Swords 'n Magic and Stuff News

Hey everyone. While the update went pretty smooth and we only had a few major hiccups, there were definitely still hiccups.

So here's a little patch to address the biggest issues. There are definitely some cosmetic issues we're still working out, but wanted to streamline the important ones to make sure your gameplay wasn't hindered much longer.

Patch Notes:

Improved:

• Changed the Elderwood Planks to automatically unlock at level 21 rather than 25
  
• Warner no longer hides behind a cow
  
• The windmill in the Farmlands has better camera collisions
  

Fixed:

• A bug with a certain important enemy not moving when spawned has been fixed
  
• The Thorned Staff replacing items in your inventory is now fixed
  
• Tanglewort is now collectable again
  
• Changed Elderwood weapon recipes to match the level of the weapon
  
• Typos
  
• Certain items in the Eyre were purchasable before you had reputations; added the reputation requirement
  
• Removed a mask from collections that wasn’t supposed to be there
  
• Honeysuckle asks to clear the village of the right mob now
  
• Ivy takes the items she needs from you for the quest
  
• Can no longer go under the world
  
• Can no longer squeeze through the gate
  
• Egret takes the correct amount of items
  
• Millie now does want an omelet from everyone, not just people she hasn’t talked to before
  
• Removed red debug lines in Chillthorn Hollow
  
• Removed architect items from the carpentry table
  
• Reading the correct book in the library now advances the Graveyard questline
  
• Ross now feels the pain of all weapons, not just bows
  
• Acid splash potions no longer give you random blank items
  
• Ice Cave quest can now be completed as normal
  
• Ore node in wasp cave moved to be obtainable
  
• Stolen Toy quest can now be completed as normal
  
• Damaged Weapon quest can now be completed as normal
  
• Spider check-up quest can now be completed as normal
  
• Fey Iron Shield no longer takes an absurd amount of materials to craft
  
• Various dialogs improved
  
• Archer Crypt fixes to get the rewards at the end
  
• Corruption zones should be respawning/spawning appropriately now with minor bugs still left to fix
  

Welcome to the Windless Woods update!

We're beyond excited to share this new zone with everyone. There are so many new mechanics and features that went into this zone. First and foremost: a complete revamp of our magic system. It still needs some tweaks, but it feels great to be a magic user now.

With this update, any staff or wand that you had will be converted to the new staff or wand in your inventory automatically. One staff and one wand will convert to their new counterparts plus a tome that you would have gotten by doing that quest originally. There is no need to go back on a new character to get these. A secondary point to the staff/wand change, if you have these items in your collections, please remove them and re-add them to their new spot in the collections. We will be removing the old items out of your collections in the coming months so if you do not convert them now, when they are removed from collections you will no longer have access to that old item.

With this update we're also releasing dedicated servers! This means you can have an always-up server hosted wherever you like for you and your friends to join. To get your hands on these you can get them from the Tools section of your Steam library. If you need help with dedicated servers we've opened a new forum channel in our Discord channel just for this. Here's the link: discord.gg/kindredgames

And without further ado, here's those patch notes you've been waiting for! Thanks for all your patience and support throughout this update. It's a big one!


Patch notes:
New:

• A whole new zone has opened up: The Windless Woods, which can be reached from the Farmlands.
  
• Main quest storyline spanning the entire Windless Woods.
  
• Completely new magic system featuring spell tomes which can be channeled via staves and wands.
  
• All magic tomes added throughout the world, including vendor inventories and loot tables.
  
• 30+ new quests.
  
• 50+ new weapons.
  
• New resources and crafting recipes to learn.
  
• Max level increased for all skills to level 30.
  
• New crops, new food & drink, and new associated cooking recipes.
  
• New alchemy reagents and potions.
  
• New housing blueprints and furniture.
  
• New hats, masks, trinkets, outfits and tailoring blueprints added all through the world.
  
• New companion to find and hatch.
  
• New mounts to unlock.
  
• New enemies throughout the woods.
  
• A variety of new traps to keep you on your toes.
  
• New puzzle and quest mechanics.
  
• Brand new vanity pets system, with one pet to discover and more in the pipeline.
  
• Game credits available at the Groves of Heroes. Kickstarter backers, keep an eye out for your names!
  
• Dedicated servers are now available via Steam.
  
• Chat commands to see what server you are in (/server)and password (/server show) then to copy use (/server copy).
  
• On owned properties, you now have the option to hide property markers to get rid of those wood posts on the corners.
  
• New arrow type added to the Boom Shop in Ramshackle Reef, back on Azura Island.
  
• Server name now shows up in the pause menu.
  
• The mystery of where the milk comes from has been solved.
  
• Millie in the Farmlands would sure love an omelet.
  
• Two new stalls in Moonberry Farms.
  
• New vendor UI to facilitate buying multiple items at once. No more smashing F!
  
• Visibility toggle for hats, masks and backpacks.
  

Improved:

• Performance improvements.
  
• Magic weapon items moved to our new magic system.
  
• Map overhaul - added world map view, zooming, panning, and the ability to see zones other than the one you're presently in.
  
• Overhaul of job boards to give more varied, interesting and fair jobs + rewards.
  
• You can now heal companions with the new healing staves.
  
• Adjusted alchemy for better balance. Every potion now takes two reagents.
  
• Adjusted Maple Planks and Darkwood Planks to not be a level 0. Adjusted furniture and weapons to match new levels (10 and 15 respectively).
  
• Maple Logs and Darkwood Logs prices decreased to not lose money when crafting.
  
• Moved Ancient Artifact from the chest in cave to its own pedestal for easier finding.
  
• Changed Matt’s dialog to reflect alchemy changes.
  
• Removed Blacksmithing station from Rayna on Castaway Rock to not overwhelm new players.
  
• Closed off the path to the big crabs from the landing zone from Castaway Rock to help players stay focussed.
  
• Camera view through trees enlarged for better visibility.
  
• Charge + aiming down sights on ranged weapons is improved.
  
• Updated mount icons in stable.
  
• Josie in Hope Harbor now gives more information on starting farming and gives out some seeds for players to get started.
  
• Astral Wolves now drop Stardust.
  
• Sleepy Hill House Plot and Sleepy Exterior Plot (the one by the river) are slightly bigger in size.
  
• All housing plots got a bump in max build height.
  
• Camera zoom sensitivity and mouse sensitivity both have their own settings to adjust.
  
• Seals in Ramshackle now sells Iron Arrows and the recipe for them.
  
• Increased all backpack slots for all backpacks.
  
• Changed 9 food items stats to include new buffs for max mana and mana regeneration.
  
• Various Ramshackle Reef quest reputations have adjusted for more consistency (each being 10 reputation). Max reputation is still 100; no quests were added here.
  
• Storage furniture items have all been increased to 5 (other than presents) for more storage.
  
• Katherine in Ramshackle made new housing plans to sell.
  
• Sleepy Haven Tailor shop has two new hats.
  
• All placeable storage chests sizes have been increased!
  
• Hal in Ramshackle now sells a new item.
  
• Our “friendly” rock golem will now respawn at 7am daily.
  
• Adjusted exp rates for combat skill leveling.
  
• No longer deal damage to harvestable resources .
  
• Boom Barrels only explode enemies and ore nodes.
  
• Arachnophobia mode, toggleable from settings menu.
  
• Camera zoom sensitivity setting added.
  

Fixed

• An issue where being banned from a server caused the game to freeze.
  
• Coal is no longer sold or obtainable; the job quest requesting coal has been adjusted.
  
• A building in the graveyard has thicker pillars to prevent people hiding in them.
  
• Admin Ban list showing character’s name and not the Steam name.
  
• Joining a multiplayer session via Steam friends no longer freezes the game if you are on different versions; now shows reason you couldn’t join.
  
• Screen will no longer get darker while using the options menu in the main menu after pressing spacebar.
  
• Admin panel for moderators can now show Steam names.
  
• Your trusty turtle mount no longer turns blue in the blue slime zones.
  
• Various terrain splits seen with low graphics settings.
  
• Deep Iron Dagger now displays properly while equipped.
  
• When a player leaves your server, it no longer displays the wrong name.
  
• Removed a duplicated Azura Mushroom.
  
• Removed stone diagonal wall piece and floor piece from carpentry; these should only be available in the architect’s table.
  
• Goblins no longer scare players through walls.
  
• Various special chests now have sounds indicating they are locked and require a special key.
  
• Buying the dirt plots at Moonberry Farms are now much easier to do.
  
• Changing mouse sensitivity to 0 no longer disables mouse; can only go down to 0.1.
  
• Removed ability to upgrade ferry as it wasn’t properly saving.
  
• All stablemasters give saddles and whistles and sell companion snacks.
  
• Items that are dropped on the ground no longer disappear when your view distance is set to low.
  
• Adjusted how chests throughout the Farmlands randomize and spawn.
  

Happy Friday, friends!

We're less than a week away from this huge update! We've got a lot of bug fixing in the works and still more to do. Before I dive into that, I wanted to talk about our community play session that happened last weekend.



We had so many people jump in and out and play. We got these awesome group photos of when we had the most people in game. I almost finished up my outfit collections, but I at least know what I'm missing now. Weapons are a whole different story. I was also able to get some quests done that I hadn't gotten to yet and the community helped each other finish their goals as well. It was such a fun event and I'm so excited for our next one after this update. It's September 24th at 11am PST. All details are on our discord. Hope to see you all there!

Other exciting news: we launched our Supporter Pack DLC page with purchases available October 6th. This is a purely cosmetic DLC that helps support the development of the game as we navigate our way through Early Access.

Let's talk about this week now. Even after the game not building because one file was different so it took three people to figure out how to get the game to build so we could keep testing even though that file that was changed wasn't working after changing it back to when it was, we were still able to power on. I also had the unfortunate disaster of our source control wanting me to redownload the whole project, but simultaneously upload the whole thing too. Source control is great, except when it's not. We made it over all those dumb hurdles and were able to put our amazing dedicated testers to work.

When I tell you that our dedicated testers are amazing, I really mean it. They are continuously testing multiple things over and over. Making sure drop rates are working as intended, repeating quests to make sure different ways to do them all work, double checking us to make sure all the new items are actually available in game, and so much more. There's a lot and we've been giving them tons to do this last week and this whole next week.

The team has been on bug fixing duty all week and will continue to knock everything out to deliver a smooth update. Of course, there's bound to be things we missed and we'll patch them up after the update. This zone is adding a tremendous amount of content.

While we all work on bug fixing, we gotta still have some fun.


I'd share some bug pictures, but all the ones I found have crazy spoilers in them! Either the tester is wearing a secret weapon, they have a secret quest tracking on their screen, the area is secret, there's just so much. I did find one picture of a camera issue. Some NPC's randomly have their cameras spawn in weird places, so here's that:

You might be able to see some new stuff in there.

That's it for this week. There will not be a development digest next week as the update is on Thursday. Depending on when the patches follow, there may not be one the week after. That means the next development digest could most likely start talking about Witches Eve! See you in the update!

-Janna

Happy Friday, friends!

We'll be launching the Windless Woods update September 22nd!

Some things I touched on last week that will be in the update that I have more information for:

Pets (these are cosmetic, not animal companions) Like this cute chicken!


Dedicated Servers (currently using Steam's service for this, but looking into hosting websites for more options). We did a stress test with our dedicated testers and it went really well! We've turned over all the information to the hosting websites we're talking with and will have more information we hope at launch. Steam's service is working, so if the hosting websites take longer, at least there is that option. Feel free to ask any questions and I'll make sure to get answers from someone who knows them better than me!

This week has been a lot of clean up and making sure all the new items are actually able to be purchased/found/rewarded/etc in the game. There are so many items. At my last count, there were over 60 weapons, 10 outfits, 50 furniture items, 15 house and structure plans, 5 alchemy reagents, 4 potions, and let's say 30 plus resources. Not including cooking, farming, quest items, and all the secrets. That's a LOT of stuff. Here's one of the items that has a really cute icon:


Here's a work in progress gauntlet that just started out looking exactly like something else already in the game:


And here's a greataxe that has a matching set of weapons (not final colors):


I won't go into the specifics of everyone as it's been a little of everywhere for everyone. Just getting everything wrapped up and fixing bugs! But speaking of bugs, look at this fun "invisible NPC"


One of our new systems that was created (that we needed a long time ago) is what we call "vanishing NPCs" which is where the NPC vanishes from one spot and appears in another. So when they tell you that they'll meet you somewhere, they won't be in that first spot anymore. There was some fun bugs with it like the above, where the NPC did vanish, but left all their stuff.

Finally, I want to talk about our arachnophobia mode. We had it set up with potions that would last an in-game day, but some weird bugs started appearing. We ended up changing it to an option in the ESC menu so that it will be set for your whole game. Here's what the spiders will look like (one isn't colored, but it'll be the same purple, just without the legs). It applies to the mount as well so no one can join your server and creep you out with their mount.




That's it for this week. The two monthly community play sessions I talked about last week will be on September 10th at 5pm PST (TOMORROW!!!) and September 24th at 11am PST. Details on our discord. Hope to see you all there!

-Janna

Happy Friday, friends!

If you haven't seen any of our social media channels (Twitter, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Youtube), yesterday we announced the Windless Woods update will be booming into action September 22nd! While this is much later than anticipated (but still summer!), there are so many features and so much content being jammed into this new zone we wanted to make sure everything was just right.

A few things included in this update:
-Pets (these are cosmetic, not animal companions)
-Dedicated Servers (currently using Steam's service for this, but looking into hosting websites for more options)
-New magic system
-And of course the obvious: a new zone with new resources, items, crops, weapons, etc.

On October 6th (could change depending on Steam's approval), we'll release the Hero Edition DLC. This is a cosmetic-only DLC that was originally offered to our Kickstarter backers. With the Windless Woods update we'll be giving those who purchased the Hero Edition DLC via Kickstarter access to this content for two weeks before releasing it to everyone on Steam. This DLC is basically additional cosmetic content intended to be a way for hardcore players to further support the development team. It includes a Hero house plan, unique title, and Hero outfit.

Future DLC (if we ever get to that point) will be far more substantial and actually add additional playable content, quests, and likely whole new zones.

Let's get to the week's recap!

While I've been doing a lot of backend planning, organizing, and managing, the team has been going strong on the final touches before the update.

Louis had a lot of cool gifs, but Steam doesn't like the size, so unfortunately I'm having to add these to an external site to view. So here's one for you to see right now: https://imgur.com/vC91YuW

Wendy has been finishing up the level design in the boss area and then working on getting the bugs cleaned up that our testers have submitted.

DD has been finishing up the main questline and ensuring the bugs along the way are fixed.

Michael has been chomping away at his modeling list. So first off, here's some cool new weapons:


And then we have this little bear figurine (which no longer has a purpose. Sad day):


Then the real hard questions came up when talking about the new glyphs with the magic system. Michael needed to model and make icons for each new glyph. So here's the first iterations (which we all didn't love):

Here's a gif of one moving: https://imgur.com/HIvPIbl

Then I said "why don't we just reuse all the book icons you made originally? Go back to the roots?" and so Tomes were reborn:


I'm super excited to have the books back in action. Can't wait to get the models in.

On a different note, the team decided to do some feature creeping. They were really stringing me along with this feature creep so I posted some pictures of my angry octopus (those stuffed animals you can flip from angry to happy) and then this happened:

And even though I told the team to not spend time on that because we have lots to finish up, Michael decided to strum away at it anyway (it really wasn't that long) and added a new weapon type to the game. I'll admit it's pretty cool, but it still struck a chord with me!

That's it for this week. The two monthly community play sessions I talked about last week will be on September 10th at 5pm PST and September 24th at 11am PST. Details on our discord. Hope to see you all there!

-Janna