of these web games because of time constraints; the more applicants the less practical it becomes and the more you'll lose the chance to impress quickly. It's similar to advertising a game I guess in that sense. You need a sizzle reel of a minute or two that gets to the point quickly and some screenshots that helps gauge the quality. In a related sense, linking the presentation to the role being applied for is helpful too for showing relevant skills. For example, many people who applied have a background in Unity which is fine for roles using that but presents a challenge in our situation where our code uses the MonoGame framework. The clearer it was from the covering mail or website that their experience ran deeper on having worked on their own engine, used XNA/MonoGame in the past, released commercial games, demonstrated more advanced Unity usage (maybe developing their own plugin/editor), the better. Such applicants moved towards the top of the pile, as it demonstrated existing experience that would suggest they could do well in the role and that they understood the role they were applying for.

#2 - EASILY VERIFIABLE CODE
Second is seeing source code and github usage, which gives me a good sense of how a person has worked on prior projects. Lots of bonus points to ones where there is a project with a bunch of commits for the project. A surprising amount of applicants I found included repos where there was an initial commit and that was it (the only repo updated was the website portfolio one). Personally I found this a bit disconcerting as it just leaves a big project to scour through with no true sense of how it was worked on (including the sceptical wondering of knowing if it was one person's sole work). It also links in with #1 that scouring through means it is taking a lot of time to try and find the good parts. First impressions are really important cause you just don't know the circumstance of when it'll be seen and how much or little time might be spent looking at it.

#3 - PORTFOLIO POLISH
Third is about quality of the portfolio. Once you've caught my eye enough to look through video/screenshots (and maybe play if time permits), the next thing I'm looking for is how polished/solid/creative/innovative each presented bit is. A lot of 'professional' game development is about spending the time on those details. Perhaps some examples might help illustrate some common features of projects that don't catch the eye:

• A character jumps in a platformer and looks weightless.
  
• Standing on a slope and feeling like it has no effect (again, from a weightless point of view where you'd perhaps expect sliding, friction, different animation, etc.).
  
• The camera being fixed on the center of the player the whole time.
  
• Power-ups collected that just disappear without any visual/audio cue.
  
• Menus/levels/UI being really static and not guiding the eye at all.
  
• Clones of things like Tetris/Snake/Asteroids where there's no difference to the originals. (Funnily enough, part of my application to Lionhead was from a Tetris clone but I had included an extra twist of bomb pieces and adding falling blocks to the menu screen to liven it up which managed to do the job some 17 years ago!)

Hopefully the list above gives a few ideas of the ways of making the difference in quality that helps show understanding of what it takes to finish a game. If we were in the first year or two of development maybe we wouldn't be quite as picky on this front, but this role is all about helping us finish the game. Basically, every little bit helps in terms of showing attention to detail and persistence in effort. So to be efficient on a portfolio it can be about choosing the right parts to concentrate on, as obviously completing every piece to commercial quality would take too long (and you might as well be looking to sell the game at that point!). I find making a short video or GIF of something I work on, then reviewing just that video or GIF, often helps a lot on that front as it creates that distance of perspective where you can look at the game without being immersed in the controls.

As other advice on this point, I'd recommend checking out the best games that are the same genre to what you are making for ideas of the little touches. Seeking out tutorials on YouTube or various game dev sites can also help with the implementation details and providing pre-packaged research. (Game Maker's Toolkit on YouTube is particularly useful for this I think.) The challenge in just following the lead of others though is it shows a level of competency but there is a lack of flair/innovation to make your own mark. So it is also important to consider how you can show your own originality in combination with polish as it will help stand out and reach the top of the pile.

I think those three points probably cover the basics to go over so I'll leave it there for now! It's been really humbling/inspiring seeing all the applicants and having the chance to interview some as well. For now we're still in the final stages of the hiring process and handling the business developments but hopefully we'll soon have more to announce on all that!

To wrap up quickly on actual game development progress (as time permitted amongst the coder hiring process): since the update in the middle of August I've been working mostly on items and recipe setup along with some bug fixes. I've also started work on the player children setup, which is exciting. (To set expectations, this is early days stuff so will take a few months to reach a public build.) Apart from that, work is continuing on all the polish/improvements for the relationship update which is now starting to see long-standing in-progress items ticked off but there's still plenty to do which I better get back to. 'Til next time, wishing everyone all the best!







As my cohorts mentioned above, the lion's share of our time in these recent weeks has been spent on looking for another coder to add to the team. As is often the case, focusing on the business side of this project always tends to require a fair amount of our available time and focus, thereby causing game development to take more of a back seat than we'd like. (If it were possible I imagine we'd prefer to never stop working on the game, living in some sort of perpetual business-free utopia.) Yet this time we don't terribly mind it cause the business at hand is to find someone whose sole job is to help code.

This is incredibly exciting for us, because up 'til now we've been chiefly running as a skeleton crew. As such, most of us share multiple roles on the team which forces us to divide our time and focus between the various (and often large) workloads of each role. For example, Neal has been not just our one and only programmer but he also manages much of the business and finances. (Taxes, payroll, expense management, and so on.) So adding another person to assist purely with code will have a huge impact for a small team like ours. Ultimately, it'll help improve the quality of the game and the efficiency with which we make it.

Originally, my plan for this Post was to collate some interesting community stats for you all to check out (sourced from overall community analytics as well as our recent player survey.) Though as often happens with best laid plans, my focus got diverted elsewhere due to us recently starting this hiring process. Hiring some help for the code has always been something we've considered since before Early Access, but as a small team just starting out we often didn't have the resources to make it happen. Yet it always stayed on our minds as a "maybe one day" type of goal.

Thus, it seems that day has arrived. So once we decided we were finally at a good place to expand our little team, we wanted to move on it rather quickly. The first order of business was that I needed to create a new jobs page on our website along with posting the position itself. We wanted to not only explain the job adequately but also show a bit of our personality as a studio. Making sure we hire someone who "got" our vibe and culture as a developer was super important to us. (Here's how that page turned out, for anyone interested.)

In addition to this, I helped set up a sort of pipeline for our application process. Namely this just meant setting emails up to funnel applicants to some designated areas of our master inbox on Outlook and to help provide Neal with any support or assistance he might need (because as a coder, he's ultimately the one who'd need to be replying to and organizing coder candidates).

From there, we then shared the job post in a few spots around the community as well as other social channels. We didn't really know what sort of response to expect, but I do know we were keeping our expectations pretty conservative. Yet the quantity (and even quality) of responses received were well above anything we had anticipated, which was encouraging and humbling. Of course, the more responses there were the more initial work this represented as it meant there were more candidates to go through, reply to, and interview. (We were also very keen on not being a sort of cold silent company during this process and so it was important to us that we took the time to not just view every candidate's response but to also give an individual followup reply to each regardless of our decision.)

I found that during this process my mind was very much put into the mode of thinking about how our game and company might seem to a new-hire joining for the first time. What internal processes might possibly need polishing or updating? Is all our project's internal file sharing still up to snuff, for example? What other such areas might need attention? In addition to this, working on the new jobs page of our site got me thinking about how some of our website was in dire need of updating, both on the front end and back. Similarly, adding yet another email address to our server's already long list (addresses for team members, bug reports, community accounts, job applicants most recently, and so on) reminded me of our myriad of server-side email forwarders I have set up and how our master Outlook inbox could probably stand to get somewhat reorganized.

This then sent me on a bit of a twisting path in which I assessed such areas and found there were many things I felt needed updating. That said, I've rattled on a fair bit already for one update, so I'll graciously save you all from enduring a detailed explanation of all these individual updates I got into. Perhaps I'll touch lightly on it in the next issue for anyone particularly interested. Long story short, I've had my hands unexpectedly full with such work these past number of weeks.

Still, the time we're spending on these business things now will yield rewards for the game later. Once we finish the final remaining steps of this hiring process, we'll finally have some extra hands helping out on the code - something which will no doubt have a significant positive impact on the game. It's a most interesting time for our team to be sure and I look forward to offering more updates on these things in our next issue of The Post. Until then, much love to you all!