Saddle up your pigs everyone, because Kynseed is now out on Early Access! We invite you to come visit this whimsical world as we build it piece by piece, tree by tree.
As a small ragtag team of developers, seeing our game appear around Steam's website is pretty crazy for us. But it's also a bit frightening, because it's not finished yet! For a sandbox RPG like Kynseed, we knew we had to get player feedback as early into development as possible. So most of the game simply isn't made yet and the bits that are made are as rough as a badger's bum. Our aim is to let players have a meaningful impact on shaping Kynseed from the beginning, one small step at a time. Of course, some of you have already been with us since the very first prototype! So a hearty and heartfelt thanks to all you community members who've been at our side on this game making adventure.
For those of you just joining this adventure, allow us to give you a quick "Previously On Kynseed's Development" recap: We're a tiny team of ex-Lionhead developers who worked on the Fable series for over a decade. Kynseed is one of the baby phoenix chicks born from Lionhead's ashes and it all started with a humble Kickstarter, which has since accrued over 10,000 backers (and trees)! After the Kickstarter, we immediately began toiling towards Early Access and hanging out with the community every day since.
There's still a great deal of development left to go, but if checking out wildly incomplete games is the sorta thing that strikes your fancy, then we encourage you to spend some time in this quirky world we're building and watch it literally grow one tree at a time. So go forth! Go explore this new bug-ridden world of ours. Then return to us with tales of your adventures, be they good or bad. And if you need anything at all, don't hesitate to get in touch. Our castle doors are always open.
LET'S HANG OUT SOMETIME
As players ourselves, one thing we always found frustrating was when companies would be secretive and toss people some company line. Or worse, just sort of...disappear, months at a time. It's the sort of thing we have pretty strong feelings on (especially on Early Access), so we've always been dead set on hanging out with the community each day we work on the game. We're always around and we try to be as laid back and approachable a dev team as we can be.
The easiest (and arguably most awesome) place to find us is over on the Kynseed Discord where we spend pretty much every hour of every workday - or worknight. You can also find us on our forums or on Twitter in addition to numerous other corners of the internet. So feel free to say hello wherever you bump into us. Plus, the entire Kynseed community is a really chill and welcoming bunch. We're lucky to have 'em.
GIVE US ALL THE FEEDBACK
All of it, I tell you! We feed on feedback. There'd be no point in us being on Early Access if we didn't. So don't be shy in telling us what you think, whether compliment or complaint. Have a suggestion that you think is the best thing since sliced bread? Let's hear it. Is there a game mechanic that you think is the worst thing since unsliced bread? Send it our way. Have strong feelings about our implication that unsliced bread is inferior? Sure, we'll take that too I guess.
The absolute best place to send us any kind of feedback is on here on the forums, especially when telling us there's something you particularly dislike. We like being able to jump into threads to have conversations with players. That way we can ask questions, or share future design plans, or even just toss around ideas with everyone.
HOW TO TREAT BUG BITES
All across Kynseed there are freeloading bugs who've decided to take up residence. The nerve! So to help, we need good folks like yourself to submit bug reports. To do this, you can drop by our bug reports forum or even email us directly at [email protected]. When you do, just be sure to include as much info as you can about your issue. Bonus points for screenshots.
Make no mistake, the bug population is doing well for itself in this earliest of early version of the game. We're not a big team with big resources. We're a small team with big ideas. We have only one programmer, one designer, one animator, and so on. So we'll depend on you lovely players to alert us of any problems you run across on your travels.
ALL BACKER KEYS HAVE BEEN SENT!
We've dispatched our entire fleet of carrier pigs to all backers, bringing magical keys made with love. You will be receiving two emails: one from Humble Bundle and then one from us. The Humble Bundle email is the one that contains a special link. This will be the one link you'll use to access all your backer rewards when they get released in the future. So be sure to hang on to that link by either bookmarking it, saving the email somewhere safe, or by hitting "claim this page" to add it to your Humble Bundle account. (Note that if you opted in during the backer build, then your Humble Bundle link will not include a key because your backer build key has already updated to the latest Early Access version of the game automatically.)
Need help or have a question about your backer tier? Drop us a line at [email protected] and one of us will reply back personally.
FOR ALL YOU STREAMERS
Put enough streams together and eventually you'll get a river. We're here to help with that however we can, so if you stream Kynseed let us know on Twitter and we'll help spread the word. Or even drop a link to your stream in our Discord's #community-videos channel for all our Discord peeps to see. We also try to personally pop into as many streams as we can.
Need any Kynseed assets for your stream? Check out our Media Kit and grab whatever you like.
Kynseed is a game about choosing how to spend each lifetime that you're given. We've chosen to spend ours making games. We're real people with real dreams, and making Kynseed is the sort of game we've always dreamed about. But what amazed and humbled us was finding out there were so many of you who dreamed of a game like that too.
A dream like that is one worth doing right. That means not only doing the game right but also doing right by our community. Moreover, making a game the right way takes time...and Kynseed's development will require heaps of it. So saddle up for a long ride. To those of you who've been with us from the start, our journey together is only now truly beginning. And for those of you who just joined us, you've arrived at an excellent time.
For great things can grow from the smallest of acorns.
Love,
PixelCount
