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EDIT - Game's out!! Steam page here -->

(https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steam/apps/1061610/header.jpg?t=1603292142]) (https://store.steampowered.com/app/1061610/Tenderfoot_Tactics/)
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1061610/Tenderfoot_Tactics/ (https://store.steampowered.com/app/1061610/Tenderfoot_Tactics/)

(https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steam/apps/1061610/ss_aa9b757f27a8dbabdf60178ea460116bd4f8a6ae.1920x1080.jpg?t=1603292142)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGL0gDMsrgI&feature=emb_title


OK the rest of this post represents roughly where the game was when I began this devlog, but a LOT has changed.
--








Here's where I'm at with the major components of the game:

(https://i.imgur.com/45dzlHK.gif)

Combat is where I've spent the most time. Most everything here is working, but needs a lot more work to get where I want it. Right now I'm halfway through moving my systems from a 12x12 grid correlated to the movement grid to a 128x128 fine-grained simulation. I've prototyped out each tier of class in the RPG structure and feel good about the general arc, but need to fill in a lot of holes. I'm currently like 90% of the way to my next major milestone here, which will allow testers to start from a starting party and play through random encounters to level through the job tree.

(https://i.imgur.com/hnvsIvj.gif)

(https://i.imgur.com/8fGcImc.gif)

(https://i.imgur.com/G0N88QN.gif)

Party Management is a functioning prototype that needs a lot of consideration from design/UI perspectives. It's in because it needs to be for me to rearrange parties and is just recently being given to testers.

(https://i.imgur.com/1VbsGPa.gif)

The Overworld is a bare-bones concept basically, but has gotten some recent love where I've hammered out the core structure for quests and dialogue.

--

I'll post more in-depth stuff about systems when I get a moment later! Not sure whether to dig into the way things are first, or to just jump into what I'm working on now (water rendering, fire simulation).

(https://i.imgur.com/QLIoMGh.gif)

Spent some time this weekend getting the water to a more watery place by modifying the color based on view reflection angles, and adding some watery panning normal maps (just sampled from world position) to the vertex positions.

Kind of a waste of time but I let myself do that on weekends :)

Started to dig into actually marching the reflection direction into the depth map to get the 'correct' color, which should be doable since I'm using the deferred renderer, but wasn't able to do it right off the bat. Decided it looked pretty good with faked colors and I shouldn't be wasting a bunch of hours on something so unimportant so I'm leaving that blob of code commented out for now but maybe I'll come back some future weekend.

The stuff that didn't end up working out was something like this:


Instead I'm doing this way lazier but more performant, controlled, and pretty-good-looking hack:


-

I think I'll try to put my fire simulation in a compute shader next, and then maybe get to the meatier and way-more-important stuff of leveling-up characters

Redid the plant and fire sims in compute shaders, which was really gratifying because I'd written a sort of superstructure and some reusable components already, and it only took a few hours total.

The plants were immediately growing in more interesting and obvious patterns, and the fire has a much clearer route. Before things were all running per vertex or per quad, so roughly 12x12 on these map sizes, and it was lacking a lot of the nice fine-grained stuff I'm getting now, so I'm really happy with that. I ultimately want the systems to feel very rich and alive and the higher resolution seems like it's doing a lot for that.

(https://i.imgur.com/hQpp6br.gif)
(https://i.imgur.com/BkN8ojq.gif)

Also have the core leveling stuff working, but need UI now :X

Hellooo!!

Lots of reworks of core systems over the last few weeks as I pull my various prototype scenes together into a cohesive entity that can more fluidly transition between the overworld and the combat scenes, and can overlay all my menus within either.

UI

The UI used to be composed of a random assortment of panels that were toggled on or off. Now it’s built as a persistent core that has various smaller components which can be told to become visible or to hide themselves, and to listen for input or not. These small components can now be restructured more easily, can be reused in different circumstances, and can decide on an individual basis how to show or hide themselves, and how to handle input when they’re focused.

I’m also starting to replace parts of the UI that used to be wholly text with icons. Currently the icons are just purchased assets. They’re probably just placeholders I’ll replace later. Do you hate them? I can’t decide whether I hate them or whether they’re hilarious and great. I think they do a lot for the game regardless.

(https://78.media.tumblr.com/6f379e70cdbff98debea68e931c89691/tumblr_inline_pamze5vMR71qjwcuw_540.gif)

Input

While rewriting the UI I decided I wanted to handle player input more holistically and in a more robust manner. I wrote a wrapper for my input plugin (Rewired) and rewrote all of my input interfacing to go through that wrapper.

The wrapper is structured as a bunch of static delegates that send out custom "ButtonState" or "AxisState" objects when input is received. I also wrote a second layer for the cursor which lets you register world colliders and UI rects and handles deciding which was clicked and which is hovered, firing off generic events as well as optionally calling registered delegates per-collider.

The input system should now easily handle mouse and keyboard as well as controller input, including small things like changing camera behavior and hiding the cursor when a controller is being used.

New Overhead Displays

I restructured the display over units’ heads to have more uses. They still show a unit’s turn order, but when a unit is currently taking its turn they’ll now act as a sort of highlighter to indicate the unit more clearly (rather than just displaying “0”). When a unit takes damage, they’ll animate out a small health bar (like before) but without numbers to reduce clutter. When the unit is hovered with a cursor or their grid space is hovered with a map selector, the overhead display now animates out to show additional information: specific health numbers, the unit’s name and job, and the icons of the unit’s known skills, which should help players make more informed decisions. I think I’ll also add an outline on the map indicating where that unit can move, since that’s currently a bit difficult to parse.

(https://78.media.tumblr.com/4b1fb06aa7b0f05f69796f8e9300747c/tumblr_inline_pamzblvTlQ1qjwcuw_540.png)

Job Trees and Progression

Units now gain experience at the end of combat, after which the player is returned to the party menu. As units level up they unlock more skill slots within their job as well as unlocking more specific and complex jobs.

The jobs and skills still need to be filled in, but this is the core of the progression loop and it’s more or less functioning, although not feeling wonderful just yet.

Right now a job is unlocked for a unit if it has X levels in a previous job, and if the unit is one of the correct "affinities" - so e.g. both fire and earth attuned units can become lavamancers but only fire attuned units can become warlocks.

(https://78.media.tumblr.com/af75623322648a07b8d4c5e9444ebca0/tumblr_inline_pamzczoTl91qjwcuw_540.png)

Also!

The party menu has been moved into the overworld, so it should be fairly trivial to add in overworld exploration and questing in the near future (e.g. when I want to be able to release a demo).

A lot of the visuals have been unified around sky/horizon/light colors, so it should be manageable to add biomes, time, or seasonal cycles somewhere down the line.

The AI has been rewritten to bypass UI and input in a way that is less bug-prone, and looks cleaner for players (you don’t have to watch the AI choose what skills to use) as well as somewhat more mysterious, which I like. It uhh it used to fake controller input and use the menus as if it were a player, which I think was cute but kind of hacky and more work than it was worth.

–
Happy solstice!
☀️ badru
–
PS - if you want to help test hmu :) [email protected]

Those effects look great, really surprised this hasn't gotten more attention.

I also quite like the stick figure look of the people. Are they placeholders or are you sticking with that style?

The fire effect seems a little cartoon-y for how realistic the terrain is, though.

Looks like the interactions and UI already have quite a bit of juice. Would really like to see a video of a battle start-to-finish if possible.

Thanks!

I am actually not sure whether the stick people are placeholders or not! I'm sort of playing with the idea of replacing them with custom meshes per job/class. Right now there's an equipment system that's hidden from the player, and the stick people are good neutral models to put whatever clothes on. So I could either make triple-digit numbers of individual equipment meshes and let players dress their people up (which does sound cute), or make 28 character meshes (one per job) that hopefully could use the same animations retargeted mostly. Both sound like a lot of work. I think the visual clarity of a single monolithic 'look' for each job would do more service to the combat gameplay and maybe the visual design, but I also like the idea of dressing up your own people, and I definitely want the player to think of their team as a bunch of dolls they play with, so that matches the creative goals in some ways. I don't know! It's bad to not know probably but I'm just avoiding working on those systems until I have a stronger direction.

The fire is almost definitely going to be reworked to be more detailed / less symbolic. You'll see in the old gameplay video I'm going to link you below that more of the game used to be in that simplified geometric style. I struggled a lot with feeling like there was too much noise to read the gameplay-relevant signals from the visuals, and what I found was that hewing closer to realistic made it take less mental energy to decode, for instance, when the soil was wet or the grass was dry.

I'm actually doing that pass on the brush right now, moving from more symbolic to more naturalistic, and maybe I'll do a quick pass on the fire too...

(The promised video, circa January. First ~40 seconds are edited cuts but after that it's just a play of a single battle. The look and systems have changed a lot but the core combat is very similar still.) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDsmFbzBeNs)

Actually, here's from when it was even more fully geometric/symbolic, for better comparison:

(https://78.media.tumblr.com/fda521d1c26f2f1320309768a974bd7f/tumblr_ovo2fa8aJN1wttnrto1_1280.gif)

Redid my "lighting" setup while fixing up my foliage in general.

I've got two gradients, one for fog color and one for sky color, and do a combination of lerps and multiplies of an object's local color against those two based on vertex world position. So for example as an object gets further from the player's position its shader lerps from ObjectColor --> FogColor(pos). And as a vertex gets further off the ground height, the light color it's multiplied against lerps from FogColor(pos) to OverheadSkyColor.

(https://78.media.tumblr.com/b04a0af412803636a0fe198655aa40c4/tumblr_pay0bcJh6H1wttnrto2_r1_1280.png)

I tried using normals for lighting direction but decided it described the form of the objects too well and ended up distracting from the colors and silhouettes. You could see leaf quads clipping with each other and such. I think it's nicer to use something like world space for lighting, which guarantees that where two triangles intersect, their colors will be identical and so the geometry clipping will be less noticeable.

I've also fixed up my instancer (all my foliage is built on top of Unity's DrawMeshInstanced(), which hooks into GPU instancing of meshes and lets me put way more foliage on screen than I could afford with full game objects).

Next up - writing a Region Settings Manager, which will let me serialize out different lighting and foliage for different regions / biomes, and eventually let me transition between regions based on the player's location in the overworld map.

Oh I just thought to note that this game is set in a real place and I'm using reference to get specific colors and general shapes.

(https://78.media.tumblr.com/877f5043d1cd75546706e111fed80c61/tumblr_inline_pay1jmiqcT1qjwcuw_540.jpg)(https://78.media.tumblr.com/3a7aa183a6caa5d0ad88241d7f0e65b3/tumblr_inline_pay1jiA0tc1qjwcuw_540.jpg)

I'm using a combination of cheap assets and quick blender trash for my meshes depending on need. It's for speed right now as I get the systems in place but I'll probably stick with them as much as I feel comfortable, because the project itself is of such a large scope that I think it's valuable to cut corners wherever I can.

Did some futzing to build out a RegionManager singleton papa and wrote a ScriptableObject definition of what a Region is so I can serialize them out.

I'm associating each Region object with an ID from 0-255. My map is a single channel heightmap grabbed from real world data using https://terrain.party/ (https://terrain.party/), so I'm painting in region IDs in the green channel. My idea is to, when I want to add or adjust a region boundary, open the map in Photoshop, paint the region I want in, make it into a layermask and dump the right green number into it. Hopefully it's a manageable way to edit a map that doesn't bite me in the butt later! Could always make a real map editor application myself but I'd rather not make tools if I can just adapt other tools to my uses.

(https://78.media.tumblr.com/5c2462d45b6b9b9c976d91c0a0f57503/tumblr_pb5ij8vpbk1wttnrto1_500.gif)

And I made a very simple second region, using a photo ref from a nearby location at a different time of day

(https://78.media.tumblr.com/d70cc9c963f8d48877f9d4ecbb95417a/tumblr_pb5ij8vpbk1wttnrto2_640.gif)

Right now making and editing regions isn't super streamlined, so I may need to come back to that later before really building out content. Or maybe I'll just suffer through a little difficulty. Depends how many regions I want.

Unlike maybe every other game I've made, I'm planning on associating a time of day with a spatial location, rather than letting a day-night cycle pass. I'm interested in being able to control time of day and weather to help communicate a specific feeling with a location in service to the drama and the fiction.

Very cool! Always love a neat tactics game.

Update time!

Did a bunch of work on the combat ground generation. It was always based on theoretically high resolution noise, but because of dumb tech debt that noise was then res'd down significantly low to vertex heights. I've done the thing I've been doing with everything else in the combat system and moved it to a texture, currently 256x256. I get a lot nicer finer details with this system, and the way it interacts with flowing water is real nice. Still working out some light bugs with spells that modify the terrain but most of the way there!

(https://78.media.tumblr.com/556534f2989c154afc2c9a9ee959f09e/tumblr_pbv8x9nHoR1wttnrto3_1280.png)

Also visible above is a new turn order monitor UI element that shows you the full order in one place. You can hover over names to highlight the relevant unit, and hovering units now shows their move distance too - players have been saying that it takes a while to start internalizing the need for caution and spatial awareness, so I'm hoping this'll help with that.

Also doing some work to bulk out the early jobs.

Scouts now have a handful of utility skills - Song (near aoe heal), Grenade (near aoe damage), Garrote (high damage from behind melee). My goal with Scouts is to have a relatively weak but incredibly versatile job as the very starting one - someone that could go in any direction.

(https://78.media.tumblr.com/9ebf55087ae34546f27f98b330b096da/tumblr_pbv8x9nHoR1wttnrto1_400.gif)

Knights now have a couple moves that alter turn order - Praise promotes units in the turn order and heals them, and Insult demotes units in the turn order and does a small bit of damage. The focus with Knights is to have them be a supporting and blocking job. On your knight you should be thinking about dangerous enemy units and how to foil them. Hopefully this leans that direction. Players have also noted that it took a while to get familiar with the turn order so I'm hoping having some early skills that mess with turn order will help players realize the need for tactics that take turn order into account.

(https://78.media.tumblr.com/704092552449b3a6a26e3a866f1272de/tumblr_pbv8x9nHoR1wttnrto2_400.gif)

I spend endless hours playing squad combat games like X-com and your project looks very interesting. Keep it up, I like your updates.

Hi!

Working on a big update, mostly things that aren't very exciting, but first I thought I'd post a note about what I've been up to and how it's changing the direction of TT.

So I took the couple months of focus away from TT and put them on a project I wanted to publish for the fall - Fire Place (https://store.steampowered.com/app/933080/Fire_Place/). Some of that time was pulling the core of it together - UI, visual assets. Some if it was in revising the simulation and rendering. Most of it was wasted time trying to work with consoles. Fire Place may still end up on PS4 (if I either give Sony $3k for dev kits or manage to find them another way), but because it's 'not a game,' it will never make it onto Xbox. I have a newfound appreciation for Steam!

(https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/6403256/2133eb98332d9f38646c6f54aa5c911b8259b647.gif)

The major discovery and sticking point on finishing Fire Place was that I've been working on it almost entirely on brand new, high end machines. Fire Place does so much with graphics resources and new graphics APIs that it just won't render properly on most anything else. For the last couple years, I've been using both FP and TT as playgrounds for trying out graphics techniques in Unity, and so they've been overpopulated with me-being-too-clever. FP is at a point where its core is built on compute shaders that make heavy use of shader model 4.6-5.0: the fire is simulated on the GPU via compute manipulation of a 3D texture and visualized through compute ray-marching. I 100% regret it! The audience for FP is definitely not limited to people with Nvidia 10-series graphics cards, and I feel like absolute shit telling people they can't have a cozy fire because they don't have the latest Turbo Venom Extreme Murder Gaming PC. So one of my biggest takeaways from launching FP is that I need to use old technology and focus on the thing over the craft.

The other thing I did over the last few months was go to some festivals, which really refocused what's important and exciting to me about games. I think I've been afraid to get into the creative weeds, and have really been over-focusing on the technical craft. Like, for most of my brief adult career. Which is maybe fine - I'm young and I knew nothing about the tech going in, so at least I've learned some things I can bring back to a creative practice. But I'm overdue on the *bringing it back* part of that.

What that meant coming back to Tenderfoot Tactics 2 weeks ago was:
 

• time to rip out all compute shaders, tessellation, geometry shaders, and anything that doesn't run in SM3 emulation mode
• time to actually get serious about writing
• time to rework my art pipelines to be simple and ready for me to actually make real content myself
• anything that's so 'clever' that I'm distracted from creative work to fix endless bugs in it - has to go

And that's what I've been doing! All of the simulations are back to running on the CPU, and run smoothly on the oldest machines I've got around. I've been devoting a portion of my time every morning to writing. I've been walking through each component of the game visually and redesigning the look around a production pipeline. I'm just now happy with where I've gone with characters. Brush and region color are about halfway thought through, and I'm working more on icons and the spirits.

I'll post more detailed breakdowns of what I'm doing with each component, how I'm building out a production plan, and *hopefully* some more creative-side stuff too soon, but for now here's a screenie of it in it's ripped up state:

(https://66.media.tumblr.com/f9776e6581683cf4924ae978e2405b6c/tumblr_pg4wjwmKee1ql5ctbo1_1280.png)

This looks so good!

From reading your posts, and having only played a couple of tactics games, I like this unique sense that unit abilities and skills have. Something like the knights ability to affect turn order and job classes designed around controlling the environment are twists I haven't seen before. I also like the idea of an open-world tactics game, being able to take your time and build up your party (assuming this isn't a Fallout 1 situation with a main story deadline).

How expendable are you planning on making units? You mention wanting players to form an attachment (from the discussion on customization), but I'm wondering if you're aiming for making a loss or near-death of a unit a white-knuckle experience (one of my favorite things about XCOM).

I'm glad to hear you're focusing on older hardware (as someone who relies on it when traveling). I appreciate the constraints it forces and the simple and stylish looks that can result. Regardless, this looks great so far. I really like the flowing style, with environments growing and fading. I'm looking forward to seeing how it evolves  ;D

Thanks for the thoughtful feedback!

I definitely want to lean in on unique vibes for different classes. Right now some of them are pretty fuzzy but I'm hoping I'll find something special in each one and then really hone in on it for release. And definitely want to let people take their time to explore the islands and build up a party, although right now I'm thinking of tying class progression (the unlocking of new classes anyway) to main story progression.

Currently there's no concept of persistent unit death, and I don't have plans for one. I kind of feel like losing a lengthy fight is enough of a punishment already, and I don't love how games that kill your characters either (A) make you want to just reload to the save before that fight because you cared about the character that died or (B) churn through characters in a way that stops you from developing connections to your less favorite ones.

I'm actually even leaning away from some of the customization stuff right now (specifically the dress-up ideas, still going to have customization in class/skill load-outs). I'm feeling like it's less central to the core of the thing I'm pretty happy with already, and I'm worried about bloating out the idea any more in ways that might stop me from releasing it sooner.

Feeling generally very laser-focused on finishing a thing I'm happy with in a timely way right now! :)

playing to be god

Okay hi!! Some things I've ironed out in the last few weeks:


Characters

So for a long time now I've been putting off making a pretty critical decision - whether to leave the humans as dolls for you to dress with items you find, or to design specific looks per class. After talking with a friend who does costume design for theater (plus a lot of rumination time), I've decided that it'll overall make the game stronger to do the latter.

There's something exciting about using costume as a creative area for allusion and metaphor. Making clothing would be a large part of the production either way (whether as individual items or as holistic looks), but if I lean into designing a full look for a class, I can really work from the ground up and treat that class as a character.

For instance, there's a strong thematic thread in TT of the tension between complexity and imposed order. The first class transition is from a Feral human to a Scout. Scouts are entirely about flexibility and control. Their ability set is about having a lot of options that allow for convenient reaction to a circumstance - they can attack close to mid range, they have aoes, heals, high damage melee.

Narratively, Scouts are the first imposition of player order over an otherwise feral human. And in gameplay - as Scouts upgrade to higher tier classes, they'll be sacrificing some of their versatile, reactive control, for more powerful but inflexible and therefore riskier, more chaotic conflict. I see Scouts as a convenient place to strongly imply the order v chaos theme in TT early on. They also happen to have songs and archery as their main tools. And so for costume design reference, I'm looking at Apollo, who is probably the most obvious possible allusion in this case. Not only is Apollo strongly identified in literature with law and order, he'a also identified with music, archery, and healing.

(https://i.imgur.com/u510Lpk.png) (https://i.imgur.com/a8IvkSw.png)

And as a kicker, from a more traditional game design perspective, when I've gone back and forth on this in builds, it's been pretty obvious that the specific silhouettes of a designed outfit make for much easier play - players can reduce a complicated field to some recognizable archetypes. And I can lean into that by making the class looks really identify tightly with their function.

The loss, which I am pretty sad about, is that it would've been nice to have been able to dress your folks up.


Combat earth and plants

After I finished moving all of the systems from HLSL back to C#, I started to look at what shaders I had that use new graphics features.

The earth used tessellation, and the plants used GPU instancing. I decided both had to go, and that it'd be good to rework their looks together.

For the earth, I decided to focus on simplicity and readability. I ditched my textures and went for a smooth lerp between the fog color where the ground is wet and the light color where it's dry.

(https://i.imgur.com/0pVShQc.png)

For the plants, after futzing with a few different possible looks, including traditional lighting, I decided that what was most important to me look-wise was to let them feel soft and organic, to avoid the hard edges that usually come with leaf planes. I know it's doable to work past that for skilled artists, but I also wanted to prioritize ease of production for future-Badru. One really easy way to avoid hard edges is to use a coloring/lighting method that relies on worldspace position, since that guarantees that any intersections in the world will have the same color on either side. Since my ground height is in a texture, it was pretty easy for me to just blend from the ground upwards into a green color, purely based on worldspace height. The result is soft and meshes produced for it won't need to be UVd or need normals or tangents.

(https://i.imgur.com/By3AXNi.png)

The plants are

• grass that very directly represents the amount of "growth" in the simulation at any given point on the map by raising or lowering in height, and
• brush meshes that pop up to show when the plant growth has become significant enough that the gridspace is now "difficult terrain"

Both are lit with the same fade-up model. Their color comes from a globally defined "PlantColor" and "DeadPlantColor" that are built into the definition of a biome. The bushes are individual mesh renderers that are pooled and moved around in C#. The grass is built at startup into a single large mesh, and each blade's base height is just set in the vertex shader to align with the earth height.


Icons

I had been getting pretty excited about the idea of painterly icons, and figuring out a production-ready style for those was top of mind in this rework, because I knew they were likely to be a time-sink. I spent a solid day painting and trying to find something I liked, and I realized in doing so that icons are REALLY HARD! I love painting, but making something that communicates an abstract idea for functional purposes and rendering it in a readable way for 64x64 px display is pretty insane. I might enjoy it if I was being paid hourly, but for the sake of finishing this dang game, I am really excited to design that away.

(https://i.imgur.com/1wOyaD7.png)

Instead, I'm going with heavily symbolic, simple icons that will be very easy to produce. I'm confident that players will be able to learn icons as they need to - which will be a fairly slow rate, as they'll need to level into the skills first anyway. And I'm already finding a sort of symbolic language that should make that easier - diagonals mean action and violence, verticals mean defense, horizontals mean stability. I just bullshitted that but you get the idea. I'll figure it out as we go. And it'll be easy to introduce colors to represent the various elemental spell effects clearly.


--
next up!!

Right now I'm working on: encounters, quests, npc monologues, and the Overworld in general. More on that soon I hope!

(https://i.imgur.com/Q80OxVL.gif)

Hallo!

Little bit of a gif dump with some notes on what I've been working on this week -

The biggest thing I was working on was the overworld - a lot of time spent on figuring out how I want to do the Look, plus a bunch of functional work. The most exciting things are -

1 - I used to do all my foliage by keeping a list of matrices and gpu-instancing geo, but I want to get away from that for now at least. I went with a system that has a similar, though more surreal look. Instead I'm just making rings of geo that always surround the player. Since they are low poly but have heights that are set by a relatively high detail heightmap texture, they do a cool undulating thing when you move. I think the effect is pretty cool! I'm using the same system/shader on the trees as on the cloud in the gif below, and I'm happy with how versatile it feels.

(https://i.imgur.com/zZsxjjv.gif)

2 - I brought back the canoe! The canoe will move faster than being on land, plus the water will act as a safe-haven from random battles. The trade-off is that it will require you to take sometimes less direct routes, especially as you move inland and the land gets denser and the rivers sparser. This'll map to a relative difficulty and narrative intensity increase further inland, where more of the late-game takes place.

(https://66.media.tumblr.com/fc8b82084d29c6cd8fbbc05bd6f263da/tumblr_pgrmu9hNqX1wttnrto1_540.gif)

Something that's been suuuper exciting for me is how big the world is! I hadn't really properly explored the place until now - I put in a supersprint button for in-editor exploration and it's really wild. I loove the feeling of scale in digital worlds.

(https://i.imgur.com/0392wm2.gif)

Something I wanted to get established while I'm messing around with the Whole Look is spell effects. I want them to be splashy and super fun and powerful feeling, and I want them to be fun and quick to make. So first I made a generic and uncolorful block-in of a sort of effect-style: some predictive/anticipatory particles followed by a solid center impact, an outer fuzzy cloud, and some splashy sparks.

(https://66.media.tumblr.com/fba411a67104eec41f0a0953b67365d4/tumblr_pgt2e7KWNZ1wttnrto1_540.gif)

And then just this last night / morning I did a quick first pass on a generic fire effect, which I'm pretty happy with. I might do a breakdown of this later because it was fun and easy to make and people seem to like those sorts of things!

(https://66.media.tumblr.com/7938db4c8c308d3f354052c1ca751404/tumblr_pgwsmbGDWl1wttnrto1_540.gif)

Woah, this is really something, looks inspired

<3 thanks! I feel inspired :)

Guess I'm gonna write a little devlog update while I wait for a bar to fill up!

Spent this week working mostly on my overworld and narrative stuff, largely by just walking through implementing the first bit of the game. Wrote and rewrote the format for my scene/script data, which for instance lets characters perform actions, say lines, propose quests, and is used both within a combat encounter or just as a simpler version in the overworld.

Did a bit of work to genericize my water shader so it functions right both in combat and in the overworld, and blends between the combat version of itself and the overworld rendering in the background of a combat. It's a bit sloppy in certain places. The biggest reason I did this is because I decided to make the combat ground based on the overworld where the combat was initiated, and if that happens to be right on the shore I wanted the water to blend into the lake smoothly. Oh yeah! I also put in the logic so that if the combat water surface is below the water level, water can rush in from off-grid to fill it to lake-height. Gonna try to get a flattering screenshot, lets see...

(https://i.imgur.com/aG8HDjK.png)
(https://i.imgur.com/xWtdbYL.png)

Made a new region you can see in those screenies, meant to be a more colorful, inviting, happy place for the earliest zone.

Oh yeah! One thing I did during this process that was exciting - until now I only had AI control of non-magical units - knights/archers/scouts, which are obviously simpler. But I really want the very first scene in the game to be of two AIs fighting with high tier units, so I mocked that up a bit. It was incredibly easy to make fairly stupid, but still fun/satisfying AI for the units I chose for this - Shaman, Bog Witch, and Warlock.

(https://i.imgur.com/Eozq7Nq.gif)

Oh and because it's something I worked on this week, here's a shot from some early story stuff, that I probably won't share as candidly??

(https://i.imgur.com/RIzO4vD.png)

Nice progress! Not sure if you already wrote about it but I wanted to ask how does the progression outside battles look? Can you upgrade your "soldiers"? And if so, in what ways? How about the equipment choice?

Thanks! I guess you mean like upgrading your folks' skills and such?

(https://i.imgur.com/LEbqowb.gif)

Right now it's really simple. You level up in whatever class you're playing as.

Having enough levels in the right classes (and the right affinity, which is a born-in attribute currently) unlocks classes further down the tree. E.g. level 3 Scout unlocks both Archer and Knight. Level 3 Knight unlocks Battlemage (if you're any affinity but life) and Spellsword (if you're any affinity but fire).

For each level you have in a class, you get one skill slot. At any time outside of combat, you can swap out your skills freely.

There isn't any equipment system anymore - cut it. I might put something back in but I'm leaning towards the simplest version of this thing for now.

Sounds cool, I like class progression trees! I agree that not including eq might be a good idea, but in that case I'd also not put any consumables - maybe do some refilling fountains or sth.

Though I'm not sure about the Knight -> Battlemage  :lol:
maybe something like a battlepriest or paladin would fit better?

Hm okay. Yeah I don't have any consumables or items at all currently.

The comment on classes is a weird one. Battlemage is the name I'm using for now for the class which has at its core: fire/earth/water spells at very close range, broad AOE, high health. I don't think your suggested names fit it at all? Seems like you're projecting world/story ideas from other fantasy universes onto this game. Maybe you're trying to be helpful but it feels rude to me. Maybe the ":lol:" is just a bit too much.

sorry, man, definitely didn't want to come off as rude. don't take my comments too seriously

WOW I took too long between devlogs, so this is kind of a biggie. I'll probably just drop short notes on certain things and then possibly dive into them deeper as a follow up. Are dev-vlogs a thing people like?? It might be easier to just stream me talking through the stuff and then post the recording as a sort of vlog... just thinkin' out loud here...

THE BIG AND BROAD STUFF

Okay so the first thing that I'm absolutely not going to talk about at all yet: I've done a ton of work on the intro sequence, implementing features I want for storytelling reasons, changing around the way the characters work and even the world concepts. Writing is hard but it's what's going to make this real.

One thing I'll mention is I decided to frame all of the humans as goblins for thematic reasons. A core theme I want to address is the gradient of intelligent life and moral personhood, and part of how I want to talk about that is by framing the goblins (ex-humans) as dog-like compared to the spirits. I want to write them as stupid and cute and loyal, and I think goblins already have some of that baked into them as a concept. Plus, I want it to feel playful on the surface to be fighting your lil dudes against each other, and I think goblins come with that for free too, whereas humans killing each other feels more fucked on the surface, for good reason. Got a lot of work to do replacing all of my Human___ code with Goblin___ code, heh.

Hugely, the game's been silent for a long time, but we've just added a full first audio pass, and its REALLY GOOD AND I LOVE IT so maybe I'll do a deep dive into that later. Probably definitely. It feels so much more full and deep and rich and wild.

An important functional change, that impacts a lot of the game's structure:

• All jobs other than scout/archer/knight start locked now.
• When a unit of yours meets the req for a job you dont have, a pointer shows up on your horizon, where there will be a special encounter with units of that job type, which will grant you the job unlock.

This has helped a lot with reducing the information load on the player right at the start. It also adds a nice structural component that adds spatial meaning to the overworld, which has helped a lot with making the overworld and travel important. AND it has added a nice way to build out a game-long structural arc that relates to the overworld navigation and is narrative-esque but can live on its own for players who don't care about the story.

COMBAT

Added a pause menu. While paused all of the goblins sit down. This wouldn't be a combat note except that! The reason I added a paused menu is so I could but in it a button to run from combat

• for enemies, to make fights end faster (and with less violence) when you're clearly winning
• and for you, so you can bail if you're clearly losing or just don't want to fight right now

This is a major improvement for gameplay, but I'm also really happy with the way this changes the tone of the violence.

(https://i.imgur.com/otacdER.png)
Added trees as fixed impassable objects per map for more tactical variation. Has done a lot to make each match more specific and interesting.

(https://media.giphy.com/media/PPV8wMrwQOIJfDPC3A/giphy.gif)
Improved the readability of bushes and difficult terrain by adding a particle pop to them (and adding a ton of late snap to the animation) when they get full grown.

(https://media.giphy.com/media/RMxwCsHQU122xxNfq4/source.gif)
Added a concept - interior encounters! Excited about the narrative and visual possibilities this opens up for me.

OVERWORLD

(https://i.imgur.com/bU4FWH1.png)
Added a map to the overworld. Currently this indicates roughly where you are, but nothing else. I'm not sure what I'll do with it long-term, but I wanted to start to build this in because I want wayfinding to be a functional element of overworld play. I'll probably want a compass and to mark some key locations? But it's also nice to just give players a map and let them use it manually.

Goblins now scale down as they get further away from you in the overworld, until they disappear.

• better for perf
• adds mystery and required attentiveness for players when in dangerous areas
• leaning into the thing I've got going where reduction of detail due to distance is a structural part of the visual style

(https://media.giphy.com/media/Wx9d8bmAKcuU5TD3Lm/source.gif)
Built a system to blend regions in the overworld spatially rather than temporally by serializing material properties into color values and writing them onto a data texture, blurring that texture, and then sampling it with bilinear filtering. Did a lot of tools work to build a better editor for this.

(https://media.giphy.com/media/LwDEGRAHpb4bjp4jOu/source.gif)
Added a concept - overworld forests.

• Now feral goblins (which are the source of random encounters) only spawn in forests
• The player now moves faster and the camera zooms out a bit outside of forests

I did some fun shader work on this to get the models to pan in worldspace (there's just a single static mesh for those trees, with no C#). Could be a fun little post maybe?

PARTY MENUS

(https://media.giphy.com/media/7vAbZJbxPNm4Ts4PtM/source.gif)
Built real skill trees!

• Used to be a simple pool of skills you could choose between
• Now skills level up into other skills - More powerful, and sometimes more complex
• With this came lots of polish on the skill menu UX

(https://media.giphy.com/media/9Dva6HKI74LDW1pgfw/source.gif)(https://media.giphy.com/media/1PgO9swaxZRjdltM4x/source.gif)
Really built the early classes out further

• Added earth mod to knight (slam - an AOE skill that lowers the earth),
• plant to scout (canticle - an aoe heal that grows plants), 
• fire and earth to archer (fire and explosive arrows)

On a last note!
I've decided to actually try to maintain social media accounts. They'll be 100% (95%?) focused on creative work, because that's the internet I miss existing. So if you want to follow my creative work in a way that's more regular and less of a wall of text, my sig has a link to my website hub thingy, which has links to the various social media platforms.

Okay it's been a long while again. I'm at the tail end of a big push to polish the combat enough (in places) visually to be able to produce a teaser that more clearly communicates the genre and intent. Hopefully I'll be launching that real soon, and I'll post here as a follow-up. Trying to launch it along with my Steam 'Coming Soon' page so people who see it can wishlist it - and waiting for my Steam page to be approved now.

I've had to do some more visual development for what the primary color palette is for things like icons, store capsules, and such. It sucks and I'm super bad at it!! But here's where I'm at, as represented by my title screen and icon -

(https://66.media.tumblr.com/f6264e7a8cc6a3d7ea534a8dc121492c/tumblr_ppnmbsOmDw1ql5ctbo1_1280.png)

(https://66.media.tumblr.com/bace8c1f72021715da03b83d22275f8c/tumblr_ppnmbsOmDw1ql5ctbo2_1280.png)

Just trying to make it feel acceptably presentable for now I guess!

-

For this last, more marketing-focused push, I've been thinking some more about this 'screenshot theory' write-up (https://blog.adamatomic.com/post/172749451585/gdc-wrap-up-part-2-screenshot-theory-spring) from adamatomic bit ago. This thing honestly hasn't crystallized enough to deal with the finer points, but I think I've been failing to really communicate visually things that will clue the right people into what might be exciting about this game.

I don't want to emulate the visual style or feeling of Final Fantasy Tactics, but I DO want to make very clear to fans of that game that TT is firmly situated in FFT's legacy.

So for starters I took my current 'Evolve' menu, which I had no strong feelings about other than that it was definitely not finished, and emulated FFT's 'Job' menu. The process of doing this forced me to make simple placeholder silhouettes for my full roster of planned evolutions, which was a lot of very helpful creative work.

(https://sm.pcmag.com/t/pcmag_in/gallery/f/final-fant/final-fantasy-tactics-the-war-of-the-lions_pamj.740.jpg)

(https://66.media.tumblr.com/8712f4b972cce8c2374e8316e6ea82dd/tumblr_ppnmbsOmDw1ql5ctbo3_1280.png)

You'll see I also refined or reworked the early jobs I wanted to show in the teaser, and in doing so made some more concrete costuming decisions. I've decided to pull inspiration from a very broad and unbounded era of Russian historical dress around the 14-1500s. This might get more specific and clear as I learn more about the history and dress but for now it's just a treasure trove of colors and silhouettes for me to grasp at. Ultimately it's not a historical game, but I think having a historical source, even one this broad, will help unify the look and feel.

Some other stuff I did for the teaser that's smaller and so I might not screenshot it or anything - refined my damage reaction + popup text to emulate roughly FFT's, simplified my overly ornate tile highlighting in the direction of FFT's simple squares, improved a variety of UX / player communication issues such as path highlighting, enemy highlighting, damage and kill prediction UI (many of these thanks to very helpful notes from friends Galen Drew, Nick Kaman, Reed Erlandson, Isa Hutchinson - god bless).

(https://66.media.tumblr.com/9b68f8cb93e89e7cbeb2090aee1258d0/tumblr_ppnmbsOmDw1ql5ctbo4_1280.png)

-

I've been doing more playing of similar titles to see what's out there, what interesting design developments have happened in and around the genre more recently. One that excited me the most was Human: Year Zero. To be fully honest I couldn't really tolerate it once it had any level of difficulty - I think I just find XCOM-likes uninteresting on a fundamental level - but it had some very good things in it that I'm just going to borrow, at least as starting places.

For one thing, it felt GREAT to be embodied as a single party member, with the others following. So, that's been implemented in TT now. For another, I loved being able to see the enemy aggro radii and use those to inform my wandering. Also in TT now.

(https://66.media.tumblr.com/202e9ff0c5b7f1cacdef262cea1b4239/tumblr_ppnmbsOmDw1ql5ctbo5_1280.png)

-

And as always I've been doing a lot of writing and rewriting. Michael Bell, who's doing sound and music, is also an English professor, and recommended me the excellent book on writing Wonderbook, written by Jeff Vandermeer, whose books Annihilation and Authority are some of my recent favorites, and have certainly influenced TT. Borne was alright too. Wonderbook's been an incredible help for me in thinking out the story, both in terms of broad scope, plot, outline, and also in terms of presentation and tone, especially in terms of where the story starts, who tells it, and what order to introduce elements in. I think I finally have a solid outline of the whole thing??

In addition I've gotten some really great feedback from Isa Hutchinson, who's been my design collaborator on this, playing the fuck out of builds and giving pages and pages of notes for probably years now. The most essential bit of feedback relevant to this bit I'm talking about now: that maybe it would be nice to just hang out with a goblin and NOT kill them. Which yeah. Why would these living things want to attack you? I feel like I've been sort of penned in by the genre and I'm excited to break out of it a little here for the sake of world building and storytelling and tone.

So these two things together - I've decided to more or less kill the idea of "feral" goblins, in favor of one clear enemy: The Fog, one vast spirit miasma that has possessed the many goblins who attack you. The idea for now is that the Fog will have a clear (but growing) border, and if you stay on the safe side of it you won't be forced to fight. There will be a smattering of goblin towns along the coast outside of the Fog border, and the story will ask you both to visit these towns and warn them of the Fog, and also to venture into the Fog to attempt to stop its growth.

I'm excited about a lot of parts of this.

I'm excited to have a bulk of the writing be one-off towns - the kind of world writing that lets players explore freely and discover interesting novelties. And also to have a clear mainline plot which can live in a clear relation to that nonlinear one.

I'm excited to have a chance to communicate some positive visions of the future, to give players something to fight for. What are you protecting and why is it worth protecting?

Similarly to the way I feel 'goblin' more clearly communicates my intention than "humanish but sort of stupid and degenerated and animal-like, in a way that can be cute and endearing, but also it shouldn't bother you too much if they're violent and die," I feel that "The Fog" is a trope that more clearly communicates "sort of like a vast hivemind that is encroaching slowly across the landscape and turning the people and towns in passes over into zombies." I love the way these things fit together as fantasy tropes.

-

What's next?

I think I need to be focusing on how my development process relates to my ability to release teasers and other updates that double as marketing assets.

Now that I feel I've got something that at least hints at the genre and intent of the combat, I want to do the same for world and story. Which is kind of terrifying. But also exciting.

I think I need to redo my overworld terrain. The way it warbles and undulates is nauseating for some who've played it, and I just really want my work to be accessible. Maybe need it to be accessible, given that it's a pretty niche genre. So I'll probably try to find a solution for that that feels more stable and grounded.

I need to build out at least one goblin town and get a sense for how players interact with them.

I need to build out my writing integration better. I think I may look into Ink as a solution. Copy-pasting strings into the inspector is obviously not a good plan long-term, haha.

-

Eventually I think I may be trying to release a playable demo of the intro, alongside an early access storyless 'foreverlands' mode, so I can have more player feedback as I develop out the classes more specifically. And also money. But I think it makes sense to resolve and communicate the world and story before I start asking people to buy an unfinished thing.

Lovin' the evolve menu, looks awesome

Thanks ANtY!

Finally launched my combat teaser and store pages I've been working on... for now I'm too lazy to make them look good in links here but you can find em all at https://badru.graphics/ (https://badru.graphics/)

edit: did not know you could just paste a youtube link and it would embed it???

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLP58cnsHLs

Added to my wishlist on Steam, great work on the trailer!

Dude, this is awesome. Also, the music is superb! Any info you can give on the composer? I'd definitely want to give him a shoutout.

Thanks!! His name's Michael Bell - it's on the Steam page and at the end of the trailer but I could probably do better attribution... He's so stellar! Some of his old audio tests for this are up on  his bandcamp  (https://icewatergames.bandcamp.com/album/rhizome-tenderfoot-teasers-and-trailers) (along with some other fantastic stuff).

Hi y'all!

Been like 2 weeks. Had a bit of a slowdown while I helped bring Ritual of the Moon onto our label, which is super exciting!
http://www.icewatergames.com/ritual (http://www.icewatergames.com/ritual)
But also got a lot done!

First off I knew I wanted to iron out the world itself, and I felt uncomfortable digging into that with the overworld causing motion sickness, so I rushed to take a crack at making the landscape less nauseating.

Previously I was using a very coarsely roughened mesh, which blended more or less from large polygons far away to small ones near up, but with no consistent pattern. I replaced it with a very consistently spaced mesh which switches at certain distances to larger spacing. I'm shifting this mesh around so that the vertices snap to certain intervals on the heightmap in a way that keeps the terrain looking very consistent. I guess if I had UV maps it wouldn't work, but since everything is worldspace sampled it does a pretty good job.

(https://i.imgur.com/zRbmoEK.png)

I also added trees, brush, and grass in the style of the battle scenes, out to the overworld. These are just instanced meshes currently and are faded with a shader to disguise them being moved as you walk about.

(https://i.imgur.com/vrtkcVM.gif)

Implemented a rough first shot at Stinkhorn, a village of mushroom cultivators. Really happy with the way this came out. So very tired of programm tbh, and really just want to dig into asset production.

(https://i.imgur.com/VwlWGRz.png)

Spending a lot of time on research and world building because I want to feel confident about whatever I put into my teasers at this point - would like them to be usable marketing assets for the final product, and not just catalogs of a forever and ever development process. It's been nice! Did some learning about industrial mushroom production processes!

Spent a bit at the library doing research on ships and boatbuilding. Don't have anything presentable for that yet but hoping to get some time soon to develop real boats. I'm sort of back and forth but the more I read about various boats the more I feel like canoes weren't just a regional accident, but also make a sort of deterministic sense, so I'll probably end up doing something very canoe-like.

Did some work on idle chatter + sort of like world state systems - so now I can place town goblins around with various animations and saying various things, starting battles and quests and such - and after certain battles I can change the world state. A bit overwhelmed by the scale of this stuff so hopefully I'm doing it in a good way.

(https://i.imgur.com/ESkIdaI.gif)

BIG + CONCRETE

UNNERVE! Hitting a unit from the side or back now knocks it back in the turn order and then makes it face the attacker.

An important driver of design choices on TT is: meaningful board state. Some of this is reflected in the natural systems' repercussions, but one of the most essential bits of this is simple spatial relationships. Things like threat ranges, movement blocking. So we knew we wanted to have unit facing matter. It's so intuitively visualized!

In most games, facing matters because flanking changes your % chance to hit or crit. But Tenderfoot Tactics has no randoms in it after the initial board setup, and I kind of think I want to keep it that way - so there's no % to do anything that we could modify slightly.

We'd also already started to play with the idea of manipulating turn order through unit actions. For instance Knights can PRAISE or INSULT and in doing so make units go sooner or later than otherwise, and some ice magic chills units, dropping them in the turn order. This stuff felt super interesting, and made the turn order, which already takes up so much mental + UI space, way more worthwhile.

So we decided to lean into that even further, and make flanking damage 'unnerve' units, causing them to drop in the turn order. The result feels so good. Even low level combats with very simple units are so much more interesting and complex than before.

(https://i.imgur.com/eNQfAqV.gif)

There are a lot of interesting side effects from this but one of my favorite new dynamics is surrounding a big bad scary enemy with a handful of little friendlies, and watching them turn back and forth as you bother them from all sides.

Renamable goblins! Which maybe could've been an easy task, but I want to make sure TT has full controller support (since I personally love playing from a couch) so, somewhat more complex. But worth it! I really want the goblins to feel like beloved little pets, and I think being able to choose your own name does a lot for that.

(https://i.imgur.com/HKv1jd7.gif)

New boat! We used to have the gobs seated in canoes, but as we've made their evolutions so differently shaped, that became overly complicated, for little gain. A big ol' time sink, trying to get a canoe to fit both our tiny floating Wizard and the massively floofy skirts of our Botanist.

(https://i.imgur.com/Y1bc2Li.gif)

I spent a lot of time doing research on various boats and their workings, only to conclude that there really is no replacement for the canoe when it comes to the kind of terrain in Georgian Bay, where TT takes place. So instead I started with a very basic birchbark canoe, and dressed it up with some goblin flair. A canopy to hide your gobs, some sacks of travel supplies poking out, some stubby paddles.

Overworld traits. Some evolutions now have traits that enhance your abilities outside of combat! I've been reading the Earthsea Cycle and I'm really inspired by it! Earthsea wizards have a simple job of weatherworking on ships, to hasten voyages and quell storms. Well, now some Tenderfoot Tactics mages are now blessed with the weatherworking trait, which adds a sail to your boat and increases its' speed.

(https://i.imgur.com/Zv2d5og.gif)

The woods witch! Likely quite a ways from the final version still, but I wanted to block in some colors and feelings for this breed because I think it'll be playable in an upcoming press build (along with some others I need to flesh out still). Maybe I'll do little evolution feature blog posts in the future, once their abilities are more set in stone, but to give a broad idea of this'n - it's a broadly defensive, ranged spellcaster with water, earth, and life magic. Heals, terrain manipulation, ice magic, those sorts of things!

(https://i.imgur.com/1zyZz3d.png)

Foreverlands updates. I'm planning on sending out a first playable to press folks soon (next week?) and so needed to solidify a flow for that which could onboard players smoothly from small early battles to the big late ones. So now in the Foreverlands you start with 3 units, unlock new breeds by defeating them in combat (including special custom encounters for the mage breeds), and expand your party slowly by finding lost goblins in the fog.

Fog goblin encounters used to scale to match your level, but now they have some difficulty variability (visualized with some overhead UI), so you can choose to seek our more or less difficult fights based on your skill and the kind of play you want.

(https://i.imgur.com/XWpPDYf.png)

There's also been some work done to tutorialize (in an unobtrusive way) the absolute basics of combat, and to highlight your party menu when you've got new changes to your party.


BIG + INTANGIBLE

Lots of design ideation around story. Without saying too much: I had planned to have a somewhat linear guiding story, but as I've been writing and rewriting the intro, I feel really compelled to do an Eidolon-style structure. Drop the player into the world, let them figure out (or not) who they are and why they're there. Let the world speak for itself. Let the player choose to do whatever they will, and let the game be about that. It's a big change, but I feel pretty confident about right now. I feel like I have a sense for the whole scale of this thing. Wish me luck!

NOT SO BIG BUT STILL TOOK TIME

• better highlighting of active unit
• some flavor text brought back to the title
• heal text looking like heal text
• combat optimization - but still more needed!
• improved plant particles

Posted a sort of dev timeline over on the Steam page (https://steamcommunity.com/games/1061610/announcements/detail/2712768304831096223) if anyone's curious where this is heading when!

(https://i.imgur.com/xvdYWZ0.gif)

Wrote up an in-depth thing about the basic combat systems on the Steam page (https://steamcommunity.com/games/1061610/announcements/detail/1602632162283892662), in case that's interesting to anyone here.

Been nose-to-the-grindstone the last couple weeks. Made the hasty decision to try to get on people's radar before we're super polished, and so quickly pulled together a showable combat build, fixing outstanding bugs and adding some tutorialization and ramping up in the beginning, a little bit of polish where needed.

Now back looking at world systems and have some stuff I'm really excited about! Wrote up some thoughts about two systems I was particularly jazzed about on Saturday over on twitter (https://twitter.com/sonofbadru/status/1134906035796189184) - the Fog as a cellular automaton and bird mode as your map/scope tool:

(https://i.imgur.com/QJyVWzC.gif)

I probably should've held off posting about these things on that more public-facing medium, heh. Looking forward to putting together a world teaser once things have clicked into place well enough.

Dang man love the look of everything here, especially the trees and shrubs.

Unlit colors with some input from the depth buffer and y-axis?
Trying to see how you did that... Looking great!

Thanks!! Most everything is unlit colors with a custom 'fog' applied to it. The color of the ground is sampled from a gradient (or actually blended between gradients so you can transition smoothly between biomes) based on distance from the player character. The 'fog' is just this ground color blended in based on height above the ground (which can also be sampled easily in shader because it's all a texture heightmap).

Very neat! I'll have to try my hand at something like that. I've been meaning to play more with unlit shaders.

New world teaser!! This has been a lot of work to pull together, but REALLY excited to have something more concrete and meaty out there about the open overworld, the themes, the characters, etc etc.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYRQDGzXjZY

So now to try to remember what I've even been doing the last few weeks before I was just recording and editing a trailer haha...

-

One huge effort was in pulling together the spirits (the floating faces in the world teaser that monologue at you), both functionally and also in their intention long-term. These spirits have long been a core part of my planned world for TT, but recently I've felt unsure about where they fit in, whether they're bringing much. So I hadn't been showing them, or working on them. But now I think I've got it somewhat figured.

An important thematic thing I'm focusing on with TT is on a separation of conscious, moral beings into a tiered ladder, great-chain-of-being style. The goblins are meant to be explicitly nearer to animals and plants, and the spirits nearer to god. This has an important relationship for me with other major themes in the game, for instance deterministic systems as incomprehensible and beautiful, as personified actors, consciousness arising from natural systems. So it felt important to find the spirits' place structurally within the game, rather than lose them.

I hope the trailer does a good job of announcing the spirits, their distinctness from goblins, their relationship to the player
(spirits being more Mind, more isolated individuals obsessed with grand ideas, monologuing almost incomprehensibly)
(goblins being more Body, more social creatures who live together, concerned more about each other and about bodily needs, pleasures, pains)
(the player having a somewhat unsure relationship with a narrating spirit, who you maybe are, or maybe are part of, or are possessed by)

The opening of the trailer is actually now the implemented opening scene of the game. It was an interesting challenge scripting out something like this, but it turned out the general functions I'd written for dialogue scenes were pretty easy to repurpose in a coroutine.

The player starts off in the Fog (which is like random-battles-ville, tall grass in pokemon), guided (maybe) by a spirit's internal monologue.
There's a cast of nonplayer spirits who have different thematic obsessions and (maybe) related goblin teams. Beating one of these spirits in a match will unlock the evolution they are most closely identified with.
Once a player's goblin has reached the level where it should be ready to evolve, if the player hasn't unlocked the corresponding evolution, they'll be guided (by pointer or internal narrator) to the appropriate spirit. The spirit will automatically roam nearer the player (as opposed to sitting wherever their home normally is). The map is just way too big right now, so it felt really absurd to expect a player in any given location to sail out to the outer islands for a fight they might not be able to win just yet.

I'm really happy with the new intro. I've had a lot of trouble, working in a world that's so fantastical, trying to figure out how to gracefully introduce the key absurdities to the player, especially spirits' relationship to goblins, and the nature of the fog, and the player's motivation within all that. I feel like this framing is gentle and concise, puts the player in a good place, and sets up a justification for an internal narrator that can easily be repurposed to guide the player where necessary in the future. I've gone through so many rewrites but this feels like it might stick (probably not hahaha whatever).

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I have a bunch of other structural resolutions like this, but they're either smaller or less interesting or less significantly implemented, and maybe I'll be more ready to write about them later, so I think I'll leave them for now, but just as a log of what I've been working on:

> biomes now have unique music libraries, as does the Fog

> the Fog now grows organically after you finish a battle, and you eat the Fog away with your presence, and in larger chunks by winning a battle

> you can now find and collect birds from nests scattered around the map, increasing the range and height of your bird-form survey abilities

> fog goblins are now sometimes alive inside, and you can recruit them after knocking the fog out of them

> fog goblins now sometimes have eggs inside, which you can collect and bring to goblin towns, where they'll be raised chao-garden-style

> plans to implement trinkets dropping from combat and providing minor bonuses from equip

> plans to implement herbs you can gather and, with the help of goblin herbalists in towns, turn into bundles that provide major bonuses from equip

> plans for tiered dungeons deep in the Fog as major progression points for the main story/intention of the game

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I also made a bunch of new world assets for the trailer! I normally have been putting off actually building out planned towns, knowing that it's more efficient to work with rough assets while the structural stuff falls in place, but it was really gratifying how easy it was to make major set pieces! The barges (aka Sniff) and the mushroom city (aka Stinkhorn) were maybe a day's work each. I only intend to have a dozen or fewer cities like these so a day each is fabulous.

Similarly, the big baddie at the end of the teaser took maybe an afternoon, and modifying some stats to make a harder enemy was a real breeze. I think I'm going to have to redo my AI unfortunately, because the plugin I've been using produces garbage, but other than that it's nice to feel like expanding the list of enemy types will be pretty low-effort. Been planning on doing this for a while but it's just not priority yet.

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We only had a few folks actually grab and stream the demo build but their impressions were overwhelmingly positive, which was very gratifying. Also watched most of them live and got some very good feedback, both real design feedback and just usability notes. Had intended on doing a more intense rollout, but now I think it'll be wiser to implement some of the most essential changes, and then do little waves of sending keys to streamers when we want to get some useful feedback. Eventually of course doing a big ol push when we have something we primarily just want to promote.

Loving it, great music, great trailer, and best of all - a great vibe overall.

Thanks Anty! So happy with the music, and real excited about where we're heading  :beer:

My first Patreon post basically turned into a devlog, so here you go: [EDIT: PATREON REMOVED MY PATRON PAGE BECAUSE THEY'RE MFS and also because I stopped updating it or charging my patrons]

wow holy shit I'm sorry I left this unupdated for so long!

BUT ALSO ITS DONE AND OUT

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGL0gDMsrgI

Kind of a bummer this devlog is just a slice of the development and not the whole thing but, one day I'll write a post-mortem. Little too crazy with release to take the time just now though, haha. Just reread this though and I'm really glad it's here and I was able to.

(https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steam/apps/1061610/ss_a425a12205e48a9b09ff0eaf0daa5f2076eeece1.1920x1080.jpg?t=1603292142)

(https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steam/apps/1061610/ss_56277502d9e68e072be322218bcd0c888a9db887.1920x1080.jpg?t=1603292142)

(https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steam/apps/1061610/header.jpg?t=1603292142) (https://store.steampowered.com/app/1061610/Tenderfoot_Tactics/)
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1061610/Tenderfoot_Tactics/ (https://store.steampowered.com/app/1061610/Tenderfoot_Tactics/)