- Last call to get YOUR OWN ADER PLUSHIE! - 2 April 2026
Hey everyone! Very straight-forward post today!The Ader plushie campaign on Gimme Swag that ran all through March is almost done! We're down to the last 8 hours to get your own Ader to hug!THE SITE TO BUY IT: https://www.gimmeswag.com/products/ader-plushieTHE PREVIEW OF ME MAKING NOISES WHILE FLYING AN ADER PLUSHIE AROUND:
- The Hayseed Knight: FULLY available in Spanish and French!! - 28 February 2026
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…
- Chapter 4: AVAILABLE IN SPANISH AND FRENCH AT LAST! - 7 November 2025
Hey everyone!How have you been these last couple of months? I've finally moved back to Spain and I'm doing my best to get used to small town life after a year in Tokyo! With any luck, I'll be out on another adventure soon enough.If I've not managed to break anything, this update won't be very significant to English players (I've mostly just updated credits, fixed a little thing at the end and changed some links)... but thanks to Bedeschi Mathieu doing the first pass in French, Alex García Cutillas doing the first pass in Spanish, SireRed editing and rewriting in French, and everyone's support on The Hayseed Knight's patreon, the translations for chapter 4 have been completed in Spanish and French!!! That only leaves chapter 5 left to be translated in both languages, but we're almost there!!I'm afraid, however, that the future for the Japanese translation beyond the demo version is still…
- OFFICIAL ADER PLUSHIE CAMPAIGN LIVE!!! - 3 September 2025
The title says it all!You've been asking for it for years, and it finally has a chance to become real: the official Ader Plushie campaign is now live on Gimme Swag!! I designed the plushie myself back in 2023 and I've been waiting for a chance to get the design out there! AND HERE IT IS NOW!!Here's how this works: for the plushie to go into production, we need 100 pledges in 10 days (Sept 2nd - Sept 12th). If you pledge to the campaign, you'll be initially charged $2. You will only pay the full price of $34.99 if the campaign becomes successful, otherwise you'll be refunded!If the campaign is successful, we could do new campaigns for other characters and maybe other types of merchandise as well!Please, help me make the Ader plushie a reality and get your own lovely shovelhands to hug!!
- Last 3 days of Summer Sales! + General Updates - 7 July 2025
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'…
- 2025: Localization Plans vs Problems - 8 January 2025
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…
- 1.8.1 aka FULL STEAM DECK, CONTROLLER AND KEYBOARD COMPATIBILITY! - 13 July 2024
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 comfort…
- 1.8.0.2, fixes, and the future of The Hayseed Knight! - 1 June 2024
Hey everyone! How have you been these last few months? Me, I've been enjoying my new-found freedom after 7 years obsessing over my project. I quit a 5-year-long job that had caused me massive burnout, and I've been trying to just learn how to exist again. I spent some time in USA with friends, I've been practicing different painting styles, I've been streaming a lot of fun games on twitch, and I've taken up singing lessons again. The Hayseed Knight was born in therapy, in a space between jobs and finding a new life, and it's in this moment between calm and uncertainty that I find the most fertile breeding grounds for creativity. I'm not the kind of person who does well under pressure to tell you the truth, so I hope I can keep this peace moving forward. On to the meat of the announcement! 1.8.0.2 was a rather small update to fix typos and a couple silly mistakes here and there, add hint…
- The Hayseed Knight, FULL GAME OUT! - 29 February 2024
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…
- Dev Stream Announcement + Small price increase for full release! - 30 January 2024
Now that The Storyteller's festival has started, it's time to make a couple more announcements yet! First off: To celebrate the announcement of the full release date (29th February, don't forget!), I'll be holding a Steam live broadcast playing through the as-of-yet unreleased full game demo! including lots of cool new visuals, voice acting, and the all-new rewritten meeting scene in chapter 1. I'll be answering questions and hanging out with the chat, so come join us on the THK discord, and click on the event to get a reminder! The schedule for the broadcast is: PST - 9 AM, Friday 2nd of February CDT - 11 AM, Friday 2nd of February GMT - 5 PM, Friday 2nd of February AEDT - 4 AM, Saturday 3rd of February (sorry :
- CHAPTER 5 ahead! FULL GAME release date! - 29 January 2024
Hey everyone! How have you been these last few months? I've been working a lot (and I mean a LOT) to bring you the full version of THK. In fact, as I write this my 9 year old cintiq 13HD has just died and I'm waiting to get a new tablet because I wanted to update a lot of backgrounds to bring them up to speed with my latest ones. Just my usual luck, but I really think you'll love them. Sep thinks so too. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GEeAzFdXsAADwp2?format=jpg&name=large ...I think. So! On to the matter at hand! The Hayseed Knight Chapter 5 and therefore the full game will release on FEBRUARY 29TH, 2024 If you're thinking "Maxi, did you see it was a skip year and made a silly choice" yes, 100%, you are correct. Chapter 5 is almost done (only animations and SFX remain at this point), but the last half of it is a very involved minigame and I need the buffer time to do a lot of QA, and prete…
- Deadlines, or the art of never meeting them - 20 November 2023
Hey everyone! How are you all doing? I've had a few really chaotic months. I spent all of October working on an amazing project for a client that I can't yet reveal, and then my PC which had been malfunctioning for a while kindly broke down and I had to wait a few weeks for it to be repaired. Chapter 5 progresses quickly, but I'm afraid there's still a lot to be done and I can't give you the 8th December deadline I was hoping for. I can give you, in exchange, a preview of a little something that is very close to my heart: A preview of the animated intro trailer for the full game! My friend Piti Yindee and I have been working for four months to bring you the first ever animated version of THK. Piti handled the animation and clean up, I handled corrections, compositing and backgrounds. We also counted with the lovely help of Patt Jewanarom and Mookie handling the rough animation for one s…
- Chapter 5 delayed until December, and progress so far! - 1 September 2023
Hi everyone! How were you these last few months? I had to endure a hellish July and a muggy August, but it's been going alright overall other than some health hijinks as usual. My original plan was to release chapter 5 in September. That might have been optimistic, but nothing could have prepared me for how incredibly cursed the recording for chapter 5 would be. I'm not talking cursed as in painful memes and laughing. I'm talking car accidents, near-death events, general sickness, people quitting voice acting, a hurricane, having to rerecord several parts because of recording mishaps... to the point that it still is not yet complete (there is very little left, but it is not complete despite having scheduled all recordings to be complete before July) So yeah. If I can have at least all the audio ready this month, that'll be a victory. Then that will only leave my greatest enemy: scriptin…
- The Hayseed Knight 1.7.1: 翻訳総改訂 / Complete Japanese revision! - 21 June 2023
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…
- Chapter 5 Casting Call (and a small delay to the updated Japanese version) - 7 April 2023
Hi everyone! How are you all doing this April? I'm a little freaked out because I'm off to Japan tomorrow. It's my first time there, and it's going to be 30 hours of a journey. I'm very excited all the same!! すーごく緊張してますよ！ On the matter of Japanese, in fact: the next significant update, 1.7.1, has sadly been postponed until May. The update itself contained small fixes in English to typos and such, but the major update was on revising the current Japanese translation. Localization QA is still ongoing and the Japanese editor, Chisato-san, really wanted to make sure it was in perfect condition before it was released. 日本人読者の皆様へ:お待ちいただいてありがとうございます。 Going back to chapter 5, though! The current casting call is now live until May 6th 2023! Check it out and take a look at a few of the characters yet to come! Chapter 5 continues advancing, and I'll keep writing during my trip! Remember that you ca…
- Chapter 5 tentative release date, and other bits! - 22 March 2023
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 th…
- CHAPTER 4, out at last!! - 1 February 2023
Welcome, everyone, to v 1.7.0 AKA CHAPTER 4 RELEASE! After two years of work, it's finally here. Finally done! 6 hours of all new gameplay! Picture the Frodo LOTR meme gif here. Originally, it was going to be just the one chapter to rule them all, but it grew so large I had to slice it in two! You can see it's still pretty large. Among other things, Spanish and French translations are up to Chapter 3 now! And there's an update to the Japanese translation for chapters 1 and 2 on the way! Exciting stuff!! And now for the full update list: Updated to Ren'py 7.5.3 Switched to GL renderer, so now there are tints, blurs, and all sorts of cool new visual updates! Updated Eina's sprite majorly, plus a few other bits and pieces in others Updated a few backgrounds to make them clearer! I added a couple of new mini scenes around Added a new bad ending to chapter 3 (dundundundun) More tracks from E…
- Chapter 4: Coming out February 1st 2023! - 20 January 2023
Hey everyone! How is 2023 treating you? Mine has been: BUSY. I've spent many hours working on my computer and taken up boxing again, to help my back a bit. I've also organized a trip to Japan for spring! I'm very excited to see it for the first time, even though I've been directing voice actors in Japanese for a while now! (Maybe one day I'll have the funds to actually have a Japanese dub of THK) Chapter 4 will be coming out for real, at last, this February 1st. That's just about 12 days, I can hardly believe it. It's the result of two years of work, and I truly feel it's the best (an already excellent) voice acting has ever been. I've been so busy developing that I haven't been able to do much PR at all, so if you're or you know any game press that could cover this, I'd really appreciate if you could send me a contact that I could mail the press release to at thehayseedknight(at)gmail(…
- Chapter 4 to be released in 2023! - 3 December 2022
Hi everyone! I hope November was a kind month to you! I spent practically all of it developing chapter 4, working day after day to get all the audio edited before sending it off to THK's lovely audio engineer, Natalie van Sistine, for levelling! All the audio for chapter 4 is in the game now, but being that this is a Visual Novel, I still have a lot of art assets left to make, press to reach out to, old and new typos to crush in Spanish... Just the usual, really. And after 3 months of intense work since I first started recording with the voice actors, my back has really taken a toll. If I continue working at this rhythm, I'm going to open up the hernia that had me go on hiatus after chapter 3 again. That's why, I've decided to delay Chapter 4 into early 2023, exact date TBA. I really wanted to make it to the December 8th deadline and celebrate alongside my birthday, but more than that,…
- Recordings Finished! CHAPTER 4: FULL SPEED AHEAD! - 25 October 2022
Hi everyone! I hope you've had a lovely October! Mine has been a bit hectic (my own particular damage RNG has been so kind as to grant me heart issues), but other than that it's been fun and busy! On to the meat of the announcement: tomorrow, all of the audio for chapter 4 will be completed at last! That means that all that's left is tons and tons of editing (I'm only about halfway through that), art (I can barely count the tasks anymore) and scripting (the bane of my existence). That means I can tentatively say at last that I should be on time to make the release date I chose for chapter 4... DECEMBER 8TH That's my birthday! And all I'd love for it is for you to share the game with people you think would like it, if you'd be so kind. Maybe send them this cute new trailer I made? Fingers crossed I can make it to the deadline without any other random bit breaking down in my body! In othe…
