Kynseed News

Here's the changelog for our regularly released monthly update (with our typical monthly written progress report to get posted next week)! Let us know if you experience any issues or have some burning feedback to send our way. Cheers!


[h2]Cʜᴀɴɢᴇʟᴏɢ[/h2]🔷 Setup for family secret boxes
ᅠᅠ• Uncover the keys by raising your relationships 'til they tell you their secrets
ᅠᅠ• Only some families currently have secret boxes to unlock
🔷 Partners can now go gathering via the housekeeping book
ᅠᅠ• Allows them to leave the farm to gather items based on equipment given and location chosen
ᅠᅠ• Items gathered will appear in a sack outside your farm building
🔷 First pass of new noticeboard task for watering NPC farm areas
🔷 New skills relating to Fishing and Farming
🔷 Certain animals now poop, which can be collected in the wooden bucket and used as fertiliser (placeholder graphics in use for now)
🔶 NPC gossip/secrets are now geared towards learning more about other NPC's you don't already know info for
🔶 Use and discard confirmation from the inventory
🔶 Dandelions no longer accepted by NPC's as gifts
🔶 Adjusted growable position on farm soil and made its height relative to objects moving past
🔶 Now able to sell a shop via the Select Shop option (which only offers some of your money back and all stock is lost currently)
🔶 Improvements made to Mellowfield regions
ᅠᅠ• Additional area in Outlane
ᅠᅠ• New hut in Testy Acres
ᅠᅠ• Many other fixes and subtle level improvements/prettying
🔶 Slightly more pronounced blacksmith difficulty based on material and more reward based on star ratings
🔶 Apprenticeship balanced to give slightly more reward scaled to star rating
🔶 Trader now shows up in 6 different locations with different goods available in each haven
🔶 Baking and stove recipes are properly divided (the range of recipes is filtered when going to the two different workstations and indicated in the inventory)
🔶 Pressing escape during the intro sequence will skip to the next image instead of jumping all the way to ingame so it feels a little nicer (and helps quicker testing of the later parts for further refinement)
🔶 Some improvements to spouse behaviour
🔶 First pass of a better pickup screen for sack on the farm contents
🔶 Various UI improvements to the player status, trader buying, and skill screens
🔶 Pinned tasks for larger item requests now show the details of items required
🔶 Adjusted interaction priorities so that books and bedside money will have higher priority than nearby characters
❌ Target interaction corrected while riding
❌ Riding won't offset the player's position when getting on
❌ Item star ratings should all default to 1 star as intended
❌ Fix for workers not always matching NPC friendship rating
❌ Fix for task list not always scrolling down properly with a certain number of tasks
❌ Fix for a rare shopper trade crash depending on the item they want to trade in
❌ Fixed new animals not loading their appearance correctly from a savegame
❌ Gifting option is now correctly inactive when you have no items to gift
❌ Fixes for shop customer spawn points to occur offscreen and for shop owners departing when the shop is bought
❌ NPC's now have individual start locations where possible so they don't clump up on certain activities
❌ Fixes around animals being sold at the goods store which could lead to a temporary duplicate or stuck animations
❌ Fix for the pickaxe's level up message getting stuck onscreen
❌ Fix for text bug when hiring a blacksmith worker
❌ Fix for an issue when changing which pig you're riding caused the first pig to be untargetable
❌ Local shoppers should now work in Mellowbrook
❌ Fix for problems with dates while gifting items
❌ Prevented player getting stuck if crafting during the end of year (though will lose any item currently crafted!)
❌ Fixed a case where the cat in the tree wouldn't appear
❌ Fixed a case where duplicate key messages could appear after buying the last cat
❌ Fixed crash when claiming an item from an owned blacksmith shop
❌ Fix for Freyl blessing affecting fruit rather than vegetables as intended
❌ Fix for the ledger's yearly accounts not scrolling and potentially containing blank entries
❌ Chickens now practice good hydration habits and no longer spontaneously explode from drinking water


🔷Additionᅠᅠ🔶Improvementᅠᅠ❌Fixᅠᅠ➕Internal
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Over the last few weeks the team has been keeping themselves burrowed indoors amidst the world's current state of things. The silver lining is that our small indie team is already quite acclimated to working from home remotely and so we've been able to carry on with development relatively unfettered. We hope you've also been keeping well and, of course, invite you to pass the time with us on our Discord and forums.

In development news, March's monthly update was successfully pushed out a couple of weeks ago and has helped pave even more stones on our path towards what has become a rather large milestone: the Relationship Update. You can read more about it by hitting the image below, but the short version is we opened up a new region called Mellowfields and also addressed a number of small fixes and general improvements. For April, we're looking to start knocking out some of the remaining relationship-related bits and bobs. Fingers crossed, we'll have some more info to share in the weeks ahead of when we can finally expect to reach that ever important milestone of the roadmap.

In the meantime, we'll keep you up to speed with our individual team member devlogs below. Stay safe out there friends and we'll see you again soon in the next issue.









This week has been a bit both disjointed and inspiring. With all that is going on it is easy to be distracted.

I have been playing the game a bit, making some notes, and catching up on design docs. There was a big spreadsheet to fill in for Smithing prices. We have 10 materials and 10 things you can make, and we need them all to be useful and have some variation. There will also be some variety added to the minigame itself...with variable speed targets and strange behaviours you would expect from crafting Fae metals!

I have also been working on NPC story stuff, monster attack thoughts, events, and adding new recipes and Fairweather items to the list. On top of that I fixed a bunch of things in Mellowfields and tweaked some bits of some of the levels there.

Thankfully the recent weeks have seen some stellar game releases to inspire the mind. Half-Life: Alyx is just phenomenal...a sense of presence and scale that is just incredible and beautifully polished. The Room VR is just beautifully made too and another in that series of tactile, wonderfully crafted, titles. There are so many games to play and draw inspiration from, even if not a similar genre. The amount of talent out there now is staggering. We just hope we can create something of value that will inspire others too.





For the past few weeks I've been shifting between wrapping up the last update and starting on the next one. As usual there was a bit of extra time from the last update to address some fixes before work could begin in earnest, but it felt like it might have been a bit easier to wrap up this time with less knock on issues.

In terms of the next update, I've been working on a new noticeboard task for helping water other NPC's farms which is turning out quite nicely thanks to the maturing noticeboard event system in place. I've started adding more skills for the player to learn for farming and fishing (with extra requirements possible for quantity and quality of item that a master is after before they will teach a skill). Then most recently I've been setting up animal poop as fertiliser in the game. Never a dull moment working on this game!

In a slight return to talking about productivity, I've been finding a bit more focus lately between choice of music (Rez soundtrack) and keeping notes to come back to rather than let my mind wander too far while in the midst of something. I think it's helped a fair degree in being more productive and given me a better sense of areas to follow up on (of which there are a lot!). Quite often in the past I think I've usually just pushed back on these parts to follow up on, which usually has a tendency of feeling like I'm slowly grinding to a halt. Not because the followup part is that important necessarily, but it is just very tough going when all around there are these intended ideas stopping satisfaction in what is being worked on.

Fortunately with the return of the new update, I've been back to my weekly schedule which is allowing me slowly but surely to relieve these blockers and it feels very satisfying! Wishing everyone all the best!





I've finally managed to make music for Wisptrail that was approved! It took some attempts, but I got there in the end. Wisptrail is a region where will 'o' wisps reside. They lure you, who knows where...

To musically represent this, I took inspiration from the 'nyah nyah' song that children sometimes sing to taunt each other. It's also sometimes referenced in horror movies, such as The Evil Dead. The atmosphere I tried to give it was a little less of horror and a little more fairytale, albeit closer to the darker fairytales you might expect from the Brothers Grimm or Guillermo del Toro.

Originally the song started with a very low raspy bass clarinet and slowly moved towards more familiar fairytale-esque sounds with strings. But Charlie liked the ending so much more than the beginning that he wanted the beginning to be more like the end. So now, like an ouroboros, the beginning is the end is the beginning. I actually quite like the symbolism of this, as no matter how you deal with those who taunt you, you'll only ever end up back where you started...





I'll be keeping this week's entry of mine pretty short in order to free up some extra time for other tasks that I've been getting behind on. I tend to be the main person who writes/assembles all our communications, so between the recent monthly progress report and the rather lengthy DreamHack postmortem before that, it's felt like I've spent more time writing than even usual.

Not that I mind it really, as I do rather enjoy the writing process and, for the most part, writing to you good folks never feels like much a chore. Still, it can require a fair chunk of my time between everything (particularly if it's also image or GIF heavy, which can often require more time than the writing itself).

So to give a cursory update of things from my end, the team and I have recently concerned ourselves with putting together an overview plan (and very tentative schedule) of the remaining road of development still ahead. We've done something like this a few times already on the project but due to the evolving nature of development (and, in particular, our organic approach to things), we have to make new overview plans like these semi-regularly. The process is equal parts updating the old plans whilst also making new plans.

I find these sorts of overviews always have a bit of duality to them. On the one hand, it can often be daunting to always feel like there's still so much work left ahead. Yet on the other hand, I always feel a slight sense of relief in at least mapping it out and putting it all down in writing. Better to have a daunting plan than no plan, I say.

ᅠ



Hello there and welcome to another monthly progress report, sent straight your way by our castle's most trusted carrier pigs.

Due to the world recently going topsy turvy, we got about a week behind in getting this month's written progress report to you all (but thankfully the update/changelog itself was already pushed out earlier this month). It's been a crazy world out there in this pre-Quillian era, but our little team here has been managing alright with fairly minimal disruption. For now, we've locked ourselves away in Castle PixelCount and bolted all the doors.

In the midst of it all, a few of us on the team have taken to discussing what our "desert island top 5" games, movies, and records would be. (Though personally, if I was on a desert island, the only record I'd want is for long distance swimming.) In the meantime, we've been diligently keeping ourselves as healthy and sanitized as we can. We hope you all are faring alright as well. Fortunately, the only health concern of mine lately has been randomly getting hiccups. I'm hoping for a cure, but I'm not holding my breath.

Unsurprisingly, it seems all these recent events have left many folks with a lot of sudden time on their hands. Of course there's many entertainment options these days, such as Castle PixelCount's favourite DIY TV programme starring Count Dracula giving his castle a revamp. Or our favorite never-actually-released Netflix show: You're British, I'm British, My Son's British. Though thankfully, to truly help us pass the time, we still have a whole game left to make! Let's just hope the world returns to normalcy at a faster rate than your average Early Access developer.





As for the update itself, this one serves as another incremental step towards implementing things like the relationship mechanics as well as our gradual rollout of aging for all our NPC's. Yet we also want to make sure that adding to the game's map is done in relative tandem with adding to the game's mechanics. So for this month's update, we've included a nice handful of new regions as part of a haven called Mellowfields.

Mellowfields is a peaceful little part of the map to visit where you'll find big gardens and small townsfolk. Almost everywhere you look you'll see lovely (and large) things growing. Though it is important to note that this is just our first implementation of these regions, as there's still quite a bit more we have left to do with them. Regions take a lot of work to make, which is why we typically approach the addition of new regions as a multi-update process. This update takes care of our first step, which is to simply add the physical people and places into the game world.

That means things like: making the initial level designs themselves, adding those designs into our engine piece by piece, adding in the new art, adding in layers for things like where the player/characters can walk, adding in all the NPC's and their sim/schedule behaviour, adding new items/collectibles, writing dialogue for the new NPC's, writing music for the new regions and shops, and then connecting the new regions to the rest of the world map. So this update includes all these first steps, but rest assured there's still much more to come with Mellowfields (and other havens too, like Summerdown).

Of course, we worked on far more than just Mellowfields this update, ranging from adding new things (like picking a spirit during the wedding ceremony) to improving existing things (like new art for farm growables). There was also quite a bit of behind the scenes system and engine work done, which by their nature aren't always visible on the surface of these updates.

So read on below for the highlights and, as always, hit that link at the bottom for the full changelog.

CHANGELOG HIGHLIGHTS

Below is a general overview of noteworthy items this update includes. As usual, these are just a few selections 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 Haven: Mellowfields
Welcome to Mellowfields, our initial implementation of a new farming haven in Quill! This haven includes:

• New character and environment art.
  
• Quirky new NPC's.
  
• A glimpse of the Master Gardener (though gardening skills are intended for a future update).
  
• New lovely music for regions and shops.
  
• Sheep, a new animal type! Currently they're for riding only, but don't have a broader purpose (yet).
  
• Plus some new items of different kinds. Some can be found around the world, some can be grown as crops, and some can be bought from the Goods Store...including a new item to spice up married life. (As it happens, we've lately been spending a lot of design time on the importance of items and their purposes in the game. Our next update is intended to get as far as we can on that.)

Status Info Screen
This is our first pass of a new Status Info screen, available via "Back" button on controller or "L" on keyboard (by default). This gives player's access to info like active buffs from food, Goddess effects, and partner info if you're married.

Marriage Spirits
No, we don't mean liquor. The marriage cutscene now includes an interactive section where you pick a spirit which gives a bonus to stats for both the player and their partner. (For existing marriages prior to this version, a random one is currently assigned.)

Billy & Milly Aging
As part of our gradual rollout of NPC aging, Billy and Milly can now grow into adults.

New Dialogue, Interact Range Tweaks, & Other Fixes
In addition to the new stuff, we've also done quite a bit of polish and quality of life improvements for the gameplay experience. We've also hopefully resolved several reported problems as well. As always, we'll continue to sort through your feedback/bugs and push out hotfixes when necessary (as well as a few experimental branch and preview branch updates over the month.)

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







It's always exciting for us when we add new people and places for players to explore, so we hope you enjoy your time visiting the new locales. Don't hesitate to let us know how you get on in your community corner of choice (Discord, forums, etc.).

Our next update will likely focus on getting in some remaining relationship features plus further improvements to the current gameplay experience (particularly in regards to overall item purpose and implementation). Then, once all the core pieces of the relationship system are in place, we'll take a step back and review the system as a whole and polish it up to a point where we're comfortable marking it off our roadmap and moving on to new milestones.

In other news, one of our team attended DreamHack Anaheim recently and set up a floor demo of the game! This was one of our first times doing something like this and it was quite an exciting experience for us. To get a full account of how it went (with pictures), you can drop by our most recent Dev Log issue.

Though for now, we better get back to work here in our quarantined quarters. As always, we'll have another one of these updates and progress reports ready for you next month, punctuated by our usual flow of Dev Logs in between. Stay safe out there and we'll see you all again soon!

Love,
PixelCount

Howdy folks! Here's a small little handful of hotfixes for the larger update we pushed out earlier this month. Let us know if you run across any problems. Cheers!


[h2]Cʜᴀɴɢᴇʟᴏɢ[/h2]🔶 Slightly more hair options at the start
❌ Fix for offering sim order crashing if initiated outside the level
❌ Fix for crash on making Zinc Bucket
❌ Fix for glutton trough, including the current highlighted item on left clicking the trough
❌ Fix for market event incorrect dates on noticeboard in Mellowfields
❌ Fix for lettuce not growing on watering
❌ Removed old toggle functionality from lantern
❌ Pig not hit while riding and facing down


🔷Additionᅠᅠ🔶Improvementᅠᅠ❌Fixᅠᅠ➕Internal
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Hello there all you purveyors of fine video game entertainment!

For those of you who've been with us for some time, you probably already know that we post all our changelogs in a game update thread on our forums. Though to help make our game updates easier to see and access, we're going to start sharing changelogs here as well!

In this update, we've added some new areas to explore in a lovely little haven called Mellowfields - complete with new NPC's, music, items, collectables, animal type, and other additions. Read on below for the full list of changes.

Also, for any of you players who like to live dangerously, we offer other development branches which give access to preview builds and experimental builds. Drop by our development branches thread for info on how to opt-in.

Many thanks to you all for joining us on this game dev adventure. As always, feel free to leave us feedback or bug reports in any of the usual places. Cheers!


[h2]Cʜᴀɴɢᴇʟᴏɢ[/h2]🔷 Several new regions forming most of Mellowfields are now accessible (first pass implementation)
ᅠᅠ• New NPC's
ᅠᅠ• New music
ᅠᅠ• Additional shops with the option of player ownership
ᅠᅠ• New items and collectables
ᅠᅠ• New animal featured in the typical haven events
🔷 Billy and Milly now change to adults when they reach the right age
🔷 First pass of a new Status Info screen available via Back button controller or L on keyboard (by default)
ᅠᅠ• This gives access to player info including active buffs from food, Goddess effects, and partner info if you've married someone
🔷 Marriage cutscene includes interactive section where you pick a spirit which gives a bonus to stats for both the player and their partner (for existing marriages prior to this version, a random one is currently assigned)
🔶 Mellowfields seasonal assets setup
🔶 Interact range adjusted to make it easier to interact with a single character in close proximity, even when not facing them
🔶 Farm growables now updated with newer art
🔶 Partner has dialogue while doing some orders and can follow once married instead of seeing info
🔶 Split up NPC status by Vale/Summerdown/etc and arranged by name
🔶 Some polish/refactoring of auction and racing events
🔶 Confirm dialogue for quitting via the Options Screen
❌ Various fixes for problems with animals not returning to the correct locations on the farm
ᅠᅠ• It is known to resolve several problems that were in the implementation but without having got the exact problem reported it is difficult to be sure it has caught them all
❌ Fix to improve throwing items into water as used in one NPC request
❌ Fix for Mr Fairweather cutscene getting stuck when no audio device is present to play sounds
❌ Fix for loaded saves incorrectly handling multiple glass jars
❌ Adjustment for contents of jars to show in hotbar/radial slots and the inventory screen to show details of the contents on the selected item panel
❌ Jed/Ned aging doesn't revert temporarily with loaded savegame
❌ Fix for cat task being given the day after rescuing a cat but not actually owning one
❌ Fix for receiving bedside money for tasks that shouldn't (eg. noticeboard/dating/marriage)
❌ Fix for delivery box image of some NPC's stretching
❌ Fix for lost items potentially duplicating
❌ Fix for tavern orders always leading to Candlewych Village
❌ Loverwood player position now determined via surveying
❌ Fix for magic bean not growing after being watered
❌ Fix for tooltips being difficult to read on Options Screen by moving them to the bottom of the screen
❌ Fix for tool XP not working in some situations with some slight balancing and adjustments to the display
❌ Fixed several bugs with animal auctions with the auctioneer and bidders (mainly from leaving and returning to the level while in progress)
❌ All market seeds should now be sold in packs of 4
❌ Feeding pigs from other farms no longer completes the Feed Pig task
❌ Reduce doubled up animal names during races


🔷Additionᅠᅠ🔶Improvementᅠᅠ❌Fixᅠᅠ➕Internal
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