Kynseed News

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Hello once again and belated Samhain blessings to you all! Just as the rest of the team was recovering from being sick, it seems that your humble editor for The Post was the next to get afflicted. So alas, for the past couple of weeks there was nobody here to write up these development updates. But in the words of Monthy Python:



In that time, the rest of the team has been working along without skipping a beat. Of particular note is that the test branch of the game has been updated with our latest progress as we march ever closer to the "Growing Up & Going Out" update, which we casually refer to as the relationship update. We've also revealed our first glimpse of character art for the adult versions of the player, brillianty drawn and animated by character artist Gary. You can check them out yourself further down.

Lastly, as we've mentioned for a few issues, we're going to start releasing monthly game updates (and changelogs) alongside written progress reports. We'll be posting these in the usual places of course, with the next one being later this week if all goes to plan.

Though for now, feel free to read on below for a look at what the team's been getting up to these past couple of weeks, and we'll see you again soon!





Bit of an up and down week or two with days of struggle then bursts of creative energy. I find I am energised when art and music/sound come in, or when I see new features getting into the build. My focus has been on mapping out Woemarsh in Visio to get it ready to start blocking out ingame. I've also been sorting out Mellowfields, tweaking the Goddess Statue design, and starting to do dialogue for NPC backstories to add more depth to their characters.

I find a lot of time is also spent on our various forums and Twitter, checking for questions or feedback and trying to drum up support. As a little game with a little team, we need to raise every sail on the ship and even use our handkerchiefs if need be to catch every breeze to help us move forwards. The wishlists have been steady and pretty good every day for a while now, so it is very encouraging. A couple of new reviews have really bouyed us up too - so if you havent done one, we'd appreciate it!

As mentioned, I've also been doing a ton of dialogue for every NPC. The reason to do this is to give them more backstory/personality that you can unlock as you gain friendship with them. Each NPC currently has 3 chunks, and on top of that they have a reaction to a family member passing away. These will last for a season to give you a chance to read them. Some NPC's may also comment now and then when a bond was particularly strong.

We want the world of Quill not to be a dark depressing place, so death is treated as just a stepping stone to a new life. Quillians may miss a loved one, but they are mostly upbeat about it and death holds no fears for them. They are united and strong in their beliefs and live a life where the biggest worry is if an apple has a worm in it. Although in Herbert Lemon's case, he thinks it's a bonus.









These last two weeks has been a strange tale of ups and downs with a side order of pondering how to know what the best thing to do is. For instance, knowing when to check messages or websites when it is all too convenient to do it all the time or not at all. There is a choice at times of when to connect and communicate where it turns out helpful versus the alternative where that information derails plans in unexpected ways. As best as I can work out it's all about control and good timing, but also making sure to not let external events unduly influence plans that typically serve a greater long term purpose!

Anyway, to keep it mostly game related I've been continuing work mainly on the dating side of relationships while also working on a separate branch that upgrades us to Monogame 3.7 to attempt to resolve some crash issues. The latter is now available in a test branch with the known issues taken care of! The former has proven a bit of a struggle because it is straining the existing systems for NPC's further than before. In particular, there's the system of how their behaviours work which for now I've just kept relatively simple but do feel like it might be a future source of concern. The other aspect of it is the way following works in the game...

There have been ongoing issues with following for a while and while it wasn't too large a problem to gameplay (like having a following animal get stuck or act strangely), NPC's following for a date are a much bigger concern because the whole gameplay centers around them being there! I've spent a good few days investigating issues and attempting some fixes with varying success. Oddly the most effective fixes seem to be the simple ones where just a value tweak can somehow make the difference between them following in a straight line and going all over the place! Interestingly, looking at how other games do it shows how often the solutions employed are to simplify the action (such as the way JRPG's have characters follow in a conga line or even hide them from view).

Bringing this back to the idea of 'the best thing to do' in this case, I've realised that what I most need to do is put together a test level along with various scenarios that can be automated to replay and allow me to see the issues play out and compare how different solutions work. Getting to that idea wasn't easy and didn't even come about from sitting at the computer working on it! Instead, it was more something that played out in my subconscious to later appear a couple of unexpected times (appearing in my mind while half asleep at night and then after waking in the morning and while out on a walk).

I suspect the pattern to take here is one of needing to research a problem as much as possible, then take a breather from it, and then provided it is embedded in the mind enough it'll get processed in the background to pop out later on. The next step is then acting on that plan which I will be getting started on today!





Having rejoined the modern era after another medieval festival where I did percussion, the constant barrage of social media hits like a ton of bricks. During the festival I had no internet access and honestly, I rather liked it! It's so easy to overlook just how much time and energy goes to keeping up with social media. So I've decided to try a social media diet of sorts, only allowing myself access to things like Twitter at set hours of the day. It definitely helps. Keeping a rigid schedule in general is very useful too.

So now it's back to creating sound effects for me, which remains a very diverse thing to do. From the sound of opening a letter to the sound of discovering a new proverb. There are now a lot of sounds in the game that essentially boil down to the player gaining something or growing in some way. Thus I'm trying to create patterns among them that are consistent, so I incorporate leitmotivs into them. It only works with abstract sound effects though - sounds that represent something that doesn't make an actual sound, like discovering something new or exchanging a gift. It does mean that I have to keep coming up with new ways of orchestrating the same leitmotif. Luckily, there are literally countless ways of doing so.

Recently, I also had to redo a sound effect I did a long time ago. What happened is this:

Ages ago I made a sound for when you complete a task, back before I upgraded the samples I was working with when I was still using an older program. Back then tasks were only ever automatically given to you at the start of your day. But things keep changing in the game and one of those changes is that you can now also accept a task elsewhere. I wanted the sound for accepting a task and for completing one to sound 'related' in a way, so I examined the sound for completing a task and discovered I had never updated it to the new samples. Since the file it was made in was using an older program I essentially had to make it again from scratch.

That's not the worst thing in the world for a 3 second sound, but it showed me how things you do at the beginning of a project can still come back at any time later on. So it's good to future proof things. It also shows in little things like how the file was named originally: "Task Complete.wav". Since then I've been using a different guideline for naming files, so the new one is named "TaskComplete.wav". Now the sounds for both accepting a task and completing it form a harmonic progression together. Two aspects of one larger thing.





My goodness, what a crazy past couple of weeks its been on my side of things. In a nutshell, I ended up getting hit with a particularly weird sickness which resulted in me actually deciding to go to the doctor, something you'd normally have to twist my arm to do. (Though as Charlie reminded me earlier today, breaking my arm would probably do it too.)

Long story short, the vision in one of my eyes took a surprising and rapid turn for the worst, to the point that I was almost unable to see out of it! It ended up being a particularly rare eye inflammation of some kind, which thankfully got treated and is now back to normal. But essentially this meant I was pretty limited in what work I could do, as any work I did required squinting with one eye closed.

Naturally I asked what could've caused the weird inflammation and frustratingly the doc said it could happen for any number of reasons. They said one potential cause could be excessive eye strain due to too much uninterrupted screen time. *cough* And another potential cause could be going too long without sleep. *cough* (Maybe I should get that cough looked at while I'm at it.)

All that to say, I don't have much to report on from my end of things for this update, but I'm back in the saddle as of this week and anxious to jump into work again. That's something Neal and I were talking about a few days ago, in fact: it's one thing to take time off from working on the game, but it's quite another to be unable to work on the game. With the latter recently being the case for me, it's made me really itching to get back to work with some renewed focus (no pun intended). So in a way I guess that's a silver lining of the whole thing, though perhaps I'll try to squeeze in a few more screen breaks now and then...

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It's been an unorthodox past couple of weeks for us here on the team, but things are slowly returning back to some semblance of normalcy. About a week ago Charlie was suddenly hit with a bout of sickness, leading the rest of the team to insisting he take some days off to recoup (and mildly chastising him when he still snuck online to do work). At the same time, our illustrious musical maestro was off helping out with a fun side project at a medieval music festival in which there's no internet connect for miles. (The horror!) So we figured we'd wait to do a new issue of The Post 'til there was more of us around, hence us being a bit off schedule with this issue. Thankfully Charlie is back in action and although our musician is still away, we expect him back very soon.

Regarding game progress, things have been clicking along despite the above mentioned schedule wonkiness. The most notable bit of progress to mention is that in recent weeks Neal, our programmer, has had laser focus adding in the adult player art into the game as well as preparing the game's dating systems. This is a rather large undertaking in fact, as it means that Neal has to go through and replace every instance of the current player's assets and animations of the twins as youngin's and swap them all out for their adult counterparts - all whilst ensuring this doesn't break anything along the way. The team expects we'll be doing quite a bit of testing in the days and weeks ahead!

Also, as mentioned in the last issue, we're looking to tweak our approach to game updates a bit. In addition to the more frequent written updates of The PixelCount Post, we've also been doing larger written updates anytime we release one of the major milestones listed on the roadmap. The only problem we've found with this approach is that, depending on the size and complexity of the roadmap milestone, some may take a couple of months or so to get finished. So to help keep the pace up and to make sure folks are adequately updated in the meantime, we're going to start pushing out game updates as well as written games-focused progress reports once a month. This will mean that some game updates will be incremental in nature - aka, a stepping stone toward one of the larger titled milestones of the roadmap (like "Growing Up & Going Out, which is the next milestone ahead).

If any of the above seems a bit rambly, the main gist of it is this: The Post will continue to be our casual week to week devlog, plus we're now also doing monthly game updates and progress reports. Sometimes a monthly update will be for a big roadmap milestone, while other monthly updates will be a stepping stone toward a big roadmap milestone. Long story short: your game will be getting updated a bit more frequently now.

(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.)





Been a huge relief to get back into the levels this past week after having a couple of weeks of a bad throat and being generally unwell and tired. A good rest and time away from the game helped and once the creative juices got going again, things flowed pretty well.

As I was making the Mellowfields levels, I realised that a couple of them were quite small in regards to exploration, and Neal confirmed that. Sometimes it is easy to lose sight of where you are, so it is good to identify issues and solve them. I often create a rough layout and will chop and change it until my instinct tells me it feels right. I have no real pre-planned maps, but I do have the game stored in my head and work off that. (Making maps on paper often feels to me like a falsehood...it is fine for rough layouts, but you need to be in and walking around to really experience the feel.)

It maybe doesn't sound like a great way to work, but my levels have always been organic and 'messy'...quite amateur in many respects, but because I live and breathe in them, they come to life with detail and character. I would hope our artists go over the levels later and tidy up where assets were badly used and so on, so they will still be subject to changes right up until the end.

The creation of the levels was helped by some great new assets coming in and they can often really tie the room together. During the making of Fable 2, Brightwood was stopped and started 9 times before it became what it became. Wraithmarsh, arguably my favourite region (tied with Snowglobe and the intro level for Fable Legends), underwent 6 iterations. If I had my time again, I would make it way better.

We can always look to improve, so I'm just glad I am back in the hungry mood to mess around and get my hands dirty giving form to the land of Quill.





The last two weeks have been a bit of a blur. In stops and starts, work is progressing on the next update as life happens, as I get to grips with the next update requirements, and as I also play catchup on issues in the wild. Something I've been thinking about lately is the method to madness that comes about in that process. Especially in the last week where I've had productive spells that very freely come and go.

I've been sticking with my aims for each day by quantifying the outcome in terms of more achievable results. So instead of expecting to have completed a whole section of a feature, I'll split it up to spend a few hours on it to see how it goes in parallel with other important aspects (so results measured in focused time spent). This leads to some days that feel full with little to show as conclusively done, but that there is progress made and it is slowly reaching that point where it comes together. Little by little it should all add up to something good!

This also ties in with last time's mention of a new plan with updates. Our new intention is to have a more regular pattern that allows builds to come through at a faster pace than 'when it's all ready' for a roadmap milestone, while still allowing some quality control. At this moment I've been working on UI bits, workflow, importing the adult player character art and how that fits ingame, along with dating for relationships and looking into some intermittent crashes and out of memory problems that seem to finally be getting somewhere in the investigation stage.

This bubbling pot of activity, if looked at right now, might be a bit mad with how unconnected they are - but there is method to it in that it genuinely allows more steady progress than the straight path of one at a time might! As usual, I better head back to that assortment of ideas and advance them all that little bit closer. Wish you all a good week!





Note from the Editor: Our musician friend is currently away on a medieval festival adventure, providing his services as a merry traveling drummer. He shall no doubt return soon with tales of his travels. - Matt





It's been a bit of an unusual past couple of weeks between team members being out for various reasons (Tice being away for a project and Charlie being under the weather). When you work on such a small team, it's a bit surprising how noticeable even one team member's absence can be, let alone two. Things get a bit quieter around the virtual office of our team's Discord server and there's fewer voice chat meetings to be had. Though one obvious benefit to this is that it gives the rest of us an opportunity to bury our heads into the work and focus exclusively on our immediate tasks, completely uninterrupted.

I feel like this has been particularly handy for Neal, who's been slowly going through and adding in all the adult player assets into the game. Hearing Neal describe the work makes it all sound a bit tedious, as there's simply so many player asset tiles to add into the game for all the various situations. As always, I continue to be impressed with the myriad of things Neal has to tend to in the code. It boggles my mind to think about how Kynseed's engine is the work of a sole programmer.

Meanwhile, art has been churning out quite a bit of new content in recent weeks. Gary has moved on from making adult versions of the players to making different age versions of NPC's, which are shaping up very nicely. He's also been creating a number of side characters, ranging from a frightening monster to the more friendly (if not occasionally grumpy) Pott the Brounie.

That said, when it comes to game development, it's very typical (if not necessary) for the creation of art to outpace how quickly code can implement art. This makes logical sense given the nature of these two departments, but it does unfortunately mean that many times Gary will be working on something that won't be ready for implementing until quite some time from now. We still like to give sneak peeks as we can though, so every now and then I'll create a GIF like below to give a glimpse of what's to come in future updates.



This is Pott the Brounie, a sharp tongued goblin who will show up sometime after the game's Prologue to live on your farm and help look after things. He'll help keep things tidy and will even make sure your kids are looked after. He can also be talked to for pieces of advice, to check on the status of certain things, or even to learn about different stories of the Fae. Just be sure to feed him offerings now and then, cause otherwise he'll get unhappy and he won't be shy in saying so!

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Last week we pushed out the "In-Between" update. For those reading these weekly dev logs, you'll know that this update was a slight detour from our intended roadmap destination. Instead, we went back and polished up some existing features before pressing onward into new update territory. This resulted in a sort of 'in-between' update, though we still managed to pack in quite a few new bits whilst polishing old bobs. So head on over and read the update announcement for all the details.

Since pushing out the update, the team spent the remaining time last week focused mainly on two things: addressing feedback/bugs for the update and planning out details for the relationship update. For the latter, something we've been considering is releasing smaller incremental updates as we work towards the bigger 'named' updates (aka, the ones specifically listed on the roadmap). So rather than waiting for only the big updates, there'd instead be a more consistent flow of smaller updates that will lead up to the big updates. We're still working out the exact timing we want to commit to, but think something along the lines of monthly updates, with our development branches being more frequent than that even. Alongside each update we'd share a changelog like usual, plus a brief progress report on how the next bigger update is coming along and how development is going in general.

No doubt one of the benefits of being a small team is the freedom to be agile and make small course adjustments like this as we go. The first few days of this next week we'll pin down specifics on the above as well as put together our final plans for the relationship update. By Wednesday we'll be kicking off work on the relationship update proper, and we look forward to letting you know how it all goes when we talk again next week!









Rather than fill in another 'I worked on the same stuff as last week' post, I thought I would share out some lore, facts, and such from in the game. So here are 6 Goddesses that watch over Quill. These are:

Druida - Goddess of Orchards
Naida - Goddess of Fertility
Freyl - Goddess of Fields
Morwenna - Goddess of Beasts
Hyalis - Goddess of Death and Rebirth
Aurore - Goddess of Seasons

There are also 2 other deities that are revered: Solnir (God of the Sun), and Luminos (God of the Moon). Additionally, the days of the week in Quill are:

Moonsday Truthsday Woesday Turnsday Freylsday Satyrday Solsday

Each of these days will eventually affect certain actions done on those days. (Crops have a better chance of having an extra star when harvested on Freylsday, for example). There are also 4 Fae realms accessible from Quill, which are:

Tir Na Nog - Home of Gnomes and Fairies
E'ergreen - Home of Dryads, Mossmen, Pucks, and Green Children
Briar - Home of Fel (hare and fox tricksters/shape-changers)
Voide - Home of the Shimmerkyn

That's it for now! More next week, unless the ransom is paid.





A continued theme of odd weeks following last week's eventual completion of the recent "In-Between" update! Releasing an update tends to be a rather busy time with game development (or at least it is with our style of development which is to be working on it until the last hour or so before release). Trying to finish any last minute improvements while fixing bugs and in some ways hoping and praying that any changes will not create new issues that slip past testing due to a much tighter window 'til the release. We are, I hope, getting better at this with practice and trying to adjust based on learnings from update release to release!

With the update released, there's then the nervous anticipation of what reactions will be. Will it all be good or will something not work? Will there be a blocking crash? Will players be happy with changes or prefer the old version? It's a scary and exciting situation to be in because the possibilities are endless and you can never be quite sure what will pop up. Nor when it will pop up, because sometimes you might catch players at the right time to try an update but other times (like perhaps now) there's so many new games appearing that trying an update for our game might be lower down the priority list of some players.

Then once the aftermath of the release is done and any immediate issues get fixed, then attention starts turning to the next update and starting the cycle all over again. I've been trying to use these moments as a point for a bit of more reflection lately. Moving back from the details and figuring out what went right or could go better next time is a very valuable piece of information that oftentimes gets a bit lost in the flow of whatever that next urgent pressing task is. I think what we're coming round to is looking at ways to have more consistency in our process, to find ways that control this cycle a bit better when previously we've let it be dictated by the size of the roadmap update. By focusing more on delivering updates at a consistent pace in time, then we have more opportunities to release fixes to issues as we go and more times where we can reflect and adjust our aim as necessary.

I dunno if the above makes that much sense or not from an outsider perspective and, in a way, I'm writing it to try and understand more myself! I guess I'm just trying to share how releasing an update feels and how the feeling comes up of wanting to continuously improve based on it. With this game there is lots more to learn right now because there is lots more of it to make! So with that in mind, I'll leave it here for now to get back to that work and wish you all a good week!





The relationship update is coming next! I have tracks waiting in secret aching to become part of the public build. Tracks I've been wanting to show you all that can now finally be implemented! I see goals listed on our Trello board (aka, our task manager) referring to the regions I've written for already and I get all excited!

It doesn't happen often for me that I have to keep work secret for a long time. It's quite a grueling experience to be honest! Once I've finished a track, or often even long before that, I want to share it with everyone! I want to get feedback on it and to know what people think of it! But often now I have tracks sitting on my hard drive for quite some time before most people ever hear them.

So if in the future you're running through a place called Mellowbrook, or the Whispering Path, or Outlane, and many more, you'll know that the music there has been waiting patiently to be heard. And right then and there it finally gets to do what it was made to do: to reach you, and possibly affect you. Which I hope it does!





I spent the majority of last week getting caught up on all manner of things that had been piling up. One was getting these issues of The Post current, as we'd developed a backlog of issues that needed posting due to changes around the Steam site (which I share more info on in the last issue). The short version is that the new Steam site has a different way of formatting news text and images, so I had to reformat the text I'd been using for these issues as well as all the theming images I use. Thankfully by Tuesday I had gotten all caught up on that.

The next thing I had to prepare was the announcement for the "In-Between" update to get pushed out on Wednesday. These are generally quick to write up, but they still require a handful of images and GIF's to give them some flavour - all of which take a bit of time to make, of course. Plus, I have to format the announcement three different ways as I post it on three different platforms (our forums, our Steam news page, and Kickstarter). That doesn't include all the supplementary places I post as well, such as our Twitter or our Discord.

Remainder of the week (Thursday and Friday) was spent taking in feedback on the update and forming next plans with the team (the latter of which is mentioned more in The Short Report above). All said, it feels good to have gotten caught up on those and other tasks that had been piling up. This'll give me a slightly clearer schedule for this upcoming week when we kick things off with a more frequent incremental update release schedule as well as beginining exlusive work on the relationship update, which I imagine I'm probably looking forward to just as much as the rest of you! Drop by again next week and I'm sure we'll be happy to ramble all about how it goes.

Howdy there Seedlings. Things have been stirring in the depths of the castle, as we've just completed work on a sort of 'in-between' update!

For those of you who've been following along with us in The PixelCount Post (our weekly dev log), you've likely been reading about how we recently found ourselves taking a step back to look at the game thus far and realising some elements we added in the early days were in need of revisiting. Namely: improving player purpose, better pacing, refined feature introductions, and overall quality of life improvements.

This was a bit of an unscheduled stop on our roadmap, as originally we planned to dive straight into the relationships update next. No doubt our first pass of relationship features will be an important leg of our journey, which is why we wanted to make sure we had a solid foundation to build atop it first. In fact, some of the things we improved in this current update were things that had been relatively unchanged since the prototype days, and the game's done quite a bit of growing since then!






Those of you lurking around our forums may have noticed the presence of a Developer Branch thread. For those unfamiliar with 'branches', they're a bit like a specific game update channel you can subscribe to and change at any time. There's our main branch of course (which is the default everyone starts with), and then we have two development branches. The main branch is reserved for only our more cohesive and stable of builds, but the other branches are good for anyone wanting to follow development more closely.

Development branches do get updated more frequently as well, but the caveat is they'll be less stable. We recommend development branches for any players interested in getting their hands dirty with ever-changing builds while working with us closely to give feedback. Just hop over to the thread above to read all the details.

On a similar note, keen-eyed community members may have also noticed that our roadmap has been updated with new subsequent updates to come. We've also begun putting general status indicators into the 'entire journey' section to give a feel for where various elements of the game are at. Though there is undoubtedly much work still ahead, the game is continuing to get ever-closer to that point of shaping up and fully blossoming.

Speaking of, we look forward to updating that section of the roadmap in the days ahead to reflect today's new build. For being an impromptu update, there's a fair bit that's been packed into it. Read onward for a casual overview, or click the changelog link down below for the big beefy list of everything.

• Further developed Goddess offering with an updated system, UI, and SFX
  
• Gift to each of the 6 Goddesses during the week and on the last day of the week you can assign 'grace' (which can offer boons)
  
• Failing to give sufficient offerings over time will incur a negative grace, which will lead to curses if not careful
  
• Not all boons/curses are added as yet and are marked 'TBD' if not yet implemented

• Many tasks can now be set as 'active'
  
• Where applicable, this will mark it on the world map with a location
  
• Pressing F1 or Clicking Left Stick will trigger the 'Thatterway', a magical sparkling trail that'll point the way to go
  
• (Though this might not always be the shortest route, as many shortcuts are hidden all over the world!)
  
• Using the Thatterway is of course entirely optional for those of you who prefer exploring without such aids (looking at you Fable gold trail)

• The beginnings of the noticeboard are in place
  
• Delivery box to drop off task or gift items for each household
  
• Initial setup to start receiving letters via mailbox
  
• Pet whistle to summon or dismiss owned pets (very handy!)
  
• Added the 'Wottyzit', a small faery that draws your attention to new interactive elements and then flies away
  
• Reworked the game's Prologue to provide additional tasks and to better pace out the introduction of new features
  
• Nearly all tasks carry over after the Prologue to make for a less abrupt transition
  
• Various UI additions and polish
  
• Additional engine improvements and bug fixes of all sorts (see link below)
  
• For a complete look at all changes, check out the full changelog

A huge thank you, as always, to all our supporters for helping make this impromptu update happen. We hope you are as excited as us to continue along this game development journey together, with our sights set firmly on the relationship update ahead. Though for now we must raise the drawbridge, hole up in our laboratories, and begin cooking up our next concoction (aka, update). Talk again soon!

Love,
PixelCount

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Hello there! We're finally back to our regularly scheduled programming this week. As some of you have likely noticed, over the last couple of weeks Steam pushed out some updates to its site and desktop client which introduced a brand new way of posting news items such as these. Steam libraries on the desktop client have been undergoing some changes as well. However, this did have the effect of breaking all our images and formatting for issues of The Post as well as our roadmap on Steam, so Matt's been spending the last few weeks getting everything fixed back up for the new Steam layout. So today you may be seeing a small backlog of a couple of issues posted at the same time, as we wanted to make sure we didn't skip any - due diligence and all that.

In fact, you may want to keep your eyes peeled for another news item to get posted within mere hours of this one. That's because we're happy to report that there's a new update now available! For those who have been following along, you may remember this was a bit of an impromptu update that we felt was important to sneak in before we began dedicated work on the relationship update. We've been casually calling it 'The In-Between Update' and it's allowed us to do some important work that had been piling up on the side.

Although this update wasn't a planned pitstop on our roadmap, we're pretty happy with the amount of polish we've been able to add to existing systems and we've even managed to pack in a few new things while we were at it. All in all, this update will help give us a nice solid foundation to add atop for the relationship update and well beyond. So be sure to look for the proper announcement to drop a few hours from now with all the details!





A slow week really that was up and down, mainly due to my acute sinusitis playing merry hell. When I managed to get going, I started writing piles of dialogue that NPC's may say in various situations. So these are things like: player riding a pig, player owning a shop, player with high rep, weather related comments, reactions to tools, pranks, player absence, age, and so on. (With variants for unfriendly and friendly NPC's.)

We want the game to feel full of life and get away from the RPG cliche of NPC's stood in one spot repeating the same lines. This is where the Fable influence and our Lionhead heritage come in. Neal and I dream of PixelCount having that same Lionhead spirit and eccentricity - and maybe even one day attracting that same amazing talent (we would love to work with some old Lions again). Lionhead was a home to me, but without its death Kynseed would never have been born.

So here we are, fulfilling our dream with the incredible support of our backers. We may fail (hopefully not!), but it would not be for lack of effort. We're pouring everything into this project and we're eternally grateful to have the chance to do it. And best of all, I get to write a stupid amount of references and daft jokes. Lionhead lives on within those words.





It's been an odd week again where the first half was flipped in an odd direction (too much concentrating on polish details of the UI) compared to the second half from Wednesday with the team chat being a pivot point. This time around though we made sure with the team chat to actually come up with a plan that covered the next week! It sounds common sense but it is remarkably easy to get trapped in trains of thought and patterns that stop common sense taking hold. So the plan is to finish the build this week, whereas last week was spent on final polish and additions (plus leaving a few days to bug fix and polish as time permitted).

I had a similar common sense revelation the next day when I was in the midst of the remaining work. So part of the current update is about improving the Prologue with additional content and improving its flow - this had been written up into multiple design documents to go through. On the day while I was working through it, I was still caught up in the details and working in a linear fashion through those docs. Luckily I managed to pause myself for a quick break before diving into the Prologue's Day 4 work and on coming back to it realised how I'd completely forgotten to actually break down what work there was left!

After spending an hour and a bit on that, I then had a list of the exact specifics remaining to do and could start rearranging it to be more efficient (grouping together similar tasks and seeing where I might need to ask questions). Within the next few days, I've been able to work much better without having to jump my thoughts around as much because I can just pick up where I left off.

As I'm still in the midst of work to wrap up the build update while typing this, I'm going to leave it at that for today and wish you all a good week!





I'm escaping modern life this weekend! I cast out technology! Be gone, mobile phones! Away, computers! Leave my sight! I'm going back to the way things were in the 15th century!

As it happens, I've got a weekend coming up where I play percussion at a medieval festival. It's a great way to get my head into a new space and gain some inspiration. I usually come back both tired and refreshed at the same time. Plus lately, a couple of non-Kynseed things have been pulling me in several directions at once. Some Gregorian music here, some brass band music there, even some voice work.

I don't consider them distractions though, as they come in quite handy usually. A different angle of looking at things that come back in ways I don't always expect in whatever other project I'm doing, Kynseed included. You can see this quite clearly with the bard's music in the tavern, which is very obviously inspired by medieval lute playing.

Though for now, I say goodbye to the internet and delve into a time when video games did not exist!





While the rest of the team put the finishing touches on the latest build update, I spent the last couple of weeks working with the new Steam update and creating new images for it. You'd be surprised how many assets are needed to make up a store page for a game, and with the new Steam look rolling out this meant that I had to go back and remake many of our store assets from scratch to fit the new store page requirements and dimensions.

Sometimes this meant something as simple as cropping an image to a new or different resolution. Other times it meant creating brand new assets that we didn't have made up until now (such as our Steam library image, which I think turned out rather nicely). Working with pixel art is all the trickier too, because many times it's not as simple as resizing an image to fit a new dimension requirement. With pixel art, if you're not careful, resizing the image can lead to a sort of blurring of pixels and they'll end up losing that pixel 'crispness'. So it's sometimes a bit of a dance trying to resize pixel art while always maintaining a crisp resolution.

When not reworking our media assets for Steam's new look, I've been reworking our text. Things like our roadmap use some pretty elaborate formatting and some fancy trickery to get it to all look how I like. For example, Steam doesn't have any way to center items in a news post. However, I do know that Steam's maximum width for news posts was 622px wide. So if I had a 500px image that I wanted to center, all I had to do was add 61px of transparency on both sides and this would create a sort of feaux-center. Yet with the new Steam changes, news posts have gone from 622px wide to 800px wide, meaning that anything that I centered previously is now just a little off-center to the left.

In danger of boring you all with pixel-based math, the short version of all this is that I had a fair bit of tedious media asset work keeping me busy as of late. There's still more to be done, but the brunt of it all is complete at least. Thankfully my role on the team here is precisely for times like this in which I step in to assist with production-based matters such as these (among other things) so that the rest of the team can continue to work uninterrupted on the game. That said, I'm rather looking forward to a change of pace next week with a bit of video editing and soundtrack work!