[https://store.steampowered.com/app/1061610/Tenderfoot_Tactics/]

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

BUT ALSO ITS DONE AND OUT





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://store.steampowered.com/app/1061610/Tenderfoot_Tactics/

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]

Making a new demo!

This looks sick as fuck. I don't even have anything to say other than, amazing work, keep it up, god bless. Mostly just replying to follow.

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

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.





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).

-

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

-

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.

-

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.

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).

Wrote up an in-depth thing about the basic combat systems on the Steam page, 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 - the Fog as a cellular automaton and bird mode as your map/scope tool:



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.

Posted a sort of dev timeline over on the Steam page if anyone's curious where this is heading when!

[BIG + CONCRETE]

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.



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.



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.



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.



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!



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.



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

Big companies have employees who've been there a long time and cemented specific social norms. Internal politics, and who you do or don't get along with, may have a big effect on your career and general emotional well-being.

Working at an engine may sound sexy in a way, but beware that especially coming from indie, the shift away from creativity can be harsh. So make sure you actually want to work on an engine, and not on games.

Big companies also have a lot of weird cruft internally, people who've been there a long time and don't really care to do good work, tiers of executives calling the shots in ways that don't really make sense. Be ready to not feel proud of the product that actually comes out at the end of the tunnel.

All that said, the financial stability can be tremendous, and if you do want to work on an engine, and you do well in a large established company setting, it might be great for you. Congrats on the opportunity regardless!

this looks so fucking good. replying to follow.

looking so good. real into the visual + mechanical presentation, the story direction, and being small. replying to follow.

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
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.



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.



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.



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.

I keep thinking about these dang faces.

I'm wondering if you can go into more detail about how and why you use procedural meshes in Unity? (Not like ... the basics of procedural mesh gen, but more just - how are yours structured and why did you go that route?)

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 (along with some other fantastic stuff).

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/

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

these are SO GOOD!! I love their attitude!!

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 -





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 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.





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).



-

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.



-

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.