Category: Update

Posted on by EGadd

We’re getting close to 1.3

Hey everyone, I think it’s about time we gave you some insight into how development of our next major update is going. Spoiler alert: It’s going great!

Just to remind you, this update is not live yet. This update contains some ambitious plans, the main features we mentioned before are:

Friendship and Roomie System

Our next update mainly concerns Staxel’s quirky villagers. We’re adding tons more dialogue content and progression to them and you’ll be able to get to know them all a whole lot better.

If there’s a particular villager you’re getting along with super well, you’ll even be able to roomie up with them!


Pet Shop

This will be the main hub for anything related to your fluffy companion. The store will sell pet accessories, tools, and even some new pets – sorry Fido!
Pets are one of the aspects we’ve received an overwhelming amount of requests to add on to. Having this system in place will mean we can easily add new pet breeds to Staxel without too much fuss.

New Festival

As development continues we’re trying to add more and more festivals. The 1.3 update includes a mysterious new Springtime festival, but I don’t want to give away too much on it just yet. We’re sure you’ll all love it though!

So now that we’ve covered what you’ve got to look forward to, let’s talk about the current stage we’re at with everything.
All of the new dialogue and quests have been written up and are currently with the translators. There’s a whole bunch of new text in this one as you’d expect, we really wanted to put the focus on the villagers and give them a lot more depth. In the meantime, we’re busy making sure everything is implemented correctly and we’re about to enter the testing phase, (we need to make sure that absolutely everything is working correctly and that none of the new features could possibly end up breaking the game).

Besides being busy with that, we’ve been sprinkling in some all-new content along the way! While most of the team are busy with implementation and testing, others have been working on some fun new items you’ll be able to get in the game. (Particularly some Summer-themed ones!) Now, I have no intentions of spoiling all the new content but I can give you a cheeky glimpse at some of the new Summer stuff at least.

Along with these delicious summery treats, we’re adding swimsuits, beach gear, and toys! Take some time off from the farm and go enjoy the beach! Did somebody say water gun fight?

I’m going to stop it here though before I get in trouble.

We can’t wait for 1.3 to go live, we’ve all been working very hard on it! This update contains a lot of changes to how Staxel will be played, and we think everyone will enjoy what it will bring to the table. The villagers are much more fleshed out now, and with another festival in the pool you will all be able to celebrate the release of 1.3 in style!

Thanks everyone for giving this a read, I hope you’re all as pumped for 1.3 as we are! I can’t give you a specific release date, but what I can say is it’s not long now!

Posted on by EGadd

Upcoming 1.3 Update

Hi Staxivilians

We’ve been quite busy with bug fixing and design but we’re ready to share news of what we’re working on for our next major update

💞 Friendship System
Work has started on our friendship system, this will consist of the following

– Each Villager has a storyline to follow
– Give gifts, help them out or talk to them to increase your friendship level with your favourite villagers
– Once you reach a new friendship level new events will trigger to learn more about them.
– At the highest level you can get your favourite villagers to become your roomie

🐶 Pet Shop
– You will be able to build a pet shop in your town which will allow you to buy new pets, customise them and some other small features.
– There may be some new pets to choose from too, but you’ll have to wait and see !

🌽 Crop Quality
– You will be able to grow and cultivate better quality crops depending on the soil you plant them in and how you take care of them while growing.
– Better quality vegetables will give you more money, better recipes and may even win you a prize
– There may even be some rarer vegetables to grow for the ultimate farmers out there.

🎆 More Festivals
– Keep an eye on Max as he tries to bring more festivities to your little village

🐛 General Bug Fixing
– As usual we will continue to work on bugs to make your play experience even better

Posted on by EGadd

Introducing Staxel 1.2!

Staxel 1.2 is here!

With Staxel 1.2 we bring new features, countless bug fixes, and a more stable experience. In this post we’ll be walking you through some of the most noteworthy changes that we’ve implemented.

JournalTitle
The journal is our realisation of an incredibly useful feature that many of you have been requesting since launch. In its present state (as of 1.2), the journal provides an overview of all your ongoing quests. In future revisions, it will also provide detailed logs of your conversations with the villagers, keep track your relationships, let you jot down important notes you don’t want to forget, and provide access to a nifty calendar!

JournalScreenie
MusumTitle
Finally, a place to show off and display all of your discoveries! The museum will bring a dash of history to the village and its surroundings. Visitors near and far will marvel at your latest finds! That is, if you decide to donate them to the museum instead of keeping them for your personal collection!

With the addition of the museum, there are new collectables to find! Perhaps you’ll come across a Murmur merchant selling an antiquated work of art, or maybe you’ll excavate the bones of an ancient creature!


PostalServiceTitla
Max has finally managed to secure postal coverage for the village! The postal system will turn your static post box into a working one! Receive newsletters from the mayoral office, advertisements from the stores, gifts from the villagers, and all the other joys (and aggravations) that come with any mail service!

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FossilsTitle
Excavate rare fossil stones you find dotted around the island and put them through the fossil polisher. If you’re lucky you might find the remnants of a terrifying predator!

Decorate your home with your findings, or put them on display in your new Museum—under Max’s rather lax policies, whatever you find is yours to keep!
MuseumTeaser
MoreRewardsTitle
The villagers will now be much more grateful when you help them out of a jam! Better rewards and more acknowledgment can be expected for a job well done.

SteamNetworkingTitle
We’ve made a number of big improvements to the steam networking feature. Playing online should now be a breeze!

NewVillagersTitle
The village is always growing, but perhaps not quite in the ways you might expect. In 1.2, you’ll welcome two new villagers to the island, but they won’t be coming by the usual routes! We hope you’ll give them a warm welcome and solve their rather…unique situations!
EconomyAdjustmentsTitle
We’ve been constantly tweaking the economy ever since release to try get it to a more sustainable and enjoyable place. While there are still improvements to be made, we believe we’re much closer to the mark now!

That’s all for the larger features in this update, but there are many more adjustments and tweaks that you might notice during gameplay. You can find full patch notes that detail these changes below:

Changelog 1.2

Updates from 1.1.51 to 1.2.4

Big things:

  • Mail system. You can now receive mail.
  • Journal. Press J to see your current daily quests and main quests.
  • Museum sign. You can make a museum now.
  • Two New NPCs.
  • A lot of stuff to put in the museum.
  • A large number of item prices have been changed.
  • New reward items.

New:

  • Added “/plantwithering”. Turns on/off plant withering. Only recommended for large servers/build servers.
  • You can turn stone and wood back into their original blocks.
  • Added Sushi and Ice-cream recipes. Updates to other food recipes.
  • Name tags now show on map

Changes:

  • Food doesn’t get used in creative mode.
  • Pot plant beds don’t trigger house bed counts.
  • Commands can now except blobs again. (e.g. /spawnitem {“kind”: “staxel.item.NullItem”})
  • Wooden Pole Fence T and X appear in autotiling.
  • Trough should be clearer about why it can’t be filled.

Fixes:

  • Forced a minimum size of particle. (Fixes crashes due to 0 size.)
  • Lots of catchable fixes (catching bugs should no longer give you the wrong bug).
  • Fixed double Music track issues.
  • Fixed music playing in Mono.
  • Fixed ambient sound carrying to Main Menu.
  • Fixed totems displaying a notification on new scans.
  • Fixed a number of Steam Networking issues.
  • Sound should be playing in the correct ears now.
  • Selfie mode is disabled when going to sleep.
  • Catching all bugs should now be possible.
  • Fix fishing bobble particles not showing.
  • A number of behind the scenes changes/fixes to Entity Saving and Loading.
  • Fixed UI paths failing when they have spaces in them
  • Fixed Aristaeus achievement failing to trigger

Modding:

  • Game Version Class has been added. (Ways to use it can be seen in the Mail class.)
  • Watering Can particles and sound are editable.
  • Steam version will remove 32bit DLL’s before trying to load the game.
  • Polaroid has been added to NPC’s. This shows up in journal.
  • You can hide more than just the Hair layer with “hideLayers” in Accessories.
  • “notCategories” is added to AnyOfCategory achievements. To use for filtering out items.
  • Anything using IEntityLogicBuilder needs to update to IEntityLogicBuilder2.

 

Posted on by EGadd

Patch Note Compilation

From this point onwards, patch notes will be compiled and shared in a biweekly post. This way, we won’t clutter the announcements section while still giving major improvements and additions to Staxel the spotlight they deserve.

We will keep this section readable and succinct. For more detailed and technical patch notes, see http://wiki.playstaxel.com/Changelog

Brief Overview:

New Stuff:

  • Staxel is now running in 64 Bit:
  • Staxel now uses FNA.
  • Cards and Emotes are now avaliable!
  • Steam Networking.
  • New camera mode, “Selfie Mode”, when pressing X.
  • New hats.
  • New recipes.
  • Flowers drop petals for crafting.
  • Commands can now get players with spaces in names by surrounding names with “”. (i.e. /kickplayer “Hah You Can’t Kick Me”)“
  • Tutorial Skip for players who have been through the tutorial once before.
  • Text Speed option. It can be made 5x faster.

Due to 64bit, the following changes have occured:

  • Less Out Of Memory Errors. Less Purple Screens.
  • Improved lower end performance. Performance Stability should be increased.
  • Graphics Card usage is down.
  • Disk Usage is down.
  • Note: Reported memory usage (RAM) is up. This is due to Staxel not hiding memory in the Page File anymore.

Changes:

  • All postboxes and signs (Totems) have two tiers. Shops won’t immediately die when you take their boxes. Important signs also give a warning when you break them.
  • A lot of price changes have been made.
  • A lot of work has been done to lower Hard drive usage. It is now under control.
  • World generation and Level Of Detail generation have been sped up.
  • Tutorial changes, most for those not the admin of the server.
  • Animal behaviour is more reliable. They also have more trouble jumping over fences. (Still an area we are working on.)

Fixes:

  • A large number of fixes were made. Game should crash less, and more systems should work as expected.
Posted on by EGadd

Staxel Is Now Available!

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After nearly four years of development, and our team growing from a small two-man operation to nearly a dozen hard-working developers, we have finally published Staxel to Steam! As you can imagine we’re all feeling a mix of excitement, pride, and nerves over this and we can’t wait to see what you all think of our game so far. While we still have so much we’d like to do, we think you’ll all certainly enjoy what’s already there!

aaa

As you can see, Staxel has come a long way from its humble beginnings. It started out as a basic creative builder, with not much other than an open world and a handful of tools and building blocks. Since that point we’ve kept on adding more and more of the content and systems we’d had in mind until we reached a point where we were happy to show the world what we’ve got. It’s been a wild ride so far, but now begins a totally new phase for Staxel, and we’re super excited to get started!

This brings us to a very important point, and one we’re forever grateful for. We’d like to take a moment to thank our fantastic community for all the support you’ve given us and for all the fun we’ve had with you over the past few years. We’ve had a blast gaming with you, chatting with you and spitballing ideas. All the way from the tiny IRC channel we started with to the busy and friendly Discord server we hang out on together now. Thanks guys, we’ve seriously loved every minute of it, and without you, it goes without saying we never would have reached this point!

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With that, we hope all of you have a blast with Staxel! Keep an eye out as in the coming days we will be posting another article outlining some of our plans for Staxel’s development, including plans for new features and such!

You can get involved with our community through the following links:

Staxel: Kid-tested, parent-tested, parent-approved, kid-approved.
Posted on by demanrisu

Post-PAX Aus roundup!

Staxel: Kid-tested, parent-tested, parent-approved, kid-approved.

Whoa! PAX Aus! It was a thing! It’s a week later and my feet still hurt! What’s the deal with that? Despite that, it’s back to work for me and the rest of the Staxel team (who were still at work during PAX anyway). We had a huge amount of awesome player feedback, and, let me tell you, it’s certainly informing our work on what’s shaping up to be one awesome game, if I do say so myself! With that in mind, I’d like to give you all some insight into the development process by listing a few things that we’re improving in Staxel due to player feedback. Disclaimer: it’s all ideas at this point!

1. Reworked item dropping and pickups!

This sounds pretty mundane, but it’s something that almost everyone at PAX ran into: apparently setting the B button on the Xbox controller as “Drop Item” is a terrible idea. Fellow devs, never do it! In light of that, we’re also looking at reworking the way that the player picks up items. Formerly, you had to look at an item on the ground and press a button (left trigger, in our rushed PAX control scheme), which… isn’t super intuitive. We had lots of feedback on that one, and one group of playtesters even took turns hitting the drop button to throw out all 425 admin-mode inventory items!

(The game didn’t crash, which was encouraging!)

2. The user interface!

Our current UI has been in the game for “too long,” according to Liam, who I’m in a Skype call with as I’m writing this. I’d say it’s been around for approximately 8 dog years, which is equivalent to 16 cat years, which is… pretty close to just over 1 human year. Anyway, point is, it’s pretty outdated, and luckily enough, we’re working really hard on giving it both a redesign and a facelift. For example, here’s what our character creator looks like now:

Our initial, ugly, implementation

And here’s what Conor’s work-in-progress mockups are looking like!

Wow! So pretty! Such customization!

As you can see, we’re going for a naturalistic vibe with our our interface, which we hope reflects the fun and friendly nature of the game. We’re always open to feedback, of course, so if you’ve got thoughts on that, please pop on over to our forums and let us know what you think!

3. More support for social activities!

In Staxel, you can already cook, go on picnics, hunt bugs, catch fish, and explore for secrets on the island, alone and with friends. But at PAX, the players wanted more. They wanted something extreme. They wanted… Staxel 2?!

Actually, no, they wanted beacons. And we’re happy to put those in the game! We’re thinking that each player will have a small number of beacons that recharge over time, so you can let your friends know exactly where you are on the island, no matter how far away you are. Because, hey, we don’t want to get in the way of you having fun with your friends. That’s a major part of our game design: letting you have fun, unobstructed!

There were plenty more points that players brought up at PAX, and most of them are things that we’ve either considered already or, even better, we’re working on already! It’s super exciting to know that we’re on the same path as the players with regards to game design and expectations, and it tells us that we’re doing just fine when it comes to getting this game ready for everyone to play.

Soon? Maybe. Who knows? We know. You wanna know? You’ll have to wait! Mwa ha ha!

By the way: there’s a secret hidden in our reveal trailer. Did you find it? We’ll be letting you know about the second part of that before the year ends. Look out for it!

Happy travels, friends!

– Damon, narrative designer on Staxel

Posted on by EGadd

Back from Minecon!

Hey guys! The team just got back from showing Staxel off at Minecon and I thought now would be a good time to update you all on how things are going.

We’ve been quiet for a while but we’ve been actively working and have been making good progress! We had to crunch for the last 3 weeks to prepare for Minecon and
got a huge amount of work done.

Our team has grown too, which we’re very excited about! Check out our team section to see the updated team list here.

Minecon went above and beyond with our expectations, everybody loved the game and we got fantastic feedback. People especially loved our unique crafting system, which is what the next blog post will be about, so make sure you’re following us on either Twitter, reddit, or our forums!

We met so many fantastic people, and plenty of dedicated and passionate game developers. We had a great time playing all their games and having them play ours. (Which I’m sure they enjoyed immensely. 😉 ) Seriously though, their feedback was very encouraging and greatly appreciated!

 

Keep checking back as I’ll be posting more blog posts regarding what’s new in Staxel soon!

Posted on by SteampunkStein

Development Update

Hello all!

Sorry for the lack of updates recently, I’ve been in the process of moving and setting up a new PC so I can spend more time on Staxel.

I’ve started streaming my development for art assets on my twitch channel.

Here’s a little update on some concepts I’m working on and hopefully will be implemented into Staxel soon.

In addition to this, we’ve started work on the gameplay of Staxel and “Adventure” mode which will be the main focus on the game and hopefully we can give you some more details about this new mode soon.

Thanks for reading!
~SteampunkStein