Hi everyone!

We are excited to announce that the Winter Content update is now LIVE!

Thank you to everyone that has provided feedback and bug reports on the preview build. The slight delay in the release schedule has given us time to complete the update as well as incorporate and fix any issues and feedback from the community.

The Winter Content Update brings many new changes, content and improvements! You can check out the full changelog at the end of this announcement but let's dive into a few of the highlights.

We know a lot of you have been waiting on this one! Villagers will now automatically move home!

If a villager lives too far from their workplace they will become unsatisfied with their housing and will look to fill any empty housing slots closer to their workplace. If none are available they will look to swap with another villager or even evict lower status houses so that they can move and upgrade, if the house is in a desirable enough location.

If a villager cannot find a house that will satisfy them then you will be notified via the warnings panel so that you can rectify the issue.

The Lord Manor has seen some love for this update including all-new monument parts as well as a new assignable function, the Study Room.

The Study Room, once assigned and staffed, will allow a Scholar to study blueprints that you might be rewarded. Without giving too much away, these blueprints won’t be easily acquired, in fact, some villagers may not survive!



The Wooden Keep has also been improved with new parts including a barracks building to house your soldiers, as well as multiple decorative items to set up your military camps.



We have made some major changes to the Military system and quests for the Winter Content Update. You will now need to raise your chances of a successful campaign by both training and equipping your soldiers with weapons.

Once trained you will be able to send your soldiers on an extended campaign where you decide the right time to bring them home. Each mission will vary in difficulty but the higher difficulty missions will bring greater rewards.

To facilitate these changes you will now find a new Military manager panel. Here you can check on your soldier’s stats, equip weapons as well as keep track on available and ongoing missions.



Beer! The Winter Update sees the, much teased, introduction of the beer production chain. Similar to wine, beer is sold in the Tavern as a luxury item and brings with it 2 new production buildings, namely the:

Hop Farm
• Produces Hops
  
• Added: Hops
  
  The Brewery
  
• Produces Beer from Hops, Wheat & Water
  
• Added: Beer
  
  Both of which can be found in the Public Buildings panel.

With the introduction of the Military Manager panel, we have tidied up a few elements of the UI and also introduced a new Estate Manager panel. You will now find the estate unlockables and the military manager have their own buttons in the top-right menu cluster.

As well as that we have added a new part preview to the build menus. Hovering over public buildings will show you a preview of the building and each monument menu will also give you a useful visual guide to the part you are picking.



The Winter Content Update will now give you more control over the status of your villagers. It will be up to you to decide which villagers are allowed to rise in their societal rank.

This will come at a rising cost dependant on the status upgrade but you will also need a Lord Manor with Great Hall function to be able to hold court and decide on status matters.

Once your lord manor has built you will have the opportunity to upgrade your villagers at the end of each month but only if their needs for the current status have been filled.

Housing already plays a large part in villagers’ happiness, with the new system you will find that commoners will now require a level 2 (stone) house. You will need to improve the housing desirability of an area to ensure that your commoners and citizens get the house they deserve


The above highlights are just a few of the changes and improvements. Check out the full changelog below:

Additions:
• Villager move home
  
• New status promotion system
  
• New military system
  
• New parts in the Keep monument
  
• New beer production chain
  
• Visual building and building part preview
  
• New onboarding quests
  
• A new weather effect
  
• New achievements
  
  
• Jewels (reward)
  
• Blueprints (reward)
  
• Lord Manor weathercock animations
  
• Woodcutter walking animation
  
• Hunter animation + bow weapon to hunters
  
• Envoy idle (reading scroll) animations
  
• Weaver cloth animation - wind effect
  
• Allow different tool in separate hands
  
• Individual job outfits
  
  Improvements
  
  
• Shift-Click keep building part and orientation selected on shift-click
  
• Unique need concept
  
• Separated housing (levels) and water needs in villager information window
  
• Help icon on promote window
  
• Set barracks as dorms for soldiers
  
• Wooden bridge cost
  
• Bakery - change bread in oven for an unbaked one
  
• Lord Manor Balancing and New part costs
  
• Updated Help menu
  
• Restore event window on load game
  
• Female face
  
• Updated localizations
  
• Multiple Hurricane Engine improvements & optimizations
  
  Fixes
  
  
• Non-valid bridges with no positioning warning
  
• Material - Multiple materials display as plain grey.
  
• Update upkeep cost when editing a monument
  
• Wrong calculation when removing resource of warehouse
  
• Inn Gateway building zone
  
• Upkeep total when game speed is high
  
• Entrance/exits being too close to the sides
  
  Modding
  
  
• Custom Component: Write your own component with custom data and update function, allowing you to control object transform. This will allow way more interaction with the game in the near future.
  
• Military system: missions, rewards
  
• Update Modding documentation
  
  
• Fix: Custom maps - Remove resources that aren't over their preferred terrain
  
• Fix: Prevent incorrect mods from loading

Hello everyone! We have kept being busy working on the next update and are very excited to present it to all of you. That said, we need to delay the official update to next year. The extra time will allow us to complete and polish the new features, like the house move feature.

For those of you who are most eager to try some of the new features, we are releasing a preview of the Winter update:

• New status promotion system
  
• New military system
  
• New parts in the Keep monument
  
• New beer production chain
  
• Visual building and building part preview
  
• New onboarding quests
  
• A new weather effect

• Custom Component: Write your own component with custom data and update function, allowing you to control object transform. This will allow way more interaction with the game in a near future.
  
• Military system: missions, rewards

Winter Preview Modding documentation can be found here: https://www.polymorph.games/foundation/modding/preview

To access the Winter Preview Build, right-click on Foundation on your library, and access the preview build under the "Beta" tab:

• expose DESIRABILITY_RESIDENTIAL, DESIRABILITY_FERTILITY and DESIRABILITY_IRON_ORE
  
• add a tag filter in the mod browser
  
• load game crash when a building function was switch from workplace to market
  
• mod dependency loading issue

• most building were considered dynamic object after a load game

• discord, Crowdin & mod.io links
  
• building part highlight during construction
  
• notification width is now constant
  
• rain position offset from camera
  
• terrain physic collider was not matching visual terrain
  
• a few more engine small fixes
  
• texture compression quality

The team will be resting for the holidays and will get back at work on January. Happy Holidays to all of you!

- The Polymorph Games Team

The Steam Awards gives you the perfect opportunity to throw support at your favorite games. Your vote can really make a difference, particularly to small indie developers like ourselves and as such we are not plugging ourselves so much as asking you to think about the indies not just the AAAs when you vote.

Of course, we would be overwhelmingly happy and thankful if you choose to nominate us for this year's awards! If you do choose to vote for Foundation, you can choose any one category but we have suggested a category above and you can vote right here in the announcement.




We still have some work to do but the December Update preview build is beginning to come together.

We plan to push out the preview build within the next couple of weeks and we look forward to receiving your feedback on the new features. We will have more news on the changes and additions included in the preview build, soon.

Hey everyone!

We have some news on the next content update!

… but first we would like to take this opportunity to thank every single one of you!

We have recently surpassed 200 000 sales of Foundation and thanks to all of your support and feedback we are able to realize the game of our dreams, and hopefully yours too.

From the whole team… Thank you!



As you can probably tell from the title we are planning to release the next update before the end of the year. We will bring you more news and more details on the update once we are closer to release but in the meantime here are some of the things that will be making it into the next content update:

• Villagers will move house when too far from their workplace. The lord will also have the authority to force them to move.
  
• Jobs will be directly linked with villager status where you as the lord will have more control over status promotion.
  
• Improved military system with stats, levels, and equipment.
  
• New production chain with two new buildings; The Hop farm & the Brewery.

• New buildings parts and function for the Wooden Keep.
  
• New Character visuals including new job outfits.

• New weather visuals.

• New sounds including workplace animation SFX as well as UI SFX.
  
• New modding capabilities: Custom components and behavior trees.

The changes to job roles and villager status will be major and due to this, we are planning to release a preview build in order to test and gather player feedback on the new feature. Keep an eye out for further announcements on the preview build release.

We have even more planned for the December Content update and we will bring you more information soon.

We are excited to announce our attendance at MEGA & MIGS 2019 this coming weekend!

If you are in and around Montreal this weekend then you can check out more here.



We look forward to seeing you there!

-The Polymorph Games Team

Hey everyone!

Welcome to Devlog #11, where I will be giving you some insight into what the team has been working on since the last update.

I don’t often do this but let’s kick off by talking about me! Well… not so much me but at least what I have been up to.

In the last update we introduced a way for players to create their own custom maps that can be uploaded to mod.io for everyone to play. With this in mind, I have been learning some basic modding and creating a custom map that is now available in-game. I have then gone on to use this map as a template for a custom map, tutorial video which can be found on our YouTube channel.

Check it out if you fancy making your own map.



For any queries and help with map modding we have a very knowledgeable modding community over on our Discord server that will be more than happy to help.

For those that would prefer to wait for a map generator, it will come before the full release, in fact, over the last couple of weeks, Ben has started work on an early prototype for a procedural map generator.

Moving on to Vincent, who also hasn’t been mentioned in a recent devlog, but for good reason, as he has been hard at work on job outfits for villagers. This has been no small task with multiple job roles for both female and male villagers.

You can see a few examples below of the new outfits:



More recently Christopher has also been working with Vincent on villager outfits, though for Christopher he has been looking at the villagers themselves and allowing for the integration of all the new outfits as well as hair styling. Alongside this, he has been working on some performance optimizations for villagers which should hopefully see some fps improvements in the future.

I know this one will make you happy… one further thing that Christopher has started initial work on is the possibility to force villagers to move home!

Having done some great work on the new workplace animations in the last update Michaël has also been working on the villager job outfits, in his case he has been looking at skinning the new outfits on the 3D villager models.

Needless to say, the villager outfits are coming together well.

Claudine has begun work on some visual research for new environment biomes, creating mock-ups and sample textures for visual reference.

Here you can see a couple of mock-ups of how things might look:





She has also been looking at a ways to improve and polish some of the current in-game assets and textures, such as improvements to trees, water and ground textures.

Some time ago we teased the Brewery and now we have a Tavern but no beer. Never fear though, Loup-Gabriel has been working to complete the brewery as well as working on the hop farm.



Loup has also been working on a new production chain but there will more info on that in a future news update, however he has also been working on some new decorative items that will work with the new production chain, so I’ll leave that one to your imagination for now.

Maxime has been continuing work on improving performance for low-end systems, as well as general optimizations when generating models, and improving LOD generation.

He has also been working on ways to provide pathing feedback to players when placing buildings and creating the dev tools required to configure this in our Hurricane engine.

Nicolas has, as always, been thoroughly testing improvements and gathering information from the community regarding any bugs and feedback.

As well as this he has been working with the engine programmers investigating possible performance optimizations, one of which was released in a hotfix patch last week to improve performance for larger cities.

Talking of large cities and performance, Phil has been looking at ways to improve villager needs efficiency. This, tied in with villagers moving home will see some major improvements to your overall village/city efficiency in future updates.

Finally Léo has been looking at many aspects of the Hurricane engine, working with and helping the team.

In no particular order he has been looking at

• Improvements to our shader system
  
• Improvements for our skinning system (new villager outfits)
  
• Investigating RAM usage with an eye to improve memory allocation tracking
  
• Undertaking performance analysis between updates
  
• Prototyping terrain improvements that support more ground types and vegetation (Biomes)
  
• Improving the dev tools including the in-house Hurricane editor. For example we now have a new Asset Preview allowing the team to easily explore game assets.

I hope you enjoyed the read! We have a lot of improvements coming and work is well underway for the next update but there is still much to do.

Until next time…
Cheers!
-Ash

• Fix: Performance issue affecting large cities
  
• Fix: Old tax office and bailiff visual are now unlocked with the Lord Manor stone set
  
• Fix: Default save game name is back to village name
  
• Fix: Map modding - Error that spawn more trees than expected
  
• Fix: Map modding - Remove unexpected default fishing spots
  
  
• Modding: Expose
  - BUILDING_PART_HOUSING_SERF_DENSITY_1
  - BUILDING_PART_HOUSING_SERF_DENSITY_2
  - BUILDING_PART_HOUSING_CITIZEN_DENSITY_1
  - BUILDING_PART_HOUSING_CITIZEN_DENSITY_2

Hey everyone,

Hotfix 1.4.7.1010 is now live!

Thanks for all the feedback on the Fall update and also thanks to those that have sent in any crash reports.

Changes:

• Add granary quest to onboarding quests
  
• Treasury capacity raised from 15 to 30
  
• Treasury Maintenance cost halved
  
• Fix duplicate mod dependency
  
• A few crash fixes

Fall Content Update - 1.4 is LIVE!

Hi everyone, the Fall Content Update is now LIVE!

We have a lot of exciting new content in the Fall Update as well as new features, changes and fixes.

You can check out the full changelist below:

Dairy Farm

The Fall update sees the addition of a new production chain starting with the Dairy Farm.

• Produces Milk from Cows
  
• Added: Cows
  
• Added: Milk resource

Cheese Maker

The Cheesemaker is the next progression in the new production chain. Milk, produced at the Dairy Farm will be processed into Cheese by the Cheesemaker.

Cheese can then be sold at the market as a food resource to satisfy villagers' food needs.

• Produces Cheese from Milk
  
• Added: Cheese resource

Tavern

The Tavern will be a place for your villagers to relax after a hard days work, where they can purchase some wine and also get themselves a hot meal if there is one available.

The Tavern, as all other Monuments, consists of multiple Monument including a Service Counter, for storage and staff, which combined with the Public Lounge will allow you to sell wine to your citizens. The Kitchen will provide meals that will be bought (if available) when wine is purchased.

There are also many decorative items that you can place on your Tavern which will give you even more creative options to decorate and personalize your creations.



Monument functions will see some changes in the new update, these changes bring a new feature to Monuments which will allow you to choose which Monument part is assigned a particular function.

Some factors of the Monument parts will have an influence on the Monument functions, for instance, the capacity of the part and the quality of the materials used.

The Fall update will also see the introduction of the Great Hall, where you will host any Envoys that visit your settlement but will also bring an added bonus of doubling the Splendor for the Monument part that it is assigned to.



The Horse

For now, the Horse will only be used by the Envoy to bring you quests but there will be more functions for the Horse in future updates.

• Added: the Horse
  
• Envoy visits the Great Hall

The stone bridge now includes a host of new decorative items added that you will can snap to the bridge. With gates, a portculis and bridge towers, to name but a few, you will be able to make an impressive waterside entryway to your cities.

• Added: Bridge decorations
  
• Improved Bridge Collision and pathfinding
  
• Added: Warning of incorrect placement

Another new feature on its way in the Fall Update will see the introduction of multiple workstation animations which will increase the number of animations within a production building.

We have also updated and improved on some of the previous animations.

• Added: Envoy animations
  
• Added: Grindstone animation
  
• Added: Bakery oven animation
  
• Added: Market tender animations
  
• Improved: Harvesting animations
  
• Fixed: Some animation character rotation

Monuments will now have 3 tabs:

• General - General Information
  
• Edit - Edit Monument
  
• Parts - Shows parts; allows function assignation.
  - New delete option per part

Within the Parts tab you will be able to assign varying functions to some of the parts using the new assignable functions feature.

Some functions will require extra maintenance costs, hovering over the function will show the effects of the function being assigned.

Other changes to the UI and UX include:

• Updated Tutorial
  
• Confirmation popup on part deletion
  
• Taxes collected now show in the budget window
  
• Major improvement to the Monument assemblage experience
  - Monument parts can now be attached in 3D, so players only need to place the mouse to a node to have the part attach.

New Immigration factors

Immigration is now governed by:

• Happiness
  
• Employment
  
• Residency

Buildings

• Added Capacity to some building parts
  
• Bonus to bailiff depending on building part splendor
  
• Updated maintenance costs to include capacity

Resources

• Removed: Leather

Map importer

For the first time, modders will be able to import their own map in the game.

• Added: Map importer
  - Allows for the import of heightmap data for the creation of custom maps

Here’s an example of a Quebec City imported map:



Other Modding Additions

• Livestock and tool prefabs are now exposed and usable for modding
  
• New buildings, building parts, resources and jobs assets are now available.
  
• A resource can now have multiple resource types
  
• The market tender behavior is now available
  
• Building part functions are now assets, declared individually.
  • Core building part functions have also been exposed to the API.

• Fix: Infinite loading on low-end computers
  
• Fix: Bridges (pathfinding / collision)
  
• Fix: Do not remove bridge pathfinding connections when placing an obstacle under it
  
• Fix: Removed housing lvl 2 door at the wrong location
  
• Fix: Adjust housing collider sizes
  
• Fix: Warehouse & granary resource visuals
  
• Fix: Granary Collision
  
• Fix: Forester planting multiple trees standing at the same spot
  
• Fix: Fishing spot heights (all maps)
  
• Fix: Rustic Church Basement
  
• Fix: Beekeeping entrance
  
• Fix: Avoid crashes when mods are disabled or changed

Hey everyone!

We are excited to bring you news on the plans for the upcoming content update!

This update will bring a plethora of new content to the game, so without further ado let's take a look at what is to come in the next update.

If you have seen the recent teaser you may have already guessed it but the next update will see the introduction of a new Monument, The Tavern!

As the Tavern is a monument it will consist of multiple parts. These parts will include a Public Bar room, Kitchen, Sleeping Room, Stables and many decorative items.

The Tavern monument will have limited functionality in this update but more functions will be added in future updates.

A new production line will be introduced in the next update which will see the addition of the Dairy Farm and Cheese Maker.

These new production buildings will add both Milk and Cheese resources into the game, as well as new buildings and of course Cows!

A first look at the new Dairy Farm:


One exciting new feature, coming soon, will be the ability to assign functions to monument building parts.

With this new feature, the player will have the ability to assign some generic parts a function that is relevant to that monument type, allowing players much more control over their monument building functions and overall creativity with building parts.

The Lord Manor monument set, for example, currently includes a treasury building and a Bailiff office. These building parts will become generic and the players will be able to assign the treasury and Bailiff functionality to the generic parts.

The new update will also see the addition of the Great Hall to the Manor monument functions. The Great Hall is where you will host any Envoys that visit your settlement. Assigning the Great Hall function to a building part will have the added bonus of doubling the splendour for that building part.

Some factors will have an influence on the Monument functions, for instance, the capacity of the part and the quality of the materials used.

Further Monument functions are planned to be added in later updates.

Currently, new villagers join a players village in pairs, with the time between immigration waves being governed by overall villager happiness. The new update will bring some major new changes to immigration, we will be introducing new factors to govern the size of the immigration wave giving you more control over the growth of your city.

In a change to the current system, ‘Happiness’ will affect the immigration count rather than the time between waves. A happier populace will increase the number of new villagers joining a settlement.

In addition to this, ‘Employment’ will also factor in to the quantity of new villagers arriving in a settlement. Having more unemployed villagers in a settlement will reduce the amount of new arrivals in the next immigration wave.

A third factor being introduced will see a players homeless villagers having an impact on new arrivals. The ‘Residency’ factor will require villagers to be housed and if they aren’t, each homeless villager will be factored in to the next immigration wave, reducing the number of new settlers joining a village.



We will be adding even more animations in the next update alongside a workstation animation feature.

The new feature will bring multiple animation to workstations which will increase the number of animations within a production building. For example, the bakery will see a new workstation where one villager will be working the bread whilst a second villager is working the oven.

In a similar vein, the blacksmith will see a new grindstone workstation animation added that will have a second villager grinding tools whilst the first works with a hammer on the anvil.

A new Coal hut workstation animation:


With the new update we plan to add some weather variation to the standard gaming environment.

The new weather effects won’t have the same impact on the challenge to the game as the bad weather event but will increase the level of immersion with variations in the weather environment between sunny, cloudy and rain effects.

Bridges will be getting more detailed with the addition of bridge decorations! There will be a whole host of additional options to improve the look of your bridges, from simple banners to more ornate gates and towers.

Additionally we are looking into improving pathfinding and collision for bridges to ensure they are usable once built and placed correctly.



That’s right, we will be introducing the horse into the game, starting off as a vehicle for the Envoy.

We will be adding in the possibility to import heightmap data! Initially this will allow modders to include custom maps with their mods or even create a mod that is just a map.

We will be including more villager outfits and applying many bug fixes and improvements, including fixes to improve blocked pathing issues.

We plan to have the update ready for release within the next few weeks so keep an eye out for further announcements.

All the best
-The Polymorph Games Team

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