IT'S OUT! THE FULL VERSION OF THE HAYSEED KNIGHT IS FINALLY OUT!
Welcome to The Hayseed Knight v1.8, or what would have been v1.0 if I had known anything about versioning when I started!! Heck, given that there's essentially nothing left unchanged since the start, this may as well be v2.0. Short of anything failing catastrophically and needing patches, this should be the last big update.
The main game is finally finished, and I don't even know what to say. I've been frozen solid for the last couple of weeks, just trying to process the fact that 7 years of work were finally coming to an end. What started in late 2016 as a picaresque novel in Spanish I wrote for myself during my first time in therapy to try to untangle the Gordian knot of painful memories I always carried with me, has somehow turned into... this. All of this. 7 years and a half of this.
I'm terrified. I'm hyped as hell. I'm going to eat something nice to celebrate.
On to the meat of the announcement, though! While the saves should be compatible with any save past 1.6, my suggestion would be that everyone start a new game because HOO BOY, THIS UPDATE BRINGS A TON OF NEW STUFF!
- Chapter 5 (all new 7 hours of gameplay on average!), with 3 main endings and a few non canon detours!
- All new high quality animated intro so we can both cry thinking of a The Hayseed Knight cartoon!
- 100% rewritten Sep and Ader meeting in chapter 1, so I no longer have to cringe playing through it!
- Lots and lots of remade art. And I mean LOTS:
- Whole overhaul for Ilegrab; touched up Berbiz, Djao, Elbar, Eina, Sep and Ader!
- Better rendered, more varied backgrounds full of life and random people walking around where relevant!
- New and improved illustrations through every chapter!
- Better particle effects!
- Whole overhaul for Ilegrab; touched up Berbiz, Djao, Elbar, Eina, Sep and Ader!
- A new Gallery and Music Room that unlock automatically as you find new illustrations and songs! I didn't know I'd made about a hundred illustrations for THK, but apparently I have!
- More wonderful voices yet for the cast, including a recast for Bammet!
- New songs? I think?? I don't even remember anymore if they made it to the previous version!
- I'm sure there's more stuff I've forgotten! Oh no!
While the English version of the game has been finished, work continues on the Spanish, French and Japanese localizations. The French and Japanese translations have been labors of love from my good friends Benjamin Beziat and Shion Otsuka, and we work relentlessly to bring you the finished product in other languages as well.
The current available languages were languages I spoke to some degree, so I was able to help my friends overseeing the translations, but there are so many languages I would love to translate THK to! In the future, I'd especially love to be able to find the funds or a publisher to get a Chinese translation, and a pipe dream of mine would be Japanese and Spanish dubs, haha.
I think that should be all. I'll leave you with a link to the intro animation, as a treat.
To all the people who have been along for the ride since the beginning, thank you. To the people who just arrived, thank you. To you, for reading this, thank you as well.
I really hope you will love Ader's story as much as I loved making it.
I've been Maxi. You've been wonderful.
