Hey everyone!

In the last Devlog some of the team, including myself were packing our bags and heading off to Köln for gamescom 2019. The team are now back and working hard on the next update and I am very happy to report that gamescom was a resounding success with Foundation being nominated for Best Strategy Game in the gamescom 2019 awards!.

We met many new fans as well as veterans of the game. The booth was full from start to end and we would like to say a big thank you to everyone that dropped by the booth during the week! Thanks also to those that braved the photobooth where it was all getting very medieval.





Whilst we were in Germany showing off Foundation the rest of the team were still back in Quebec City so let’s find out what they have been up to whilst we were away.

To help the Gameplay Programmers Ben has been working on a behaviour tree Debugger which will show the current state of a villager in the Hurricane editor. This will make a big difference when searching for issues and bugs in the behaviour of the villagers, particularly as we add more content to the game.

Max has also been hard at work on the dev tools to improve the development process. One such improvement is allowing the Hurricane editor to be ‘moddable’, using Lua, by any of the developers. This will allow them to create their own functions/actions in the editor which are more targeted at their own individual workflow and job role.

On top of this, he has also been working on LOD generation, in order to increase optimization for low-end graphics cards.

Christopher and Loup-Gabriel have been working on Weather Systems. This will be a new environmental feature that has no direct impact on gameplay but will help to immerse the player in the world.

Each map will have Weather Systems configured individually to both add variety and ambiance to the maps.

Weather Systems are still work in progress but below you can see a couple of examples of work so far.





Additionally, Christopher has been taking an initial look at Villager life cycles including aging and eventually the death of a Villager.

As well as the Weather Systems Loup-Gabriel has also been creating placeholders for all the upcoming buildings in the game. These are basic visuals that will help to get an idea of how everything will look in the final game and make sure everything is fitting together visually.

He has also been working on some new decorative items for the stone bridge that will be placeable on bridge nodes.



You may have seen a horse rider in need of coffee in a recent Social Media post… Well, Michaël has been working to polish the horse and rider animations including the King’s Envoy animations as well as uphill and downhill animations for the horse itself.

Here you can see the new horse reins and improved rider animations as the envoy heads into town.

https://youtu.be/jN1haOs4noU

We have also been keeping an eye on player feedback and working on some of the major issues currently affecting many players. Phil has been looking at a fix for the housing building loop bug where houses will continue to be built and not occupied. As well as this he has been looking to improve the collision on the granary which can be too easily create stuck villagers.

Thanks for reading and I'll catch you all soon with more news from the team.

Cheers
-Ash

Hey everyone!

We are taking Foundation to gamescom next week! If you are heading to Köln, you can drop by and say hello and we even have a photobooth where you can get your photo taken with some of your favourite characters from the game. We will also have 6 stations where you can try out Foundation, if you haven’t already.

As some of the team are packing their bags to head off to gamescom this is a perfect time for me to catch you all up on what the team have been up to in the last few weeks.


Claudine has been researching some visual variations to increase the ambience of the Foundation environment, including new weather effects as well as looking at options to increase the variation of vegetation.

You might also be pleased to hear that she has also started visual research for future buildings and monuments such as the Castle monument!


As you have previously seen, Michaël has been creating a new ‘vehicle’ for use in the game which Christopher has now been working to implement for a future update. Its first use will be for the when envoy is coming to town to deliver a mission from the King.




The last update saw a number of new animations added to Foundation, for instance the farming cycles have seen a lot of love with new seeding as well as harvesting animations with the scythe.

Michaël is now hard at work on some new animations for production buildings where we will be increasing workstations in some of the buildings and adding new ones to others. For example, the bakery will see a new workstation for a second baker to be working at the oven whilst the other kneads bread.

He has also been working on new walking cycles for specific jobs as well as new animations for some tools with both single and double-handed uses.


Concept art for job visuals are being worked on and expanded by Vincent, which will see new outfits for jobs such as the Hunter, Forester, Miner and more. On top of this he has been working to increase the variety for character visuals, such as new haircuts for both female and male villagers.


Immigration is something that we are looking to improve and with this in mind, Christopher has been working on new immigration factors. These factors will see the way current immigration works changed to give you more control over the growth of your city.

With these changes, new factors will affect the quantity of villagers joining your village per immigration wave.




Phil has been working on some changes to the way monument functions are implemented. In an upcoming update we will see some of the current monument parts become generic.

Some building parts will have a “capacity” which can be assigned as a villager capacity for that building or if players choose that part to be a treasury, for example, then the “capacity” will be combined with a treasury multiplier to create an overall treasury capacity.

This will free up some of the existing parts to allow them to be used more creatively whilst giving you more control over what parts will have particular functions.




Speaking of assignable building functions, one such function we are currently developing is the Great Hall, which can only be set to 1 building part in all the city. This function will allow you, the Lord, to determine where you will receive requests from envoys. This functionality will also expand in the future.




We are always working hard in the background to improve the game engine to allow the team to improve both the way we create assets, transitions and new features.

Ben has been working on a timeline feature as mentioned in a previous devlog, this is being improved to allow for better handling of the AI and behaviour tree. These improvements will help for game optimization as well as debugging for future updates and improvements.

We have also been testing and working on improvements for GPU compatibility, specifically Léo has been testing AMD graphics cards for better compatibility as well as investigating crash reports to smooth out the player experience.

Max has been hard at work on Improvements to graphical optimization as well as modding compatibility across game versions to prevent crashes when mods are removed from existing savegames.

With that it’s time for me to go and pack my own bags!

Stay tuned as we will be bringing you more news during gamescom.

Cheers
-Ash

• Bad Weather event changes. Berries, wheat and grapes yield decrease change from -90% to -50%. Fish yield change from +50% to +20%
  
• Trading villages now sell food
  
• Add a delay between two villagers leaving, thus preventing massive exoduses
  
• Weather transition is now saved
  
• A few crash fixes

Fixes

• Bug with Market Tender getting resources from Workplaces under certain circumstances
  
• Wrong scythe tool offset on farmer
  
• Assign a default resource visual on warehouses and granaries for modding
  
• Rare crash when destroying buildings
  
• Tree Chopping rebound
  
• Crash when shift+clicking on a wall with only 1 control point
  
• Crash on mod loading when "generated_ids.lua" was corrupted
  
• Rare crash during mod download

Hi everyone, the Bad Weather & Balancing Update is now LIVE!

Aside from the new Bad Weather Event, there are significant changes to the core and balancing.

Here's the changelist:

• New Bad Weather event: will give malus on some productions, but bonus on other.
  
  
• Grow and Harvesting cycle of Farm and Vineyard are now timed on a global cycle
  
• New building: Granary, used for stocking food-type resources
  
  
• Market tender will now only get resources from Granaries and Warehouses
  
• Reduced workplaces capacity from 100 to 50
  
• Rebalanced the Wine production chain, to make it more profitable.
  
• Rebalanced the Bread production chain.
  
• Desirability has been rebalanced and visual has been improved
  
  
• Buildings will now display their desirability range
  
  
• Raised warehouses and granaries worker capacity to 4 and resource capacity to 100 per slot.
  
• Fish and Berries are depleteable. Will replenish after a while.
  
• Stone source are now limited to 5 workers at a time
  
• Building upkeep cost may raise depending on the amount of workers
  
• New onboarding quests
  
• New unlockables that will give trade bonuses for a while
  
• New trading village resource balancing
  
• Trading village will have a maximum amount of buying resource that will replenish over time
  
• New construction steps visual

• The first 7 achievements have been added to the game!

• Gaelic
  
• Turkish
  
• Japanese
  
• Vietnamese

• 5 new Level 2 music snippets have been added

We hope you'll enjoy the new changes!

-The Polymorph Games Team

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