Hello again, and welcome to the next Tribe: Primitive Builder devlog!
This time we'll be talking about ways that players will struggle to survive on an island, our approach to combat, and the effects of weather.
From the day we decided to start working on Tribe, our goal was to make something unique. While still taking inspiration from other similar titles, we wanted to refresh a little bit the survival/simulator formula. To achieve this, we made some critical decisions for our game design. One of them was that the player wouldn't be alone on this island; there will be lots of NPC characters in the form of village members that will be working with the player towards the common goal of surviving. We wanted players to be a part of a growing community and to play a very specific and important role in the development of the tribe. Because of that, we also decided that players won't be able to do everything alone and will need to rely a little bit on other tribe members. That’s why we decided that the role our players will play in this primitive society is to build and explore the island, to innovate and communicate with gods. All of this makes players responsible for prosperity and how fast this society will develop. This is already quite a lot of work to do, so we decided that more mundane tasks will be fulfilled by other tribe members. Thus, the roles played by NPCs are Hunters, Fishermen, Farmers, etc. Players will still be able to collect some food, though mostly from fruit bushes.
Another decision was that we wanted to create a relaxing experience focused on constructing, exploring, and interacting with the culture of the players' tribe. The big consequence of this decision is that we decided that there won't be any hostile creatures on the island: by this, we mean there’s no dangerous animals, and no hostile tribes. We wanted to encourage players to explore more, and the lack of threats during the day worked well with that idea in mind. The lack of hostility between tribe members is also important, as all inhabitants of this island are descendants of one tribe that the player is part of and plays an important role in. During the late game there can be some misunderstandings between subtribes that could escalate to a temporary split from the main tribe, but it will never lead to bloodshed. No matter how angry our tribesmen are, they don't believe violence is an answer. Their beliefs are concentrated about balance in nature; cycles of day and night, rainstorms that will always turn into clear skies, the circle of life and death that comes naturally. All of this is reflected not only in their behaviour but also on their bodies, with light colored paintings in front and dark patterns on their backs. Since the player character also follows this set of beliefs, we decided to remove the ability to hit NPC characters with tools. The reason being that during the tests of our game, we noticed that players will try to hit NPC characters, and when they discovered that it was possible, the next step for them was to try to kill them. The penalty of losing reputation and, in the end, losing the game was not enough to stop them from doing this. Because this "game over" screen and reloading to the last save point was only stalling the player experience, we made a decision to remove the feature from the final game. Now players will need to start thinking the same way as their character and find solutions to conflicts outside of resorting to brute strength.
Although, there will still be other things that can catch careless players off guard!
As we said, we wanted players to explore during the day, when the island is warm and cozy. But at night... Well, that’s a different story altogether. Many primitive tribes feared the night, and the unknown that could hide in the darkness. As there are no monsters on the island (as far as we know), there is something equally dangerous. Nights on our tropical island can get devastatingly cold, and players that are far from the village could risk freezing to death. To avoid this from happening, players can construct temporary camps that require only a small amount of resources and will provide them with a fireplace and a place to sleep. As you already know, sleeping in a village is important because it allows you to discover new things, but we also wanted to allow players to skip night whilst out in the wild, looking for those unique places and sparks of imagination. Just don't wait to construct them at the last moment, nights can get really dark!
There will also be times that during the day the island will be consumed by powerful rainstorms. Seeking shelter during these will also be important. Players won't be losing temperature as quickly as during the night, but it could also be lethal. Keep in mind that rainstorms will affect not only players, but also the whole Tribe. If some of your constructions were already in poor condition, you could find that some of them collapsed completely, leaving some of your fellow tribesmen homeless and without work. This will have severe consequences on the prosperity of the Tribe and on the player’s reputation, so you’d better be ready. Weather in our game is not always as extreme as that; you can also encounter slight drizzles that won't kill you, but will slightly weaken your constructions.
So with combat or without, surviving on our island won't always be so simple, and we are making sure that there will be many other activities that will help players to fully immerse themselves into the world we are creating.
Hello again and welcome to the next Tribe: Primitive Builder devlog!
This time we’ll be talking about resources, their importance, ways you can collect them in our game, and how it’ll impact the island environment.
We’ve got over a dozen different kinds of resources sprinkled all over the island, and many ways you can acquire them. Our approach was to try to balance out realism but also to not make the process of gathering them tedious. Because of that, some of them you can pick by hand, whilst others will require a specific tool. Some of the collected resources will require further processing before you can use them. There are also resources later in the game that can only be manufactured by a specific craftsman in your tribe.
It’s a lot to take in, so let's unpack it one by one!
At the beginning of the game there will be a short period when you’ll only be able to pick up loose resources such as small rocks, branches, etc. After that you’ll start to craft your first primitive tools. Each of them will allow you to collect at least one new resource. A pickaxe is needed to mine and collect stones, a hatchet is needed to collect bamboo, an axe to cut down trees, a shovel to collect mud and clay, you get the gist. The importance of each tool will change with the game’s progression; your first huts will be mostly constructed from branches, grass, vines and bamboo. Later in the game this will shift more towards wood and stone, or even bricks! After going through a few iterations to make the game more realistic, we decided that bamboo, wood, stone and clay will be resources that require additional refinement before they can be used in construction.
To encourage exploration of the island, we decided that resources would despawn after collecting them. So if you cut down a tree, its trunk will fall to the ground and only the stump will remain. Fallen trunks can be further split into smaller pieces and collected, but after this the tree will be gone, so if you want more you need to explore further into the island. This also has the additional benefit of letting you see your impact on the island. After all, who doesn’t like seeing physical progress and impact? But don’t worry, for players that want to play endlessly, we’ve implemented a system that after a long period of time will respawn some of these resources if there is no building blocking them. It’s the best of both worlds!
As we mentioned in the previous devlog, the player isn’t alone in their resource gathering endeavours. Each workhouse you construct will provide additional resources based on its surroundings and will transport them to the main village stockpile each day. But you need to keep in mind: your tribesmen aren’t as efficient at this task as you, so they’ll gather resources significantly slower. It’s still possible to construct enough workhouses so you’ll never need to collect resources by hand, but we didn’t want to make it too easy to achieve. Your workhouses will require additional tools and upgrades to achieve full automation. There are also two resources that can’t be found in the wild: bricks and tiles can only be crafted by your fellow tribesmen later in the game.
There’s also one more way to collect, or rather trade, new resources. It’s connected with the fact that you’ll be constructing a big ship. But we don't want to spoil everything and ruin the surprise, right?
So to sum it up: there are a few ways to collect resources which will allow you to tailor this experience to your liking. You can complete most of the work by hand to immerse yourself, or skip the tedious parts and let your tribesmen help you. There will be many ways to play Tribe, and we want you all to find in this game what you enjoy the most.
Hello again and welcome to the third Tribe: Primitive Builder devlog! In this one, we’ll be focusing on the player progression and how we divided it into multiple intertwining parts.
When we first started thinking about progression, we looked into many successful titles already available on the market. There’s no point in re-inventing the wheel, but we wanted to expand and build on what we saw.
So, let’s talk about what you can expect in Tribe! First and foremost? Discovery. A feature in which all of the game progression depends on. Discovery is our answer to an issue we encountered when discussing progression — the speed at which we want to introduce new resources, tools and building tiers is unrealistic for a tribe living in those times. It would take a considerable amount of time for any civilization to go from constructing huts made out of dried grass to using bricks. However, it made a lot of sense from the gameplay perspective and made the game fun to play, which frankly is what’s most important.
To solve this problem and make it more acceptable to the eyes of our players, we looked toward the sky. In Tribe, when you discover anything new you look to the stars for inspiration, create constellations and use them to provide you with answers on how to improve yourself, your constructions or your tools.
Though discovery doesn’t come cheap. Like many open world games we wanted you, the players, to explore the island we’ve delicately prepared and reward you for your curiosity. During your journeys across the island you’ll often encounter unique places: these, whilst visually appealing, will also award you with “sparks of imagination”. These “sparks” are what you would consider experience points in role-playing games. Each “spark” you earn can be spent in the Discovery system to progress in one of three ways: improving the tribe by unlocking new buildings and building attachments, improving your exploration potential, or unlocking new or better tools.
As you can most likely tell by now, progression in Tribe is divided into three parts:
Buildings
Tools
Exploration gear
New and better buildings mean a better life for your tribe, and who wouldn’t want that? Each tier takes a longer time to require repair and also increases the productivity of anyone living in them, which in turn means a lot more resources that you can use to craft better tools or new buildings. However, buildings of higher tiers will require better resources to construct; resources that can only be gathered from regions you might not be able to reach without exploration gear.
Better tools on one hand will allow you and your tribe members to gather resources faster and more efficiently, especially in higher tier buildings, but on the other will require more advanced resources and in larger numbers to craft.
Exploration gear will unlock previously inaccessible parts of the island for you. These, while providing more advanced resources and access to new “sparks”, will also allow you to expand the reach of your tribe across the entire island and smaller islands near it. Yes, you heard us: you’ll get to build a raft and take it for a swim!
To sum it all up and make a long post short: the progression in Tribe is divided into three parts that will depend on each other to make the most out of them, all connected through the “Discovery” system. Perfectly balanced, as all things should be.
When experiencing Tribe for the first time, the question we want you to ask yourselves is: “What’s the point in reaching a further part of the island if I can’t use the resources from them, or unlock the ability to elevate brick houses when I can’t even gather clay and make bricks?”
In the end, it’s up to you to decide which progression path to go with, and experiment to see which approach makes the most sense or is the most efficient for you.
If you have any questions, and want to stay in direct touch with us, then join us on Discord! ----> https://discord.gg/PZmRVnt7Jv
Devlog #2: Nature
Hello again, and welcome to the next devlog! This time around we’ll be discussing the island itself and how we approached the topic of nature in Tribe: Primitive Builder.
Tribe takes place in an Asian region of the world, sometime between 300 BC and 300 AC. This choice brought many difficulties; the time period we’d chosen left us with no real reference materials since smartphones and photographs weren’t a thing back then, obviously.
Because of this we began to shift our focus towards the Yayoi era of Japan. We went in this direction for two reasons: there was a lot of archaeological research we could study for this time period, but also because it gave Tribe a more unique visual aspect when compared to the other survival games currently available.
The research we conducted gave us a ton of information on fauna and flora, food habits, and most importantly on how shelters were constructed (which, as you already know, is a major part of the game). We wanted to get as close as possible to what we saw, giving you a truly memorable experience with Tribe.
However, we still lacked certain knowledge. We couldn’t find everything we needed, so with a bit of roleplay and imagination as to how life could have looked back then, we tried to figure out the parts we were missing on our own. This led to a more modern approach as to how we, as developers and players, would approach life on this island we were creating. Though this meant we had to make some historically inaccurate choices, know that we have done it for you. For us, creating a fun and engaging game comes first and foremost to true accuracy. After all, what good is a game that isn’t fun to play?
We often relied on photographs of the regions we wanted to get inspired by when researching for the game, but the real MVP award had to go to “walkthrough” videos we found online. Though rather niche and unheard of, there are a ton of videos on the internet showing parts of the world through the lens of someone living there, which gives us a plethora of references in super high detail to work with! It’s also worth noting that by not being static images, we can learn a lot more about how surfaces and objects behave under different lighting conditions, which of course leads to more realistic and appealing models.
Here’s one of the reference materials we often used if you’d like to take a look: [previewyoutube="yIMDgPKgN1w;full"]
The wild and more preserved regions of Japan are very lush, and you can easily find different “semi-biomes” within the island itself. In Tribe, we wanted to do something similar and create areas that would be interesting to every player. That’s why on the island you will be able to find many small welcoming regions - idyllic plains, rocky waterfalls, blooming fields, bamboo forests, and enormous forests; but also those that could fill you with a sense of dread or unease - gloomy swamps, the barren and rocky base of a volcano, and eerie dark forests. Each of these will appear on our island and every single one of them fits inside the region perfectly.
When we originally created all of the assets we wanted and placed them on the island, the game was unplayable. Imagination has no hardware requirements, but unfortunately our game has. We visualised what we wanted to achieve, but placing all of those assets and displaying them on-screen at the same time took a major toll on performance. You’re here to play a game, not watch a slideshow. That’s why, once we were done creating all the foliage, we spent most of our development time optimizing: bending limits and working around potential bottlenecks. Finding the right balance between visual quality and performance is something we are still working on, but we’re improving more with every day.
As always, we’d love to hear your feedback on what you’ve seen so far! We’ll have more to share on the game in the future, but for now, you’ll have to hold tight. We’re very excited for you to share in this journey with us, and can’t wait for you to finally get your hands on our game.
If you have any questions, and want to stay in direct touch with us, then join us on Discord! ----> https://discord.gg/PZmRVnt7Jv
Devlog #1: Construction & Buildings
Hello, my name is Lukas. I am the game designer and producer here at Polyslash, and today I’ll be explaining how construction works in Tribe: Primitive Builder, and how we got to where we are right now.
Tribe: Primitive Builder is a game about survival on a lush island located somewhere in the Philippine Sea. You play as a chosen member of the Nei-Ju tribe responsible for its expansion, managing resources, and pleasing the gods.
When we first started thinking about the basic concept of Tribe: Primitive Builder, we knew we wanted to create a hybrid “survival city-management” game. Both of these game types have buildings as a significant and common part of gameplay, so that’s where we started. Before moving into the game design part of the entire experience, we consulted heavily with the concept artists in our team. We knew we wanted buildings that could be easily expanded (with more complex resources and the size itself) and something that would fit with the theme of the game nicely (prehistoric tribe, if you didn’t know by now). After several iterations and heated discussions, we created our first example building:
A building made out of grass, leaves, and sticks - a good starting point for any growing village.
When we made the concept and decided that it was the direction we wanted to take the game in, we started the nitty-gritty design work of making this not only a fancy piece of art, but an actual game mechanic.
As mentioned before, we wanted to go with a building that can easily be modified to form a larger place to live in. The square shape of the building made that possible. We prototyped a few potential ways of placing buildings next to each other and finally concluded that in Tribe: Primitive Builder, we will be able to build exactly what you see in the concept, as well as larger houses (up to a 2x2 square shape) by combining them.
In the meantime, when the designers were hard at work in figuring out how best to construct things, our concept artists were trying to find ways to make the house feel like it was becoming more complex over the course of the game. The designers already knew what resources the players would have access to at certain milestones, so they took those and created these building variations:
The buildings, following the player's progression, were divided into separate tiers - starting from grass and leaves and ending on bricks and tiles; a total of four tiers of building progression. We were and still are very happy with that outcome.
During the entire design process, the team was researching a lot about how to construct a home in the middle of a jungle using your bare hands or basic tools. There were hundreds of sources to learn from, and we highly recommend you check them out on YouTube. Who knows when you might need to build a shelter in the jungle?
After better understanding how to build something in the wild, the team started breaking each building into bits and pieces. Inspired by the videos and articles, we broke the entire building down to the smallest objects. It gave an insanely detailed approach to construction, but it took more than an hour to complete one building. This, while true to reality, proved to be way too much for anyone in the team to handle. We took a step back and re-evaluated our approach. While doing it this way would make it more ‘real,’ Tribe: Primitive Builder was not meant to be a simulator. After a few more iterations, we concluded that we wanted to achieve a middle point, somewhere in between what was done in real life and what would be an arcade type of mechanic. So, the buildings got divided into small parts that would later become stages of construction.
The pillars, floor, roof, and each wall was treated as a separate part of the entire construction. In a simple explanation of our idea - you start off the construction by placing the pillars in the ground and creating the entire “skeleton” of the house. After that, you add the floors, the walls, and finally the roof. This process would be similar for all houses regardless of their tier. What they don’t have in common is what resources they need and how you place them.
The design of construction was nearing its completion. We had a good idea of what buildings are going to be made of and how we are going to build them. We also added a few smaller elements to the entire process. For example, we allow the player to carefully pick where the building will appear (which you can see on one of the screenshots on our store page), flatten the terrain, clear out from anything that could block construction, store the necessary resources near the construction site (to mitigate the need to run back and forth from the site to the forest), and define where the door and windows will be located (yes, there are windows at a certain stage).
When the design was done, and the concepts were completed, our 3D team took what we created and made the buildings a reality (sort of). Now that you understand how we got here, let me show you how the buildings look when finally realized in-engine:
However, Tribe: Primitive Builder isn’t just a game about building houses. We knew that we had to take this idea and turn it into something more connected with the “resource management” and the “tribe” part of the game, but that is a larger topic for another devlog.
If you liked this sneak peek into how Tribe: Primitive Builder is becoming a reality, please let us know. If you find any other behind-the-scenes topics interesting, don’t hesitate to write to us in the comments or on our official Discord channel.
Tribe's first video teaser!
Hello Tribesmen!
We, the tribe elders, have something to share with you tonight, and we’re very excited about it.
We’re proud to present this teaser which is a very first glimpse of the game in motion!
[previewyoutube="A67rT2I3Slg;full"]
Join us on Discord to discuss the video and get the latest development updates!
Stay vigilant, for there’s much more to come very soon.
Join our tribe!
Tribesmen,
It's time to craft your tools and join us in building our community.
If you want to stay up to date with the development of Tribe: Primitive Builder join make sure to follow our social media profiles on Facebook and Twitter.
We’re steadily progressing with Tribe’s production and wanted to show you a new screenshot taken from our development build. Our island, where the game is set, is filling up nicely. We’re preparing new buildings and decorating them, as you can see on the screenshot above. Also, the first trees are starting to grow near the player’s village, so we’re getting closer to the moment when we will be able to show you footage from the actual gameplay side. Stay tuned for more info in the near future! ːsteamthumbsupː
