Kynseed

Hey nice seeing you here Matthew Allen! I will definitely have a look at Kynseed but it will likely have to wait untill I'm back home now. Only got one day left here in good ol' US of A and our schedule is packed. Then Saturday is travelling all day long. We arrive home on Sunday morning and at that point I will probably head straight for bed. Vacation is exhausting.

By the way, I had blisters on both my feet after that day you gave us a tour through downtown LA. And they weren't little ones either.

I've tried my hand at Kynseed just now. My first response to it is confusion. It was not quite clear to me what my objective was. Perhaps that is the intention, for the gamer to figure out what the objective is. The controls take getting used to. I found it odd that I'm able to point the mouse anywhere but when clicking somewhere nothing happens. I would have expected the character to move to wherever I clicked. So apparently it is required to use the keyboard to move around the game world. Perhaps the UI is still just a mockup at this point? (I'm personally a fan of games that can be played solely with the mouse, they give me the ultimate lazy gamer experience.) I had a hard time figuring out what to do. Found lots of papers spread around the gameworld which seem to hint at stuff you need to look for and recipes you can brew. I managed to pet the cat and dog, feed them and I rode a pig. Apparently it is required to do chores in order to make some mullah. I'm not sure whether I like that aspect. I also found it hard to keep track of what tasks there are. I couldn't remember which key to press to show the to-do-list, but then later found out it's the C. Mostly I just walked around exploring the game world. I like the fishing mechanic. The game (demo) suddenly just ended. I figure this is due to a time limit that is built into the demo, or did I do something wrong?

Haha, oh dear. Sorry 'bout that! LA is a city of walkers, that's for sure.



Thanks for giving it a go! (Sorry for the slow reply - been buuuusy.)

Yeah, the actual gameplay loop itself hasn't been properly put in just yet. Controls are definitely gonna get fixed over time as well, UI is very very temporary until we get a permanent artist, the prototype does indeed run short for now (after Day 7 I believe), and there's gonna be a much larger game world to explore eventually (with proper NPC's and such of course). In fact, pretty much everything is temporary at this point, haha. When we say prototype we mean it in the truest sense - we're even shying away from the world 'Alpha' at this point as we're not even close to feeling comfortable calling it pre-alpha. At this point it's mainly engine building and getting the dev tools made. A chap by the name of Neal is single-handedly coding the entire game from scratch and the prototype that's up on itch.io is the result of a few months of work.

Neal also worked on the (sadly cancelled) game B.C. from back in the early days of Lionhead but he was also lead programmer on most of the Fable games. Kynseed, from a coding perspective at least, is essentially the work of one guy building this whole engine and world up from scratch. Then we've also got a chap named Charlie who's doing level design. Charlie was pretty much responsible for creating some of the most iconic regions in the Fable games and was lead level designer and lead content designer on many of the core Fable titles. We've got an artist helping out with some placeholder art right now (as seen in the prototype) and we've even got some music getting made to help give the prototype some ambiance. Eventually we'd love to see about getting Russ involved, the composer for every Fable game, but that'll come down to money more than likely as he's understandably not free. In the meantime, we've got some lovely music being made by someone you already know but I'll let him introduce himself next time he pops online. In terms of general art direction and concept art, we've got Mike McCarthy helping guide some of the artistic direction - he was lead artist and concept artist for the Fable franchise and helped define the iconic Fable 'look'. Here's some concept art that he's done for us recently:[/span]

- Concept 1
- Concept 2
- Concept 3



Yeah, making sure people realize it's a super-drafty-prototype is something we need to get better about communicating. I worry people are interpreting it as a proper demo or a representation of how it'll look in the long run, but if you were to take a screenshot of the prototype on itch.io and compare it to a screenshot from the game a half year from now they may well not even look like the same game. We're getting somewhat close to having what we feel is a relatively functional engine at this point (tons of progress made since the last itch.io update) and once we have that foundation to build from we're going to start implementing some proper gameplay loops. Neal sometimes posts coder-esque updates over on the TIGSource forums for anyone interested in that sorta stuff.

Okay, I just backed the Kickstarter!



Initially as Seed Sower but then upgraded it to Adventurer. Might as well get my name in the credits.

Have any of the former 22cans colleagues backed the Kickstarter yet as far as you know Matthew Allen?

Hmm, looks like it's Windows-only. Shame, I would've backed it if it were guaranteed to come to Mac or consoles.

Sadly, My laptop went kaput and my replacement can't even play a real game.

I look forward to following along to see how this evolves.

I don't have enough RAM to even run games that I know will play on this thing. I have tried. It's all a no go.

No worries, that's understandable. We're being careful to not make any promises regarding the platforms as we're not 100% which ones we'll be able to secure and/or pursue. That said, we'd love to release on other platforms in the future if the stars align.