Dear players,

We kept you waiting, but we finally launched a huge patch for Switch - and we called it version 2.0!

Additionally, we partnered up with the fantastic Kakehashi Games to bring Pine to Nintendo Switch in Japan!

We are proud to have worked tirelessly on revamping the entire port to align it more accurately with the PC version. While the original port was done as best as possible under the circumstances around release, we wanted to take a good look at how far we could come after upgrading the engine and re-aligning the Switch version with the state PC was in at that point.

For months we’ve battled with the Switch’s limited capabilities and built version 2.0 from the ground up. Below is a long list of all the things that were fixed, changed and added! Some of the highlights:

• Big performance stability gains and reduction in stutters because of incremental garbage collection, through upgrading Pine’s engine
  
• Massive memory optimizations - the game does not feature any (known) crashes through playtime anymore
  
• Loading times reduced by ~55%, much faster loading between scenes (interiors and open world)
  
• Increased world density to be on par with the PC version (in other words, lots of trees/bushes/rocks/assets added everywhere!)
  
• Smoother and much more responsive combat: added dodge cancel, kick out of any move and fractional directional control
  
• New languages: Dutch, Korean and Japanese
  

Additions

• Auto camera steering setting added
  
• Support for separate inversion settings on ranged and normal camera aiming
  
• Separate sensitivity for ranged aiming added
  
• Added 'coyote time' for smoother and more forgiving platforming
  
• Dodge cancelling for more responsive combat
  
• Added a loading screen bar to see the progress
  
• Fractional directional control in combat so that you can choose your direction in some parts of some moves, making combat much more responsive
  
• Scouting Lens map radius now showing Key Graphite pickups
  
• Dutch language support
  
• Korean language support
  
• Japanese language support
  

Changes and tweaks

• Complete UI revamp: UI now scales with docked/handheld according to resolution
  
• Removed smoothing from camera aim
  
• Kicking and sliding is now always possible (also in ranged and when nothing is equipped)
  
• Changed quest start and end sound (is now different)
  
• When leaving an interior (cave or Vault) with your Scouting Lens deployed inside, it will automatically return to you
  
• You can now roll and jump out of crouch
  
• Slow motion effect on combat moves tweaked to make it more responsive
  
• Camera collision redone for smoother camera movement, particularly in interiors
  

Fixes

• Garbage collect stutters reduced through implementation of incremental garbage collection, giving a much more consistent framerate
  
• Fixed ‘A Chilling Affair’ quest bug (did not progress sometimes)
  
• Fixed the Tiny Key problem in ‘The Pact’ quest where it sometimes didn’t show up
  
• Fixed player being able to die while in between area transitions
  
• UI revamp with many fixes (such as overlapping quest text, long string overflow, etc.)
  
• Made the monument tower in the Dry Bay a persistent landmark, visible from all angles/distances now
  
• Fixed text appearing with a few frames delay
  
• Improved lock-on/focus camera (was often glitching and disorientating)
  
• Solidified Lumiconda Tooth puzzle logic in the Ancient Stables
  
• Improved dialogue camera
  
• Fixed Hue floating up (as if standing on a box) in certain locations after jumping
  
• Fixed interacts with certain context (such as 'ignite' and 'enter') using incorrect string
  
• Metal and wood footstep parameters added for Hue
  
• Fixed 'The Crossing' cutscene part 2 audio, because it had Alpafants sniffing through it
  
• Cave entrance now drawn behind fog
  
• Fixed a bunch of unlocalized strings, among others in the map menu, Vault title cards and main quest tutorials
  
• Footstep speed parameter now scaled with animation (crouching)
  
• Only footwear covering feet gives 'boots' footstep sounds now
  
• Fixed totem village information UI missing after raiding villages
  
• Grounded several floating assets
  
• Numerous fixes for wrong speaker roles in dialogues
  
• Various questing bug fixes and stability improvements
  
• Numerous optimizations on all fronts
  
• Fixed status modifiers overflowing and being unclear in effect in equipment UI
  
• Fixed broken night visuals on village lanterns
  
• Fixed waterfall and torch particles not being LODed
  

Known issues

• As per the upgrade of our engine, UI tends to glitch a few frames around the first instances within a playthrough in which certain UI is shown. This does not impact gameplay. We are currently investigating together with Unity to find the solution.
  
• In some instances, streaming (loading the world) seems delayed. This should not impact gameplay too much, but can appear jarring. We are currently looking into optimizing this more and reducing the chances of this happening.
  
• In later stages of the game, performance is sub 30 in some areas. We now have a much stronger grip on why this is happening and are looking into these areas to improve these specifically.
  

If you see any other concerns or issues, please let us know and we’ll get on it!

Thanks so much for your ongoing support. You all make it worth developing for! Love,

The Twirlbound team

Dear players,

It's finally time for a big patch! It's been a while since the last update, but we've been working hard on improving Pine in some major areas. We listened to your feedback, revamped some systems on a deep, technical level and upgraded the engine Pine was built in. All of this took a bit longer than expected, but hopefully it was worth the wait!

The update is big in filesize too, but the game's disk size has shrinked a whopping 700mb (from 3.3GB to 2.6GB on disk)! Steam, GOG and Kartridge have been updated.

Some update highlights:

• Performance gains and big stutter reductions from garbage collection through upgrading Pine's engine and implementing incremental garbage collection
  
• Combat is smoother and much more responsive: added dodge cancel, kick out of any move and fractional directional control
  
• Camera tweaks: added auto steering settings and removed aimed smoothing
  
• Platforming is more forgiving due to the addition of ‘coyote time'
  
• Two new languages added (Dutch and Korean), two more coming soon
  

Full patch notes:

Additions

• Auto camera steering setting added (as requested here)
  
• Support for separate inversion settings on ranged and normal camera aiming (as requested here)
  
• Separate sensitivity for ranged aiming (as requested here)
  
• Added ‘coyote time' for smoother and more forgiving platforming (as requested here)
  
• Dodge cancelling for more responsive combat (as requested here)
  
• Added a loading screen bar to see the progress
  
• Fractional directional control in combat so that you can choose your direction in some parts of some moves, making combat much more responsive
  
• Scouting Lens map radius now showing Key Graphite pickups
  
• Dutch language support
  
• Korean language support
  

Changes and tweaks

• Removed smoothing from camera aim (as requested/mentioned here, here, here)
  
• Kicking and sliding is now always possible (also in ranged and when nothing is equipped)
  
• Changed quest start and end sound (is now different)
  
• When leaving an interior (cave or Vault) with your Scouting Lens deployed inside, it will automatically return to you
  
• You can now roll and jump out of crouch
  
• Slow motion effect on combat moves tweaked to make it more responsive (as requested here)
  
• Camera collision redone for smoother camera movement, particularly in interiors
  

Fixes

• Garbage collect stutters reduced through implementation of incremental garbage collection, giving a much more consistent framerate
  
• UI revamp with many fixes (such as overlapping quest text, long string overflow, etc.)
  
• Fixed text appearing with a few frames delay
  
• Improved lock-on/focus camera (was often glitching and disorientating)
  
• Improved dialogue camera
  
• Fixed Hue floating up (as if standing on a box) in certain locations after jumping
  
• Fixed interacts with certain context (such as ‘ignite' and ‘enter') using incorrect string
  
• Metal and wood footstep parameters added for Hue
  
• Fixed ‘The Crossing' cutscene part 2 audio, because it had Alpafants sniffing through it
  
• Cave entrance now drawn behind fog
  
• Fixed a bunch of unlocalized strings, among others in the map menu, Vault title cards and main quest tutorials
  
• Localized controls rebinding menus
  
• Footstep speed parameter now scaled with animation (crouching)
  
• Only footwear covering feet gives ‘boots' footstep sounds now
  
• Fixed totem village information UI missing after raiding villages
  
• Grounded several floating assets
  
• Numerous fixes for wrong speaker roles in dialogues
  
• Various questing bug fixes and stability improvements
  
• Numerous optimizations on all fronts
  
• Fixed status modifiers overflowing and being unclear in effect in equipment UI
  
• Fixed broken night visuals on village lanterns
  
• Fixed waterfall and torch particles not being LODed
  

We hope you enjoy these changes. The engine upgrade in particular has been time consuming, but we hope that it stabilizes Pine and gives you a better experience.

As always, please let us know if something isn't right or isn't to your liking, so that we can keep improving Pine.

After 7 months of preparation, we are enormously proud to say that Pine now actually LIVE on Kickstarter!





The page features TONS of new gameplay content, both in the pitch video and in the information. Go check it out, and tell us what you think!

If we can reach 100k in 34 days, Pine's future is sealed. Thanks to everyone who helped us get here so far!

This is it - the official Pine announcement trailer! After months of work, we're incredibly excited to show a ton of new footage, including new species, weapons and gameplay mechanics.

It's still early in development, but we're going to Kickstarter to engage with a larger community to help us make the best game we can with our small and modest team.



What a day it has been - we've been hitting near-top-100 on Greenlight within 24 hours, and were on top of r/games on Reddit all day. The YouTube, Facebook and Twitter views combined are hitting over 40k and we get great comments everywhere. We've seen and gotten a lot of good feedback, which we all appreciate, and we're working hard on the things that are bothering people in the trailer.

We have great confidence in our game, and we hope the trailer gives you a glimpse of the adventurous feeling it's already giving us behind the scenes.

Lastly, we're working hard on another progress video - the trailer has been made completely iteratively, so we're excited to show you all how it progressed for us in about 3 months.

Until next time!