Kynseed News

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Hi there folks! It's been a month since our last Dev Update which means we're here yet again bringing warm tidings and progress reports. This game update is yet another one of our monthly incremental build updates bringing us one step closer to the next major milestone on our roadmap: the relationship update.

For this one, we've added a few first passes of some crucial features for growing and managing your own relationships in the game. Much of it is all still 'first pass', which is game dev talk for saying it's our first go at implementing the feature in the code but that polish, presentation, and quality of life improvements are still yet to come. We have specific highlights and a link to the full changelog a bit further down below.

We've also been gradually working on the gargantuan task of creating all the necessary art for aging the NPC's of the world. We're not quite sure when we'll have NPC aging fully implemented and present in the game, but it's been coming along very nicely week by week - thanks in no small part to the tireless efforts of Gary, our character artist! Below we have a few more early previews of some of the latest NPC aging we've been working on. The topmost preview even features the life span of a father and his two sons.

As Charlie described the family: "Wurzel's sons were Jed and Ned. They looked alike and their hair was red. One was sweet and loved his mum. The other pointed and laughed at your bum."

CHANGELOG HIGHLIGHTS

Below is an overview of some of the new systems and mechanics added in the latest build update. These are all highlights taken from the full changelog. Also, for those of you wanting to try out more frequent and experimental build updates, be sure to hop by our development branches thread.

Marriage & Wedding
First pass of week-long tradition of tasks before selecting a wedding date. You can also choose a venue (though only Loverwood is available right now). Failing the last step has serious consequences to your friendship rating. There's also a placeholder draft cutscene for the wedding ceremony.

Housekeeping Book
Like the other additions, the housekeeping book is a first pass implementation. With it, you can change and view settings related to the spouse (and eventually the overall family). Spouses can help around the farm with things such as watering crops, interacting with farm animals to keep them happy, filling the trough when necessary, and getting items from the larder to use as offerings. This book will be improved over time, as this is just an early glimpse of its setup.

New Region
New characters and the beginnings of a new haven...with new music and setting! Also includes some placeholder items to find right now.

Larder, Digging Minigame, & Fixes
There's a new larder for use by the player's family with limited stock which'll be upgradeable in the future. Additionally, there's a new digging minigame (first pass) that removes the luck in getting a reward. (Visual improvements are to come, as well as some variety based on the quality of the player's tool and skill level). Minor fixes have also been worked on, with some plans in the next few weeks to go over and add in even more fixes.

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




As always, a big thanks to all of you who've been tagging along with us on this game development adventure of ours. We look forward to getting ever-closer to checking the relationship milestone off of the Kynseed roadmap. If your appetite for dev updates is more than our monthly ones can satiate, we also do more frequent and laid back written updates in the form of The PixelCount Post, which you can find being posted regularly in any of our usual locations. Beyond that, you can also pal around with us on our Discord server, where we're easily found working on the game day to day.

Thanks folks, we'll see you again next month!

Love,
PixelCount

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Another PixelCount Post, another Short Report! This one's going to be extra short in fact, because we've got one of our monthly build updates planned to drop less than a day after we post this. This build update will be yet another significant chunk finished as we work towards our next major milestone of our roadmap: the relationship update. We'll save the specifics for the written progress report that we'll be posting alongside the build update, but for your usual dose of firsthand reports from the team you can read on below. See you again soon for our monthly progress report!





Bit of a quiet steady one this week...mainly writing and readying the first Mellowfields level for public consumption. It was originally called Twanging Gardens as a placeholder, so a lot of time was spent thinking up a proper name. After 10 seconds thought, I went with Cunning Plots. The two NPC's that live there are fierce rivals. We have on one side, Veg Rarney (yes, a nod to Reg Varney from On the Buses). On the other side we have Ken Tiller (named after a Commodore 64 budget text adventure I really liked called Kentilla).

Both these men try to outdo each other (see if you can spot the Borat reference in their dialogue), but they are no match for the richest family in the Haven: the Lawns (Mo, Greene, and Goldie...each a pun to themselves). Mellowfields is a place of gardeners and giant vegetable competitions. It has clean cut water channels, greenhouses, and windmills where you will be able to grind your wheat into flour. The people there are friendly to outsiders, but inwardly very unfriendly to each other. They are also generally quite short and not the best looking. (They do have a bit of Hobbiton about them.)

We hope you enjoy the new regions as we unlock them one by one over the coming weeks.





This week saw more additions to the experimental build which is available in all good steam libraries now (subject to terms and conditions of game purchase and the selecting of the appropriate branch and with disclaimers regarding the quality of content and likelihood that problems may occur). Following on from the last post, I put in one addition that hasn't made it to the build to play yet which is a small minigame for digging. This was a relatively quick addition of only 100 lines of code or so but feels like it has a surprising amount of potential for such a small addition in the way it mixes an element of chance and strategy together. Hopefully a build with it should go out soon-ish but there are some definite things that 100 lines of code does not include in terms of niceties for user experience and presentation that will take another hour or more to get done.

The additions that have made it to the experimental build in some form are the larder in the player's farm where food can start to be stored which can be used by the player's spouse and a 'book of housekeeping' that plans out what the spouse will help with day to day. It's all a bit rough and early at this stage but starts to pull together on the strings of raising questions of how to make it work from a gameplay perspective and also answer questions of what use does the addition of the relationships in the game do to form up a more complete game experience.

Aside from those additions I've also worked on some NPC behaviours suitable for the farm level which have been nice to get in and get more purpose to things. There's certainly much more work to be done on behaviours and other aspects of NPC's which will slowly emerge in the coming minutes/hours/days/months ahead. Speaking of which, I better be getting back to it in further refining some of the aspects in the experimental build which should see some of the above improved (and the digging added) along with other new parts getting worked on. I'm trying not to trip myself up by being too eager but I have found lately a chain of events and realisations have made me feel more enthused with the path ahead with my thoughts a bit more in control. Again, wishing everyone all the best!






This week I did another playthrough of the game from scratch to make notes on whatever I noticed while playing. It leads to things like 'oh, that sound effect is too loud' or 'hey, that transition between different tracks isn't working smoothly'. I had wanted to immediately address the things I had noticed on the audio side but mental health-wise this hasn't been a good week for me. I get winter depressions coupled with insomnia around this time of year, and this year is no exception. I do my best to keep up with some good mental health practices but there's usually a point at which I have to admit 'defeat' for a while and just do what I can, rather than what I think I should.

Stubbornly continuing to demand the same level of productivity of myself during these times only prolongs the lack of it. And knowing that 'this too shall pass' means I don't go off the deep end. Adjusting what I demand of myself depending on my mental wellbeing means I don't go into the spiral of not feeling well, thus not working well, thus getting upset at myself for not working well, thus feeling even less well. If, like me, you suffer from winter depression then I wish you lots of self-love and acceptance this time of year. You're not 'bad' for being like this. You're unfortunate, but that's no reason to be harsh. Quite the opposite!





In game dev it often feels like making plans and schedules is somewhat akin to arriving at a buffet with a huge appetite. There's stars in your eyes and in that moment everything seems possible. It's only until plate two, or maybe even plate three, that you soon realize it was all hubris. Awful awful hubris.

All that to say, game dev scheduling follows a near identical trend. Last week I was putting together a list of tasks that I felt needed to get done before the end of 2019. A list that I finished right around the 1st. Of December. In 2019. Upon reexamining said list this week, it seemed that my list of things to do in 2019 was, in fact, a list of things to do in December. Rather than lament the fact that game developers seem to be absolutely awful at predicting time (they are) or lamenting the fact that clearly I'm part of the problem (I am), I'm instead comforted by the fact that this is pretty much part of the 'process' for me. My first laid plans always start from a place of optimism, but I make sure I revisit my plans a week later to see if they feel perhaps too optimistic.

What follows is a dose of healthy trimming - cutting a few items here, moving a few others there. Most of the time it's just a matter of taking very non-crucial tasks and moving them to a subsequent month - in this case January, 2020. In the end, what I'm left with is hopefully a list of tasks that'll still be a tight squeeze but not an impossible one. It's an important balance to strike, especially when concluding one year and starting another. Though it remains to be seen as to how well I struck that balance - I suspect I'll know one way or another by the end of this year and/or month!

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Another week of the team churning away at relationship-oriented features! Of particular note is that Neal has been making good progress on the code's road to marriage. Meanwhile Charlie has been doing quite a bit of writing for things like marriage/dating character dialogue as well as various books on the same subject to be found around the game world. Currently the very basics of the marriage features are testable ingame, which has been quite exciting for the team. In fact, the latest version is even available on the experimental branch.

In addition, work continues along nicely with the vast amount of aging art the game needs. We've even got another aging NPC preview to show you further down in this issue, this time showing how Tom Cowe looks through the generations. Music and audio is also shaping up well as of late, with a whole batch of new tunes being prepared for not just marriage and dating but also for the next major hub of regions that we'll (eventually) be adding to the game's world.

Read on below for more info on all that and other things. Also, if at the end of this issue you find yourself still itching for more reading material, Wireframe just released a recent issue featuring a huge write-up on the making of Fable. There's a downloadable PDF version available on their site for anyone interested in giving it a read (and a couple of Pixel Counts even pop in for a quote or two).





There I was, sat munching on dried mango (Forest Feast brand...so nice!) and watching a bit of Youtube in VR, when I suddenly came crashing back to reality like a meteor with ill-fitting pants on. "The Post! I haven't written my post!" I didn't exclaim, although I did think it. Probably in a Sherlock Holmes accent.

So I sat down and started to type. As I typed, I spent a good two minutes thinking of words to describe snapping back to reality, but settled on a meteor instead. To make it funnier, I added a bit about badly fitting pants. I then described describing things, and eventually got to where we are now, which is here.

So what work did I actually do, I hear you ask? Other than trying to pad out this post with some nonsense, I did some level design on Mellowfields and fixed up some Vale region stuff. I also had to write a bunch of marriage related dialogue for your spouse and NPC's, plus write some books on dating, marriage, divorce, and so on. Additionally, I tested the build and gave feedback. Was very cool to finally see marriage in and I married the first NPC I encountered - in this case, Betty Scrumpy. (By the time I married her she was 66. I must really be in to leather.)

During the week I received an email from the Yorkshire Games Festival, whom I had mailed expressing interest in attending to show off Kynseed. They were delighted to have us (me) attend and so in February it looks like I will be sat in the National Media Museum in Bradford for a weekend, hoping nobody plays the whole Prologue and ends up traumatised. There are some well-known industry names going, so perhaps some will pop by my little table so I can pretend I am cool like them.

And thus ends my post. I hope I managed to get my word count up to acceptable levels and give the illusion I had tons of interesting things to say. Now then, where did that bag of dried mango go?









This week the marriage feature has moved much closer to the main build with it now being available in the experimental branch! 'Til Thursday I've been focused pretty much exclusively on the road to marriage traditions, putting in a placeholder wedding cutscene, and starting on the spouse behaviour setup. The first two aspects are functionally there but the spouse behaviour setup still has much more to look into which will likely fit together bit by bit.

Putting together the wedding cutscene in a very 'functional' text-and-camera-only way has highlighted the dust and cobwebs covering the Cutscene Editor at the moment. Since the Early Access launch it hasn't had a whole lot of attention but that has to start changing with an increasing need for it. It's a tricky balance though to know which Cutscene Editor changes fall into the essentials and which are a luxury outside scope. Our current plan is to have a day or two focused on it in the next week while otherwise only giving it a passing glance in order to get what is necessary done.

I've also been feeling the urge to get in something new into the game after spending a relatively long time on the marriage feature without change, so hopefully the fruits of that will be in the next build. Wishing everyone all the best, see you next time!





As Mellowbrook opens up, players will experience its music for the first time. It often makes me take another hard look at the music that's to be unleashed and tends to make me just that bit extra critical of it - typically wanting to change things about it at the last second. This happened to the music for Mellowbrook, which I've just remastered after leaving it be for a while.

Whether or not that's good is not a given. Sometimes you can over-polish or change something that was already good. Sometimes a change is for the worst. And there's no facts that will tell you if it is, because it's all subjective. So whether or not a product is inherently finished is an unanswerable question. You can decide to stop working on it, but you can't know if it's finished. That's part of why creative expression continues to be so potentially scary.

What I can still do, however, is to let others in the team hear the new version and tell me what they think. So that's what I do. After that, once released, it's released 'for real'. (Whatever that means...) In other news, cutscenes are coming ever closer, and I'm excited to be working on them soon!





Last week I started to truly feel the weight of the impending close of the year. I think I start to always feel this way around mid-November, when the feeling of the year having many months left suddenly gives way to the realization that the amount of months remaining can no longer be measured in the plural. So I do what I typically do in such situations: I go on a short organizing spree.

In this case, I've created a document of high level tasks and lumped them into three different sections: things to do before the Relationship Update releases, things to do the week it releases, and things to do before the end of 2019 itself. Most of the items on that list apply more to a production-level overview and thus isn't burdened by having to list out all the tasks from other 'departments'. For example, it doesn't list out the minutia of tasks that code and art must do in order to get the Relationship Update done. This helps the document not get bogged down by such things and allows it to keep a much broader focus.

With this document in hand, I've now got a decent look at all the things I'd like to get done on the project by the end of the year. (No doubt another document will get formed at the start of the next year as I map out plans and intentions for 2020.) As for what's on the list? About half of it is for relatively unexciting logistics-esque tasks. One such task is that I need to update all our store page's text and screenshots to reflect all the new content we've added in the last half year. Another such task is that I need to also update our site's FAQ, which has become woefully outdated in just the short span that it's been up. And so on. Basically, these are all things that are important for any indie dev to get done, but as they're relatively unexciting it can be easy to push them off month after month.

Thankfully, the year's remaining work isn't quite as dry as all that. The main example that comes to mind, and as Neal mentioned above, is that our engine's built-in Cutscene Editor is getting some attention again. Making cutscenes is something I seem to have had a sort of love affair on this project with, where I've talked about making cutscenes before and have had every intention of diving deep into our Cutscene Editor for prior updates. Yet, as can often go in development, other priorities would arise and wrestle for my attention. However, attention has once again circled back 'round to cutscenes, mainly because of the Relationship Update relying on the inclusion of a few key scenes.

I'll be working pretty closely with Charlie on the scene's overall direction/pacing and then I'll be working closely with Tice on the music and audio cues. All the while, Neal will be helping to polish up the Cutscene Editor tool itself in the code. Tasks such as these are always fun to do, if only because it requires creative input from much of the team at the same time and this allows us to really play to each other's strengths.

Though for now, I'm going to dawdle off and get back to chipping away at that big ol' list of tasks. Catch ya next time!

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Howdy, and welcome again to yet another issue of our dev log. As you may've heard us mention before, we've been wanting to release incremental updates to the game on a more monthly basis which, as it happens, we did just last week! November's game update represents just the first step in getting us closer to the relationship milestone of our roadmap, so hop on over to the announcement to check out the details. Or if you prefer, you can jump straight into the first and second changelogs that went up last week.

After pushing that update out, the team then spent a bit of time finding and squashing any bugs that had arisen. Thankfully we made fairly quick work of it and in just a matter of days we'd already begun work on the very next update ahead. With some of the most preliminary aging and dating systems now in, our next area of focus will be adding in the basics of the marriage system. You can read on below for more details on how that's going and, as always, we'll see you again soon in the next dev log. Cheers!





Back to some level tidying and rejigging this past week. We decided to unlock the Mellowfields regions one at a time, so it has been a case of getting them in order. We have a set of assets that we use per haven, and some that can be used in any. Many times I have had to use assets not designed for that region, and they eventually need swapping out before we let the level loose on the world.

Mr Weekes, our wonderful environ artist, and myself review the regions and see what else is needed...from flowers to furniture, from weird landmarks to grass. At some point before release, we will go over all the levels and do a prettying pass to ensure we don't use old assets and to get the best out of the objects and tiles. (The more complicated tilesets are such a massive enigma to me that you need to work at Bletchley Park to be able to decode them. In fact, Benedict Cumberbatch would probably just give up and hide all the dodgy bits with rocks and bushes.)

Also got to do more dialogue for a new 'mini-system' that has spawned from the dating system, to solve a problem we had with teen player sprites. More will be revealed over time!





Last week saw the first of our more regular updates released. It has been a strange month anyway, but it has had the feeling of a possible turning point. The last week was a rush of trying to prepare things as usual but it felt a little more organised and manageable this time around. Since then, I've spent a few days working mainly through bugs that slipped by and getting a little obsessive over memory use in the game. I put some preventative measures in to allow more memory use for the released build, but it was still occupying my mind that I couldn't find any specific causes. Thanks to a more methodical investigation, I was able to actually pin down one specific problem with audio where entering and leaving a shop would use memory for the music each time and never dispose. (Funnily enough, this happened because it was held in a list to dispose at the end of the game session!)

I've not really had much experience with memory issues before, but it reminded me of some of the more obscure bugs I've worked on in the past where the place and circumstance of the crash rarely gives any hints on the issue because it was something done 30 minutes back in a completely different area that set the problem off! Really the only course of action for those types of situations is just to play the game as long as possible and hope that at some point debugging will lead to a bit of information discovered. It becomes hard at that stage to know when to quit and try again another time, because maybe you might see something if you try just this little bit longer! For now though, I have moved onto adding marriage to the game, having hopefully fixed the most serious case.

With marriage, I'm not one to particularly be good at hyping up a given feature so I won't try and do so here. Hopefully it'll be interesting to players the way there's a traditional process and buildup to it that gives a roleplay feel. Then there'll be the way the spouse moves in to your farm and the extra effects that'll lead to. Having children is still a ways away because of the extra art requirements on that, but it's starting to head in that direction. So far it seems to be going ok where I'm mostly placing the broad strokes of it to give a first playable version by the end of the week and, all things going well, something should be playable next week on the experimental build.

In other news, last week marked a year since the Early Access version of the game launched. At the time, I remember thinking that must mean things are getting closer to done and that perhaps a year would see the game completed (though typically our estimates have been off by a factor of two, so I wasn't entirely convinced we would!). Now looking at where things stand, it does feel like the game has come quite a long way in that time but there is still plenty more to go! There's a general rule of thumb I read recently that in life we overestimate a year's progress but underestimate longer periods of time, such as 5 years, so perhaps my new expectation is that the game will certainly be wrapped within 5 years but that each year is going to be making a big difference in the replayability and refinement of the experience.

Last year before the release, there was a constant flow of activity as we busied ourselves with a thousand different tasks in preparation for a near unmovable deadline. It's a time I look back at nostalgically to think of how productive I felt but then at the same time I realise what a burden it had been to cram for and how the months after that initial rush of excitement at the launch fell away to burnout and a general realisation of the long road ahead. That burnout does seem to have faded finally and, as mentioned, it feels like it could be a turning point of maturity on the project that we perhaps might finally be finding a stride at which we can go. Whether that pans out, I guess tune in next year to find out...

As often is the case when I'm in one of these reflective and pensive moods, I mostly feel a damn strong urge to overcome any obstacle. This is undoubtedly the game I'm most proud of working on to date and, as long as I am fortunate to have the ability to, I will keep working to find a way to make it fulfil its potential.





It's been a strange week for me. A few non-Kynseed things are pulling me in multiple directions, so I needed to realign my creativity with the Kynseed vibe. To do so, I browsed through the work I had done so far - including the rejected tracks. And then I found something...

A track I had written that was turned down, but clicked for me this time. There's a region not yet in the game that I suddenly realized this could really fit. I reuploaded it and asked Charlie if he agreed and he did. So a track that would otherwise have gotten lost in the forgotten crevices of fate managed to claw its way from oblivion to a hill overlooking a swamp, where it will be heard by players in the near future.

So I'm glad I took the time to look at all the drafts that didn't make it (yet). Sometimes you might find just the right thing...





After my tale of woe from last issue, I spent much of this week acclimating myself back into a normal work routine. There was a slight sense of jumping back into the deep end though, as I had quite a bit of work to get done with having to get November's update pushed out everywhere.

That said, it's good to be diving back into the work. Plus, now that we managed to make good on our first attempt at adhering to a new monthly update schedule, the team is in high spirits with a sense of confidence that we'll be able to stick to this release rhythm going forward. Monthly updates are something I'd been gently pushing for now and then on the project, but perhaps it's only until now that we've accrued enough experience with working on this particular game within this particular team to feel like we had enough handle on things to publicly commit ourselves to a monthly cycle. (Every game and team is different and the 'rate of development' can vary dramatically for any number of reasons.)

I'll be keeping my update this week a bit short though, as one of the natural side effects of being indisposed for a week or more is that the work sure manages to pile up in one's absence! All that to say, I'm slowly chipping away at a slight backlog of tasks. Thankfully though, whenever the team finds itself in high spirits, I've found this has a knock-on effect of making the work not only speedier but more enjoyable. So with that, I'll see you all again in the next issue!

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These new monthly reports are a result of us wanting to tweak our approach to game updates a bit. In the past, we've only written one of these anytime we've had a big game milestone release (as listed on our roadmap). The only problem we've found with that approach is that the size and complexity of these milestones have been increasing as we go along, meaning that it can take a couple of months or so to get one properly finished. So rather than make everyone go that long without hearing from us or getting their game's build updated, we're going to now start pushing out game build updates and written progress reports once a month. Many of these updates will merely be incremental stepping stones toward the larger milestones and then other times these updates will be for the release of the larger milestones themselves.

(We'll also be updating our development branches every few weeks for those of you keen to try out and give feedback on early developer builds.)

The next major milestone we have ahead is called "Growing Up & Going Out", which we've been casually referring to as the relationship update. Since we last talked, the team has been making some nice strides towards getting this milestone ready. Neal has been adding in many of the initial systems necessary for romancing NPC's, such as new friendship rating parameters as well as programming in specific locations across the world that players can take their dates to. Meanwhile Charlie has been working on NPC dialogue to cover all these new situations and activities that characters can be found in. Plus, he's also been creating the next number of regions in the game world that we'll eventually be opening up. Of course, our environment artist and composer have also been working steadfastly to help with all this as well. Lastly, character artist Gary has been churning out an impressive number of new aging art for not only the world's NPC's but also the playable characters!

Below we have some previews of how all that's been shaping up. Bear in mind much of this is still work-in-progress and isn't necessarily included in the latest build. Rather, it's a fun early peek of some of the new content you can eventually expect in future milestones.

CHANGELOG HIGHLIGHTS

As mentioned above, we're going to start pushing out incremental build updates more frequently as we work towards the larger milestones listed on our roadmap. This month's build update includes a decent handful of new systems that help lay some foundations for the larger elements of the aging and dating focused milestone ahead: "Growing Up & Going Out". Read on below for a few brief highlights taken from the changelog of this month's build update.

Adult Player
After turning 20, you become an adult giving a taller and slightly faster perspective on life.

Dating
Unlocked with adulthood, some of the earliest preliminary dating systems are now in. Eligible NPC's with a friendship rating higher than 'Friendly' can be gifted a 'Rose of Romance' to initiate a date the next day. These involve a few steps that have to be completed before midnight where you get bonus friendship points for doing so. You can expect further changes in subsequent updates as we get feedback and have a chance to refine the experience.

Various Fixes/Improvements
With the above taking a fair share of the last four weeks, the other additions are more general. The 'create task' option has a few more additions for repeated tasks, some new SFX were added to fill in some gaps, and a few areas of UI have been polished for monuments and the end of year screen. There's also been some behind the scenes work encompassing Monogame 3.7 (our engine's code framework) to hopefully resolve a crash, plus there've been ongoing investigations into some reported 'out of memory' issues. (This is a speculative improvement to allow the game to use more memory but if there is an actual leak going on this won't be effective.)

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




That's all from us for this month's development update! For those of you wanting to follow development even more closely, be sure to check out The PixelCount Post, which is our more frequent week to week dev update from the team. Or give us a follow on Twitter to catch screenshots and GIF's of much of our work-in-progress content. As always, we also welcome any feedback and bug reports you have from playing the latest build update.

Thanks folks, we'll see you again next month!

Love,
PixelCount