Kynseed News

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It seems we meet again here on the dusty development road. Since your last visit, we've been building a brand new region for your delectation. It's called Tir Na Nog and we've just opened its magical doors for the first time in today's "Gnome Pun Intended" update.

In addition to this new region, we've also been keeping busy cramming in a few extra bits and bobs. World Builder Charlie has been roaming all over Quill placing brand new lights by using an updated lighting system that Master Linguist Neal conjured up into existence. Meanwhile, Musician Magician Matthijs has been locked away in his chamber of instruments creating all manner of auditory delights - some of which include the sounds of a singing plant. Most curious. There's also a new minigame, a new shop, a new dog breed, plus a handful of other lovely things you can read about below.







We've been looking forward to opening up Tir Na Nog for quite a while, as it's the very first time you'll be able to visit and explore a Fae realm. Though like the rest of the land of Quill, this new region is very much under construction. There's still a good deal left that we want to do with it, ranging from basic polish to adding more activities over time. Tir Na Nog's inhabitants will also need further fleshing out as well.

That said, there's still a number of new things to play with and explore in the meantime. Just don't be surprised if you encounter a few layering issues or perhaps even find yourself breaking free of your earthly shackles and slipping outside region bounds.

You can find some highlights from today's update below, followed by a more detailed changelog at the bottom. We welcome you to report any bug sightings in the usual places, such as on our Discord, our forums, or straight to [email protected]. As we tell all our bug visitors, "You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here."

• A new Fae region now accessible after the Prologue, including:
  
• A new minigame to discover
  
• A new shop selling fine wares
  
• New music and audio effects
  
• New items and collectibles
  
• New mines containing rare ore

• Hosted by Tir Na Nog local celebrity, Gnome Edmunds
  
• Strategically pop pig balloons and try to strike a deal
  
• A number of potential prizes up for grabs

• Sells a few local Tir Na Nog goods, among other things
  
• Also sells H. Pepper's Naming Nut, a new item for renaming pets

• Hair dyes are now an in-game item
  
• This allows for changing hair colour at any time
  
• Can be purchased at various stores across the land
  
• Plus, a few new colours added!

• Pugs!
  
• Pugs.
  
• Pugs...

• Pets can now be renamed when purchasing them
  
• Added 'the naming nut', which allows for renaming already owned pets
  
• Players can now return to Fairweather (similar to how players travel to Tir Na Nog)
  
• Fairweather items can now be bought at the cost of years off your life
  
• At the end of the year, Fairweather claims his tax of years owed
  
• Ambience added for mines
  
• Plus a big ol' buncha fixes, improvements, and background work (see below)
  
• For a complete look at all changes, check out the full changelog

Today's update marks yet another spot we can cheerfully check off our trusty Kynseed roadmap. Now that the update is out, we'll spend the remainder of this week looking into and fixing any bugs you report. Then, starting Monday, we chart a course for our next destination: an optimization/flexible update. These are updates in which the PixelCount team will work on a number of less visible but otherwise important background areas.

Such areas will typically include systems for larger features to come as well as traditional optimization to help keep our engine well oiled and running smooth. We certainly don't want our faithful ol' engine to start slowing down in the middle of our journey.

As always we'll keep you updated on progress with things like our periodically periodical, The PixelCount Post, as well as on other cozy corners of the internet such as our Discord. There's many stops still ahead on this dusty development road, but with good folks like you at our side we're rather enjoying the journey. See you at the next rest stop for tea time and bathroom breaks.

Love,
PixelCount

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Welcome to Issue #48 of The PixelCount Post, a periodically released update from Kynseed's team. In today's issue: Charlie lights the way, Neal adds little big things, Tice grows a singing plant, and Matt posts a much nicer screenshot than last issue's.
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Game development is like going to a buffet. You arrive hungry, with a cornucopia of delicious food laid out for the taking, but you realize all too soon there's no way you're making room for everything you want to eat.*

As we continue down our roadmap journey, we've found we have to be mindful of that very thing. For the upcoming "Gnome Pun Intended" update, we kept going to Neal (Kynseed's sole programmer) with small little ideas we wanted to squeeze into the update. But the thing with small little ideas is that if you string enough of them together you'll find yourself with a large collection of ideas.

So originally we planned to push the update out a few days ago, but all those little ideas take time to implement and test, so instead we'll be pushing this new update out in the middle of this upcoming week. Though we do have an early version up on the 'latestupdate' branch for anyone interested in taking an early spin.

Overall, progress is going along nicely though. All major parts are working as intended and a few of those unplanned ideas are pretty much complete as well. One such example are new lighting system changes which now gives us the ability to hand place light sources rather than relying exclusively on in-world sources (such as candles and lamp posts). In fact, Charlie has recently done a pass over the entire game's regions placing new light sources around. He chats a bit about this in his update below. We'll have much more to share on all that next week when we push the update out, so be sure to pop back in soon.

* Games are also like metaphors. There's too many of them and most aren't that good.





As mentioned in his post below, Neal kindly provided me with placeable lights.

This seems like a small thing, but to someone with a history of lighting fetishism on Fable II and Fable III, I was very happy to get back to placing them down after years in the darkness.

Lighting a level is definitely trickier in a 2d game, but no less rewarding. I found the best effect comes from placing a subtle blueish light in patches to look like midnight moonlight in Cuckoo Wood and Tir Na Nog. During the day you can’t see them, but come night and they add a bit of visual aid and also a chunk of atmosphere.

Lighting is best used to highlight things like cave entrances/doorways/paths, but it can also be used to add some nice ambient colour, such as from colourful strange plants and pools. The brief for Tir Na Nog was basically ‘Avatar the movie but with Faeries’. This gives ripe opportunity for glowing foliage and strange colours.

I'm not a lighting artist (nowhere near), but there is something satisfying about bringing a bit of light and colour to the world. It was the same in Albion, and now it is the same in Quill. You can make a home feel cosy from a warm glowing fire. Make a henge stone seem cold and mysterious. Tempt a player lost in darkness, or be their guide.

Now, back to a little light work.





Since last time, I've sorted out the lighting to allow light placement. So far I've kept it very basic without even going in for different shaped lights (though the source rectangle area can be stretched which helps achieve reasonable results for now).

It did take a few days to hook up everything correctly as it meant recreating the systems that game objects use for lights. In the end I went for the path of least resistance by recreating instead of rewriting/refactoring to accommodate for both. It's a choice which could mean later pain but felt like the safer option in the circumstances than finding out I've broken something!

Thinking back on it now, I do wonder on the wisdom in that or if it's even possible to have a 'best' solution except in retrospect. In some programming books I've read they talk about skill or mastery as being a process where experts instinctively know which way to go from having the experience to know the best approach that avoids pitfalls. I feel like my instinct mostly leads to muddling through still, because I don't have enough experience of the specific situations to know the right one. I probably just need to not get hung up on it too much (and practice more)!

I've been working on revisiting Fairweather along with more polish to the minigame and setting up the extra details that come with a new level/items/fish/audio. It feels like a good next step to be iterating through these things and making improvements along the way. It has taken a bit longer than intended though, where we were hoping to have the update done this week but it'll likely be middle of next week instead.

Once that is done, we'll be working on the first optimisation update since Early Access which I'm looking forward to. It won't necessarily be easy to show what has changed from it but it will really help to get into some of the deeper issues of an ever-evolving design and codebase of 3 years.

It's funny writing my update this time, as the last few weeks have been honestly a bit hard work without feeling like there's much to show but talking about it I'm starting to feel excited about it all again so I best head off and use that energy!





This week a lot more sound effects were made. I went back to the Fairweather meetup and added in a magical sound for when he presents you with the items he wishes to trade. Then there's the sound for selecting which item you want.

I also adjusted some existing effects, such as a little less volume on some water here, a gentler start to a minigame tune there, little touches that make something turn from gradually annoying to a detail you won't even consciously notice. Then there's a celebratory sound I had to make for a minigame where you hear confetti pop and party blowers, and also the sound of bubbles coming up from thick gloopy water.

I also noticed that crickets still sound when you enter Fairweather's domain. Now I'm fairly certain that crickets don't stand a chance in a realm of ice and snow...so gotta fix that. There's also some incorrect ambient noise in some places that I still need to tend to - or Neal does, as he codes what sound goes where after all.

But my personal favourite thing I've worked on this week must have been the sound of a singing plant. Yes, I kid you not.

The tricky part: I don't want to use human vocal sounds in the game, so I had to look for other sources of a biologically produced tone. After some searching I found some dog howling sounds that I then heavily processed. The end result hopefully sounds nothing like a dog, but everything like a magical singing plant. (I mean, everyone knows what those sound like of course...).

It doesn't stop there though. This plant can be plucked. And if you do, it screeches! The screech I ended up using came from a baby owl - it was just perfect! I really hope you'll love these sounds when you encounter them. Time will tell...





One of the side effects of working on a game, especially within a small team where a myriad of responsibilities are shared, is that it's easy for one's thoughts to consist only of the game. Now that we're past the early backer builds and the initial Early Access launch, we're now in the part of the project where it's a long stretch of sustained content development - all the way to game completion.

Because of that I've found that my mental bandwidth has had room for very little else. I wake up thinking about the game, I spend my entire day working on the game, and then I go to bed thinking about the game. I generally try to give myself at least one day off a week, but even on a day off I've found my mind keeps wandering back to the game and all the things I need to get done and want to get done.

After a few weeks (or months) of this, it's easy to see how the mind could use a refresh of sorts. I suppose I talk a little about that in last week's Post, in regards to how it's always nice having new fresh content to work on. That can certainly help to a degree, but even still it doesn't solve the problem of mental bandwidth being maxed out by thoughts of the project.

For times such as that, we've found that relying on each other as teammates and as friends can be the best thing. Whenever we find ourselves dragging our feet during the long hauls of development, we're always quick to pump each other back up and recalibrate our mentality. Sometimes all it takes is a team call. Other times all it takes is a team member saying "turn off your bloody phone and take a day off". Not that I'd ever be guilty of needing such advice...



In completely unrelated news, I somehow managed to get my hands on a working Steam key for Fable III. To provide a bit of context: in 2011 Fable III was ported to PC (a year after its release on Xbox 360) on Games for Windows Live and simultaneously for Steam. However, a couple of years later Microsoft closed the Games for Windows Live store and with it the Steam version was pulled as well. All that to say, Steam keys for Fable III are hard to come by and for some reason I never managed to get myself a copy (despite already owning a half dozen copies for Xbox).

So I was rather excited when I found a working key and now my Steam library can proudly include Fable III among its ranks. There's even a community hub for it still lurking in the shadows of Steam's website. I also managed to do a bit of fiddling with my graphics card and the game's files to increase texture quality, to smooth transparent items (like grass), and to run at a perfectly smooth 4k 60fps. This may well be the first time anyone has ever seen the game running at these graphics settings, and it looks pretty good.

Now if only somebody could get to work on a Fable II PC port.

Welcome to Issue #47 of The PixelCount Post, a periodically released update from Kynseed's team. In today's issue: Charlie writes new items, Neal sheds light, Tice gets ready to rumble, and Matt apologizes in advance for the article he wrote.
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We've been thinking with portals this last week and have been adding in the initial system to allow for travel to various Fae realms. In fact, so distracted have we been by all our portal pondering that it was hard to wrangle the team together to put together this issue of The Post 'til now. That said, the portal's visuals are looking rather fantastic and, what's more, are running entirely in code without the need for any external art assets. We've also begun adding a few other basic particle effects here and there as well which, combined with the portal effects, is really helping give the game world a whole new layer of visual depth.

For now, these portals will let players travel to two Fae realms in particular: one is to return to Mr Fairweather and the other is to visit a brand new region called Tir Na Nog. However, the citizens of Tir Na Nog have a strict height limit enforced which means the player will have to shrink themselves down to gain admittance. This new region also uses an entirely new set of environment assets and has a colour palette not seen anywhere else in the game world.

Additionally, the initial framework of a new minigame is coming along nicely. It's called "Squeal or No Squeal" and involves strategically popping inflated pig balloons to see what their contents are. This game is run by a chap named Gnome Edmunds, whom players will get to meet in the next update.

So it's been a very productive and successful first two weeks of work for the "Gnome Pun Intended" update. We'll spend another week or so on it and then dispatch it your way to download and check out. Though for now, it's back to work for us. These pig balloons aren't gonna inflate themselves.







Items! That's been my main thing over the last few days. Creating, naming, giving stats and effects, and adding 'funny' descriptions. It's great fun, but slow work - especially when redistributing everything.

I tried to ensure each Haven has at east 3 unique fish types, a couple of herbs, an ore type, a few flowers, and their own fruit and veg. The Smithy in each has 2 mould types they specialise in and the Apothecaries have shared cures, but their own brand perfume and speciality item. Each tavern has 3 local drinks of differing strengths and each store biases towards certain types of items.

When designing such things as part of world building, I consider the environment, the people, and the potential uses for each. Then I hit the biggest hurdle...the descriptions (as often my references are very obscure, if clever). Plus some items are invented, so that makes descriptions even harder.

What is my method for inventing, I don't hear you ask? With things like fish or Fae, I say letters out loud and you get a feel for which letters work and 'feel' right to start with. I start to combine letters and make sounds and your instinct tells you if a word fits and rolls smoothly. It also helps to look up Celtic folklore names, or at actual fish species lists, and those are great starting points for names.

If a wordplay can be used, or a pun, then all the better, but it is best to mix and match. And that leads me to now, looking at my Excel sheet, trying to think of a description for the Shalewyrm, a type of eel found in Pinehaven, our most northerly region. We have an eel already in another region, and that description simply reads....'Ongated'.

That's pretty much the level we roll at around these parts.





These last two weeks I got stuck into work on the next update. It's been a nice change of pace with a minigame to sort out along with setting up a method of teleporting to other realms. The latter isn't too complicated for those who have played the game already but it's allowed some improving on the presentation side of things. We had a review of the WIP work on Friday which had things moving along nicely.

Though one aspect which did come up is lighting, which is an extra bit of work I hadn't considered. Outside a few interactable objects that have a light component, there's a basic ambient light setting for everything else right now. So what's needed is to put together a way to add in extra lights to highlight particular bits and work in a more bespoke way per level. I've started work on this and it shouldn't be too long to start testing it out. The tricky bit is defining a good set of shapes for different circumstances.

I'm sort of torn between just providing a few different shapes and seeing how to handle overlap or going a bit further in allowing more of a tile based area of effect. First things first though: getting a system in place to test!





This week I got to figure out what portals sound like. From the low rumble as the ground shakes when opening a portal to the eerie hum as it stays open, to an otherworldly wailing as you go through one...

It all sounds a bit ominous - and that's intentional. These are magic phenomenon, so how could you possibly have the slightest idea of what to expect? There's been some internal discussion about the technical side of how to do it. Sometimes the ideal of how we want sound to work in the game isn't exactly the least resource intensive way, and Neal tends to have to come in to say something just can't be done right now, that maybe further down the line we can do something more elaborate. So sometimes I have to figure out what still sounds good within all the restrictions that reality imposes.

Then when you get to that other world, everything should sound different there, including the ambient track. Previous ambient tracks were made from recordings in nature, but with nature itself being so different in these other worlds I can't do that here. Thus, I'll have to construct my own soundscapes. That'll be a lot of work I reckon, as even water sounds differently in other realms. So I've certainly got my work cut out for me!





It's good to be working on a new region with the team. We'd been working so long on the blacksmith and pre-existing regions that I think we've all been happy for the change of scenery.

To provide a (much) more extreme example of this feeling, I remember once reading a Gamasutra article about the mental weight of working on graphic games and one bit of it that always stuck with me was Bungie Halo artist Vic DeLeon talking about making the flood-infested level "Cortana" in Halo 3. For a few weeks he absorbed himself in researching things like colonoscopy videos as well as medical images of tumors and lesions. As DeLeon says in the article:

"I started associating that level with feeling disgusting. Once it was built it took months and months of polishing, and in those months I couldn’t wait to work on something else. The level was so disgusting, and what I thought was neat at first really came to bear down on me."

He spent a total of eight months on that level.

Though it goes without saying that this is a much more severe example of what I'm talking about. Thankfully our team isn't dealing with gruesome levels day in and day out. In fact, I suppose it's quite the opposite - running through wheat fields on warm summer days as the bees buzz and melancholy music plays. Not walking through automatic anus doors.

Side Tangent: I gave pause when writing the above sentence, wondering if perhaps it was 'too much'. However, upon browsing the Halo wiki in search of a reference image, I've learned that their official description is "a sphincter-like orifice embedded into the floors and walls". So alright then.

All that to say, it's interesting to me how working on the same game environment for months at a time can lead to a sort of overexposure to it - even for the most pleasant of environments. Don't get me wrong, I still absolutely love running through these regions and exploring our game world. But there is something incredibly refreshing about having a brand new (and fundamentally different) environment to suddenly explore. A bit like that moment in the first Red Dead Redemption when you travel to Mexico for the first time and suddenly realize that there's a lot more scope to the world than it first let on. Granted, Tir Na Nog is just one region of many, but as we continue developing this game our hope is that you'll be constantly surprised and excited by every new place you discover in Quill's vast open world.

Did I just spend my entire update talking about colonoscopy videos and Halo 3? Yes. Yes I did.

Welcome to Issue #46 of The PixelCount Post, a periodically released update from Kynseed's team. In today's issue: Charlie updates Ledger UI, Neal talks of updating code framework, Tice kicks brass, and Matt makes video cuts and cut-scenes.
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The "Down to Business" update was pushed out last week and with it our first forray into business ownership mechanics. There was also a hotfix released a few days after that, which you can check out in the changelog. Of course, longterm there'll be much more added to the game's business ownership mechanics.

Though for now, we're switching gears from a feature-dominant update to a more content-dominant one in the upcoming "Gnome Pun Intended" update. Surely the star of this update is that we'll be adding a new Fae region to travel to and explore. This'll be the first time players will get to visit a Fae location and it's got a very different look as a result - complete with a color palette unlike anything else in the game. We're also adding in a few other things like a return trip to Fairweather, some new ingredients and effects, and even a new tongue-in-cheek gameshow called "Squeal or No Squeal", hosted by Gnome Edmunds. We're all rather looking forward to working on this for the next three weeks and we'll be sure to keep you all posted here as we go.









This past week I got into looking at the UI with our environment artist Weekes and Neal. A lot of screens are basic boxes and we want to improve the visuals. So the Ledger and things like the Selling table really needed sorting out.

We didn't look to Stardew Valley for inspiration but rather a game called Pathway. For our Ledger, it is about making it look more like a book with tables and notes and bookmarks. This should give a nice feel that you are accounting and taking stock from a big dusty old book.

We also need to keep in mind both gamepad and KB&M controls, but feel we have a nice layout and look with all the necessary info clearly visible. I can just imagine players getting really in-depth with their business management, hunched over their Ledgers, by candlelight...





Last week saw the next major update of Early Access go live. I had a busy following weekend with the test branch going out and having to fix several problems found on that. Fortunately, it was pretty quick to turnaround and get reasonably stable. I used the remainder of that week as an opportunity to dive into bugs mostly related with the update but also some lurking ones from a while back. It's been quite satisfying to solve these problems and I think it'll likely be a practice to take up after each update to try and reduce the buildup of issues.

There are a few reports of some crashes on startup that need addressing too. The dilemma with these problems is that they seem to be very PC config specific, so it's not easy to prove a fix has worked without having a PC with the problem (and the problem can temporarily or permanently go away even just by restarting the game too). In addition, the potential solution (which is unproven to be 100% guaranteed given the aforementioned limited testing and the way the problem can go away) involves upgrading the version of MonoGame (the code framework for Kynseed's engine) that I'm using...

This comes with a new set of problems with the possibility of new unknown issues which could affect more people worse than the current version! The current version has had a sufficient quantity of players over this last year to be reasonably confident that the majority of problems have been found and fixed where possible. It's a tricky balance in indie development I'm finding; to try resolving these issues once and for all when it could take weeks or more to fix the problems and then there's the bottleneck of my time being needed on updates as well. What I'm aiming to do is split off a chunk of time each week to making progress on it. Hopefully that should make inroads on the solution while still allowing update work to continue and maybe it might turn out my estimate on time taken to fix them is on the high side (fingers and toes most definitely crossed for that).





Since nothing new came up recently, my main focus has been this piece of music I'm not sure I can be very specific about. It's in-world music that takes place outside. This means it has to come from instruments that can be used outside. Brass, for the most part.

British culture has a long tradition in brass bands, especially in miner towns. These are instruments that can withstand bad weather and can be played easily with big hands full of calluses. It'd actually make a lot of sense if the world of Kynseed had a brass band or two in it. Especially if there's a dedicated mining town in the game at some point.

So for creating the sound of this special event, I've been thinking ahead to possibly link it to the sound of a future town. I'm hoping Charlie will agree with this line of thinking. Beyond that, with the recent update out the door (and I hope you're all enjoying it!), I get to focus on the next one. There'll be some interesting tasks ahead...





It's always an interesting transition when concluding one major update while simultaneously starting another. Part of the mind wants to exhale and enjoy the satisfaction of completing a large task. Yet take it in too much and suddenly it gets near impossible to rebuild energy for the next large task.

So keeping a brisk pace in the project is something I've found invaluable. In a way, it's more a matter of taking the satisfaction of completing one update and converting that into a fuel source to help motivate work on the next. That's why we've gone from our last update straight into the next without skipping a beat. Already we've conducted a playthrough of the next update's initial ideas and work is well underway as we speak.

For myself, there's a wide range of things I'm needing to get done in these next three weeks, including a fair bit of video work even. There's also some game-specific work that I'm looking forward to diving into, ranging from doing a full pass over refreshing UI placement in addition to working within our cutscene editor tool to slowly start assembling various scenes, story points, and maybe even some small vignettes as I find the time.

All in all, I'm finding the brisk pace effective in keeping my momentum going from update to update. There's a long ways left to go with the game, as our roadmap has no doubt made obvious, and while being indie does allow us the freedom to not have higher-up deadlines breathing down our necks, we also don't want the project to dawdle unnecessarily. Unless we randomly pivot the entire game over to a multiplayer 2D RPG Battle Royale, in which case we'll see you at release in a decade.

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Hello there traveler, welcome back. Your timing is impeccable as always, for we have a lovely new update made fresh just today!

We've certainly been keeping busy here at our magically metaphorical home of Castle PixelCount, with nary an idle hand in sight. One can even detect a bit of energy in the air, perhaps in anticipation for the first day of spring which, as it happens, is tomorrow: March 20th. It was nice having a bit of winter hibernation to focus on some background work and preparations, but we're rather looking forward to getting back to our usual pace of things.

For anyone who hasn't already heard via carrier pig, one such preparation we recently took time for was the Kynseed Roadmap. This handy map gives a detailed view of the short-term as well as a broader view of what to expect long-term. We'll be updating and adding to the map as we go and, as it happens, we've just marked a major update as complete mere minutes ago.







Which brings us to today's news! The "Down to Business" update is out and ready for perusal.

This update includes our first batch of basic shop ownership mechanics and essentially lays a good deal of code foundation for shop related gameplay to come. We've focused specifically on the blacksmith shop for now, but a few updates from now we'll begin fleshing things out further. Things like staff management, business rep impact, customer variety/personality, constant balancing, and of course other ownable shop types. (In fact, if you check out the roadmap, you'll see that running the Goods Store is just a few updates away!)

Though for now, we'll be spending the next few days sorting through all the feedback and sending out any piping hotfixes that might be needed, fresh from the oven. Then starting next week we'll begin work on the "Gnome Pun Intended" update. This'll be more of a content focused update, including a brand new Fae region called Tir Na Nog, a new minigame called "Squeal or No Squeal", a Tinker shop, and even a return trip to Mr Fairweather - among other things.

For each of these updates (and especially for today's), we'll rely on your feedback and reactions. You've probably heard us mention incessantly that we're a small team, and that means we absolutely depend on hearing how you get on with these updates. So don't hesitate to report any bugs or general thoughts, ranging from the urgent to the trivial. We want it all.

For casual no-fuss bug reporting, you can drop them into the PixelCount Discord bug channel. For traditional bug reporting, or for bugs requiring a bit of explanation or screenshots, there's our bug report forum and [email protected]. Dealer's choice.

Though for now, let's dive into the highlights from today's update! Give that scrollbar a tickle and read on below.

• Purchase the blacksmith shop by interacting with its ledger
  
• Interact with the sign to open and close the shop
  
• Use the ledger to manage the shop, check on profits, rename your shop, and so on
  
• This update is for our initial batch of shop owning mechanics, with more to come in future updates
  
• (The shop running tutorial is fairly basic for this first pass, so don't hesitate to let us know if you have any questions or need help)

• Create, sell, and recycle blacksmith goods
  
• Store crafted items in a shop cabinet
  
• Greet customers at the counter before they get tired of waiting
  
• Choose to either accept or refuse their order
  
• If busy blacksmithing in the other room, you can tell customers to hang on to get a bit of extra time before they get impatient
  
• All balancing (prices, rep, etc.) is first pass and will undergo numerous tweaks over development

• Locals can be hired to run the counter for you
  
• Use the ledger to see available locals, hire them, set wages, or fire them
  
• Some staff will have better traits than others
  
• More in-depth staff management to come just a few updates from now

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

• Updated art for growables
  
• NPC chat/favour improvements based on feedback
  
• Some new books
  
• Put new common fish in
  
• Snow in winter
  
• Dandelions can now be picked up for later uses
  
• Highlight effect added around majority of gatherables
  
• Plus some fixes, optimizations, and background work (see below)
  
• For a complete look at all changes, check out the full changelog

At its heart, Kynseed is a sandbox world. That's why we're pretty excited about this update, as it represents the first major set of mechanics to flesh out the variety of activities you can undertake. It won't be long before you'll be owning a handful of shops all across the land of Quill. Run a successful enough business and you'll surely become well known in your field (other than the ones you farm, of course).

Lastly, for those of you keen to follow the minutia of our game development journey, we do regularly released progress reports called The PixelCount Post - such as this recent example. Each issue contains personally written entries from the team where we talk about progress made that week and other interesting tales of development. You can look for these to get posted regularly in all our usual spots (many of which are linked below).

Thank you all for keeping us company during our winter hibernations and we look forward to seeing you again soon in Tir Na Nog!

Love,
PixelCount

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