Tenderfoot Tactics - It's DONE ITS OUT ON STEAM ITS DONE ITS DONE

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...

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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.