Hi space adventurer!

It's been a while.. almost a whole year! But the wait is over: the new Kincaid build is out now!

BEFORE YOU READ & RE-PLEDGE: If you have supported the game in any way since the last release we will be sending you a download link shortly through the Patreon messaging system!

A BIG FAT Thank You for the the PATIENCE and TRUST

First of all thank you so much for your patience! We know it was a long stretch, and it took us longer than we thought as such things usually go. But I think it was necessary and I think (I hope) we spent the time well and on the right things. We write more about that at the end of the post, but first:

The Fun Stuff

We will write more about the new or changed stuff in the game later. For now, just enjoy some images and GIFs.

Localization

Localization was a big one, I spent probably too much time on it trying out various things. I always rolled my eyes when I saw indies tweet about how annoying it is to make UI and translations possible. How hard can it be? You just have to load in different strings. And while that is true, it is also not nearly enough, especially when you want to support non-latin alphabets. Especially pixel games have it rough. I kept trying new fonts and showing it to chinese friends hoping i solved it and they were like "uh.. sorry dude i can understand it from context but its not nice to read"

The groundwork for localization is completed, but we decided not to ship with machine-generated translations frankly because we had no idea how well the stuff works and we had so many people offer help over the years that we decided to make this a community effort and leave it up to you guys! You know best what sounds hot or funny in your own language. Translations will be able to ship as mods people can download and add to the game. We'll provide English and later also German.

Keep your eyes peeled on Discord and a Patreon announcement - we'll start organizing translation groups soon!

Soooo, where were we?

Heya! This is Null writing - since it was up to me to decide to push the release out further and further, much to the chagrin of the endlessly patient dragon I'm happy to call my husband. Thank you Cookie for letting me be this selfish as we weathered angry, sad and disappointed messages over the months. xD

This is not critical information but long time supporters who have followed us since the beginnings are probably curious as to why we took such a long time between updates.

First I thought to put this into its own post, but I think it deserves to be here, with the rest of the announcement, since it was part of its story.

This is gonna be a bit rambly because I have a lot of things I would like to say and explain but I also have ADHD and I can't tell what of this is important or interesting to you guys so feel free to skim or skip. xD

The tldr is that we reached the point where we wanted to switch from "okay, this is still a messy prototype" to "polished game and decent production process, focusing mostly on content going forward".

During our previous release cycles we were always stuck between making new hot and exciting content for you guys and actually polishing the game, fixing bugs and improving overall quality.

While working on the previous builds back to back it became painfully obvious that we couldn't tack on more stuff on what we already have - and also polish up the jungle levels - and also working on the backend stuff that would make important features such as translations, better ui, bug fixes and jank. It was just too much for bunny as a coder.

the currency code has been inside the game for 2 years, tho deactivated in release builds, and we didn't have a single shop because.. the world wasn't built out, there were no things to find and buy and yeah - when you play the last couple of builds in order it is painfully obvious what I mean.

Looking at the old prototype UI after such a long time actually started to become depressing to me personally. It was honestly pretty rough being torn between making supporters happy and making me, the game dev, happy with what I was making.

As we started working on features like translations, it was difficult to constantly switch focus between learning stuff like that, going into level design, planning new art and mechanics, improving the mechanics we have, figuring out how to include them without opening up even more of these confusing rift portals that started out as a crutch in the first place.

Soooo I decided... I want to take a big risk! x_x

I decided by myself that both of us needed the time to bring the game to a state where it finally looked its age with a degree of polish from my part that lived up to the art Cookie was putting out.

That was gonna be a fuck ton of work, and for a couple of things I had to learn them almost from scratch, such as coding shaders (the last time I failed I made the game lag on modern computers when I tried to make water react physically uwu). For some things I also had to find outside help from more experienced and professional coders. Constantly breaking people's save files kept me up in a sweat a week before a release so many times. There were a couple of nights where I would wake up at 2am, grab my laptop and just do one or two more playtests or double check bugs I had fixed.

A friend taught me about TDD (test-driven development) and I worked on setting up automated tests that I could run whenever I made changes and eventually I'd just leave my computer running over night. What sounded super nerdy and annoying to do at the start turned out to be one of the biggest improvements to my sleep quality I've had since buying my memory foam pillow and weighted blanket - possibly surpassing even that. xD

THIS SOUNDS LIKE SUPER IMPORTANT STUFF - BUT WHY NOT PUT IT INTO A QUALITY OF LIFE UPDATE?

None of this work would have made for an exciting update, and also for most of the year the game was in a broken state.

I did not want to announce a build, get people's hopes up and then they realize oh its exactly like the old one only this time we can switch to a different language...

I also reduced the frequency of devlogs a lot because it felt like a mini-build - okay two weeks are over, what do I write this time? Oh yeah.. still fixing bugs in translation stuff and here is our ugly broken UI version 13 dubbed FinalDesignQuestionMark.

I had no idea how to communicate all this properly... it feels really weak to write stuff like "trust us bro we are working" or "sorry for the delay.. next month for sure!". Quite frankly, I had typed out a couple of devlog posts like that and then scrapped them because they sounded super lame. The time I agonized over these words I could have spent coding.

Meanwhile Cookie was vibrating with stress so hard I could feel his anxiety oozing through the walls of our home. I am pretty sure I could hear his soul crying and begging me to finish when he said "Good morning, bunny, sleep well? I made coffee!"

Yeah so we decided to post less but since Cookie was working a lot on environment stuff and new lewd animations and illustrations and we also had new music coming in we decided to do some streams here and there and just post art updates on the socials to basically show that we're still alive and working on the game.

I will say though, that I did not plan or even think that it would take me a whole year - no way! If you have ADHD or know anyone who has ADHD you probably know about time blindless... basically time is non existent... Either it is "yeah that should be pretty easy, 2-3 days tops" (2 weeks) or "never". Multiply that by the ambiguous and uncertain nature of programming and learning new stuff and fixing an uncertain number of bugs with uncertain complexity within that uncertain amalgamation of code.

I want to be clear that I am not looking to make excuses for how long it took - I still think it was the right call to make one big effort - I want to explain what I've been up to so you don't think I twiddled my thumbs or stopped caring about the game.

It is still my only project, the only game I am working on and I have no other hobby game projects that distract me from it. Well that is only half true.. I did have one other project:

Personal Life notes

Last year was pretty rough for me on personal level.

Two years ago I started therapy after getting diagnosed with adhd and depression which also took up a great chunk of my attention. I'm glad that I have good meds now and everything seems to be dialed in now, but there were some rough patches on the way there.

I usually try not to write too much about personal struggles, after all you are here for the game and I want to make something cool and fun for you guys and focus on that.

But reading Anon42 from Crisis Point Extinction's post about his struggles helped me through my own (Thanks again!) - and they played a big part in my decision to seek out help.

If you're reading this and thinking about seeking out therapy - do it! You have nothing to lose and a lot to gain. Waiting only makes it more difficult to do the first step. Heck, please do that call or write that email before reading further or downloading the game.

Back to game talk: Our production approach going forward

Soooo, Slay the Spire 2 - what a great fucking game.

I started playing it in early access and something they did shook me to the core.

This.. I know it sounds probably painfully obvious but this unlocked so much in my brain

Before I saw this game, my lean was always towards only releasing stuff that was polished and good.

But after seeing this and how they worked on their game, changed course, even ripping out a whole boss (I actually enjoyed fighting that boss, but oh well xD) and showing unfinished MS Paint art.. As a player, I didn't even care it looked bad, it was even somehow better, charming somehow? They let me see their thought process and ideas and see it grow and improve in front of my eyes.

My approach is now.. for content we do it like Slay.. We went on a vacation and I pitched Cookie the idea that hey... what if we give Kincaid a run down rental space ship and just put all of that into the game NOW. We already had so much of what we wanted to do fleshed out... tons and tons of paper notes, prototypes, level sketches with broken and janky enemies and mechanics that I was too embarrassed to put in a game that looks so good thanks to Cookie. it felt like shitting over his art with my child drawings. xD

I said we could put all of that on trash planets we can just shove into a black hole. Dasvidanje, Arrividerci, Auf Wiedersehen. The good stuff would find a home on one of the things we actually wanna ship. No more trying to find a way to tack it on the kobold world.. no more stupid portals I have to come up with a stupid explanation for last minute like the rift crystals. Now they will just be a new entry on a mission board or a throwaway NPC or something like that.

New game mechanics can live on throwaway planets like Trashius IX or Placeholderous. We can just try them out, instead of figuring out how to tack them onto the existing world, making them fit awkwardly, or spawning more of those confusing "Glitch Rifts".

As work continued and the codebase slowly turned from a hot janky mess to something I can put in new stuff without breaking things constantly, things started to become fun again - a lot more fun. I am at a point now where it feels almost as fun as when you start a brand new idea and it can be anything, blue sky - just go and make stuff! I adapted a better editor that's open source that makes it super easy and fun to stitch levels together..

When I started working on that I felt guilty spending all that time on geeky stuff instead of making new things for you guys. But I wanted to believe in what John Romero wrote in his autobiography Doom Guy: "Great tools make great games" . when I heard him say it, it made sense and made me feel so uncomfortable because what I had made was the exact opposite.

What's next?

We still have a couple more core game systems to do. Currency and shops are still missing as well as the actual Exploration/Research part of the game (Currency is actually already in the game, just deactivated xD) -- BUT(!) those feel like much much tinier tasks now that we have a proper UI system and other support structures the game systems can lean on.

Our main focus going forward is simply building out our worlds, inhabiting them with hotties and assholes and most importantly, hot assholes!

Ring that Bell

See you, space cowgirl..

Cookie & Bunny