Hey Everyone!

It took us a bit longer than expected but we are happy to announce that the July Content Update is now at a Preview Stage, meaning you can try it out now!

There are so many balancing changes that we want to get your feedback before pushing the build live. Some of the core changes include:

• Berries and Fish are depletable (but will replenish over time)
  
• Farming cycles are global
  
• A new building, the Granary, will allow to stock food
  
• From now on, Market tenders will only get resources from warehouses and granaries.

There are a whole bunch of other changes, which you can see in the changelog below.

Additionally, we are experimenting a first challenging event related to bad weather. You will see the effects that this will have on your crops and fish production and it will be interesting to see how challenging you find it!

Now that we are on our way to finalize the content update for an official release, it would be very helpful to get your feedback on the preview build by filling this form here: https://forms.gle/qDvc6rzxaKrVgboe9

To get the best experience and feedback from the preview build we would recommend starting a fresh vanilla game. If you would like to check out the new changes you can access the preview build in the Foundation betas tab in Steam.

> Right-click Foundation in your Steam library
> Left-Click Properties > BETAS
> In the drop down choose > preview




The build will automatically download and you can get a sneak peak at some of the things to come in the July Update!

Reminder: It would be very helpful to get feedback on the weather event and balancing changes. Please use this feedback form: https://forms.gle/qDvc6rzxaKrVgboe9

We look forward to hearing how you get on!

-The Polymorph Games Team

• New Bad Weather event: will give malus on vine and wheat output, but bonus on fish.
  
• Grow and Harvesting cycle of Farms and Vineyards are now global
  
• New building: Granary, used to stock and trade food resource only.
  
• Market tender will now only get resources from Granaries and Warehouse
  
• Reduced workplace capacity from 100 to 50
  
• Raised Warehouse and Granary workers capacity to 4 and resource capacity to 100 per slot.
  
• Warehouse is now unlockable on the Labour Estate Path.
  
• Fish and Berries are now depletable and will replenish after a while.
  
• Stone source are now limited to 5 workers at a time
  
• Building upkeep cost may rise depending on the amount of workers
  
• New onboarding quests
  
• New unlockables will give trade bonus linked to village allegiance
  
• New trading village resource balancing
  
• Trading villages stock and needs will deplete upon trading. It will replenish over time.
  
• New construction steps visual.

Hey everyone! Welcome to Devlog #08


As mentioned in the recent July Content Update News we will be introducing a new weather system. Bad weather is going to affect the yield of your crops. To start with this will be limited to wheat fields but will be expanded on in the future.

It would be easy to just have those crops disappear or just less production but we want to heighten immersion. With this in mind, Claudine our Senior Artist has been working on rotten crops. Nice!

Below you can see the contrast between a healthy crop and a rotting wheat field during bad weather.






How on earth do those fishermen and woman find those fish that they bring back? It's a good question and more importantly how do you, as a player, know the best place to position a fishing hut? This is something that Loup-Gabriel (FX Artist) has been recently working on. In the future you will be able to identify fishing spots by the schools of fish and plan your production around them.




The upcoming update will bring with it a number of balancing changes. To help with this, Christopher (Game Programmer) has been working on a Resource analytics tool which will allow us to track the overall cost and revenue of every resource in game.

We have had a lot of feedback from the community and this tool will prove invaluable to help get the balance right and fine tune the game.


With the aid of Christopher's new Resource Analytics tool, we will be able to balance production costs and trading values much more easily and efficiently. Phil (Creative Director) and Nicolas (QA Manager) have begun to work on the balancing of the estate progression costs as well as looking at balancing for the new weather system.


Ben, our new Engine Programmer has been working on improving some internal processes with the aid of a timeline tool. This tool will allow the artists to easily transition and blend between animations/FX. Previously this would have required a Game Programmer to write any changes into the code.

With this tool, there will be much less requirement for the Game Programmers involvement in the animation/FX process which will help to streamline workflow.

As an example, the new weather system will require a transition between sunny and rain effects. The timeline tool will allow a more automated process which can be changed on-the-fly to see the changes and effects of any animation or FX.


A future update will be looking at the military quest system and we are also looking at some more visual improvements for the soldiers. Michaël (Animator) has been working on some new soldier training animations.



Soldiers will not always be training though, you will also find them patrolling your cities




To better support the new Weather System Léo (Technical Director) has been improving and optimizing the Hurricane particle system.

The Weather system has required the addition of new particles, with these additions he has also been working on optimization to reduce the load on your PC from the particle system. These optimizations will help to offset the new additions so you can all get to see the gloomy ambiance when the bad weather hits.


There will be more news soon on the July Content Update ETA so keep an eye out for announcements.

Have a great weekend everyone
-Ash

Hi everyone!

We are happy to present to you what you can expect in our next content update!

For this update, we are focusing on improving the core game experience as well as adding new features and buildings. Expect major changes in the gameplay meta!


A weather system will be added in the next update, starting with the introduction of rain. Not only will this add to player immersion with suitably gloomy clouds, lighting and of course rain effects but the weather is also going to bring with it additional challenges.

Rain will indeed impact your crop yields, but will improve fish yield! You will need to be careful to produce enough food to sustain your population needs during this period.




The bad weather and reduced yields are going to require you to plan ahead as poor preparations will see your people starve and leave. To aid in this we will be introducing a new building: The Granary!

This new building will allow you to store a reserve of food resources. It will prove useful when undergoing bad weather. In addition, the Warehouse has been modified to only stock non-food resources. Don’t worry about food trading, the traders will visit your granaries as well.




Balancing will be a large focus for the next update. As we add more content to the game, the economics and flow of balance is evolving as well.
One of the things you can expect is having a limit to berry bushes and schools of fish yields. They will replenish over a time cycle. As such, fulfilling your population with berries will be more challenging.



Further balancing changes will focus on a building's desirability. There are a number of buildings that we have introduced to the game during the alpha phase, that are missing their desirability influence.

Desirability has an effect on housing upgrades, whether negatively or positively, and as such will have an influence on where you choose to zone housing for your villagers. Not only that but desirability gives you some control over housing upgrades by making an area more (or less) desirable to live.

With that in mind, we will be adding desirability influence to those missing buildings, such as the Rustic Church & Lord Manor buildings as well as those that negatively influence desirability.

We’ve also improved the desirability visual representation.




In order to make them more immersive, we’ve been improving the visual of building construction steps. We will be integrating a couple of those in the next update.




Currently, many of the resources stored in the warehouse are stored in boxes. This makes it somewhat difficult to identify, visually, which resources are being kept in each warehouse.

It has always been our intention to allow easy identification of warehouse storage and the next update will bring a couple of new visuals to help you see ‘at a glance’ what a warehouse is stocking.




We will be adding support for modding dependencies. While downloading a mod, you’ll be able to download all dependencies from that mod in a single click.


The update release date will be announced soon, so keep your eye out for more news on the ETA.

All the best
-The Polymorph Games Team

• Bug Fix: Trader walking animation is restored.
  
• Bug Fix: Monks can no longer be assigned to a non-monk job through the “...” menu.
  
• Bug Fix: Rare crash when destroying buildings.
  
• Bug Fix: Wheat Farms "No Farming Zone" notification message no longer appear for no reason.
  
• Bug Fix: Upkeep cost for new parts are not charged while editing an already existing monument.

Hey everyone! Welcome to devlog #07!


With the introduction of the recent content update, we will next be focusing on improving the core experience. Here are a few of the things that we have been working on.


Eagle-eyed players might have noticed weather effects in the Early Access trailer… These weren’t just for show and we are currently working on the introduction of the first weather system to Foundation. Of course, I like to tease a little, so you might be interested to know that weather won’t be purely aesthetic!




We have previously mentioned that we are working on an updated mission system for the Kingdom Estate. We will be looking at this for a future update but we have started work on the concept art for soldier levels.




As we add more production chains through development we will need to constantly update balancing in the game. There is still much more balancing to do and it will need continuous tweaking during development. For this end, we are working on an internal tracking tool for the cost per resource, which will help us for future balancing of the game.


The level of detail in Foundation (call me biased if you like) is already quite incredible but we are striving to always increase the level of immersion. We are currently working to improve and increase this with more detailed and varied construction steps.




New updates do, of course, inevitably bring with them new bugs. The community have been feeding back to us any issues created by the last content update and we are currently in the process of preparing a new patch for release in the next few days. We will announce more details and changelog once the patch is ready for distribution.


Part of the recent update introduced many new modding features, including the possibility for modders to create their own monuments. The modding community have risen to the occasion and have themselves been working hard on new mods since the update. Check out this creation from Paddy Fitzgerald using the new ‘Stone Gate Set’ mod by vjraymon:



If you have created a mod for Foundation in a previous version please don’t forget to update your mod and change it’s status to 'public' for the newly released update.

We hope everyone is enjoying the new Wine update! Feedback has been very good and the community have been sharing their creations on Discord. These screenshots from Milinia and SLy particularly caught our eye!





Thanks for checking out this weeks' devlog and we shall see you soon for more news on development!

-Ash

*Savegames from the previous version are compatible!****
*All mods need to be updated by modders to make them compatible with this new version. See the Migration documentation****
*All mods from the previous version are unsupported and may cause crashes.****

• New wine production chain:
  
• New building: Monastery Vineyard
  
• New building: Monastery Winery
  
• New building: Cooperage
  
  
• Production of workplaces can now be paused, halving maintenance cost
  
• Villager window now displays distance between home and workplace
  
• Improved job selection UI
  
  
• Destroying a building under construction will refund upfront cost
  
  
• Add severities to warning window (low, high) to distinguish stuck agents from full workplaces.
  
• Farm have separated farm fields, zonable through the workplace window. All fields need to be zoned on previous savegames. You also need to press the "Start production" button once you have finished zoning.
  
  
• Change in balancing (WIP):
  
• Reduce production rate of honey
  
• Reduce production rate of herbs
  
• Reduce the value on herbs and honey on the market compared to wine
  
• Wine is tradable
  
• Texture uniformisation on Stone Bridge, Small Stone Wall and Large Stone Wall
  
• Changes on some Monastery building part cost
  
• Update localization

• mod:registerPrefabComponent to add component to FBX nodes
  
• adding workplaces
  
• adding monuments and bridges
  
• adding walls
  
• expose particle systems features
  
• overriding game assets
  
• individual log files for mods
  
• new example mod: Mithril Factory
  
• mod IO functions
  
• mod dependencies
  
• mod sandboxing: hide some potentially dangerous lua function from mods
  
• msgbox function will only log and won't display a messagebox, unless enabled in usersetting.config
  
• log and crash as soon as a circular parenting is detected
  
• lua will use mod relative path when logging lua error instead of long path
  
• expose game textures to lua materials
  
• fix: generate generated_ids.lua sooner if inexistent
  
• fix: COMP_BUILDING_PART.FeedbackComponentListToActivate on certain type of production buildings
  
• fix: QUEST.OnFailCallback was never triggered
  
• fix: EVENT_CALLBACK_TRIGGER_EVENT with delay 0 was never triggered
  
• expose PROFILE_ENVOY_CLERGY and PROFILE_ENVOY_ROYAL
  
• rename DELAYED_QUEST.QuestResource into DELAYED_QUEST.AssetQuest
  
• rename WALL_CONFIG.UvTillingWall into WALL_CONFIG.UvTilingWall
  
• rename WALL_CONFIG.UvTillingTop into WALL_CONFIG.UvTilingTop

• Construction will cancel if builder profile change to monk
  
• Use S3TC compressed texture when supported
  
• Forbid zone painting outside of player territory
  
• Zone cleaning when abandoning tile
  
• Occasional crash when leaving a game containing a bailiff office
  
• Fix various crashes
  
• Zoning tool optimization & interpolation between two frames
  
• Tree shadows are now dynamic

Hi everyone!

We are extremely excited to share some big news with you today!!


That’s right! The next update will include the Wine production loop, the Quality of Life changes that were voted on last week, and the new modding capabilities that the community have been recently testing.



https://youtu.be/gscC1F1-Fmg

So why are we bringing you an early content update?

Going forward we have decided to make some changes to our update strategy. This will bring more frequent, but smaller updates to you on a regular basis.

Our original strategy, that we took through the pre-Early Access alpha stage, was to release larger more significant updates with major changes and content updates but with larger time frames between updates. We made large strides in development during this time and the game evolved significantly to what you see today.

We have been following the community feedback since the Early Access release and we recognise that the community would prefer smaller more regular updates. With our expanded team (including 2 new programmers) we feel that we are in a position to deliver this change to you.


Ideally, we’ll target an update every month or so with bug fixes/patches in between.

We hope this news brings you as much excitement as it does to us!


Best regards,
-The Whole Polymorph Games Team

Hi everyone and welcome to Devlog #06!

Let's dive straight in to the news...


As you may have seen, last week we submitted 10 community Quality of Life suggestions for you to vote on. The results came in and work is already under way to implement your chosen suggestions:

• Button to pause production in production buildings

A great suggestion and one that will make managing resources easier. To add to this suggestion paused buildings will have their maintenance cost reduced by half.

• Add 'unemployed only' filter to worker assignation drop down
  
  
• Villager Pane displays the Workplace/Home Distance

Managing your villagers work/home distances and optimising travel distances will be much improved with these suggestions. Great choices!

• Return resources for buildings that have building work cancelled

We have taken this suggestion and plan to expand upon it. When destroying buildings you will get 50% of the resources back that were used in the initial construction.
Additionally placing a building accidently will no longer be a drain on your gold reserves. Cancelling a construction that has not yet started will return the gold outlay for that building.

• Farms have separate fields defined

Another great suggestion which will allow you more control over the placement and segregation of your fields. We are also reworking and optimising the production cycle of fields and we will hopefully add this to the QoL update depending on testing.


We continue to work on modding functionality. We are changing when mods are loaded so rather than being loaded as Foundation starts they will be loaded at the same time as a save game, additionally we have been working on more changes to allow mods to be loaded mid game as apposed to the current situation where once a game has started no more mods can be added.
There are also still a few optimisations being worked on to ensure mod dependencies are handled correctly as well as a few bugs that needed to be fixed.

If you would like to try your hand at modding you will need to use the Lua programming language to create any mods in Foundation. Documentation for the Modding Preview (1.2.0) can be found here.

You can also join in the modding chat on our Discord server.


As you saw in Devlog #05 we have been working on some new farms and fields. The two crops that you saw in the last devlog were grapes and hops. Well done to those that guessed correctly!

Further work has been done on the wine production chain, including the Vineyard building which is currently being worked on



Here is a first look at the Winery! It's soooo cute!!



https://youtu.be/Gxao1NxLN5w?autoplay=1
Of course wine needs a suitable storage vessel. We are not talking wine bottles here, we are talking bigger scale storage! Below you can see work in progress on the Cooperage.



Thanks to everyone that got involved in the voting last week and if you have suggestions that you would like to share you can add them to our tracker here.

-Ash