Lords and Villeins News

[h3]We are happy to announce our collaboration with the publisher 1C Entertainment to bring Lords and Villeins to PC this Spring via Steam Early Access![/h3]

Rest assured nothing from our promised plans changes by this! We remain independent in our creative efforts and the game that you got excited for is not changing. Quite the opposite! Thanks to the support from 1C, we will be able to deliver Lords & Villeins on a level of quality we could not think of before!

[h2]What about the release date?[/h2]

Last year we have promised Early Acces to be released in October. As you have probably noticed, we did got there. So what happened?

Joining forces with 1C has opened an opportunity for us - we could take more time, polish the game and add more features to make it more interesting for our players when we finally launch.

We simply did not want to disappoint our players. We did not put the project aside. The opposite is true! We have been working harder than ever and have done really amazing progress!

We are not ready to announce any specific date yet, but we are aiming for an Early Access release in the Spring of this year.

[h2]Team of Lords & Villeins is Growing[/h2]

After almost three years of solo development, I was finally able to grow the team. We can focus on the project fully and even more so - the game can be much better! Christian Markowicz, a good friend and amazing programmer I met at Spelkollektivet in Sweden (a really cool coliving and coworking space for game devs!), Andrea Florez Perez, a talented artist (check out her work it's incredible), and Adam Bow, a talented composer from New Zealand.

We have been able to work together for several months already and pushed the game to a new level! See for yourself in this brand new teaser, we have prepared together with 1C:

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Of course, this all would not be possible without the support of you, our players. Thousands of you engaged with us on social media, played the demo of our game, and expressed interest in our work. From the bottom of our hearts, we are sincerely grateful!

Thank you for your support! We are very happy about this change and we can't wait to bring Lords & Villeins to you!

As always, remember to wishlist us on Steam, follow us on Twitter or Instagram, join our community on Discord and subscribe to our newsletter to stay tuned for more news in the near future!

---
For those of you interested, here is some information about 1C Entertainment!

1C Entertainment is an international group with offices located in Warsaw, Gdansk, Prague, Budapest and Moscow and operating in the segments of game production, distribution and services for video game developers. The company releases video games for all platforms through its global network of partners digitally and in retail.

1C Entertainment has successfully launched over 100 game titles including critically acclaimed series - IL-2 Sturmovik, King's Bounty, Men of War and Space Rangers. Recent releases include such games as Ancestors Legacy, Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark, Ion Fury and Deep Sky Derelicts. For more information about 1C Entertainment and their games, please visit the official 1C Entertainment website.

I'm very excited to see this happen! Digital Dragons Indie Showcase is a yearly event that's part of the Digital Dragons game dev conference. It celebrates a selection of 60 indie titles that are competing for the Indie Showcase Awards.

Visit the showcase Steam page and try those games they are all amazing!

https://store.steampowered.com/sale/IndieShowcase

I will also be streaming the game to showcase it to people hanging around the page! Come and say hi. Here is my schedule:

• Wednesday 16th 18:00 CEST (UTC + 2) / 11 AM CST
  
• Wednesday 16th 22:00 CEST (UTC + 2) / 3 PM CST
  
• Thursday 17th 18:00 CEST (UTC + 2) / 11 AM CST
  
• Thursday 17th 22:00 CEST (UTC + 2) / 3 PM CST
  
• Friday 18th 18:00 CEST (UTC + 2) / 11 AM CST
  

Make sure to also vote in the community award for the indie gala:

https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/G7V9K3T

[h2]Quality of Life Improvements and Bugfixes![/h2]

Ever since the first release of the demo here on itch.io, the game has been played by thousands of players both here, on Steam and other platforms. This has brought me very valuable feedback so I decided that before advancing the development towards the early access, I will revisit the demo with another free update that addresses many of the issues and some quality of life improvements people have pointed out. You can see the full list of changes in the changelog at the end of this post.

I hope you enjoyed the game and had a lot of fun! In the upcoming months, I'm looking to implement some more professions, animals, and also basic needs system for the villagers. As of recently, I'm also tracking the development on a public Trello board so if you are interested in details, make sure to take a look!

https://trello.com/b/6K5YFPVZ/lords-villeins

[h2]New Release Date[/h2]

Unfortunately, the development has seen some unexpected roadblocks which forced me to postpone the early access release date from summer 2020 to fall 2020. Currently, the plan is the end of October but things may still change. My #1 priority is to deliver a good value even in early access to give people an engaging and interesting game to play with and I felt like I would not be able to deliver on these goals with the state of the game right now.

Thank you everyone who played the game so far and sticking with me. I'm doing my best to bring you an amazing gaming experience for you to enjoy and your support helps me tremendously.

[h2]What Is It Like to Be a Solo Dev[/h2]

Seeing how things are taking longer than expected, I figured I will share with you - as a small sidenote with this update - how I'm dealing with the everyday responsibilities of being a solo game developer to give you a better idea of what it takes for me to develop this game and why I may be less frequent with updating on the progress.

Essentially, I'm wearing hats of five other people, each of which could easily take-up a full-time job if I would want to do everything right. To cope with this multitasking, I split my day into three parts.



In the morning I'm the biz dev/project management guy. I answer emails, look for good business opportunities, contact people, and try to keep up with the industry to know what is coming and what I should be prepared for.

Later I get in the development process. I pick up the most important task from my Trello board and get to work. Since I'm living in a community of indie game developers under one roof, at 10 AM we have a small standup, where we share what we were working on the previous day and what we will do today (most of the time I manage to do half of what I say I will do but that's kind of ok :). After lunch, I work a bit more and I try to wrap things up before 3 PM even if a feature or bugfix is not complete. Then I focus on marketing - social media posts, answering in discussions but also community management. Sometimes I might take a bit longer and switch things up, instead of programming I may focus on design, art, music production or testing and bug reporting, but I try to keep to the schedule because if any of these parts are not moving forward for too long, it becomes very stressful.

At times I may also prioritize marketing much more and focus on it almost fully. Especially after the demo has been released, I tried to bring attention to it as much as I could and I would need to develop large amount of assets, art, marketing materials, and copywriting that would take weeks to complete. Since it is just as important as the game itself, the development of new features is unfortunately pushed back a bit more when this happens.

But here it is. Project manager, biz dev, programmer, artist, tester, audio and music producer, marketing person, and community manager in one. All on a day-to-day basis. It makes my work extremely interesting, very rewarding, and rich in experience but it can be a bit too much at times. But I've learned to grow with it and especially recently things have been going very smoothly.

I will try to keep you updated more often and let you know what is going on but should you ever wonder, don't hesitate to contact me! Write me a message, post in the discussions, join our Discord server. I'm pretty active in direct communication so you can always be sure I will find my way to respond soon.

In the meantime, you can also check out the lates vlog I made, where I shared my perspective on burnout as indie game developers.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Thank you for supporting my work and wish you Happy landlording!

[h2]CHANGELOG:[/h2]

New Features

• Many areas of UI have been redesigned (building menu and popups)
  
• New more intuitive control scheme. Players can switch between BRUSH mode (Shift) or DELETE mode (Ctrl) when building and use the mouse wheel to change the brush size.
  
• Villagers now prioritize cutting down fresh trees before removing trunks
  
• Fishing rods can be built on top of the bridges
  
• Clouds are now reacting to game speed
  
• It is possible to scroll with a mouse at the edges of the map
  
• Maximum zoom has been increased
  
• Tree spots can now be placed with drag and drop mode
  

Bugfixes

• An increased threshold that prevented buttons to be clickable in a scroll view (most notably the build menu)
  
• Fixed crash when building structures on the edges of the map
  
• Fixed bug that allowed the fishing net to be built on top of the bridge
  
• Fixed bug that allowed to gain multiple resources back when destroying a large structure with erase tools
  
• Fixed bug that sometimes made the cursor permanently red after error indication
  
• Major overhaul of AI that fixes the majority of issues with prioritizing, getting stuck or having issues when loading a save file
  
• Fixed bug that prevented miners from prioritizing iron ore mountain tiles
  
• Fixed bug that allowed to skip initial questlines by reassigning families
  
• Fixed bug that allowed to gain infinite grain with farmers
  
• Fixed bug that where deleting a zone with the delete button would not revert the quest condition
  
• Fixed bug that displayed incorrect amount of family members on the welcome new family screen
  
• Fixed several issues that prevented saving and loading
  
• Fixed the behavior of UI sliders in the main menu
  
• Fixed several small and rare crashes
  

Here it is! First blog update on Steam and a big one as well! The demo is finaly available for you to play and enjoy on Steam. Just head over to the store page and click the "Download Demo" button! (you can find it in the right section)



Please try it and let me know what you think! I highly value every feedback I get so please head over to the community forums and share your thoughts if you can.

[h3]To celebrate the release, I will also be streaming live 21th July at 7PM CEST so please join me here on Steam and let's celebrate together![/h3]

[h2]New Gameplay Walkthrough and My Thoughts on Indie Game Development[/h2]

A big goal with this project for me was to start being active on Youtube and create some content both about the game and my journey as a game developer. I enjoy making videos and it was always a bit hard to set aside some time to start. Things finally fell in place and I can share my first videos with you!

Gameplay commentary introduces you to the game and the main mechanics

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25MzQKQRZaU

In this campfire talk, I share my thoughts on indie game development and validating your work

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZN-lSdlonw

[h2]What's Next? Early Access Version, Devlogs, and Marketing![/h2]

Now that the demo is out, I need to focus on two things: the development of the next major update and making sure people find out about the game and get their hands on it. From the development point of view, I will be working on these features:

• Pre-alpha: Domesticated animals will be added to the game
  
• Pre-alpha: Most of missing peasant professions will be implemented
  
• Early-access: Villagers have basic needs that affect their mood and productivity - hunger, sleep
  
• Early-access: Basic quest system that demands players to pay increasing taxes to the king each year
  
• Early-access: Ability to set priorities for each land (i.e what type of crops should be produced on a farm)
  

On the marketing side, I need to focus on involving streamers and Youtubers to try the game, approach partners for featuring, and hope for the best. You can look forward to more content on Youtube and some written blogs now and then (but I will mostly focus on video content). I am also actively trying to grow our community on Discord so if you're not there yet, please join!

Discord link: https://discord.gg/bTUJyTg

Thank you for sticking around and supporting me in my work. It means a lot to me! If you want to support even further, please wishlist the game on Steam, try the demo and let me know what you think! Feedback from players is very valuable at any point in the development process!

Wish you all a cheerful day and be well!