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[Eigen]

Hut, hut, hike!

You can now upgrade your campsite to a hut given you have enough building materials and a skill (construction) to do so. Huts keep you relatively safe during winters and enable quicker rest. Huts are permanent so you can always return to one if you wish on your travels. Without such a structure your first winter will most likely be your last but I'm considering other saving options too. Because, you know, not everyone knows how to build a shack this fine.

[Eigen]

A little fan-art from eigenbom




Thanks!

[eigenbom]

[Eigen]

Psst.

[Eigen]

http://www.pioneersgame.com

Technically it's been out for a week but I really wanted to set up the itch.io page before announcing properly. So yes, it's been over a year since I released anything related to Pioneers. Some of you might have thought I quit but I didn't. There were long gaps in development however and the summer of 2014 saw very little development. My work really drained all the energy to work on anything else.

The release of the latest build was mainly motivated by IndieCade East 2015 where Chris Dwyer from Junklatch showed the game among others. That one week before that was a crazy crunch mode taking time off work and pulling 14-hour days to get stuff working again. I completely broke the game after Build 6 when I started rewriting bits in Lua so I had to pull all the loose ends together. That means the story and the quests have not really progressed but the game is now much more stable. But of course there's also a lot of new content.

First of all, some screenshots to hint towards what's new:

There are tweaks..

• Tweaked the colors to be darker/deeper and more pleasant
• Cleaned up the sidebar (notice the circular character portrait)
• Made more of the texts closable at any moment (also clicking on animating texts will finish them)
• New sailing mode screen - no more sidebar, only the neccessary elements
• Changed adding and levelling up skills - you no longer need certain attribute points to add skills

..and there are new things

• Proper winter - anything you do requires more energy so you need to rest a lot more. Just rest out exposed to the elements and you'll perish quite quickly so you need to build shelters or find..
• Caves - Explore the subterranean areas. Right now the caves are bare but I will include gemstones and other valuables down there so you'll have a reason to wander around. Just don't get lost.
• Sheltering - Collect some wood a build a basic shelter if you don't have a proper construction skill. Once you do, you can build actual huts greatly improving your chances for survival.
• Cooking - Fish or collect meat from your defeated foresty foes and cook raw material to delicious cuisines.
• Swimming - Just jump right in and go where-ever
• And much more!

During winter your ship is frozen solid in the ice so no sailing. You can use the ice to travel on foot but if you're out on the sea when spring comes you're screwed.

Protip: Use the autumn to collect firewood and fish or meat or you'll perish during the winter.


You can get the latest alpha from itch.io. You may download it for free but I would greatly appreciate it if you would include a little donation. I think this is the last build to be completely free, so starting with next releases there would be a small minimum price. I feel the game has developed far enough over these 3 years to warrant this. TIGSource has been an amazingly supportive community right from the earliest mockups for this project, so I hope this support has not gone anywhere.

Download here

I'm really happy about this new release and I hope you enjoy it!

[Fresh Mozzarella]

I'm so happy this game is still being worked on, I remember signing up on TIG 3 years ago and seeing this devlog. All the best things are worth the wait

[Eigen]

Thanks!


The next feature I want to add is creating a single group of pioneers. At the moment you can hire or create up to 4 explorers and you control them individually. From personal experience that gets impossible starting from 3 or even 2 characters. Not very fun to play. While one dude is chopping away at the trees you forget the others and waste their turns ... not so great.

So I'm considering changing to a classical dungeon crawler setup where the whole party acts as a single unit. That solves a lot of problems. First is that I plan on developing a proper turn based combat system, so whenever you encounter an enemy the game switches to the combat view. With individual characters there was always the question who to engage in the combat. Only the attacked/attacker character? Anyone in a certain radius managing to come to help? Nah, neither option sounds good. Engaging as a group solves that. They will move and act together.

Of course, that poses the question which character determines the number of moves the group can take or who to use for the range of visibility. Right now the agility points translate directly to number of moves per turn and perception is used for the range of visibility. Use the fastest character or the slowest? The solution is to let the player set the number of moves the group can take per turn (defaulting to an average). Push them harder or take it easy, it's up to you. The higher the average agility of the group, the further you can push them. The slower characters would have to depend on the stamina attribute to determine how much energy they lose trying to keep up. Similarily, the player could choose the range to explore on every move. But as you increase the number, your moves per turn is lowered because you need time to fully uncover your surroundings. The higher the average perception of the group, the higher you can push the number. Basically it would be two sliders affecting each other. Rush through with a narrow field of view or slow down and fully survey the area.

To make things even more interesting roles could be introduced:

• Trailblazer (unlocked at 2 members) - Character assigned to this role gets an agility bonus but it penalized in strength to keep the backpack light.
• Surveyor (unlocked at 2) - Character assigned to this role gets a perception bonus but is penalized in stamina as all the mental alertness takes a toll.
• Porter (unlocked at 3) - Character assigned to this role gets a strength bonus but is penalized in intelligence as everyone considers them a grunt.
• Savant (unlocked at 4) - Character assigned to this role gets an intelligence bonus but is penalized in agility as they get lost in thought more often.

Of course the downside to all this is the slightly diminished value of turn-based gameplay but it still helps keep the pacing nice and pleasant.

[Eigen]

In case anyone didn't know (but you probably did).



I find it easier to draw things in grayscale so I don't get bogged down in trying to come up with the best color for a highlight or shadow detail (as I normally do drawing regular colorful pixel art). Since only 4 colors are availble, shape and readability of the piece is most important. Also this allows systematically to adjust the colors without touching the assets.

Basically, if the asset doesn't work in grayscale, it will also look bad in color.

[dmcondolora]

I'm really glad to see that Pioneers is still alive! I stumbled upon it a few years ago, and love the idea and historical-ish setting. And I especially love the art style!

[Rat Casket]

did you design the font you are using? cause its hella good.

[Eigen]

did you design the font you are using? cause its hella good.

Thanks! I think the main font is a mix of Tw Cen MT Bold and Comic Sans because these were most readable at size 6 or 7. I've modified many of the characters to further improve readability and make them a bit more my own. Although at that small of a size your options are pretty limited.




Above are the lowercase letters in the last build, below are the improvements for the latest version. Some of these changes are subtle but they really helped make the text look more natural, especially when displayed in longer paragraphs.

[happymonster]

Any progress?

[Eigen]

Any progress?

Little. Between work, finding a new place to live and returning to life of a bachelor in general I haven't found much time nor motivation to work on the game. All in all everything that's happened has been what I've been wanting for the last few years and hopefully will usher in a new more productive era. I'm already much happier.

My main focus right now is the combat. A couple of months back I thought I had it figured out but it totally wasn't fun to play. It looked kinda like this:



I didn't complete this because the feeling just wasn't right. That's also one of the reasons my development is so slow. I tend to fiddle, rewrite and scrap things or just let them develop in my mind until the feeling is right. I often don't know what I'm after but I know it when I get there ... sort of thing.


Then I started headed in a totally different direction. Since the game already heavily lies on text, why not make combat and all other adventure-gamey encounters in similar style. That is, text and illustrations. To me this feels much more robust and allows weird and esoteric options to be presented to the player other than just "move" and "attack". Stuff like, I don't know, wear the bear skin you flayed earlier to scare away smaller animals or using whatever's around to throw or use.



I'm also probably going to include more mythical creatures to enrichen the cast of opponents. Wolves, bears and hogs are fine but giant spiders, shrieking bats, toxic snails and maybe even ogres and forest spirits sound much cooler.


So yeah, that's what I want to complete next. I have a bunch of vacation coming up in July and with my new independence I'll probably spend it working on the game.

[Quarry]

While I would have loved the first version, the second one is a lot more fitting in the context and I believe will give you a lot more freedom with the amount of actions you can let the player take. Putting combat in a D&D-like roleplaying concept is something I never saw in a game with graphics, and I'm excited to try it out!

[Christian]

Any progress?

Little. Between work, finding a new place to live and returning to life of a bachelor in general I haven't found much time nor motivation to work on the game. All in all everything that's happened has been what I've been wanting for the last few years and hopefully will usher in a new more productive era. I'm already much happier.

My main focus right now is the combat. A couple of months back I thought I had it figured out but it totally wasn't fun to play. It looked kinda like this:



I didn't complete this because the feeling just wasn't right. That's also one of the reasons my development is so slow. I tend to fiddle, rewrite and scrap things or just let them develop in my mind until the feeling is right. I often don't know what I'm after but I know it when I get there ... sort of thing.


Then I started headed in a totally different direction. Since the game already heavily lies on text, why not make combat and all other adventure-gamey encounters in similar style. That is, text and illustrations. To me this feels much more robust and allows weird and esoteric options to be presented to the player other than just "move" and "attack". Stuff like, I don't know, wear the bear skin you flayed earlier to scare away smaller animals or using whatever's around to throw or use.



I'm also probably going to include more mythical creatures to enrichen the cast of opponents. Wolves, bears and hogs are fine but giant spiders, shrieking bats, toxic snails and maybe even ogres and forest spirits sound much cooler.


So yeah, that's what I want to complete next. I have a bunch of vacation coming up in July and with my new independence I'll probably spend it working on the game.

Oh I like that idea. But giant spiders and such seem at odds with the age of discovery era atmosphere IMO

Personally I think creatures from Native America folklore and other cultures would be a better fit. Like the Baykok or a Skin-Walker, etc.

[oyog]

The redesign for combat sounds excellent. NEO Scavenger does something similar, though with less focus on story telling, and I think it works really well. This looks like it might be a little more intuitive with the sort of choose your own adventure style and not having to deal with distance and movement in combat as much as NS does.

[Ashedragon]

That looks really awesome. Combat depth is always fun to play around with.

[kleiba]

Wow, I suddenly remembered Pioneers... and am shocked to see that it's been sooo long since this thread was last updated. Given the contents of Eigen's last posts, I'm worried that the game has been abandoned after all.

 

Please, Eigen, tell me I'm wrong...

[JobLeonard]

The Tumblr is being updated:

http://pioneersgame.tumblr.com/post/138734967608/playing-around-with-colors-for-different-real-and

So the project appears to be alive.

[kleiba]

Cool! Thanks, JL