Feb 27, 2020

v2.001 Released! "Expansion 1: The Spire Rises!"

AI War 2 - x-4000 (Chris Park)

The first expansion for AI War 2 is out! It's time for a little retrospective of how things have been going since the October 1.0 launch of the base game.

Base Game Updates

Put most simply, we've had 47 patches to the base game since 1.01, which is about one every 3 days. There have been a few of those that were just little hotfixes, and some were on the beta branch temporarily, but most of these were quite substantive.

The largest of these was v1.3, The Grand New AI, on January 10th, which we called "almost a sequel in terms of how much it adds." That's a huge read on its own, so I won't recap it here, but suffice it to say it added a ton of content and a complex new intelligence to the AI. Some of that (like the awesome fire teams mechanic) was us backporting work from this new expansion to the base game. Other bits were just us updating the base game.

I'm actually struggling a little bit on how to even describe what has been happening in the base game, because there's no singular improvement. It's just been relentless evolution and refinement on basically every front. We've had a lot of really involved testers, and some of the first large-scale mods (Civilian Industries, Galactic Conquest, and others), and a number of those modders have also been contributing code or ideas to the main game itself.

We also continue to have a healthy number of volunteers who pop in and out and make various additions. Things I really wanted, but which kept sliding down my own todo list, like the ability to load a quick start or savegame into the lobby for further customization. Dominus Arbitrationis and StarKelp have been the two most active on that sort of front. Heck, StarKelp has kind of adopted the Macrophage faction from the base game and has been adding cool new features to them.

Anyway, the release history is long, and public, and has a lot of detailed writeups already. Suffice it to say, things have been VERY active.

Expansion 1: The Spire Rises

The base game was already huge, and something that we considered to be on par with AI War Classic and maybe... two of its six expansions? Something along those lines, although it's apples to oranges since the content in AI War 2 tends to be so much more versatile and involved.

I'll skip summarizing what is in this new expansion and just let you read about that on its own page, so instead I can speak a little more broadly here.

The very short version is that we now consider AI War 2 plus this expansion to give parity to be equivalent to AIWC and four out of its six expansions. Wowzers.

AI Goes Up To 11

The Scourge are a faction born out of the desire to fulfill the Nemesis kickstarter stretch goal in a more... entertaining and robust fashion. That's just how Badger, the mastermind behind this race, is. The original concept was one large ship that harasses you mercilessly; that's still here, but instead we also get a faction of multi-racial slaved warriors doing even more involved and interesting stuff.

Being able to set the scourge as your ally is one of the things that amuses me the most. Just last night, StarKelp was playing in that fashion and watching the AI Hunters duke it out with human-allied scourge. The result was a galaxy mostly swept clean by the scourge, and then an amusing of AI-on-AI tag in the ruined wasteland as the hunter fled around the galaxy, fighting as needed, and the scourge split up and chased them, occasionally seeming to have a small group pause and catch their breath on the safety of his home planet. The fact that things like this can exist inside the game... that makes me really happy.

The really key testers for the Scourge were zeusalmighty, Astillious, Ethan "DEMOCRACY" Wong, and Ovalcircle.

Going Into All-Out War

The Fallen Spire, the other big faction in this expansion, were again to satisfy a kickstarter stretch goal, but in a more-fun way. We didn't get as much into the scripted-campaign territory (that's just not personally as high on my list), but we did build out the citybuilding to a ludicrous degree. And we then built out the AI forces to a ludicrous degree, giving them the ability to pull back in Extragalactic War units from "whatever it is they are fighting outside the galaxy." Those two big expansions of the content for this faction are just how I think about things. ;)

We've been really fortunate to have some huge-fan Fallen Spire players from the first game, such as Matt "Vinco" Taylor, show up to test things and let us know where we were failing in this expansion. Things like the relics having a stronger response or phasing in and out of reality came about because of him, and so much of the citybuilding balance and the effectiveness of the Imperial Spire in the alternative victory condition were thanks to feedback from Ethan "DEMOCRACY" Wong.

Looking To The Future

There's more that we could do with the fallen spire, and we do plan on that, but it's already a really solid and huge thing that is a fun new way to play the game. The amount of core content that we wound up adding was far above what we initially planned, so certain things like journals or multiple loadouts were pushed until later because there are just only so many hours in a day.

The nice thing is that some of those features can double as work for expansion 2, so as we enhance things we'll continue backporting not just to the base game, but also the first expansion. For now it's kind of a matter of balancing that against my goal to finally get multiplayer going fully.

The Sheer Volume Of Turrets

Soooo... this was not really planned at all, but is one of these things that we added in because somebody (Ethan "DEMOCRACY" Wong in this case) had a great idea and we wanted to do it. He basically observed that in the base game, there are not all that many turrets, and they are not spread evenly among all the technology lines (because how could they be).

Looking at the base game, I see there were 11 combat turrets, plus orbital mass driver and ion cannons as major combat turrets. Then we had a further 2 non-combat turrets in the form of tractor and tachyon turrets. And that was it. Out of the 11 combat turrets, one of those was also curiously larger and scarier than the rest, with a higher cost and much lower unit count.

Democracy thus made a big ol' table for each tech, with columns for regular combat turrets in each row, and then one larger-than-average turret in each row. Working with Puffin, and then getting some assists in new code from Dominus and Badger and myself, plus a whole heck of a lot of new art on my end, and we wind up with THIRTY freaking new combat turrets in this expansion. It's madness. They're so much fun and so varied, too! The first game never had anything like these.

Game Mechanics For All

We wound up adding new game mechanics to support the scourge, the spire, the turrets, and the new arks -- yes, there are five new arks as well in this expansion. In a lot of games, you'd see that sort of stuff gated off if you don't buy every last expansion, and so if you're a modder you have to think about what expansions the player does and does not have if you want to allow them to fully use your mod.

I'm not a fan of that. We build all the new mechanics into the base game so that any mod can use any mechanic, and the modder never has to worry about what expansions you have unless they are explicitly setting out to mod expansion content. This keeps things going along really well, mods-wise, and lets you consider our expansions on their own merits individually without having to wonder if they block you from getting some mods you want.

The Sheer Volume Of Art

Oh, yeah. One of the things that we recently did for the base game was massively upgrade the lighting, and add a lot more pleasing detail onto many ships. That required me to go through and touch basically every ship and structure in the base game, which was a great result but super time consuming.

We also added some VERY large new ships for the Extragalactic War feature, which is something I wanted to be in the base game so that any expansion or mod can trigger those guys. Right now mainly only the Fallen Spire trigger it, but it shouldn't be a feature that is limited to them in the long term.

After all was said and done, the art asset bundles for the base game are about 1 GB.

Looking to the first expansion, then, the total amount of art wound up being... 714 MB. That's absolutely insane, but shows just how large some of these factions are, not to mention all the turrets.

Hey, Multiplayer!

We haven't forgotten about that! In fact, we've been coding in preparation for it from day one, and have continued to make some revisions to things to make things easier to implement there. Balancing things out with such a small workforce has been hard, but now the turn for this aspect of the game has come.

To make things as easy on players as possible, the plan is to try to use three different transport layers to allow for playing multiplayer in any of three fashions.

Firstly, we'll have some general basic networking based on Forge Remastered. There's some light NAT punchthrough in there, which is a big feature that we said we wanted for this game, but it's only going to work but so well. You ultimately need relay servers and such, and that's expensive to set up and maintain-forever. But this would be the absolutely-no-DRM-or-service way to play multiplayer, and probably the ideal way to play via LAN. So here we are with this.

Secondly, we'll implement Steam networking as another transport layer. The game code is all the same either way, but then the code and networks that is transmitting the data of the game is different in these cases. This should be the most seamless experience for Steam players who want to play via the internet. Steam has relay servers, NAT punchthrough, and a bunch of other things that a small group of people can't hope to match. So we'll just use theirs! But locking you into this wouldn't be cool, hence other options.

Thirdly, we're going to implement GOG networking as the last transport layer. This one works very similar to Steam's, has all the same cool functionality for bypassing firewalls without a hassle to you, and even has some inter-connectivity to Steam players. The only real downside in the short term is that it doesn't have Linux support (since the GOG Galaxy client doesn't support Linux yet). When they have it, we'll add it.

None of this means we're going to have matchmaking, because for games that last a long time that just doesn't make any sense. But for connecting with your friends via your platform of choice, this should make it so that you can just connect and play. During the next few months I'm definitely going to be wanting to have a variety of testers to help us iron out the bugs and find network load bottlenecks, etc, before we move towards calling this "true multiplayer support."

Beyond Multiplayer and DLC 2

Badger and Puffin and I have some things that we'd like to do for a DLC 3, and there are always new ideas coming up in general. This project has been in work since 2016, and we could probably spend another four years on it and still never run out of ideas we want to work on.

What happens long-term is still... something that remains to be seen. When multiplayer and the other base game features come out around the same time, that will finally discharge the last of the kickstarter obligations.

What happens after those obligations are finally met is... up to the market, really. At the moment, AI War 2 doesn't fully pay the bills, and it never has. It is close to doing so, and our hope is that with expansions and related promos and so on it will start doing so. In the current climate on Steam, back catalog sales drop by roughly half basically every year, which was income we used to rely on.

I still feel cautiously optimistic despite having to take on debt to cover half of my expenses last month (and having had to take on debt to a greater or lesser degree for 33 out of the last 36 months), but I figured it was worth noting. Everything we've been accomplishing lately has been on a shoestring, despite such a successful 1.0 launch.

That sounds glum, but I'd rather give you an honest appraisal than potentially have some surprise after we get into summer if things are still on a downward-trending or flat trajectory. We're hoping that paid DLC and the free multiplayer update will reverse or at least delay that trend. There's more that we want to do beyond the "minimum required to finish this up."

The Very Short Term Future

The Scourge are very battle-tested at this point, but we're sure that with a large influx of new players we'll find more things to fix or improve.

The Fallen Spire also feel quite polished at this point, but it's hard to know if it's balanced well for all difficulty levels. So we'll probably have a lot of tweaks regarding that. Our testers were all pretty skilled.

There are things we'd still like to add to the Fallen Spire, and we'll probably do that while also getting started on the beta version of multiplayer. But for now we're going to stop working all the nights and weekends. We can get plenty of done without that, now that we're past this initial milestone. Badger is already digging well into DLC 2, to make things easier on himself schedule-wise later. So the hope is for us to not really hit a crunch period again like we've had the last month.

One of the shortest-term things is that we want some more varied and descriptive icons for some of the new turrets and ships, and so that will be coming out later today. There just wasn't time, we were all falling asleep in our chairs.

Lots more good stuff to come soon! We're really proud of what has been accomplished in the last few months, and we hope that you get a lot of enjoyment out of it.

Please Do Report Any Issues!

If you run into any bugs, we'd definitely like to hear about those.

The release of this game has been going well so far, and I think that the reviews that folks have been leaving for the game have been a big help for anyone passing by who's on the fence. For a good while we were sitting at Overwhelmingly Positive on the Recent Reviews breakdown, but there have been a lot fewer reviews lately and so that has definitely had a material negative effect. Go figure. Having a running selection of recent reviews definitely is helpful, but at least we have a pretty healthy set of long-term reviews. If you've been playing the game and enjoying it, https://store.steampowered.com/app/573410/AI_War_2/.

More to come soon. Enjoy!

Problem With The Latest Build?

If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choose most_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire.

The Usual Reminders

Quick reminder of our new Steam Developer Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do.

Also: Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to super detailed, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support.

Enjoy!

Chris

Feb 27, 2020

Growing the Gathering Tree

TFM: The First Men - cibram

Salutations, offspring of The First Men.

Much water has flown under Gathering Tree’s bridge, since the release of our vision demo. In this post, we’re going to be unraveling the current state of our game, and the plans we laid out for 2020 and the release of TFM: The First Men.

If you’re not aware of what TFM is by now, you can read our Game Overview Document, watch gameplay footage on YouTube or check out its Steam page. The document especially goes in detail about the stages we’ve been through during the discovery phase of the development, apart from useful gameplay information.

Alas, we’re here to finally talk about up-to-date affairs! We’re aware of the fact that our update section seems kind of deserted, but it’s mainly because of our perfectionist nature. We’ve been swamped by the overwhelming amount of re-iterations due to complicated design decisions, thus we didn’t want to talk about them before we were convinced enough of our baby’s condition.

After Overfall’s release, we’ve encountered a number of publishers and investors who were interested in what we can creatively bring to the table with our projects. While we were meddling with TFM’s design and progress during the discovery phase, there were a lot of negotiations and offers floating around. Finding a partner with good qualities and character is not an easy task, I assure you. The people you want to work with must be open-minded and willing to grow together as partners. They must share the same vision and value as yours. Things like trust, useful skills and productivity are the cornerstones of a good business relationship.

TFM: The First Men has been on Steam’s most wished games list for a long time now. This causes an unbelievable amount of attention if your Steam page says that you’re actually, literally independent of any partners as publishers.

Game development, even for small projects, is a costly and time-consuming endeavor. Independent developers like us have to find ways to cover their expenses for a long, long time. This includes things like salary, rent, food, bills, etc.

While we were in the discovery phase, our latest project Overfall was paying most of these, but even that was not necessarily sufficient, because we were focusing our creative flow to TFM, not Overfall, so the sales were understandably, and simply not enough. When we finished the demo with four members, we immediately realized that the team had to grow in quantity in order to shape TFM into what we have envisioned it to be, as it deserved undoubtedly.

Like I said before, we had multiple publishers who were eager to pay for our costs, however, a healthy developer-publisher association is like a dreamy marriage. It requires attention, common interests, unconditional trust, and respectful communication. We just simply didn’t feel like these conditions were met with any possible partners at that time. Most companies see you as a cash-cow without respecting the fact that you wish to create art and then turn it into something that actually, organically deserves success. Companies like this usually spam offers to games like a berserk miner who strikes his pick blindly. The sad part is that people you interact with usually are not even familiar with the genres you’re interested in. Or worse, not even gamers themselves. It is difficult to describe the meaning of these two factors for us.

But then out of nowhere, something surprising occurred and a thought-provoking investment fund spotted us. Due to our previous experiences, our immediate reaction was skepticism. But this time our interlocutor’s professional approach intrigued us. From what we’ve understood, they both knew how to ensure a project’s financial success, and also understood the advantageous ideas of what makes a game fun and desirable. The interesting fact here is that these people were literally investing in games themselves, not the companies. This is a very underrated business decision and one that should be respected as a very logical move.

Our conversations with them fascinated me. Their energy and vision were bright as daylight, and they explained the idea that the functions of publishing and funding must be separated at the beginning. Their terms were clearly laid out, deliberately short and very straightforward. These guys knew what they were doing. We felt like they were here to actually fix painful parts of our old connections and negotiations. The deal was too good to be true. Even if we had projects in our hands that were generating absurd amounts of money, I would still work with these guys. Because the thing that they bring to the table is what’s called smart money. It causes you to share risks, focus on what you do best, gain access to a great family of game developers under their umbrella, reach connections and possible partners all around the globe and when the time arrives, share your success with them to make yourself and that family bigger, while keeping your IPs and sequel rights. I talked about how TFM is our baby, this last part is especially important for us in that regard.

We are finally super excited and happy to announce that TFM: The First Men is a part of a new lineup of games supported by Kowloon Nights. It is a video game investment fund to make sure we can give TFM all we have as it deserves. The amount of potential this game has in our eyes is of great importance, so this partnership is what we all needed to make TFM much better over a long period of time.

New office, new colleagues, new updates

During TFM’s discovery, we worked in a wonderful, small office apartment. The problem was that if we were to bring our vision into life, we needed more people. That also means more space, a stout infrastructure, easier transportation options, and most importantly fresh air. Where we used to work was a mess with all the construction noises, water spillages, etc.

Finding a proper office in that regard is not an easy task in a city like Istanbul. All of these efforts naturally hindered the development of TFM, but we were confident that we’d find a good home for the Gathering Tree. After a brief time, we’ve found the perfect place.

It has four floors, a private garden near a pine forest, a super silent and safe neighborhood with traffic-free transit. Most importantly, an internet connection as fast as the speed of light.

We moved into our new office last November and began searching for new people, so we could invite them to our home and grow the team. Our goal was to have a 10-men squad working on TFM full-time. A producer, three designers, three artists, and three programmers. As of now, we have a family of nine, rallying around our literal Gathering Tree. Yeah, we have a real Gathering Tree!

I wish to offer my gratitude to our Discord community for supporting both us and a giant of a game; TFM. Their enthusiasm and input matched with our energy so fittingly that the idea of having an actual Gathering Tree inside the office was actually theirs! We’re enjoying it a lot, hope you’re excited about how tall this tree of ours can grow. If you end up in Istanbul one day, you’re very much welcome to join us for a cup of coffee (and maybe an inside look at what TFM is up to).

Enough backstory, now it’s time to talk about TFM. What has changed, blossomed, how and when we’re hoping to release the game through several distinct updates.

After what we entitled to “The Vision Demo”, or the Alpha update, we’ve decided to re-write all of the code from scratch, because we have been iterating and meddling with too many design variations. Naturally, this caused the code to not carry a healthy structure for our future plans of multi-player, procedural generation functionalities, modding tools, etc., which we think should be in the released version of TFM. Because we strictly established the design decisions of the game, we don’t need any of the discovery phase elements inside the game anymore.

Let’s talk about four main updates of TFM: The First Men and what they cover up in terms of gameplay and development tools.

Ways of Life

This update’s main purpose is to provide us with editing tools that we call “Makers”. These makers will be implemented in, and designed for the game application itself, inside a scene called TFM Builder. This is done for the purpose of easier modding by our community. Our designers will also use these in-game Makers for the game’s “Base” mod.

There are four main features involved within this update that we expect to finish until the end of March. We’re already half-way done with these and are getting ready to start creating new and importing old content. These features are;

Map Maker

It allows us and users to design maps, using our biomes brushes and other helpful tools. Including our main scenario map, all maps will be made with this maker. It is specifically designed to be able to work around the concept of “regions”. A new map with a specified width and length will be loaded with a single Ocean region. The user will be able to create new regions on top of this ocean region, slowly turning his world setting into TFM. We already had a Map Editor in our Vision Demo, but this one’s getting a redesign too.

Map Objects

These are Constructions and Doodads. They are considered tile-based objects unlike characters and items, which are not restricted to fit within a tile, or a tile group. By using their specific Makers, the user will be able to create new ones or edit existing ones by duplicating them to make their own versions of the Base game’s assets. We, of course, will be able to create new content for the Base database and consider it as the Mother Mod.

Doodad Maker

Next to Map Maker, we’ll be able to interact with the Doodad Maker. It allows us to fill our world with decoratives, path-alterers, resources and findings as loot.

Construction Maker

It follows the same pattern as the Doodad Maker and is used to place constructions on the map. These constructions could be natural, or unnatural. Outside of the player’s starting region (which is the only Grassland biome region), AI dwelling entities will use these constructions to obtain a home for their own.

Database Maker

From items to character traits, every inch of functioning data inside the game will be edited through what we aim to produce as our Database Makers. These will have a similar feel like a spreadsheet and will make seeing the huge amount of content much easier to handle.

Decision Maker

This will be our node-based flow tool. It is mainly designed for the character AI activities and will grant designers the ability to create work time and downtime activity flows for the settlement’s characters. During our brain-storms in front of the whiteboard, we figured it would be a very useful tool to use for our combat behaviors, world events, etc.

Heart of Battle

At this point, our maps will be filled with immovable map objects. Heart of Battle’s main purpose is to create characters and items. Not just placing them, but their mechanical counterparts too. Everything a character needs to live and breathe in a TFM world will be implemented in this update. They’ll have primary stats, secondary stats, traits, skills, indicators, activities, etc.

As the name suggests, this update will also cover our real-time combat system after the characters are implemented with their stats and skills. Let’s examine what we wish to accomplish and play by the end of May.

Characters

A character in TFM is a mobile unit that can move around the map and perform various functions. Since we start the game with our so-called “Adam and Eve”, any character from that point on will be born, raise and serve their settlement as best as they can (if they’re not filthy traitors of course!). Since we have five primary stats for our characters, numerics of these stats will be determined by their traits. Traits determine primary stats, primary stats determine secondary stats, secondary stats determine how effective a character is both in or out of combat.

Each character’s main progress is through their Experience indicator, and their need is determined by their current Energy. Each primary stat (Body, Mind, Heart, Soul, and Self) has its own Experience and Energy indicator. Energies are depleted by natural needs through traits and must be fulfilled by gathering downtime activities when they become idle after finishing up a work time activity. Energy indicators are designed to reduce their respective stats one by one over time, causing an imminent death to a character whenever one of his stats reaches 0. Experiences are filled by finishing up worktime activities, increasing their related stat each time they’re filled.

Their uniquely generated (or given by hand) names, ages, appearances, etc. are always subject to time and activities. More detail on each subject individually will be provided in future updates.

Activities

By using our Decision Makers, we’re able to create a gigantic amount of AI activities that a character can receive when they’re idle. Since the personal progression of an individual character is dependent on how the player designs his settlement, our characters will be limited to their traits, surroundings, their settlement’s constructions, chosen traditions, stat numbers, indicators, etc. to choose a proper activity for themselves.

By the power of individual activity weights and how they’re modified by every inch of data in the game, a character will smartly be able to create a list of activities to pick from. And then he’ll roll for an activity to start. The nature of this “weight” system grants a character the ability to pick more appropriate activities with their increased weight while allowing other ones with lesser chances to occur too. This system will provide a seamless settlement flow as your characters will always find logical activities to complete. If you look at the big picture as a player, it is your responsibility to choose your characters’ destiny by placing constructions, choosing traditions as you deem fit for your people.

Completing these activities will allow characters to increase their individual stat experience indicators, fulfill their energies, earning new traits and granting points to their settlements so that the player can spend these to create new opportunities for their growing settlements.

Parties

While all characters pick activities when they’re idle, some of them will be the chosen ones to go out and explore, fight and return items, other loot, and glory to their settlement. Characters specifically tailored to obtain class traits and become adventurers will be the only candidates to become party members.

A party is a group of characters with class traits that can be raised as a controllable unit by the player. Party members can be picked and kicked individually. Once a party is “raised”, the characters will stop trying to obtain activities and obey their player master, waiting for orders. At that point, the player may control any of his parties by ordering them with the classic RTS unit actions. They’ll also ignore their energies, so it’s your job to proceed and choose wisely what you want to achieve with your party within a certain amount of time. In the future, we also want to establish the design of resting mechanics, but let’s not get into that at this point.

Traits

Using our Database Makers, we’ll be able to implement character traits. Even being a “Human” is a trait, a racial one. So every piece of appearance and stat altering data for an individual character will be used as a “trait”.

Skills

With the same structure, we’ll be implementing skills for both combat and non-combat situations. Our characters inside raised parties will use these skills through player input and try to get out of difficult situations because they’ve been training hard for it!

Combat

This is probably one of the most iterated parts of our game. With a lot of brainstorming over the discovery phase, we finally decided to ditch our turn-based iterations and turn TFM’s combat into a classic real-time one. Since we had the ability to pause the game prior to this decision, it fitted perfectly like a cRPG combat. Not just how it flows, but the depth of characters’ skills and items will be very familiar too. So we know exactly what we want from the combat right now. Also, our postponed project “Battle Commanders” (also on Steam) helped us a lot with this while considering this decision, because we have experience in real-time combats.

To give a brief introduction a “combat” actually means; whenever a character is issued an attack action against another character, two associated parties enter into a combat state as soon as their attack radius intersects with each other. This transforms two parties' characters into individually controlled characters for their controller, unlike their traveling state where they moved together as a cohesive unit, not individually.

Until this state ends without player input, each character automatically chooses a target according to the hardcoded combat AI behavior and starts using his Auto-Attack skills against him. Whenever he wants, the player can issue movement and active skill commands to his controlled party members.

Bloodmoon

This is the part where the high-level scope of TFM is focused on. Combined with everything prior, we’ll focus on creating logical “entities” as our controllers. An entity is a symbolic thing with independent existence, with a group of assets (Points, Constructions, Characters, and Operations) controlled by a single player. This player can also be AI.

These are the things we expect to finish before PAX West, 2020. Dates have not officially been announced yet, but if this year’s event follows the tradition, it will take place over Labor Day weekend, which is September 4 to 7 this year. The most exciting part about this milestone is the fact that we’ll be able to play our very first gameplay demo there!

Points

Points are five collectible resources of an entity. A settlement or a dwelling's main point income source is its characters. Characters start and finish worktime activities (as we discussed before) and provide points to their entities. Then, the entity spends these points to invest in its settlement or dwelling's development through operations. There are five points in TFM: Prosperity, Industry, Influence, Unity & Amenity. Our approach to the “color wheel” helped us shape both our points and characters because each character stat is mainly related to one of these points, which helps determine a character’s ability to perform activities with such outcomes.

Operations

An operation in TFM is a process in which a number, quantity, expression, etc., is altered or manipulated according to game rules, such as those of addition, multiplication, and differentiation through a game panel. All operations are managed by entities to utilize their points for the purpose of providing minor and major progressions to their respective settlements and dwellings. These operation panels will be organized and designed uniquely with fluid user experiences in mind and each will have a specific purpose to organize a player’s settlement and its characters. A couple of examples would be; Path of the Warrior where the player trains characters to obtain class traits so that they can enter parties, Path of the Mother where the player causes female characters to become impregnated, and so on.

The interesting part about these operation panels is that whenever the character spends his points to give an order to their characters, they’ll still be using the activity system, but this time the activity will be forced to them by the player’s will. And their tailored nature will allow the player to develop each operation decision differently, with unlocked features through Traditions and Bragging rights (unlocks).

Traditions

These can be taken on through spending Unity points. Although the traditions system is based on a familiar tech tree structure, it does away with its standard progression in favor of a shuffled approach. This injects a semi-random element into unlocks, making it somewhat less predictable as well as more non-linear. Whenever the player collects enough points to unlock something new for the settlement, they are presented with a set of possibilities to choose from.

By deciding which traditional path to take, the player naturally transforms his operation panels and thus, his characters at the end of the cycle.

We’ll be focusing on what unique mechanics and content database we can bring to the table with this system thoroughly.

Bragging Rights

Mechanically works similar to Traditions, but as you can tell by the name, these are the things that your settlement brag about inventing. The player will be presented with multiple choices tailored with an intelligent weight system (every asset of your settlement matters for the change of these outcomes), chose one and get a hold of that choice. Each choice will be unique to an entity, and no other entity will be able to obtain what others are bragging about.

Paths

Paths allow the player to invest the points they have collected in individual characters. They contain several choices, each resulting in different bonuses for characters. Investing in paths may result in stronger characters, as well as the potential for population growth and building new constructions.

From training children to decide which construction activity you might want to provoke on your characters, these path panels will work differently than each other to bring a unique feeling to them. They’ll have socket-able UI elements so that the player can tailor however he/she likes a path decision before ordering it.

Side Operations

Other operations like saving the game, utilizing the party panels, how the game timeline works, etc. will also be implemented in this update.

Zenith

When the Bloodmoon is over, we’ll have a build-in our hands that’ll be the closest thing to our Early Access release. Polishing, balancing, bugs, core features, and mechanics will be done and tested here. Their final shapes will be given according to feedback. This feedbacks will mainly be from our community aside from internal team members and close friends. Because we don’t have the necessary budget for a proper in-house Q&A department, we surely must give our 120% on the matter.

We’ll have to work extra for our main scenario map of The First Men, which covers the story of the beginning of the human race and their struggle after arriving in the world as a foreign species with a divine purpose and background. (p.s; there will be a killer intro cinematic too!)

We hope to finalize these touches before November arrives, but the nature of game development may sometimes cause friction on your timeline. Let’s see what specific topics will be covered here in this update apart from all the matters I’ve mentioned above before Early Access knocks our door on Steam.

Kismet

Our living, breathing, dynamic worlds will need a set of decision-making features that will determine the beginning of local and global events throughout the map. These features will partly be connected with our timeline mechanics, characters, spawns-timers, etc., and everything else related will be covered in our Kismet AIs.

Reputation & Relations

While playing TFM, sooner or later, the player will have to meet other entities (both the dwellings of non-human races, and other human settlements) who will have reputation statuses every entity they meet with. These statuses and how we react to them in terms of game mechanics and roleplay will determine our trustworthy allies, undecided neutrals, and hated enemies.

All related panels, logics, and decisions will be covered and implemented here.

Entity Agendas

These entities will differ from each other according to their racial, territorial cultures and specific goals. They’ll have low-level, spontaneous goals and high-level, grand goals. Doesn’t matter if they’re a bunch of bandits in a cave, a dwarven mining company or a hill giant city. They will have desires, survival instincts (because every character on the map will also have energy and experience indicators), and dreams.

Done with our Decision Maker tools, well-constructed AI flows and diagrams will help us differentiate one Orc tribe from another or one human settlement from the other. Everything related to the decisions of the creatures of our maps will be covered and implemented here.

UI Overhaul

We’ll have our mock-ups for every piece of game panel implemented and tested at this point, but they’ll have to go through a revamp for a better user experience.

Ambiance Improvements

Soundtracks, sound effects, every piece of art, including icons, character appearances, weapons, how the skill effects look or ambient sounds, etc. will be polished here too.

You can always check our development progress by looking at our Trello development board. Please do not hesitate to write in Steam discussions or Discord server, we love comments and feedback a lot, it motivates us and helps us understand your expectations.

On behalf of the Gathering Tree team, I thank you for reading so far. Until the next update, stay safe!