Kynseed News

Welcome to Issue #61 of The PixelCount Post, a periodically released update from Kynseed's team. In today's issue: Charlie adds a new character, Neal branches out code, Matthijs digests gassy music, and Matt tackles tiny tasks.
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This last week was spent sorting through the usual: fixing bugs that had cropped up, designing a few new things, getting a bit of new art in, and chipping away at the gargantuan soundtrack. Specifically, Charlie and Gary have been working on a new character for around the farm. Meanwhile, Neal's been looking at utilising a branching approach for the code. Then over in audio land, some new gassy music is slowly being digested.

In addition to this, we've been slowly circling in on our next planned steps for the relationships update as well as the next batch of roadmap updates to come. We'll be sprinkling in a fair bit of onboarding improvements as well, which we go into a bit more detail about in last week's issue. This upcoming week we have a couple of team meetings planned where we'll be nailing down all these specifics for good and, from there, getting it all prepared for sharing with you lovely folks!





A slow-ish week with Neal away, but it let me mess with some ideas for Mellowfields to expand the exploration and to get on with the onboarding designs among others. To help give your farm a bit of character, Gary (our character artist) and I colluded on a new character: Pott the Brounie!

All those offerings you have been giving or not giving? They go to him. After the Prologue, the idea is that you can now see him (and all other Fae) and he will hang around your farm. He will take care of the little things while you are away and be a source of advice and direction. All this delivered in a grumpy, sarcastic little fella who we modelled on Albert Steptoe from the old UK TV show, Steptoe & Son.

He is going to whine and complain a lot, and if you don't give your offerings he won't take it kindly! We hope he will be an endearingly enigmatic character who you grow to love. Let us give the little guy a chance to say hello...

"Nice to meet yer, I be Pott,
I sweep n' clean and wairk a lot.
Give me grub and be a friend,
Sweets make me loyal to the end!
About your house I will creep,
Mendin' things while you're asleep.
Scrubbin' muck and dustin' cob,
Polish wood and shinin' hob.
So feed me good and treat me fair,
Or I'll put spiders in your hair!"





This week was a little short for me as I was looking after some cats for part of it, which I used as a minibreak of sorts. The time I have spent on the game has been about figuring out some reported bugs on loading saves along with an unintended setup for fishing where they'd respawn every level load. I've uploaded a build with the fixes to the experimental branch which is where I'm aiming to put builds more regularly in the coming weeks. There's a few smaller areas I'm looking at for the next week, with the chat system getting UI tweaks along with the noticeboard as a source of new tasks (which should make it into the experimental build).

Something that I've started doing with the code is making use of branches for source control. For those unfamiliar, source control is a way to track changes to files (mostly code) over time and then branches is a way to have multiple simultaneous versions of the files for different purposes that can be merged as necessary - say one branch for releasing the game, one for fixing bugs, one for working on future features, etc.

It's quite a powerful feature, but at the same time can get complicated to figure out what's going on (as there's no longer that guarantee of consistency that a feature/bug in one version will work the same way in another, as the code is no longer the same). So I've been easing into it to see what benefits can be gained there.

The main benefit seems to be the ability to easily experiment without affecting the stability of the build, but the struggle I am finding is in then being aware of what the state of any other branch is like and knowing when to cross over. So definitely a new learning curve for me to figure out, as I can see it being very handy soon as we continue looking at improvements from player feedback while the next update is also starting to gear up!





Another week flew by. This week I spent working on a track for an upcoming town later in the game. It's in the swampy area I've worked on previously and from what Charlie told me, there's copper pipes everywhere and the town is being lit by gas.

I've tried to incorporate this into the music by using metal percussion instruments and some big bass trombone and tuba 'bwaaps' as a sort of 'fart' in the music. It gives the whole thing a tinker-ish vibe. The banjo and acoustic bass ground it all within the same soundscape as the other swamp music so that, even though it is considerably cheerier than the surrounding swamp tracks, it's still distinctly the same overall atmosphere. I deliberately chose working on this task first rather than going right back to the ambient track I was working on before because I just really needed to get some composing out of my system.

I've also been shopping for some new gear, mainly a synthesizer and MIDI keyboard. So far, whenever I needed an instrument to have very free 'human' timings, I've had to emulate that sense of timing even though I'm drawing in each note with the mouse. This is very time consuming, but it means you get to micro-manage every single note. For the sake of efficiency, I need to bite the bullet and learn to do this with a MIDI keyboard instead. The one I want needs to be ordered though, so it'll take a while to get here. The somewhat jazzy timings I'm adding to the track I'm already working on will just have to be done with the mouse, like always. Though once I get plenty of practice with the keyboard, it'll do a lot to improve my ability to perform live, as a nice bonus.





Something that's always been a challenge for a team like ours is how to implement some basic project management/organisation that fits the size of our team. Oftentimes, it seems like these sorts of things are either geared more towards much larger studios or they're more for one to two person teams and thus feel far too simplified. So it's been a challenge over this project to find a balance that works best for us. Typically, this means making our own solutions to fit our own needs, which generally does the trick but it is something that needs revisiting now and then. So with us charting the next batch of updates for the roadmap, it seemed a good time to tweak some of our organisation solutions as well (stuff like spreadsheets, Trello, and so on).

In addition to this, I was able to also set aside some time to get caught up on an ever-growing pile of 'little' things. It seems that there's always a whole slew of small tasks I'd like to get done, but when compared to all the other work that needs doing it's easy for these smaller tasks to get pushed aside for a later day. The problem is, this can really start to pile up if not careful!

So it was nice to dedicate a handful of days last week to getting caught up on such things and marking them off as complete. This included things like researching info on future game events and their submission process, implementing some extra spam protections on our site, and even adding some new features and updates to our community Discord. It's good to have many of these smaller tasks finished, as it does give one a sense of relieving a burden and freeing up some mental bandwidth - all with the intention of being better focused to tackle some of the higher priority tasks ahead!

Welcome to Issue #60 of The PixelCount Post, a periodically released update from Kynseed's team. In today's issue: Charlie works on more design, Neal battles a crash (and wins), Matthijs studies studios, and Matt boards onboarding.
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This last week the team pushed out the latest "Song of Price and Hire" update to all channels! Contained within is the Goods Store as a new ownable business, managing hired staff, and the initial framework of the shop Reputation system.

This proved to be one of the more complex builds we've done, as it contained lots of 'moving parts' on the engine level. For those following along with development, you'll also recall that we had to rework how NPC-owned shops behaved, mainly to ensure there was some consistency between how customers and inventory worked across the world. It's an update that took a bit of extra time to do right, but all that work will help pave the way for future business updates and make it all that much smoother when it comes time to add the Apothecary and Tavern business.

We won't bother getting into the finer details of the update here though, as the official announcement is the best place to go for that. Be sure to give it a read for a fuller look at everything packed into the update.

We'll continue to take in feedback and bugs this week, but otherwise now that the update is out we're moving on to the next one ahead: "Growing Up & Going Out". This is an update that a fair number of you have told us you're keenly looking forward to and we're pretty excited to begin work on it ourselves. Its main highlights are progressing to the adult phase and pursuing romantic relationships. Bear in mind this won't include the full generation aging loop, but rather just the next age phase. Our tireless character artist, Gary, has been meticulously recreating every player sprite and animation, but as adult versions instead. In fact, he has to do it all twice to account for both playable siblings!

Something else we're wanting to tackle in the next update is taking a look at what's known as 'player onboarding'. This essentially refers to how players are introduced and taught the game's concepts and mechanics, oftentimes extending beyond just tutorials. Now that we're a handful of updates in, we've felt that the onboarding process has been getting a little left behind. So we're going to start spending a bit of this next update looking for what we refer to as 'cheap' wins, which is basically game dev talk for adding an improvement that doesn't take much time to do and doesn't necessarily require brand new bespoke assets to be made (which can often slow up development).

We're actually still hammering out a lot of those details, as this upcoming week will be a bit of a transitional one in which we tie off loose ends from the last update while nailing down the exact specifics of the next. Plus, on top of that, we're also going to plan out the next batch of updates to be put on our roadmap, which you'll note only goes so far as the "Growing Up & Going Out" update currently. You can expect that next batch to get revealed in a couple of weeks.

There's definitely a sense of excitement here on the team, as it feels like development is really starting to hit a stride. We're happy to be able to mark many of our initial updates as complete and are looking forward to kicking things off with a whole slew of new ones - many of which will begin to take individual game components and connect them together into a more cohesive gameplay loop. No doubt the adult phase and romantic relationships will be a big step towards that and will help to really tie things together, not unlike Lebowski's rug.









Lots of appalling weather this week...stupidly hot one minute, constant downpours the rest of the time. Been getting into some design work otherwise - looking at shop specialisations, tutorial stuff, map stuff, noticeboard requests, and special character bios.

Lately it's been great to play the new Fire Emblem game as well, as it has many things that we're also doing so it is nice to see how they approach it. They have a wonderful UI and there's much to learn from it. Of course, we'll never match their resources, but there are still cheap wins we can utilise.

Was also good to finally get the Goods Store update out and it has given us food for thought. Mr Weekes had an idea to do with the currency, and we got some great feedback from the community. We love getting ideas, so keep them coming!

In my other spare time, I entertained myself by attempting to design a Kynseed board game. Maybe we should take it to Kickstarter and make 10 million pounds like all the other board games seem to do!





The Goods Store update is finally out! It ended up taking a few more days to get through some polish and deal with one last minute problem. In this case, the night before, I'd made a change to avoid a crash I'd seen in a cheat debug state where I owned the Tavern. All seemed well for a few hours and then Charlie started noticing customers huddling outside the Goods Store and not going in. It took a bit of investigating to put two and two together with the previous change, as I couldn't immediately get the issue.

The cause I eventually found out is being out of the level and time passing enough that NPC's in other levels were going shopping and, without the shop data around, were creating blank versions of it with the wrong info. This didn't result in a crash, but it meant when you actually went to the shop in the level, they were looking at the completely wrong shop data to choose where to go. The fix was just to remove the small change from the night before, but then it actually revealed that without the fix it would actually crash the game in the same situation where it went wrong!

Thankfully that was easier to deal with and the build went out after a bit more testing. I guess the moral of that tale is don't fix cheat debug state bugs on the night before an update (and there would have been a high likelihood the out of level crash was spotted and diagnosed/fixed a lot quicker).

With the update out, it's been a chance to reflect a little on the progress of the game and catch up on our next steps while eagerly eyeing to see any feedback or bugs lurking around. Just round the corner is the relationship update and with it comes a large focus on NPC's, where I'm looking to improve my debug capabilities. I've started compiling a list of 'nice to haves' for this and have already begun implementing a special view where you can zoom out and follow all the sim activity in the map.


Here's a very early look at the sim activity map, a handy debug tool which will allow us to track what any sims are up to at any given time throughout the day. (Click here to enlarge.)


Though what we've started to realise with this update is how focused we've been to sticking to the roadmap ever since it came out and how it has led to the player experience being a little quirky or clunky (depending on how polite you want to be) outside the chosen area for the update. With the relationships update on the way, which seems a big draw for many, we're feeling like we need to level up the player experience a bit first. There'll likely be a little crossover between the two as say, improving the process of relationships will help for when the player can get married, but it probably will mean the relationship update takes a little longer while we make those changes. We're hoping to provide these player experience updates in much smaller chunks as soon as possible, so although the relationship update may be a while away, there'll still be improvements in the meantime!

I'm quite excited about it as it'll feel good to actually address the known issues that we've seen or heard about and then unwrap the next layer of fresh impressions based on the changes made.





I'm so happy with the reactions I've seen to the new update! I've watched some streams of people playing it and they seem really excited with what the team's put out.

In other news, I get to experience my home studio slowly taking shape. It's a wild ride, and a far bigger project than I had ever thought. I do start feeling guilty though. The studio project has been taking up so much time that I hardly got to compose throughout it all. That's tough for me, as I always want to be well ahead of schedule if I can help it. However, the psychological effect of being in a cleaner, more spacious, and prettier studio is undeniable. It had to be done sooner or later.

Meanwhile, I get to look forward to the next update, which I've already written some music for. Charlie tells me that he's been listening to it on repeat, even though it's a relatively short tune that was very tongue-in-cheek. I can't wait to see the full sequence it was written for. I also still haven't finished the ambient track for the dangerous swamp areas you'll encounter much later in the game, which is adding to my sense of guilt for lack of progress. But come Monday (which I'm guessing is when this text is published), I hope to be back to a sense of 'normalcy', as far as that exists!





Phew, what a busy last week! As you've no doubt seen us banging our drum about above, we released the Goods Store update! Though in the midst of juggling its release, we've also started work in earnest on figuring out some very important next steps for development - ranging from preparing the next update ahead as well as charting out the next phase of our roadmap.

This next update, which we (I) chat about in more detail in The Short Report, is going to be a fairly important one. It'll feature the next aging phase (adult) and the pursuit of romantic relationships (courting, marriage, and moving in), which will be an exciting step forward in fleshing out the sandbox and role-play experience. Granted, it's still just a step, but it's one we've been rather looking forward to.

As also mentioned in The Short Report, we've recently been having a think on player onboarding and how we can tighten it up a bit. This next "Growing Up & Going Out" update is probably going to bring in an influx of not just brand new players but also some returning players who've been letting the game accrue updates before diving back in again. So revisiting the early portions of the game experience and seeing how we can better communicate the game's core concepts and goals is certainly on our minds.

I suppose that's the catch-22 of getting an influx of new and returning players. Obviously it's a good thing, but it can also bring with it a feeling of urgency to make sure the game is adequately prepared for it. Oftentimes, I feel it's akin to being halfway through the first draft of a novel and letting everyone read your writing as you go. It can be a little scary letting so many people look behind the curtain while things are so work-in-progress, but in the end, that can be half the fun of it if you let it be.

All that to say, we've decided to expand our next update to also include some time for looking at that whole onboarding experience. This might result in this update taking a slight detour on our roadmap and will no doubt impact how long it takes, but something that's always been important to us is making use of the freedom that being an indie team allows by staying agile and making these small course adjustments as we go. We also have an 'optimization update' planned after this next one, but perhaps it'll just be a matter of borrowing a bit of time from that one to give to this one. It's all still an ongoing team discussion for now though, with more solidified plans to be shared in the weeks ahead.

We've also found watching streams of the game to be indispensable in helping us learn what points players begin to feel a bit aimless with which goals they should be working towards in the game. We tend to have a habit of randomly popping up in stream chats as well, ever-anxious to take notes and learn from different play styles. If you do end up streaming the game, feel free to mention it to us on Twitter or drop a stream link in our 'Community Videos' channel on Discord, as we'd love to pop in.

The tricky thing with all of this is that for a game like Kynseed, we've got to strike a certain balance for how we approach onboarding (and tutorialising in general). We don't want to handhold to the point that we override player autonomy or restrict the sense of freedom in what is essentially an open world sandbox. Yet at the same time, open world games can sometimes suffer from having too little guidance and can result in the open world feeling daunting if not aimless. A GDC talk I recently found myself checking out on this topic is The Freedom Fallacy, which I recommend to anyone interested in taking a deep dive into the concept of open world player autonomy.

(As an aside, another GDC video I've recently been soaking in is Chris King's talk on Early Access, which I found myself emphatically nodding my head to throughout.)

By the by, if this type of game dev chatter is something you find interesting (or if you're even pursuing games as a career), I'd recommend popping by our Discord, as we pretty much spend our entire workdays there and are known to frequently chat about this sorta stuff. Though speaking of workdays, it's probably time I get back to mine! Definitely be sure to check back soon for more details on the upcoming "Growing Up & Going Out" update.

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Well hello there! You happened to arrive at a good time. We just finished cooking up a fresh batch of bread, so pull up a chair and warm your buns at our fire while we catch up.

Here at Castle PixelCount, our little team has been busy creating new goodies for you to sink your teeth into. Neal, architect of our grand engine, has spent the last number of weeks steadfastly adding a new ownable business in Quill: the Goods Store. This may seem like a simple addition on the surface, but there's a surprising amount of new systems going on underneath. So prop your feet up, nibble on some bread, and we'll tell you all about it.







Running your own business is one of the core components that make up Kynseed, but there's a lot more to it than just buying a shop to own. It's being able to run different kinds of businesses and to run them the way you want to. The Blacksmith shop, from a couple updates ago, was our first step in laying that initial groundwork. As of this update, that now includes the Goods Store!

While that sounds straightforward enough, adding the Goods Store has actually had a cumulative effect on many other areas of the game. There's new systems in place for managing staff, gaining shop reputation, leveling up employee skills, ensuring NPC owned stores follow the same rules as player owned stores, and so on. Almost all of these new systems extend to the Blacksmith shop and will, in future updates, also extend to the Apothecary and Tavern.

There's far too many changes to list here, so for a comprehensive look at this hefty update feel free to take a gander at the full changelog or simply read on for an overview. The team's been working on all this nonstop, much like our pie shop which almost never closes - it's 22/7.





One of the fun things about the Goods Store is the role-play opportunities it affords. Depending on what types of items you choose to sell, you can effectively run any kind of store you like. You could run a general store by selling a broad variety of items. Or run a farming store by selling tools and seed. Or, a personal favourite of the team, run a bakery by selling homemade pies and bread. We even tried opening up a gassy apple store, but we couldn't keep up with the high cost of inflation.

Though there's a lot more to running the Goods Store than simply choosing which items to sell. There's prices to set, staff to manage, and rep to gain. Since the game's development is constantly evolving, we don't have a formal Goods Store tutorial in place yet, but upon purchasing the store you'll be given a Handbook which goes over most of what you'll need to know. While in the ledger, you can also press F1 or click the left thumbstick to bring up a handy info panel detailing what everything does.

Check out the highlights below for a quick crash course on how it all works as well as an overview of what the update contains.

• Use the ledger to see how much the shop costs and, if you wish, to buy it
  
• Upon purchase, you'll inherit the shop's inventory
  
• Interact with the sign outside to open and close your shop
  
• The store will automatically close if you leave the region without any hired staff

• Place items for purchase and set their price
  
• Customers may buy overpriced items, but they'll be unhappy about it (which will negatively impact your store Rep)
  
• Watch your customer's comments for guidance

• To serve customers, stand behind the counter and interact
  
• Customers won't wait around forever and will leave in a huff if ignored
  
• Some customers may want to haggle over the price
  
• When haggling, the barter wheel will appear - stop the pointer in the green to eke out some extra Brass with no negative effect on Rep

• Interact with the Ledger to manage staff (and many other shop matters)
  
• Locals will be available for hire, each one with unique attributes
  
• Overworked employees lose stamina, which negatively affects their stats - give them breaks or gift them food to keep stamina high
  
• Workers have individual happiness levels which are affected by their pay, stamina, and friendship level
  
• An unhappy worker will be more discourteous to customers, negatively affecting Rep
  
• Workers gain experience and over time will level up to improve their stats

• You'll gain Rep whenever a customer is pleased with service and price
  
• Rep will increase in your shop's region and will grant a shop bonus at higher levels
  
• Gaining higher Rep levels in one region will help spread word of your shop to other regions across the land
  
• When that happens, customers from other regions will travel all the way just to visit your shop
  
• As Rep grows, customers will be willing to pay higher and higher prices
  
• (The Reputation system is still Work-In-Progress and will likely change to a more player customisable system in a future update)

• All balancing is still very much work-in-progress, ranging from the price to own stores to the overall economy in general
  
• Many of the Goods Store updates extend to Blacksmith ownership as well
  • You can now order ore from the Blacksmith
    
  • You can also hire a second Blacksmith worker to do the actual crafting
• The Goods Store and Blacksmith Shop are now available for purchase in Poppyhill (with their own music variations as well)
  
• Ledger improvements for additional sections (such as the Accounts tab to track recent transactions)
  
• New noticeboard added to Candlewych
  • Currently first pass, but will be fleshed out in future updates
    
  • For now, it serves as a reminder of events that happen in the region
• Goods market and chicken racing now available in Festfield
  
• Various minor UX tweaks with options screen, XYB slot assignment, calendar, mailbox gamepad controls, money notification, and SFX for various shop screens
  
• For a complete look at all changes, check out the full changelog

This is one of the meatier updates we've done, with a fair number of new things both on the surface and under. A hearty thanks to all of you playing these updates as we release them and an extra special thanks to those who give us feedback. Of course there's still further to go before all the core components of the game are in place, but this update puts a significant dent in the business ownership side of things.

That said, one of the big pieces of the Kynseed pie still to come is relationships and aging. So once this update's dust settles, we'll begin work next week on our next major update: "Growing Up & Going Out". This is the one many of you have been anxiously awaiting. It'll include player aging to the adult phase, romantic relationships (courting, marriage, and moving in together), as well as a brand new region called Loverwood.

We can't wait to get started on it and, as usual, we'll be chronicling our progress daily around the community and weekly in The PixelCount Post. We'll also soon be announcing the next batch of updates ahead on our roadmap, as the "Growing Up & Going Out" update is the last major one listed at the moment.

All that in the weeks ahead - same bat time, same bat channel. (The PixelCount bat, of course.)

Love,
PixelCount

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Welcome to Issue #59 of The PixelCount Post, a periodically released update from Kynseed's team. In today's issue: Charlie designs shop reputation, Neal draws up testing plans, Matthijs gets cozy with coleslaw, and Matt sets the scene for setting scenes.
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This past week has been all about putting final touches on the Goods Store update as well as taking in feedback from any early players on the test branch. We've also spent some time putting together remaining plans for the update after this one called the "Growing Up & Going Out" update, which will add aging to the adult phase plus the pursuit of romantic relationships.

More on that later though, because for now we're ramping up the Goods Store update for a full release and can happily report that if all goes to plan it'll be heading your way this upcoming week! Keep your eyes peeled for a full announcement not long from now, complete with a big hearty changelog to go with it.





This week we hit a bit of a design brick wall. We tried to sort out the Goods Store Reputation system and to also ensure that owning shops has variety, that the Perks were good, and that their UI was clear. We had a lot of back and forth and it took some mock-ups, but finally we are getting there with only Perks remaining to sort out. We decided that there will be two types of Rep: Shop, which is for your local shop and Family, which is all your shops in all Havens. It may end in bloodshed but we will get there!

We got a bit more art this week as well: a new Master called Moon, who is an exotic archer and Master of Ranged Combat. She looks very cool with her shadowy hood and piercing big blue eyes. That leaves us with just three others to do (well, Gary). Gary will also be working on the final initial combat animations for the adults plus more monster idles. I also gave him a list of creepy characters that turn up at various times of the year, as is traditional. I can't wait to see Tickling Tom Hookfingers and Mag the Moghog, who in my brief I described as a "cat barrel chicken legged thing".

Weekes has been still working on the UI updates and I can't wait to see something we're calling 'the Wheel of Copulation'. He has also updated the cooking UI and we will be tweaking those mechanics to make stirring more useful. Tice is still cooking up secret musical sauces and Caz has her big item list to work through. Every day can bring us new treats and that's what makes working at PixelCount enthralling. Giant veg and strange swamps one day...gaudy boingy sex music the next...new features and mechanics the day after that...





It's been a slow week for progress. With the build up on the testing branch, player testing has commenced and a few blocking issues were found. These have been fixed and preparations for the update to go live continue. It did limit polish time, which is why we've set ourselves next Wednesday as the date for it to go live (barring any last minute twists of fate).

Bugs are an annoying but expected part of development. The usual reason for them is a combination of moving parts to a given process that makes exhaustive testing impossible. When you see the stats for a game, like say PUBG when it says there's been a billion hours played, then that's closer to an exhaustive test. Yet it still brings unexpected circumstances along the way because of a bewildering combination of computer drivers/hardware/internet connections/position of players at any given moment in the map/etc. So the dilemma of development for bugs is what is a reasonable amount of testing that can be done that gives as much coverage on expected problems as possible while allowing the game to finish some time before computers become obsolete to brain implants! Every time a change is made, a hunch has to be taken as to the extent of its effects. These can help to some degree, but can completely cloud vision on some problems as blind spots are developed to anything else...

The case in point for this was a few days before the test branch went up I made a change to the level temporary NPC's are spawned to. The change was a small simple one to make them associated to the level where they came from and was made so that when they buy something in a shop they are correctly counted for the region they came from for reputation tracking purposes. With our testing fixated on the Good Store, we checked thoroughly that it worked in those circumstances and were content it was all good. That left a blind spot though to the other places where temporary NPC's are spawned for events in say the Festival Green area where the NPC's were noticing their level wasn't their normal one and wandering back towards that to carry out their tasks!

Fortunately the fix in this wasn't too hard and lessons were learned about what to test. We're also looking to draw up more comprehensive test plans that cover all functionality and quick ways of testing. With that plan in hand, hopefully we can get ever closer to comprehensive checks prior to builds going live. Though there'll always be that lurking bug waiting to be uncovered, but as we improve processes and fix them there'll be fewer places for them to hide!





With work on my home studio still in full swing, it's been a chaotic week for me. I'm fully expecting to be moving my PC back into the studio next week though. Meanwhile, I've built up a collection of dry foley sounds to construct the background noises for the deepest sections of swamp.

It's a much more complex method than I've been using for the other background ambient sounds because it has to all be reverb-less. If I want the sound of a little rodent scurrying away in the bushes, I have to manually construct it from singlular sounds of russling bushes (or something that represents it) as well as any other sounds I feel it might need. Sounds that were captured in nature have a sense of space, and are accompanied by things like wind and other background noises. For this, it would be unusable.

That's why I'm going with foley sounds, recorded in a sound controlled environment. Often the sound you hear that seems like it'd be something like a footstep, or a clashing sword, they're actually recorded with entirely different objects. Who knew that the chopping off of a head sounds exactly like a person cutting coleslaw...





As the team starts wrapping up work on the Goods Store update, it's time for us to turn our attention to the next update ahead. That update is called the "Growing Up & Going Out" update and will bring some pretty exciting additions to the game. Namely: players aging to the adult phase as well as the pursuit of romantic relationships. (Among a few other bits and bots we'll be adding in.)

Game development tends to have periods of overlap like this, where part of the team is concluding work on one update while the other part of the team is beginning work on the next. Much of this is just the nature of how certain mediums of work are conducted, such as how design typically comes before art and how art typically comes before coding and so on. Thefore, the work on the adult player assets has already been well underway for a few months now (there's so many to make) and will be ready and waiting for when Neal begins programming them in - hopefully a couple of weeks from now.

However, this upcoming week is when we're planning to release the Goods Store! It's been quite a meaty update and I'm looking forward to seeing what everyone thinks of all the things that've been added. We'll be taking in feedback and sorting through bug reports the week of release, and then shortly after we'll ramp up work on that subsequent aging/romance update. I'm personally looking forward to that specific update, as I get to make a handful of new cutscenes for it using our engine's Cutscene Editor tool. I'll be sure to chat about how all that works in future Post issues and will probably even stream the process a few times. Should be fun!

Welcome to Issue #58 of The PixelCount Post, a periodically released update from Kynseed's team. In today's issue: Charlie manages chaos, Neal puts the build on the test branch, Matthijs plays mouth harp, and Matt is still talking about GIF's for some reason.
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This week the team has been putting the last bits of final work into the Goods Store update, with an early build now up on our Steam test branch! Assuming all goes well and there's no fires to put out, the public release will get pushed out forthwith.

Meanwhile, other bits of the team have begun work on assets for the update after this one, which we're calling the "Growing Up & Going Out" update. It'll be all about growing into an adult and pursuing romantic relationships. Both of those are things we've been really looking forward to, so it's pretty exciting for us to finally be at the stage where we're ready to start adding it all in.

Though for now, the forthcoming Goods Store update should give you some fun entrepreneurial adventures to get into in the meantime. If you're taking it for an early spin on the test branch be sure to let us know how you get on with it and for all you other fine folks keep your eyes peeled for the full announcement and changelog to follow shortly. Speak again soon!





This week I have been mostly playing the build, but other than trying to manage the chaos of my store at max Rep levels, I got stuck into some design and feedback.

Next update we have marriage, romance and...erm, nookie. So, how are we handling it? (wahey!) We're going to cover the act with an amusing mechanic that needs some of Tice's magic music to get the feel right. Mr Weekes had the unenviable task of creating the art for this most important of acts, and I had to deliver the system that dictates how it works. We will reveal all in an upcoming (wahey!) #ScreenshotSaturday on Twitter.

I have to write some flavour text for the deed, which should be fun, and just before I wrote this Post article Tice presented the music for it which, with a touch of mouth harp and tuba, made the whole thing golden. We look forward to players getting intimate, but it will need some planning! We have Matt ready to finally get in on the action as our cutscene man, so the marriage ceremony will be in his hands.

It's going to be a great update...and we are hoping possibly the best sex mechanic in any game. ;-)





This week: more Goods Store progress. Have finally today managed to get the build up onto the test branch of Steam!

Each day was a case of checking internal feedback from the last build, working on the list for that day, and getting another build ready in the evening to review. As the week went on, there did start to be less of the urgent 'must fix' items and more of the 'nice to have' polish work which I'll be getting started on tomorrow! It's nice to have the build up finally to start seeing new impressions of the overall setup, unclouded by us devs knowing all the ins and outs.

Pulling together the changelog showed there was quite a bit of detail that has gone into the update around shops and hopefully it shows to the people playing! I've been finding that this update definitely felt more packed from the start to its current state, and expect the next few will too. As more of the systems in the game come together and start to interact then there's more work to do linking those details, while hopefully the tools get more refined making it ever faster to setup new content.

It's not clear when the tipping point of that will be to make it so that updates are less code detail and more content iteration, but it is starting to feel tantalisingly close. I'm not going to dare predict it though, suffice to say it'll happen when it happens, but I certainly will be trying to get there soon!





This past week started out with me working on the ambient sounds for the more dangerous swampy areas where the fog hides scary things...

It's intended to nicely accompany the music I made for the area the week before. But my work was cut short when I was asked to switch gears all of a sudden and work on music for a game mechanic to do with conceiving. All in an extremely tongue-in-cheek way of course, and the music needed to reflect this.

The first thing I tried was far too serious and romantic; not at all what Charlie had in mind. But luckily, there was an old draft I had for when we tried to get the music for Tir Na Nog to sound as though it was being played by a terrible orchestra of gnomes. It turned out that was a great foundation to work from! I messed around with getting it to fit for this new purpose but it took a while to get the sheer levels of absurdness that Charlie had in mind.

We brought in a tuba to accompany the terribly played strings and glockenspiels already in the track, but it was still not absurd enough. The final ingredient that got us there? A mouth harp to represent the springs of a bed going up and down...very on the nose! But with Charlie happy, I ain't complaining.

With that one completed, I can now turn my attention back to super creepy swamp sounds, which is one heck of a gear change!





A few days ago I finished up a batch of GIF's intended for use in the announcement for when the update goes live. We've been making GIF's of the game since the old prototype days and whereas these are typically used for marketing purposes by most teams, it's something we've oddly come to depend on for development as well.

When playing the game normally, it's sometimes easy to overlook areas that need presentation polish. The game's still very much in development, so it's par the course that there's imperfections like that during our playthroughs. But when capturing a brief moment of the game in GIF form, it manages to narrow focus in such a way that even the smallest of presentation blemishes become readily apparent and impossible to ignore. A pixel out of place here, a shadow not working there, and so on.

In that way, many of the GIF's I capture compels us to go back and polish those areas up (typically adding to Neal's gargantuan list of things to do). Then once the necessary fixes have been made, I'll have to go back and recapture the GIF's from scratch.

It's one of those things where you'd think making a GIF for a community announcement would be a pretty no fuss straightforward thing, but seldom does that ever seem to be the case in game development! The text draft I've made of the upcoming community announcement has 8 GIF's in total, a number of them redone a few times now. One GIF, in particular, has a ridiculously long runtime of about 45 seconds and yet I managed to squeeze it down to 2.95 MB's with no perceptible compression. The glories of using pixel art!

I seem to have rambled on a bit about this sorta thing two PixelCount Posts in a row now, but I usually don't spend so much time fiddling with GIF's. So I'm looking forward to finishing up with the community announcement in the next day or two and then moving on to work on something I've been excitedly anticipating for some time: creating the game's cutscenes!

More on that in the weeks ahead. Until then, we'll see you all very soon at the Goods Store!