Where can I read The Hayseed Knight patch notes?

This page lists official Steam announcements for The Hayseed Knight, including the latest post "Last call to get YOUR OWN ADER PLUSHIE!". Each entry links to the full changelog on Steam.

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The Hayseed Knight Patch Notes & News

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The Hayseed Knight Patch Notes & News | SteamScope

Hey everyone!

How have you been these last few months? My life's been going through a whole bunch of changes ever since I came back to Spain from Japan. Chief among them are that I've accidentally become a film producer; I'm attending evening classes to learn how to install solar panels; and of course… Sire Red and I worked tirelessly over these past 6 months to finish the French and Spanish translations respectively!

I would truly say that The Hayseed Knight is over at last for the time being… unless something catches fire or there's a bad enough typo that I need to come back and update it. That's why I wanted to take a moment to truly look back on it.

I wrote the first few versions of what would become The Hayseed Knight in Spanish, and only switched to English because I was so excited to show my online friends back in 2016 what I was writing. After that, I wrote exclusively in English, and had to figure out how to translate back into my own language.

Benjamin aka Sire Red came to offer his help right as I released the very first demo ever for chapter 1, halfway through 2017. He'd been following along since I started posting on twitter, he liked the game, and he wanted to be involved, volunteering to translate the game into French.

Neither of us knew how crazy the story was going to get. Long story short, it's been 9 years, we're both much busier people, and this feels like saying bye to a life project even if I already supposedly fully released the game back in 2024!

I'm afraid that one part of the game will remain unfinished by necessity, however: the Japanese translation will sadly remain a translation of chapters 1 and 2 as a proof of concept. I don't have the money required to continue it with a new translator and editor (somewhere about 160k words remain, and the price tag would not be any lower than 10-14k EUR at the cheapest).

My friend Shion Kanda, who started volunteering to translate into Japanese sometime in 2019, now works as a professional translator — I look back and I can't stop thinking "wow… we were all just in our early 20s back then. We've all grown so much". When Shion first started translating, I could barely read a word in kanji. I'm now fluent in Japanese, and with that fluency comes the doubtless knowledge that I could not make justice to my game if I attempted to translate a word, haha.

Maybe one day we'll get to see the Japanese translation finished! But for now, I can only simply thank everyone who's supported the game along the way and apologize to anyone who was hoping to see the game in their own language. As always, if you ever find this post and think "translating this story is something I would love deeply" you can reach me here or on Bluesky.

Games have been my job for almost a whole decade now, all thanks to starting this visual novel when I first hurt my wrist after an intense career in comics. I've had great joy, I've been burned a lot, and I've had to contend with the reality that despite being enough for me since I made everything mostly on my own, at just 4500 sales worldwide currently over 6 years on steam, THK was a commercial failure. It doesn't make a difference to me in the end because it's something I made to prove to myself that I could make it, but my life isn't as simple as it once was when I had a stable job and less health issues, and money matters more than I'd like it to.

I've tried and I've tried to go back to making games, but every time it feels like I'm forcing myself to do something that just feels draining. Rather than hurt myself making for the sake of making, I've decided to move on and work on other things until the need to make games comes back. While I spent a very long time thinking up a sequel and writing for it, I can't currently imagine the day where I'll go back to working on it… but I know in my heart where all of these characters are going, and perhaps one day I'll know exactly what I want to say again through them.

I do have other projects in store once that day comes, both set in the universe of THK and completely new! And I've also been posting lots of art and stories on Patreon if you want to keep enjoying the characters a little more. I hope you'll look forward to my next projects as much as I do.

Thank you always for your support. I've been Maxi, you've been wonderful.

Last 3 days of Summer Sales! + General Updates

MaxiMJdevsteam_community_announcements

392d ago

Hey everyone!

How have all of you been doing? It's been half a year since the last update!

First off, I wanted to let you know that we're on the last 3 days of the steam Summer Sale! It's one of the best chances to get The Hayseed Knight in the year, provided I remember to set the discount (I did, I super did, it's 30% off). Tell your friends, tell your foes. Tell literally anyone because THK finally got to 4,000 sales two days ago after 4 years and a half since chapter 3 was first published on Steam.

I'm not going to lie, that is a tiny number in comparison with what games reach is and the 7 years of development that making The Hayseed Knight on my own took. But, it is still 4,000 people out there deciding to go and choose the game I started making one morning when my wrist gave up on me after 5 years working in comics and I had to give up what I thought would be the job of my life. It's bittersweet, but I am always eternally grateful for your support. Especially so because I've been without a stable job for a long, long time.

That's why I've spent the last two months focusing efforts on my patreon account to sustain myself in the mean time, and as a result, I've made tons of art after years fearing putting pen to paper!! You can get access to lots of cool exclusive fanservice illustrations, development stories and streams supporting me on patreon MaxiMJdev.

(Real interesting stuff in there)

I continue looking for ways to finish the translations before I can fully delve into developing a sequel. So far, even publishers who would have been interested in making a console port really don't see a reason to spend any money on translations for a visual novel like this, especially given that it's already released on steam. While I understand it (I broke down the HUGE cost it'd suppose in this post at the beginning of the year) to me that is the most important part — Console sales wouldn't make much sense or amount to anything otherwise.

That means that at the moment, I'm limited to continuing to work with volunteers or people who would be open to accepting payment way below industry standards. I'm sorry to ask such a thing, but if you're a French, Spanish or Japanese native / fully fluent speaker with some experience writing or translating, and you would like to be involved in helping finish The Hayseed Knight's translations knowing these, please contact me on bluesky or send an email thehayseedknight (at) gmail (dot) com

My time in Japan is soon coming to an end, with October being the final date to return to Spain if I can't get a job. I'll be in Bitsummit next week, not showing but just running around trying to make contacts as usual. I'll let you know if anything comes out of that!

That's all for now, I think! Thank you all for reading me as always. I hope you have a wonderful week and a wonderful month ahead of you!

2025: Localization Plans vs Problems

MaxiMJdevsteam_community_announcements

572d ago

Hey everyone! Happy New Year, first of all! How have you been these last few months? I moved to Japan back in October, and I've been having a lovely time over here in the big city (when my good ol' brain has been letting me do so). I've been touching up on python again lately, improving my Japanese fluency by talking to every person over 50 in the neighborhood, and squishing my brains dry trying to conceptualize the plot for the sequel. It's getting there, but also, I realize that after 11 years in the industry I'm burned out on making games like you wouldn't believe. I'm still unemployed, and every day I feel like creative work is something foreign that I managed in a different life—my brain isn't braining quite as well as I'd like it to. I'll get there, I'm sure. The concept for the sequel is already awesome, and I just need to hammer it into place. Since the last update back in July my husband Alex and I have been working tirelessly on the Spanish translation for chapter 4. It should hopefully be ready in the next couple of months! Which leads me to the first problem we'll be facing in 2025: So far, the French and Japanese localizations were carried out by two close friends: Benjamin Beziat (French) and Shion Otsuka (Japanese). They offered to provide these translations voluntarily all the way back in the first chapter and chapter 3 respectively, and that was all good and well— except that The Hayseed Knight got really freaking long over 7 years of development and they both have lives that take priority over this project. Their situation has changed, and so I'm without a translation team at this moment. I'm writing to let you know that the French translation is currently indefinitely on hold, and the Japanese translation will take a long time to resume. I've worked as a translator for many projects, and I love localizations with all my heart —the fact that Ader's story can be read in different languages, that more people can laugh at the translators' choices and marvel at the way Ader's accent was localized— however, the truth is that even if I were to add all the sales for both the French and Japanese markets since the game was first released on steam I'd have a grand total of 125 sales. THK hasn't even hit a total of 4,000 sales globally yet and that's a tiny figure in comparison all the same (3,3% as of now), but I'm Spanish and I know how it feels to be part of a market that only focuses on English releases. I truly wanted to offer The Hayseed Knight in as many languages as possible, so that we didn't have to play in someone else's language. Localizations, beyond my friends' good will, are a cost that I cannot afford for a story as wordy as this (220k words total). With about 100k words remaining for French (chapters 4 and 5) and 160k words remaining for Japanese (chapters 3, 4 and 5). Assuming a rate of 0.07 per word in French and 10 yen per character in Japanese, completing the localizations would cost over 25,000 EUR. That's a cost I can't justify to fully translate the game right now. The only way I see forward for localizations, short of finding a team that would be willing to assist the original translators, would be a publisher picking up the game for some form of re-release. There is definitely a TON of space for optimizations by people who know what they're doing better than me, and for release in consoles as well... but that's a pie in the sky sort of talk, as the industry is kind of in shambles right now. No matter how and how long it takes, I promise I'll find a way to continue the translations. I want to give one more thank you to Benjamin for being one of the first people ever to support The Hayseed Knight and for his determination to get the French translation out there (check out his channel SireRed so that I can keep on teasing him for being a youtubeur fameux); to Shion for being my friend and working in her spare time always to get the Japanese translation sorted out whenever I needed something for a new update, and to my husband Alex for always being willing to help out with the Spanish translation. Thank you as well, for your patience and trust in me and my passion project. I hope 2025 brings you nothing but happiness.

1.8.1 aka FULL STEAM DECK, CONTROLLER AND KEYBOARD COMPATIBILITY!

MaxiMJdevsteam_community_announcements

750d ago

Hey everyone! How have you been this last month? After a fairly nice start, summer is getting hot as hell in Spain. Instead of resting as one ought to, I've been working hard on this update, and I hope it'll be one that helps a lot of people get to experience the story comfortably! Introducing 1.8.1 aka FULL STEAM DECK, CONTROLLER AND KEYBOARD COMPATIBILITY! I had to ditch the original plan of upgrading to Ren'py 8 as my game depends on a whole lot of stuff that is specific to the version 7.5.3 and doesn't play nice with python 3, so I rolled up my sleeves and started scouring the internet for fixes that could make this version steam deck and generally controller compatible! (Thanks to Ashley of Gods of the Twilight for helping me out and testing, and to Kam aka Elbar's voice actor for testing as well!) I've added a lot of custom functionality to buttons so that you can navigate comfortably, play through every minigame, and get from start to finish of the story without needing to use a mouse! In fact I kinda enjoy navigating with a controller much better now, woops. I also added a handful of new encyclopaedia entries, improved encyclopaedia and diary navigation (made the entries a little prettier too), fixed a few visual bugs and generally just made stuff nicer all around. I believe this should be the last important update for a while until the localizations for each chapter are ready. After that, my plans include:

adding a descriptive mode accessibility function for visually impaired people
implementing a function to hover over a word to see a small encyclopaedia preview (which I managed to fully implement but sadly had to remove as it didn't play nice with localizations)
continuing to work on the next THK project sshhhhh

As a last personal note, I'm currently unemployed and could use some help gathering funds for the next project if you enjoyed the game. I have a Patreon page if you'd like to leave a tip, and if you have any leads on writing gigs (English, Spanish), voice direction (English, Spanish, Japanese) or generally overseeing a project, I'd really appreciate if you could tell me about it. I hope you have a wonderful day. Thanks for taking the time to read!

The Hayseed Knight, FULL GAME OUT!

Maxi / SandraMJsteam_community_announcements

885d ago

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!
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.

The Hayseed Knight 1.7.1: 翻訳総改訂 / Complete Japanese revision!

Maxi / SandraMJsteam_community_announcements

1138d ago

Hey everyone! How are you doing this fine June? Summer begins today here in Spain, but I've been melting under the Sun for a couple of weeks now. In my town, Alicante, we celebrate the night of summer solstice by going to the beach and jumping over bonfires where we burn stuff we want to cleanse ourselves of. Like notes and exams. Some people really just never want to look at their grades ever again in their lives. Me, I celebrate by bringing you all a new update while working tirelessly on chapter 5 to hopefully have it ready by September! The 1.7.1 update will be fairly minor to English, Spanish and French speakers (some typo fixes, updated credits, and little else), but it brings about a newly rewritten Japanese translation courtesy of THK's new Japanese editor, Chisato-san! Chisato-san, Shion-san and I have been working tirelessly this last year to bring together a stronger Japanese translation. With the addition of Chisato-san's expertise with literary wording and attention to detail, the style of the Japanese translation has truly been elevated. Chisato-san is a freelance editor and translator, and you should definitely keep her in mind for your English to Japanese projects! I am one step closer to fulfilling my pipe dream of having a Japanese dub of The Hayseed Knight, haha. For now, however, all the budget is going to chapter 5, and I can promise you this: it's going to make you cry, laugh, and cry again. Even though it ended up being 70k words long, it's still not everything I wanted it to be, given that my budget is limited and it couldn't cover the expanse I originally planned. There are still multiple endings, with one super hard to find Golden Ending™ that I'm not expecting anyone to figure out for a while, but I hope you'll have fun finding all of them! Thank you so much for all your support as always! Have a lovely day, and a lovely summer!

Chapter 5 tentative release date, and other bits!

Maxi / SandraMJsteam_community_announcementshide_store

1229d ago

Hey everyone! Welcome once more to: episodic releases and the fear they instill within my very soul. If you've ever had a project that ran on updates, you know what that's like — the fear of keeping people waiting. The "oh no, what if I run out of energy", "this writing sucks, what am I even doing" and who can forget the eternal "am I allowed to take so much as a break?" To everyone's surprise, and mine's first of all... Chapter 5 is pretty nearly written by now! Far, FAR faster than I expected. You may have realized that, perhaps, slicing the original plan for chapter 4 in half and having nearly 20k words written by your past self would help in the process. If you did, you're a bit sharper than me, and I'm proud of you. Be that as it may, I'm now sitting on the 50k+ word count for chapter 5 (I don't know what it is about that number but this keeps happening to me somehow) and facing three incredible facts:

There's a new casting call on the way for the remaining characters
I'm maybe two months away from recording this script (would be one, but I'll be in Japan in April making business contacts!)
I only have two months to save for the voice acting

That's right -- if everything goes well, I'll be recording in May, and hoping to release chapter 5, THE LAST CHAPTER at the same time as the epilogues, in September 2023. Let me zoom in on that last bit about voice acting first, however: with a large word count comes a large voice acting expense. Since this is the last chapter, I decided to go all out and make something I would be proud of for years to come! The way things usually go, I would spend years saving for new chapters, pinching coins wherever I can from my day job and patreon, and then build a voice acting budget from that. This time, however, I have but two months to save close to 5k USD. In the immediate term, I should be able to face that cost. I've been developing the game for six years, and I've had time to learn not to break the entire bank for an update. In the long run, however, that's an incredible blow to my budget and therefore my ability to make anything after this. If you'd like to throw some extra support at The Hayseed Knight, I'm currently passing the tip jar around and trying to gather some help on patreon. I don't have a whole lot to offer in return other than my gratitude and the promise that chapter 5 will be the strongest yet. I'll update you all again when the update to the Japanese text for chapters 1 and 2 and the new casting call for chapter 5 are ready. Thank you so much for your time and your support every time. It really does mean the world to me to see people enjoying the game.

The Hayseed Knight news & patch notes

The Hayseed Knight news & patch notes

IT'S OUT! THE FULL VERSION OF THE HAYSEED KNIGHT IS FINALLY OUT!

First off:

Secondly:

FEBRUARY 29TH, 2024

A preview of the animated intro trailer for the full game!

DECEMBER 8TH

AND the fact that Steam Cards have arrived!

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