An ancillary tale / free prequel game / something of a combat demo.
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The Foreverlands will tell a small story to introduce the world of Tenderfoot - and show the current state of gameplay for the first 7 evolutions.
Note that even the parts of the 'full' game included in this freebie (those first 7 evolutions, the UI, the controls, etc) won't be representative of their state in the final game. There are lots of improvements we want to make. But we think they're rad already!
I'm also sending out advance keys to select press. Get in touch if you'd like to take an early look! (hey@badru.graphics)
Expanded and refined the first tier of evolutions - those that will be playable in the Foreverlands - with a bevy of new skills, a first pass at sound and visual effects, some tweaks in general appearance.
Built a system to associate overworld biomes with different combat map types, enemy types, enemy team compositions, and natural system settings. So for instance an arid, rocky biome might now: have large rocks instead of trees in combat, start with no water or plants on the map, have a very low rate of moisture input from map edges (normally soil moisture is replenished from the edge of the map to replace the moisture extracted by growing plants - now, a low moisture zone won't naturally support plant life unless you bring a lot of water into the map with spells), have maps that start with more cliffs, and feature a certain subset of enemy types, like our new 'ember' enemy, arranged in team compositions designed for a certain player level range. This adds a lot of texture to exploration and progression across the map.
Made a huge amount of quality of life updates. Added UI displaying more specific information about the simulation state, clarifying time passage during actions. Improved keyboard/mouse camera feel. Added hotkeys for the action menu. Et, cetera.
Expanded our cast of non-playable enemy types!
Enemies in the overworld now have a wider aggro radius when you're significantly lower level than them, and a very narrow radius when you're higher level, making low level zones easy to traverse as you level out of them. Enemies also now 'leash,' eventually giving up if you run far away from where they originally saw you and started chasing you.
Finished replacing our 'steep ground is difficult' system with cliffs, and subtley modified the way earth spells interact with those cliffs for more naturalistic effects.
Added a 'jump' button in the overworld because, I don't know, I have a grudge against games that don't let you jump, and I don't have anyone to stop me. Very seriously planning on adding a 'crouch slide' button when I have a manic moment and can allow myself to do something so nonessential.
Okay, that's all for now! Thanks for sticking with us! Talk to you soon!
Dev Update - Class Hierarchies
You last heard from me when we put out the World Teaser a couple months ago. Making that involved a lot of work on the story and overworld systems, but since finishing it I've been back focusing in on combat again.
There's a huge number of quality-of-life improvements we've been making to the UI/controls/etc, from feedback we got with our first round of streamer demos back in late spring, but that's not very fun to talk about, so instead let's talk about the most fun I've had in a while: implementing the whole next tier of evolutions!
Evolution Tiers
The evolutions (classes) available in the streamer demo are the set planned to be available to the player straight away from the beginning of the game in the final build: Scout, Knight, Battlemage, Spellsword, Archer, Wizard, Woodswitch.
These have a sort of branching structure from Scout (simple, broad) to Knight (melee) / Archer (ranged) and from those to more aggressive and more defensive ranged and melee spellcasters. In this set of evolutions is a very broad taste of what kinds of abilities are available in Tenderfoot.
After [major story event], the player will unlock ~10 more evolutions, what I've been calling tier 2: 5 each ranged and melee, representing pairings of elements (other than fire/plant, the forbidden flavor). The elements have fairly focused characteristics (water casters are slippery, fire casters are dangerous) that these pairings tend to go deeply into, and in many cases the paired elements have been developed into very specific and elaborate movesets.
For instance the fire/water mages both have electric spells, which tend to be teleports that hurt the caster, start fires where they travel, and if they touch water spread to effect every unit in that body of water. (Slippery and dangerous!)
Or the melee earth/water mage, the Worm, has abilities like Burrow (long ranged teleport that requires the destination to be moist earth), Ram (straight line charge with knockback that breaks brush), and Thrash (AOE that creates water and stacks a damage-buffing 'rage' effect).
I wish we had pretty models and fx done so we could show them off in gifs but you'll just have to wait! For now just trust me when I say: They're SO COOL AND I AM SO EXCITED TO BE MAKING THIS GAME!
The first tier of evolutions is nice groundwork and I think there's a lot to dig into there, but really working out tier 2 has made me so full of enthusiasm for what Tenderfoot's becoming. We also managed to add about 40 new spells in a week of work, including building the systems for major new concepts like status effects (poison, cocoon, blight, etc), terrain effects (lava, ice, etc), and more! There's gonna be an absolute Load of cool shit in this videogame, y'all.
Oh and there's a planned third tier, to be unlocked after [second major story event], which will be ~ single element mages ~ and wow am I excited to get to those. But for now, more broad fixes to prepare for a second streamer demo.
Other things we've been up to:
> Building a story and world for the next demo to be less empty than the first. It'll have a bit of a peripheral story to tell, and some more structure to it.
> Adding cliffs and jumping! So instead of "this terrain tile is too steep so it's now difficult to move on" we'll have "moving from this terrain tile to this requires hopping up a cliff, and costs more move." It's made terrain spells much more clear in their effect, and I think has just been a huge general improvement to the feeling of the game, but it has a lot of repercussions to iron out. Worth the time I think!
> Pre-combat setup! Long planned and long neglected, now (in dev builds) you can set up your initial unit placement and turn order however you like, which makes it much easier to strategize.
And more secret stuff, probably.
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Also, I've got a Patreon now, so if you want to help *financially* with this thing, you can do that!
And we've got a Discord, if you want to come ask me questions about the game or just hang out and chat.
Ok thanks for reading and bye! I'll try to post again here soon. I'm so busy making this dang game I don't find enough time to yell about it online, but I'm trying!
I haven't been very loud about Tenderfoot until now because I've been waiting to get this teaser together to show off the open world, which is part of what makes it stand out among TRPGs. (I mean, also the combat is super deep and interesting and fun.)
Anyway I'm really excited about it! It's a small team but all of us also worked on Eidolon and Viridi. Wishlist it! It really makes a huge difference!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYRQDGzXjZY
Combat Basics
Hi folks! First of all - I've started (slowly and individually) distributing access to our pre-alpha combat demo to streamers who play other games like it, or seem interested in the genre. If you know of anyone who might like Tenderfoot, let me know in the comments or at hey@badru.graphics.
Now, I'd like to talk a little about the state of the combat systems as they live in that demo. I'll try not to go overly specific, but it'll be hard for me because I'm neck deep in it!
Turns
Like in Final Fantasy Tactics, your units have individual turns. On a unit's turn it may Act and Move once each, in either order.
Except in very special cases, all units have the same move distance: 4 squares. Once you've played for a bit, this helps you develop an intuitive sense of threat zones. Movement is blocked by enemy units and impassable objects like trees - and you can use this fact to create bottlenecks or protect weaker units behind tougher ones. Certain environmental features like steep slopes, thick brush, and deep water are 'difficult terrain,' which afford only one square of movement at a time. Since the environment is constantly evolving, this becomes a crucial tactical element.
A unit's Act options are derived from how its skill points are distributed within its current Evolution. Evolutions have specific character to what skills are available to them, and having a good squad loadout going into a tough fight is crucial. Actions tend to have clear effects (a 100% chance to deal a fixed amount of damage) which interact with the natural systems in ways that become difficult to predict many turns out.
Turn Order
One defining characteristic of Tenderfoot Tactics is the way turn order plays out. Flanking attacks (and certain spells, like the Woods Witch's FROST, or the Knight's INSULT) can push enemies back in the turn order. Because of this, a low damage flanking attack on a powerful enemy might turn the tide of a losing fight, if it puts your endangered, low-health units before that enemy in the turn order, giving them a chance to escape.
Side Effects + Natural Systems
The other essential factor that sets Tenderfoot Tactics apart is that almost all actions have side effects, and that those side effects interact with ongoing natural systems in ways that have a significant impact on play.
The obvious example here would be FIRE ARROW, which does more damage than the un-upgraded Archer ATTACK action, since it places a lingering burn effect on the enemy, but also can backfire if the fire spreads to your own team.
However there's much more depth to the systems in Tenderfoot than that basic example would imply! For instance, melee attacks have a tendency to destroy plants as a side effect. In the clearest case, this means breaking bushes that would otherwise be 'difficult terrain.' If you're attacking enemies in a bottleneck and breaking apart the brush that's crucially slowing them, you might think twice! And as you develop a deeper understanding of the systems, you realize there's many more results of a simple melee swing. Destroying plants with an attack can break the line of travel for a spreading fire, for instance, so that attacking an 'empty' space might prevent tremendous damage to your weak units. Or it might halt spreading grass, which you may want to prevent from proliferating into a zone of the map where you don't want to see brush popping up. Plant life also drains moisture out of the nearby area, so that destroying plants means making it possible for the terrain to further moisten, which can in the future make the terrain more resilient against fire, and more accepting of life.
One question I've seen from players as they first grapple with the mechanics of the early game is: What benefits are there to modifying the shape of the earth itself? Unless you create a very deep chasm or steep cliff, it doesn't create difficult terrain. Earth modification tends to feel underpowered or pointless, because it doesn't interact so directly.
Although earth modification feels weak at first, it has the most dramatic and long-lasting side effects. The shape of the earth determines the way the water falls across it, which determines plant growth patterns, which determine fire routes and the shape of 'difficult terrain' on the map. So earth magic can exercise a lot of control over the battlefield.
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Okay I feel like that's enough said for now. What's next? Right now I'm working on the overworld systems, and hoping to show those (along with more hints at the story) with a new video in a couple weeks. While that's in the works, I think it might be interesting to do some little showcase updates on the Evolutions in the game so far. What do you think?
Oh and reminder! I'm looking for streamers who might like this thing. If you, or a friend, or someone you follow might fit the bill, please do let me know, either in the comments or via email at hey@badru.graphics. We're running on a shoestring budget and don't have PR people or a publisher so any support is extremely helpful and appreciated!
Where Tenderfoot Is / Where Tenderfoot's Going
Hi y'all! As a very first update over here, I thought it'd be appropriate to give an outline of where the game is currently, and where I think it's heading. Let me know in the comments whether, for future updates, you'd rather see more raw development notes, world/story teaser features, design deep-dives, etc. But for now ~
WHAT WE'VE GOT
a robust combat system
interesting and performant natural systems for terrain shaping, soil moisture, water volume and velocity flow, plant growth, heat and fire
plans for 27 playable evolutions
prototyped designs for 13 of those
implemented designs for 7 of those
menus for learning and swapping skills, evolving and renaming gobs
a vast overworld with lush regions and surreal transitions between
first implementations for a couple goblin towns, with plans for many others (as well as being story locations, these will be places to snag new units)
first implementations for several spirits (which will be custom encounters with interesting enemy compositions, and also a route to unlock new evolutions)
a draft for the full scope of the story of the thing
Currently this is broken up in builds (to lock the story stuff away until it's ready) into an infinite-play mode called The Foreverlands, and a currently-locked mode which will eventually be The Chronicle.
WHERE WE'RE GOING
This is a tentative outline of my current development plans, and what you can hope to see when. Expect this to change, because life is chaos!
SOON: like maybe next week? I'll be sending out a first playable to press and streamers. So if you write or stream, even if your channels are small, reach out! This'll just be the first third or so of the combat progression in the Foreverlands.
JUNE: I've been working on the world systems a lot over the last couple months, and I'm hoping to, in the next month or so, be ready to put out a world teaser, to show more of what this place is like.
SEPTEMBER: I'd like to put together a more developed demo, with a small story and world peripheral to the main stuff in Tenderfoot. We'll have put a good deal more work into the combat at this point, and hopefully stuff will be feeling pretty good. The story systems should be in place and it'll be a good opportunity to give people a fuller sense of what we're going for with Tenderfoot Tactics.
OCTOBER: Tentative for sure, but I think we might release on Early Access to get live feedback as we polish up the combat systems. If that'd be something people would be interested in?
And then, depending on how things hash out, I think the game might be ready for full release sometime between January and March of 2020. Hopefully, anyway!
So, for the future, what kinds of things are y'all curious about, that you'd like to see featured in project updates?
Hello!!
Hi! I'm Badru!
I started Ice Water Games, lead the Eidolon team, did a bunch of colors and design and code on Viridi, and uhh did some other stuff too!!
I just made a Steam Creator page for myself here, if you want to follow my work:
And hey also! I'm working on a new thing with some past collaborators (which may or may not end up coming out under the IWG label) - Michael Bell's doing the music and Isa Hutchinson's helping a bunch with design. It's a big open-world TRPG about wizardly goblins and fae spirits and elemental magics. Wishlist it if you're into the stuff we've worked on in the past?
