Ylands News

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• Snowball fighting - find stacks of snowballs in Random Encounters and use them in fun battles with your friends!
  
• Christmas animals - you can meet new Christmas variants of specific animals on newly discovered ylands and tame them.
  
• Toy hunt - Christmas came early and you can already find presents hidden in the world of Ylands. Merry Christmas! 
  

[h2]New Assets
[/h2]
DISCLAIMER: These assets will be available only during the event. Once you acquire/tame them, you will be able to keep them even after the event ends. 

[h3]New animals[/h3] (exclusively in new maps in Adventure)
Festive Terrorbird
Festive Rhinoceros
Festive Tiger
Festive Bear
Festive Wolverine
Festive Penguin

[h3]New items[/h3]
Toy Teddy Bear
Toy Doll
Toy Robot
Festive Bait
Thrown snowball

[h3]New pet[/h3]
Socky The Shark

[h3]New Achievements[/h3]
Having a Snowball (throwable)
Santa's Little Herder
Santa's Little Hoarder


______________________
FIXES 
Fixed: The player's ship should no longer appear in the middle of the Elmwood outpost.
Fixed: We fixed the problem with the safe in Ember Yland which did not unlock also Distant memory should no longer disable music for players.


ADDITIONS
[YLD-48435] Added Anti Cheat sanitation. Multiplayer will be a safe place again.
[YLD-48791] Added: Editor: Trigger On player created / On player spawned on Spawn point.
Added: Three new Achievements - SANTA'S LITTLE HOARDER, SANTA'S LITTLE HERDER, HAVING A SNOWBALL


CHANGES
Changed: All new festive items can be found in chests in random encounters, happy hunting!


TWEAKED
Tweaked: Resource price for unlocking the Adventure region is reduced.
Tweaked: Some recipes in Adventure were not obtainable, but now you can find them in random encounters.

Ahoy Ylanders!

We are bringing you important updates from our design team this week!

For a while, the issue about discovering new recipes was weighing on us heavily, as the current situation was not optimal. But finally, after many iterations and changes, we bring your the final result!

We are introducing the TECH TREE!



What does it mean? Recipes should no longer be learned by picking up ingredients, but will have to be discovered in the tech tree. This will give you much greater control over your recipe pool and progression in the game. At the same time, many recipes that were previously hard to find or were undiscoverable altogether, will now be found in the tech tree.

How will it work? The main progression through the tree will include combat gear, vehicles and technologies. To unlock those recipes, you will need to provide resources found in the appropriate region. The side progression will be about optional recipes which include decorations like carpets or vases. And for these recipes, you will need not only resources, but also a small amount of Exploration Points. Each bunch of recipes is a so-called node, and all these nodes have dependencies between one another. So for example, to unlock the Junk Ship, you need to have already researched the node for the Primitive Ship etc. The tech tree is divided into 8 categories:

• Survival
  
• Vehicles
  
• Combat
  
• Manufacturing
  
• Decorations
  
• Apparel
  
• Furniture
  
• Building
  

What's handy is that when you encounter an ingredient that your character does not know a recipe for yet, clicking on it will link you to its location in tech tree. And when you're in the tech tree, to avoid unnecessary clicks, you can go directly to crafting when you click on a recipe in the node.

Another important point to mention is backwards compatibility. If you know all the contents of a node, that node will unlock automatically. And if you only know some but not all the contents, the node will be cheaper than a fully undiscovered one!



To make sure that it all made sense, we also looked into and adjusted the way you receive Exploration Points and recipes from Random Encounters, which, we hope, should be more immersive and make more sense in regard to the specific region and its theme.



What do you think about the first look at our tech tree? We're sure that you have many questions so please drop them in the comments!

That's it for this week! Stay Classy!

Ahoy, Ylanders!



Sometimes you mention that you want more of an insight into the development process and how things are done. Thank you for that suggestion and we are happy to oblige! We agreed with the leads of our teams, or departments to be more precise, that it will be great to lift the curtain of the development process more often. And to get you started, let's take a look at the big picture and see an overview of all the departments the Ylands team has!



Production

How to make sure that the process actually works? How to make sure that everyone does what they need to be doing? Ask production or rather, they will let us know to ask them so we can let you know in some future diaries.



Game Design

Designers are the brain behind the operation. They come up with a vision, a concept, a plan, and then together with other teams, they make that play a reality. Or game reality, if you will.



Programming

From procedural generation of terrain and ylands, to game interface, throwing grenades, shooting from bows, free placing mode and yes, everything else. Programmers are the creators of the fabric of the Ylands universe.



Art and Animation

All the grenades, bows, ylands, terrains and yes, again, everything else needs to have some shapes, colours, and animations. The fabric of the Ylands universe needs to be shaped into the characteristic look of the game.



QA aka Quality Assurance

Then, the fabric's reality also needs to be tested. Otherwise it would be a world full of flying sharks, moving ragdoll bodies, weirdly shaped heads and in many other ways just crawling with bugs. That's where testing and quality assuring comes in.



Marketing & Community Management

And when we want the fabric to be used, we have to communicate it to the people. Which is where marketing comes in. Despite much less actual development happening there, it is still one of the parts that make a whole.



hat's all for today, and feel free to drop your questions for any of the departments into the comments or come have a chat with the developers on our Discord!

Stay Classy!

[h3]Ahoy Ylanders![/h3]

This winter we have a few gifts for you. As you can read in the last Dev Diary, the next update is going to be quite big, so we made sure to take our time with that one, but don't worry we ain't gonna leave you hangin'! What do we have in store for you? Let's see!



Thanks, Ruth1ess! Maybe not a Christmas update but you can look forward to Ylands Winter Fest! Or as we in C.A.G. like to call it P...P...P...P...P...PARTEYYYYYY!



[h2]Fun Activities and Achievements[/h2]

Explore the world for unique toys and tame festive animals to earn new limited Christmas achievements. There is one more activity that won't be revealed today. Guess what the third achievement will be for. Let us know in the comments!



[h2]Sale and Gifts[/h2]

As every year there will be some Christmas gifts for you. Let us know what you'd like to see on sale in store.

Also, there will be a small treat for anyone to pick up on our Discord. You just need to find it there!



[h2]Discord contests and stream[/h2]

We don't want to spoil all the fun, but you can be sure, that there will be a full Christmas sock of it! You can look forward to opportunities to win some Christmas themed assets. Will it be a pet, a costume or even something completely different? We shall see...



In the meantime, you can get some coyns back if you send us a screenshot or a video of your Scarecrow costume on our Discord into #halloween_payback! So don't forget to check out the current Halloween sale in the shop.

Stay Classy!

[h3]Ahoy Ylanders![/h3]

Ales, the Ylands Project Lead here. Today I would like to talk with you about the current state of the game, our plans for it and react to some of the feedback we've seen based on our Dev Diaries.

Let's start with the current status of the game. We've managed to improve the game a lot in the last couple of years, moving from around 40% average rating on Steam to around 80% (82% when writing this). Improving the game this much was not an easy task and it took us quite long, but it was absolute necessity for us to stay alive.

We would definitely like to move past the "fixing" stage to "hey, let's look at the amazingly cool feature we've added" stage or "hey, here's a ton of new content for those of you who already seen and experienced everything the game had to offer". You bet that it's what we all would love to do. But we're not there yet.



The biggest issue we have is player retention and we are dedicated to fix it - in other words, we want you to have fun as long as possible and having players returning to Ylands is our main focus now. Like that everyone can get the grasp of how complex the game is and experience all it has to offer.

Here are some reasons for it:

• We fail to present to players what the later gameplay is like early in the game and what cool stuff you can find or do. As the ratings go up, we get more and more of "hey, this game is so cool - why aren't there more people playing it" - but it mostly comes from people who get past the "you are on stranded yland so go and grab X sticks and Y of grass, just like you've done a million times in dozens of other games".
  
• Even though we fixed dozens of things that were annoying, unintuitive or didn't work as they should, enough of those still remain. Often tiny annoyances that add up and eventually lead to a rage quit.
  
• Playing with friends needs to be easier - especially on mobile devices.
  
• These changes will definitely improve the experience for everyone, both new and long-time players (actually many things in the planned update 2.2 come to mind), but indeed, there will be no "endgame" content added in the next six months, namely updates 2.2 and 2.3. If everything goes as intended 2.4 (Q2 2024) may finally see some major new world content.
  

As for release dates - update 2.2 will be released in January 2024 but given how many improvements and features it has, we plan to give players access to the experimental branch already before the end of this year.

What you can also expect is more Dev Diaries like this one to give you regular updates about what we're doing to make the game better and more popular among players.

We've come a long way in the last few years. We've turned the wheel away from the "Roblox-like" path, put Adventure back together, and will keep doing that. So, big thanks to everyone who stayed with us even through our failings.



Stay classy!