Hey, I'm happy to announce that the game page is now available, so remember to add Space Smash to your wish list to know as soon as the game is released.




click here to go to the page!

Hey, I'm happy to announce that the game page is now available, so remember to add Space Smash to your wish list to know as soon as the game is released.




click here to go to the page!

[NT]

/ Dispersing Minds

Welcome to Issue #42 of The PixelCount Post, a periodically released update from Kynseed's team. In today's issue: Matt talks about what's in the next update, we give Neal a break, Charlie busies himself with new assets, and Matthijs feels the love.
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Hello there! It seems a new issue of The PixelCount Post is finally here to once again grace your virtual doorstep. Admittedly, your poor doorstep has been made to suffer a longer wait than is usual for us, but it shan't have to wait any longer. Today we bring some news on all manner of things, including: progress on the next update, details on what it'll include, some work-in-progress images, and even tales of our programmer's recent adventures.



If you've occasionally popped in to our Discord server or forums, you've probably seen us frequently mentioning that Neal, our trusty programmer, has been away for a few weeks. For those of you just getting to know our team, Neal is the madman who has been singlehandedly programming the entire game - engine and all. Right after Lionhead closed (RIP), Neal got straight to work coding what would eventually become the Kynseed prototype. That was in 2016. He's been diligently coding Kynseed every single week since - commonly putting in 6 day work weeks, the nutter.

Altogether, Neal's been working nonstop for about 32 months straight! Thankfully the plan was that once we got The First Steps Update out, he'd finally take a few well deserved weeks off to recoup and give his noggin' a break from the 60,000+ lines of code he's written so far.

One of the challenges of being a small team with a single programmer is that without said programmer there's not much code progress to be made. The only thing Charlie and myself are qualified to program is a microwave.

Though as of last week, Neal is now back amongst our ranks once again, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. Neal chats a bit about his time off further down in this issue, but first: progress reports on development!



Our last major update was all about getting a few basic game systems in place to help pave the way for more complex systems to come. This included such things as a first pass for player hair customisation, the start of the NPC chat system, a goods store selling table, Fae wanderers, multiple saves, and a decent handful of other things.

With that inaugural update now under our belts, it's time we begin adding in one of the gameplay systems we've been particularly looking forward to: owning and running the blacksmith shop!

Running your own business is one of the major activities that players will be able to undertake in Kynseed. Long-term, the types of businesses that you can own will range from the blacksmith to the apothecary to others. Each business will be unique and unlike the others. If running the blacksmith, you'll keep busy by using your forge and other tools to fulfill customer's orders. If running the apothecary, you'll concoct elaborate potions using ingredients you grew yourself.

Because of how uniquely different each business is to run, we have to begin by implementing each of their systems one business at a time. The blacksmith seemed to us a perfect place to start, especially seeing as the current game version has a handful of blacksmith components already in place (forging items, mining for ore, collecting moulds, and so on).



The sign out front will let you open or close your shop. This is how customers will know that you're open for business. (The final version of the sign asset will have some light animation.)



Below is a general overview of the things that we're currently working towards including in the update. Blacksmith ownership is the highlight of course, but we'll be adding in some other bits as well. (As always, bear in mind that smaller items may change or be moved to a future update once we start seeing how all the code's puzzle pieces are fitting together.)


Blacksmith Ownership

• Open and close shop
  
• Fulfill customer orders
  
• Create, sell, and recycle blacksmith goods
  
• Basic first pass of the business ledger
  
• Among other things

New Fairweather Items

• Trough (to assist with pig-related chores)
  
• Rootways (a magical way to get around)
  
• Home Sweet Home (keeps your farm close)

As well as:

• Updated art for growables
  
• NPC chat/favours improvements based on feedback
  
• Snow in winter
  
• New books and item collectibles
  
• And probably a lot of behind the scenes optimisations

Now that the entire team is back at full capacity and firing on all cylinders, we'll be hard at work getting this next update pushed out. Our aim is to have it ready in about three weeks. For those of you who like living on the edge, you'll be able to download early versions of the update via our Steam 'latestupdate branch'. We'll also be keeping you more regularly updated on how development is coming along in the weeks ahead and I'm sure you can expect us to share some work-in-progress screenshots around the community as well.




Speaking of screenshots, I've just posted a bunch of brand new Dev Pub threads! Of particular note is a thread where I've posted dozens of new character designs for the adult versions of the twins! Deciding on which of these new designs to go with is an important decision and we'd love to get you Dev Pub members to hop into that thread and tell us what you think. Hit this link to visit the ol' pub and check it all out.

(The Dev Pub is a forum available to anyone who backed the Kickstarter at the Land Shaper tier or higher. If you backed at one of those tiers but don't yet have Dev Pub access, just head to the Backer Verification Thread and we'll get you set up.)

However, we haven't forgotten about the rest of you lovely people. Whenever a thread has run its course in the Dev Pub, we then move it over to the public forums. So in the spirit of all this blacksmith talk, I've moved over two blacksmith related Dev Pub threads to the public forums.

The first is the Blacksmith Art thread, which takes a detailed look at all the art that went into designing our blacksmith interior. It covers the whole process, starting with Charlie's design doc blacksmith diagram, then the concept art, and then ends with showing how the in-game art slowly came together over multiple iterations.

The other one is the Blacksmith and Apothecary Code thread, which is written by Neal and takes a deep dive into showing some of the early code work that went into setting up the blacksmith and apothecary shops.

Expect more of those types of threads to come in the future and if you have any special requests for a particular area of development you'd like us to highlight don't hesitate to let us know. And, of course, if you ever just wanna chat us up about game dev stuff in general you can always find us hanging out in our cozy Discord server.

As always, thanks for being the awesome people that you are and for joining us on this adventure. See you around the community!







It's been a while, perhaps too long, since the last Post. Since then, we've gone through our first update and commenced work on our second. Although time was limited with the first one I was happy with the systems that went into it. The chat and task systems have good potential to expand on and will be slowly iterated on over time to give more guided player activities. For our second update we've started work on the blacksmith shop ownership system as well as tentative steps on NPC relationships. The hope is this will again be a good starting point to iterate on as well as a further outgrowing of Kynseed's core gameplay loop. The system is already playable internally allowing us to grow it over the coming weeks for the next update.

There is a slight wrinkle in the timing of this next update because, at the time of writing this, I'm about to be away for several weeks. I do feel a certain anxiety/pressure in taking time away when the game is still in development, but it's something where this seemed like a good opportunity before getting back into the full flow of the next year-plus. My hope is to come back refreshed and with renewed energy which I've found myself lacking a bit lately. I'll be taking my laptop with me so it'll be interesting to see how long I last before getting back into coding. In a way it might be that being in a new location will give me itchy fingers to be getting on with the game. Either way, I'm really excited for the break and to return to work, as this year is going to be all about heading towards full release.

*cue an elaborate time warp transition*

Well I'm back now! The holiday was good with a lot of sun/food and change of scenery. One week I did get into some daily coding on some of the backlog of areas that felt worth exploring for a day or two outside the usual update plans. This went quite well and I think showed the power of keeping things fresh where possible. This week I've taken it easy getting back into the routine and sleep patterns while getting some business matters wrapped up. The art, design, and music that's been done while I was away leaves me eager to get back into it. As always, there's a lot of work ahead which needs to be paced out for this marathon effort.







Where did that time go? Our coding machine was silent for an entire month as we sent it off to sunny Thailand to have its engine restored. In that time, the rest of us took full advantage and collapsed into our beanbags for some gaming, movie watching and lots of resting. Things still ticked along here and there. New books were written, new levels blocked out, new artwork appearing, NPC's fleshed out, design docs caught up on, new music drifting over from the Dutch fields, and so on.

Now though, the break is over. The cobwebs are being swept away and the engine has been started anew. Planning meetings, roadmaps, and game updates are all on our plates currently.

Meanwhile, the music continues to appear and we have even seen Gnome & Fairy shop art as well as Spriggans assets made, a grotesquely intimidating Jabberwocks, and we even decided on the appearances of the adult player characters - which look absolutely fantastic it must be said.

So, onwards and upwards as the train continues its climb up development mountain. Glad to still have you all aboard. Onboard meals will be served shortly.




Some folks can get a bit feisty if they have to wait too long at the counter.







Wow, has it been that long already? Much has happened. Last I wrote anything for The PixelCount Post I was talking about one of the Fae realms. Meanwhile there has been work done on a Fae mini-game, which meant I had to write a game show tune. Never done that before. Though doing things I've never done before is kind of the new 'normal' these days. Then Christmas happened and the lovely community gifted me a new batch of guitar samples. (And goodness, it's awesome. Thank you!)

After completing the tracks for the mini-game, I was tasked with creating music for a new region in the game that's connected to the musical culture I established in Poppyhill and the surrounding regions. In this case, I needed to lean closer to French influences. Love and romance play an important role in this area and French accordion music seemed like a natural fit for it. Though if I went full French on the track, it'd be too out of place compared to the rest of the game, so I had to combine it with the already established Kynseed sound. I hope I've succeeded!

Every now and then we'll do a developer voice chat on our Discord server that members are welcome to eavesdrop on. In one of those recent chats, Matt Allen and I did collaborative feedback passes over many of the game's new tracks. The French influenced track mentioned above was one such track that was previewed and discussed, though by now it's more developed than what was heard in that public meeting. Initial feedback from the folks who listened in on this impromptu meeting was positive, so I hope I'm headed in the right direction with it.

In that same meeting we made a list of things to improve about many other aspects of the game's audio, so I imagine I'll never have a moment where I don't have things to keep me busy. This year is going to be most interesting as we move closer to fully realizing our vision for this game. It's gonna be an exciting year I'll not soon forget.

Recently, I also received a list of regions that make up a brand new haven. 6 regions in total, 1 of which I had already made a track for a while back. Just like I did with Poppyhill, I'm establishing a sound profile for this haven so that its music sounds cohesive across all its regions. Well, all its regions minus 1. That 1 region is...different. In it, there's 3 stones called 'the dancers' - an ancient structure of unknown significance. The creative direction I got for its music was to make it creepy, similar to this peculiar clip that Charlie gave me as reference.

Tricky thing is is, the reference uses voices, and we agreed early on not to use vocals in the soundtrack. So I had to achieve a similar creepiness but with a very different sound profile. Luckily, my very first stab at it got approved right away.

I've also recently been working on a track for a new farmland area. In fact, during a recent community voice chat, Matt and I spontaneously started discussing the new track and brainstorming over what needed changing. I love being able to give the community that kind of insight into the process. It's what I had always wanted from other game developers, but it's rare to listen to actual meetings where decisions are being made and debated on the spot. It's quite vulnerable to do it 'live' like that, but I hope some of you find it interesting to hear the kind of thinking that's behind whether or not 'a fiddle should sound more distant'.

There's a few more tracks still left to do for this new haven. When they're all done, I'll take themes from all the tracks and incorporate them into the track I made for the haven's main town. That should give it a similar cohesion that I attempted for Poppyhill. I may switch to sound effects for a bit after this current track though, just to give my mind some variety. There's so much left to do!

Hello all,

An update has been released. Here is a list of everything that has changed.

• Fixed a display bug related to colonist starvation.
  
• Fixed an issue where saving and quitting resulted in no save file.

Yes! We just launched and we have news!
Following is a small update, correcting a bug that prevented one of the images shown in the screenshots from being played. She is now Level 11.

ATTENTION: You must repeat some levels to be able to open level 12. They open according to your score, as well as the achievements.

We also added level 12 !! and we'll try to add AT LEAST one level per day until we complete 30 levels.

It is also available for Win32 and we are opening up a place for linux users who want to do a beta test.

We thank all those who have acquired the game and contribute to our improvement.

In short we will provide letters and backgrounds, as well as improve some of the images already available in the game.

A big hug.
Ero Triangle Team

Hello everyone,

Thanks a lot to all of you for playing Sokoban: The RPG over the past six months - I really enjoyed hearing your feedback!
This resulted in this long overdue update - the reason for this is technical, but I tested it and asked on fora, so I think in the end my worries were void and there should be no issue.
The updates for Mac and VX version of the game will arrive sometime soon, but again due to technical reasons I cannot yet update those versions.
If there's any issues, please do not hesitate to let me know.
I hope you continue to enjoy playing the game.

Kind regards,
Mike

Changes include:
- Displays puzzle number upon entering the map for reference purposes
- Minor typos fixed in dialogues
- 12 new puzzles have been added to be solved after all regular puzzles in the game, which can be accessed from the living room
- Some minor changes in some puzzles
- Other minor bugs reported have been fixed

Hey there!

Many of you asked for a scrollable map, it's finally here!
We've also totally reworked glass physics and we're delivering a massive optimization for Sewers map.

Enjoy!

ps: we started chapter 3 production :drill_picklock:

Fill free to scroll map to investigate objectives or search survivors exact position!
In order to scroll the map, just touch it, press and hold trigger button and move your hand.
ENJOY! :gas_jerrycan:



Both cars and houses glass can now be broken with a melee or a gun :gun_pistol: and breaking a glass will sound like it is supposed to sound!



Huge Sewers map rework in order to reduce engine draw calls, this should boost performances on low-end GPUs.

We're also releasing a number of bug fixes that should solve all reported problems (scar and xm8 bolt and fire selector animations, pick things up out of the water, ...). :drill_picklock:
Check full list below!

Cheers!

New features & tweaks:
- tablet: scrollable map
- melee: players will be able to break any glass with a melee
- physics: fixing glass destruction physics
- supernova: pumping a supernova should require a wider movement to avoid involuntary pumping
- tablet: joining a match with a different game version from the tablet shouldn't be permitted
- gameplay: adding decals explaining safe house logic
- Sewers: level rendering optimization (hisma)
- graphics: switching to temporal anti-aliasing
- Santa Carla: adding some dead bodies
- Prologue: adding a sign indicating that you should actually duck to go through first roadblock (and which button you're supposed to press when playing in sitting position)
- Sewers: adding some rats

Fixed bugs:
- options: adjusting height via options menu should change character's height realtime
- gameplay: unintentionally trials mode start when launching game
- weapons: fixing scar and xm8 bolt and fire selector animations
- inventory: unable to pick things up out of the water
- tablet: collectible skin textures in extra menu are stretched
- sounds: radio broadcast message should say "becomes available" instead of "become available"
- Sewers: magazine Weapons&Ammo for the M416 red magazines could not be picked up at all
- oculus rift: using the reset view option from the oculus dash puts you below the floor

To get in touch with us, just drop a line on discussions forum or join our discord channel.
As always, feedbacks are welcome!

The primary focus of this release was to address as many major gameplay issues as possible that have been reported over the last couple of weeks, as well as a fix for Xbox / Windows 10 players who could no longer access cosmetic items they have unlocked through progression.

BUGFIXES

• Fixed more of our most commonly reported crashes increasing overall stability.
  
• [AS-6164] - Fixed a major issue where vehicles would decide to take an unwelcome nap, and would remain stationary despite being powered.
  
• [AS-5572] - Fixed a major issue in Multiplayer that would cause Client Player’s camera to be launched into space if the "Enter" command was pressed multiple times when entering a seat.
  
• [AS-6127] - Added some guards and performance improvements to address the issue which occurred most often on lower end machines causing picked up and dropped items to fall through the terrain. There may still be some visible stuttering on lower end specs, but items should no longer be irretrievably lost.
  
• [AS-6103] - "Up By the Roots" achievement should now become unlocked by unearthing Popcoral
  
• [AS-6243] - Fixed a major issue where Players on Xbox / Win 10 would no longer see their unlocked cosmetic options as of version 1.0.6.0. The underlying issue had to do with the platform not properly communicating with our backend service and therefore not being able to pull down a player’s inventory. Actual player inventory was not affected and all items should be rightfully restored in the UI view as of version 1.0.7.0.
  
• [AS-6070] - Fixed a major issue in Multiplayer that occurred when a Client Player disconnected a rover train the Host was driving, the towed vehicle could no longer be driven by any players.
  
• [AS-6218] - Remove the use key quick stow capability (Edit: Clarification = We removed the 'hover over something + press F to Quickstow because it was causing some usability issues... namely for gamepad users who had something accidentally proximity selected that would wind up stowed.)
  
• [AS-5857] - Fixed an issue in Multiplayer games where Terrain would be briefly invisible for Client Players when joining a Multiplayer game. Included in this fix are other improvements to the load / join experience which should result in a more consistent experience throughout the game.
  
• [AS-6180] - Fixed a rare Multiplayer issue that would cause a rover train to become disconnected when Client Player drove the train.
  
• [AS-6233] - Fixed an issue which would cause clouds to z-fight to death when viewed from distance and turn into a flickery soup.
  
• [AS-6190] - The required resource icon at the subterranean Engine on Glacio has been changed to match the resource’s tool tip.
  
• [AS-6114] - Removed the erroneous mention of Oxygen on the gas resources tab of the Astropedia
  
• [AS-5902] - Removed erroneous smoke effects on the Shuttle Wreckage Thrusters.

KNOWN ISSUES

• Client desync and performance drops on all platforms. (Update: We are working furiously to ease the pressure on the host machine in order to fix this. Turns out MANY non relevant items were being rendered (items below ground in caves for example) so we are working on implementing an unreal engine feature that will help this issue tremendously)
  
• Exiting Tractors will sometimes cause clients to catapult into space and subsequently suffocate. (Update: Verified that is happens when pressing "enter" twice before entering. Should be fixed in next week's update)
  
• Vehicles will sometimes not respond to input, causing repeated enters and exits before resuming normal operation (Update: turns out this might happen when other inputs are held while entering. Should be fixed in next week's patch)
  
• Some modified terrain nodes will sometimes lose collision, causing players to quicksand into them. (Still debugging this issue. Seems like deformation is causing terrain node math to get into a weird state. Hoping to have this fixed next week)
  
• Crashing on loading before the start menu (This seems to impact players on windows 7. If you are having this problem there is a workaround you can use while we work on the fix.
  
• If you crash while in a shuttle in orbit, the shuttle will remain in orbit and your starting point might get broken. We have a solid repro of this and are tracking a fix.

Glad we got some of the gameplay bugs that impact the most players! Looking forward to continuing to squash gameplay bugs and get performance in line with what what we expect on all platforms!

-jt

I inform you that the update is ready. The game will be released soon. Yes, I decided to make the whole game at once and not break the update into parts. This did not affect the quality of the update, as I release it much later than previously planned.

It remains only to update the page on Steam, bind Steam to the new build of the game, set up achievements and check the game a few more times to identify bugs.

I will try to release the game before the end of February, but I do not promise. I want to release it and not make patches every day. I'm done.

About 2.5 years I was constantly working on the game, something changed and supplemented... Several times I started to make it from scratch... I'm really tired of it and more to go to early access will not, it's a real torment. My conscience literally kept me awake... My own fault.

Thanks to all those who buy the game! I hope that the final result, at least a little bit like it.

It is very difficult to make a game of this level, especially one. Thanks again and I'll be posting an update very soon. It is possible that I did not have enough experience to make it great, but I finished it and You can go through it from beginning to end... Whatever the game is... I finished it. That's all.

ːsteamhappyː