Swords 'n Magic and Stuff News

Happy Friday, Friends!

If you're not on our Discord, you've missed a few announcements of Twitch streams and YouTube videos showing off the early stages of Delver's Pass! It's been great for us to see these first look reactions and we've been working on adding the rest of content to Delver's Pass along with fixing up bugs.

Here's a few new sneak peeks of content that we've added:


We're working hard to finish this zone up and get it out to you! It's getting close!

While you wait, we've got a fun Witch's Eve Costume Contest starting October 1st! This is your opportunity to design an outfit for a chance to get your costume design added to the game. We'll be posting more details on our Discord on October 1st!



Thank for your support,
Janna & Michael
Kindred Games

Happy Friday, friends (although it's Saturday for a lot of you now)!

I come bearing gifts.



Michael has been hard at work finishing up Delver's Pass. If you haven't caught a stream in the past few weeks, you've missed out on a ton of awesome level design, AI, and secrets. I've been working on adding new items to the item database, doing some house decorating, and adding resources around this new zone. Official release for this zone is by October 15th.

Be sure to keep an eye out this week for a few streamers and youtubers exploring this new zone! We'll post about them on our Discord as they go live or post a video.

Before showing some more screenshots, we wanted to give you a short roadmap for what the rest of the year looks like! After the Delver's Pass update, we'll swiftly move into our Witch's Eve yearly content. Then we'll be releasing the dungeons and skill trees to some of the people that signed up to test this through our Discord (info was posted about previously). Depending on how that beta test goes, depends on the release to the public. It could be with Frostfall in December or shortly after. This means we'll have a ton of new content in the game come the new year!

But now, the moment you've been waiting for, screenshots with no context to get your imagination running!













See you all next week!

Janna & Michael
Kindred Games

Happy Friday, friends!

I wanted to post a short update reminding everyone that Michael and I are currently running a summer camp teaching girls how to make games! This is an all month camp and this is the third year we've done this. It's a great experience for the kids. We are always on our Discord though!

In other news, we posted a sign up sheet on our Discord asking for people who wanted to test out skill trees when they are available. We'll need a lot of feedback from people who know and love the game. We're looking for people who have put in the hours and know how the game feels to be able to test out how skill trees affect gameplay. This will be a closed beta test and only hosted through our Discord. We don't have a specific date for this closed beta as of yet, but will keep you all updated. If you are not part of our Discord you will not be selected to participate as this will be how we communicate the process to get to the testing version and answer questions.

If you want more sneak peeks or to just chat with Michael and I, join our Discord! We're in there daily!

Thanks for all of your support!

- Janna & Michael
Kindred Games

Happy Friday, friends!

It's been a slow couple weeks over here as we all recover from a wicked cold that hit the whole family pretty hard. But we're mostly back on our feet and have been hard at work on the next update.

Our top priority right now is the skill trees and we're getting really close! Only one tree left to knock out and a few skills here and there from the other trees.

Here's a sneak peek at one of the abilities I finished up today for the Rogue's tree.



While I've been working my way through the skill trees I remembered that with the weapon stats and skill trees that weapon balance was going to be all over the place. Not to mention that bows and spears have been in a bad spot for quite a while now. And two handed weapons have felt a little left behind after we set up the combo system for the other weapons.

So I spent a few days last week working on a full rebalance of all weapons. This time based entirely on the weapon's level, so we don't have to spend time balancing every weapon we add to the game. This works really well and tweaking the strength of individual weapon types is very simple now.

Two handed weapons got a boost in not only damage, but their physical size, making them even more viable against groups of enemies. They also received two additional attack animations.

While working on those attack animations I decided that since the greatswords and warhammers were SO huge now that it wasn't very realistic for the player to hold them in the default idle state. So I dove into adding some basic combat idle states to make combat look a whole lot cooler.







Since the last digest I also took a break from the priority stuff and managed to sneak in one of the Kickstarter weapon design rewards, and with it I added a new spell, a new outfit and a new secret quest. I don't want to spoil too much about this one, though so you'll have to wait for the update to find it!

Since we're coming close to wrapping up skill trees finally we've been talking about the best way for you guys to fully experience the new class-based skill system and I think we've decided that we want to release them with the game's first official dungeon.

We're not sure on the details yet, or which dungeon we want to release first, but I'm sure you'll catch me on Twitch sometime this month working on it.

That said, since this is going to be one of the biggest updates we've ever done, right along size the Farmlands and Windless Woods updates, it might not be ready until later this summer.

Janna and I take a few weeks off every July to work at a girl's game dev summer camp, so be prepared for that next month as well. Though we'll still stay in touch via Discord throughout the camp.


If you want more sneak peeks or to just chat with Michael and I, join our Discord! We're in there daily!

Thanks for all of your support!

- Michael
Kindred Games

Yet another update!?

I've been enjoying fixing up bugs and putting out smaller updates lately, so I thought I'd keep going. Hopefully not too many bugs are remaining from the quality of life update and I can move on to working on some bigger stuff like skill trees. That means you shouldn't expect another update for a little while.

[h3]Updates[/h3]

This patch also introduces multi quest tracking! This is something that's been requested a lot, for a long time.

Players have also been requesting quest markers over NPC's heads. While this kind of flies in the face of our immersive design principle, I did come up with a solution that meets you halfway. Now any NPC's that have a quest associated with them have a quest chalice icon next to their name when you approach them. If you've completed all quests they can offer, the chalice will disappear.

Keep in mind that this feature doesn't necessarily mean you're able to take that quest right away, as you might need to complete something else first, increase your town reputation or bring them a certain item before they'll offer it. But now you can at least tell when an NPC will have a quest or not.

I hope this doesn't discourage our players from seeing what other NPC's have to say, as we make it a point to sneak fun, sometimes informative dialog in whenever we can.

Also keep in mind that some NPC's who have secret quests or secret interactions don't show a chalice, so you'll miss out on some of those if you don't talk to everyone still.

Lastly, I fixed a bunch of bugs related to the auto depositing button for clients. Keep in mind that the method for auto deposit right now isn't ideal and I'm working on a better way to handle it. As of now, for clients (players joining others in multiplayer servers) with high latency (poor or slow connections) you may find that the auto deposit button is rather slow. Hopefully still faster than manually depositing items, but still quite slow as each deposit needs to wait for the server to okay the transaction before moving on to the next. This is to prevent your items from transferring before the inventory has had a chance to update, resulting in a lost stack of items. Sorry for the inconvenience here. I'm hoping to have a faster method soon.

Anyway. On to the patch notes!

[h3]Patch Notes[/h3]

New:

• Chalice icon next to NPC’s names that can grant quests
  
• Multiple quest tracking - can now track 3 quests at a time
  
• Added gamepad stack splitting support by holding LT and RT while pressing A to drag and drop items
  
• Can craft new Maple and Darkwood staves
  

Fixed:

• Old Wedding Ring no longer droppable and is now labeled a quest item
  
• Conjure Feast food buff is now removed as expected
  
• Gamepad not being able to drag items in inventory
  
• No longer locked out of the game if your chest is full when you auto deposit for clients
  
• The issue where you can’t auto deposit into banks or vendors as a client
  

Improved:

• Focus stat added to Conjure Feast
  
• Conjure Feast now has a better chance of rolling multiple buffs dependant on mage level
  
• Gamepad cursor movement smoother and less floaty now
  
• Focus and Willpower both received a buff from 5% damage boost per point to 12%