I don’t put silk hats on pigs. But I can turn it into bacon. Animal Friends Adventure released a few days ago to mixed feelings of the community. The feedback I have received has been fantastic. Thank you to everyone involved.

What we’re facing is some crash bugs that slipped through the extensive playtesting I and Microsoft had done. Seriously. 6 certification rejections for various bugs and level issues. One player reported the game would almost always crash when having a pet in tow. I mostly used the Rabbit because i think he’s cool. But I need to test ALL pets. That’s my job. But being a one person indie dev, things do slip by. But they don’t get ignored.

Control issues. This has been an ongoing battle. The player controller needs a rewrite. It’s a tangled mess. There’s just too much stuff going on in the “Update” thread. Double jump sometimes works, sometimes doesn’t. There are times you can get in a 3rd jump. But there’s that issue of time. I had so many more important things to concern me.

Achievements: Not sure if these are allowed to be adjusted on the MS side after release. What I can do, is make adjustments in game on the scores are tallied. Collecting coin/diamond is currently very specific to the player directly collecting. Awards and treasure boxes technically don’t count. So I fixed this. Gold coins count as 2 now. Since most coins in game are gold, your score will go up faster. Note, awards are still a 1 to 1 ratio.

Achievements – Pacifist: This one is admittedly confusing. I left the description vague on purpose. But a lot of people didn’t like that. Bottom line, Don’t intentionally kill monsters and beat all non-boss levels. If monsters blow themselves up, or get run over by a boulder no worries.  Progress will reset if you do kill a monster. I was told this is “way too tough”. Next update will address this. Once you beat a level, it will mark you as a “Pacifist” or not. get a “P” on all levels and you unlock the achievement. Once the “P” is gained it will not be undone if you replay the level.

Crash bugs: I’m mad about this. I thought I addressed them all, and failed this. These bugs are also very challenging to fix because I never get a good Core dump, or the debugger doesn’t catch it. I’m working on this now.

Wrapping up

I expect the next month, maybe two months these updates and fixes will go in. The Character controller rewrite will take a bit longer.

Thank you for your patience.