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