Swords 'n Magic and Stuff News

Happy Friday Friends!

I just need you to know that I just realized something amazing. Like less than a minute ago. I was adding the Shrubrian furniture to be items you can place in your house. Well Shrubrians are small. So I wanted to see how tiny the furniture was because I liked it small. They are the perfect size for the plushes! AHHHHHH! (I also made a ton of new plushes)



How stinkin' cute, right? Kindred made me all of the base races for plushies and I've been making different professions for them. Above you see a treasure hunter and a detective. I think making the plushes is one of my favorite things to do.

In other, not as adorable, news, Kindred has gotten a new mechanic working that is a part of the main storyline in Windless Woods. There will be these, let's call them "places", that will have unique things happen that are randomly spawned. These places will have a unique resource and have a backstory as to what they are and why they are there.

Wendy has been setting all the traps for you. You'll have to find your way through a tomb and make it past all the secrets and traps before getting to the treasure.

We've got a lot of new models going into the game and one is more structures for The Eyre.



Honestly, we have so much going on right now. New furniture, new quests, main questline, new enemies, new attacks, combat, map overhaul (plus reviewing each quest in game for map markers), items, mounts, outfits, shops, npcs, traps, puzzles, magic system, dedicated servers, job boards, weapons, and any bugs for all of those. It's a busy time! I've probably missed like 10 things for that list.

I want to know what you want to see next week. More furniture? New enemies? More overview shots? Some traps? Do you want to read all the technical details of the programming going on? Let me know so I can tailor our weekly chat more to you!

See you next week!
- Janna

I need a catchy Friday catch phrase here.

*Insert phrase*

After our non-clothed NPC fiasco last week, I'm happy to say they've all found their proper attire again and confirmed by testers to be clothed. Phew.

If you aren't on our Discord, Michael/Kindred does some Behind the Curtain streams where he just shares his screen and works on new items. It's very chill and any "talking" is through text. One of my favorite things he made in the last session was new base races for our plushies!



I'm so excited to add new plushes to the world. They are my favorite furniture item by far.

Something else on our Discord is our ideas channel. We get so many great ideas all of the time and then our long time members let people know that those ideas have already been submitted. Well we wanted an easier way to see all of the ideas and allow for people to upvote. That's where Canny comes in. You can submit ideas, comment on others, and upvote your favorites. It's easier to see what everyone wants to be added. We can then add top items to the roadmap which will make their way into the game. Check it out here!


As the game grows, we've been wanting to do a rebranding of our logo and key art. We're happy to say we've found an amazing artist who has made art for games like Delver and Minecraft! His name is Sam Cube and here's the new logo he made:



We'll be transitioning the art around our Windless Woods summer update.

In other news, Louis has finished up the map overhaul and it's ready to go out to testers this week. It'll get some polish and tweaks with feedback from testers, but it's a much better system. Still more can be added to it, but those are quality of life changes that we'll add over time.

Other than a lot of new models, art, mechanics, quests, bug fixing, and general work, that's the big stuff for this week. I'll leave you with a new picture though and let you guess what it's for!

-Janna

Hello Friday!

This week was a lot of clean up. I actually reorganized some outfits and houses and because of how source control works, it ended up breaking for everyone else and we ended up with about 150 unclothed NPC's. It's since been fixed, but it was quite funny.




We've had a ton of testing happen on quests, Lots of tweaks and fixes going in along with new quests. Wendy and Kindred have been working hard on this questline through Windless Woods. With Louis back, he's been switching between getting the map refactored (he's been working on this on his stream) and working on mechanics needed for quests and other various things.

Without an animator on the team, Kindred has converted back to the old days of no animator where he finds an animation he likes, purchases it, then models over the rig. This week he found an amazing animation pack that had basically everything we need for Windless Woods and some creatures for Bone Reach. He's already modeled out a few, but I don't want to spoil them just yet. One is a new mount that the Shrubrians use and the other is the baby fox pet for the Kickstarter backers. What do you think the Shrubrians ride?

Speaking of pets though, I never shared the chicken pet! It's a longer gif, so I can't post it here on Steam, but here's a link https://imgur.com/lMCPxEq to view!

The pets are just a cosmetic item. They have little houses that will go on your plot to interact with to summon your pet. You can pet them and have them follow you. They don't have health so they won't die while you are in combat. It's pretty cute to have a little chicken follow you.

While this week was a lot of content, there aren't many pictures to post. We've got another busy week coming up with hopefully more pictures (maybe I'll spoil the mount then - if you are a Patreon subscriber, I posted the mount as a spoiler)!

See you then.

-Janna

Hello Friday!

There's been a lot this week! Even with Louis out on vacation, lots of progress has happened. First and foremost, we've had a successful test on a dedicated server! The server stayed up for a couple of days and most issues our testers found (which have been pretty minor) have been addressed and ready for another test. Super exciting. We'll have more information available with the update.

Kindred has been working on new quests and NPC's. New secrets have gone in, including a new stash mechanic (putting the right item in the stash can trigger something) and new puzzles. He's also been doing some programming for new mechanics needed in Windless Woods like this:



Then, of course, he had to leave something for a placeholder. This one made me laugh:



This past week Wendy has been adding new decorations to Dewdrop Village and fixing bugs from the last test build.

As for me, I added TEN new buildable houses. Here's eight of them:



These houses were built by two of our long term testers. Which house is your favorite?

The other thing that I worked on this week was getting all of the Hero Edition (supporter) DLC and Kickstarter Exclusive DLC items in and ready for testers. The Hero edition will become available for sale soon after the Windless Woods update. I'm also working on gathering all the house and plot sizes and implementing a system to let you know if a house will fit on a plot. Along with this, we now have a way to increase the height of a plot! Not all plots will change their height value, but we'll start having more varied plot sizes.

Last, but not least, the credits are now available in the Grove of Hero's. These can still be adjusted and most likely will be changed throughout development.

I'll see you next week!

-Janna

Happy Friday the 13th!

This week was more backend work with a lot more distractions. I've been out most of the week sick (dang kid germs), Louis started his vacation midweek, Kindred has been taking care of me and working as much as he can, and Wendy has been moving right along. So let's get into the specifics!

Louis is continuing work on the map and finishing up some combat overhaul work. He'll be finalizing these once he gets back. Wendy is bouncing around as models and mechanics become available. She has been moving through Bone Reach with more level design and adding finishing touches into different areas in Windless Woods. The quests have new placeholder items in currently, which I'll be replacing soon. Kindred has been fine tuning the Shrubrian village houses and modeling their little furniture and Wendy has already taken the furniture and started decorating!



There was some bug fixing mixed into the week. We updated Sen's quest on Castaway Rock with a new shiny pedestal for the key. We had a report recently that you would open the chest in the secret crab cave and not get the key. We have only had this report once before and couldn't replicate it. After one of our new testers tested it over 40 times it seemed it would fall through the platform between two planks of wood and end up in the bushes below, which you can't see. It was a random chance for this to happen so the key has been taken out of the chest and put on it's own pedestal.

Our other news for this week, which was already released to our Kickstarter backers, is that we don't have the time or resources to support a Mac build at this time. As the game grows, we're constantly trying to understand performance and optimize the game for everyone. Unfortunately, through our testing with Mac builds, only the highest of high end specs are running the game at an acceptable performance. We still plan to add Mac support, but it won't be until the end of Early Access as our best guess right now. We need to focus our efforts on continuing to add content and moving the game forward.

That's it for this week! See you all next week.

-Janna