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Hello and welcome again to another progress report of this roadtrip we're all on called game development. April has been a most unusual month for us all, but amidst the unusualness we've been doing our best to keep things moving forward and onward here on the Kynseed team. Our last major game update, which somehow ended up being rather poop focused, was pushed out a little over a week ago followed by an additional week of community feedback rounds as we pushed out another handful of smaller polish updates to follow. For a full look at this update you can read on to the following section which'll give you a few highlights as well as a good ol' fashioned hyperlink to the changelog.
In other news, our artists continue to impress us all the more with their pixel pushing as more and more assets get churned out. Gary, our character artist, has been carrying on with the army-sized cast of NPC's in the world and all their various aging states. Meanwhile, environment artist Weekes has been working on some new species of trees and grass, to be used in some as of yet released game areas. Charlie and Neal (design and programming respectively...as opposed to disrespectively?) have been recently going over game areas applying some polish where needed and have also undertaken the task of redesigning how Goddess offerings work.
As is our custom, we have a few previews to share below, though as always just bear in mind that these our early drafts and it may be some time before you see it included in a game content update.
CHANGELOG HIGHLIGHTS
It's been a somewhat distraction heavy month between everything going on in this ol' world of ours, but we've been lucky in that we were able to carry on with work with minimal disruption all in all. This last update represents another step towards completing our largest milestone to date: relationships. Yet one of the important things that happens when nearing the completion of a major milestone is that you have to take time for polishing and fixing near that final leg of the milestone. So essentially, that's what this update's focus was all about.
For those of you who don't always dive into our changelogs, we categorize each item as one of four icons/categories: 🔷Additions, 🔶Improvement, ❌Fixes, and ➕Internal. (Granted, "Internal" doesn't get used so much, as it's chiefly used for invisible behind-the-scenes engine work.) So for this recent content update, you'll find that the full changelog is more focused on items categorized as Improvements and Fixes. Focusing on such things becomes evermore important as we prepare for finishing a milestone. Granted, we don't expect a milestone to be perfectly polished at release, but as we've gained more and more players on this journey we've been finding it more and more important to set time aside to polish as much up as we can before major milestones.
All that to say, you'll see that focus on polish reflected in the changelog and in the highlights below. So feel free to carry on reading below for more info.
Poop
Apparently not everybody poops. But as of our last update, at least a few animals now do! The byproducts of which can then be collected in the wooden bucket and used as fertiliser!
Partners Can Go Gathering
Partners can now go gathering via the housekeeping book. This allows them to leave the farm to gather items based on equipment given and location chosen. Items gathered will appear in a sack outside your farm building.
Family Secret Boxes
Initial setup for family secret boxes. Uncover the keys by raising your relationships 'til they tell you their secrets. Only some families currently have secret boxes to unlock, with more to be added in the future.
Full Changelog
Jump on over to the full changelog to check out the entire list of additions and fixes.
At the time of writing this, the team is already back to work on preparing the next update. We'll be sharing more details about it in the coming couple of weeks no doubt, but in short we're starting to get pretty close to the relationship milestone and are excited to share some concrete info on its release once we, ourselves, nail it down first.
That also means that feedback is more critical than ever when nearing a big milestone like this. So don't hesitate in the slightest to reach out to us anywhere you find us ([email protected], Discord, forums, Twitter, etc) and let us know if you have any problems or just some ideas.
In the meantime, the team will be pressing onward with working on the game. We hope you all stay safe and stay smart out there in the world and, for now, we'll get back to working on a world of our own called The Vale. See you there!
Love,
PixelCount
