Folk Tale Production Status: June 2014

by Simon Dean, Project Lead

A significant portion of the community let us know in the Spring Player Satisfaction Survey that you would like us to blog more often, but not at the expense of quality. Producing the monthly video blog requires a great deal of time, a new batch of features and content, and for those features to be in a working state that I can record. It's just not feasible given the team size to produce two video blogs a month without compromising quality.

What I'd like to try as a compromise is publishing a Production Status blog in between the monthly video blogs. The purpose is to share what we're working on right now, and what you can expect in the coming weeks and months. They won't be published via Steam Announcements as they lack the broader appeal of the video blogs, but we will be announcing them via Twitter if you want to follow @gamesfoundry.

Current Tasks Being Worked On
- Basic combat, including monster spawning and attack waves;
- Debugging city walls and pathfinding;
- Recast navmesh generation evaluation;
- Adding Hunting Lodge and Hunter profession as well as the Hunting Ground where deer are;
- Adding Bakery and Baker profession;
- Adding Tavern and Innkeeper profession;
- Adding Butchery and Butcher profession;
- Starting to tie together the economy chains;
- Creating handheld items for all the professions so that once basic combat is in, we can add loot, and players can equip characters with weapon and tool upgrades that show in the character's hands;
- Making resources important;
- Capping initial resource stock piles, raising cap by building additional Storehouses;
- The need for warmth causing villagers to need firewood, produced by the Woodcutter Hut;
- Animation blends for archers so their arms swing up/down when aiming a bow;
- Loot, inventory and research icons;
- Sound effects;
- Soundtrack: more grassland neutral tracks;

In The Near Future
- Adding Fisherman's Hut and Fisherman profession as well as the Shoal Of Fish where fishing happens;
- Herbalist profession ( works at the Apothecary making potions used during adventuring and to cure population of ailments );
- Apothecary building;
- Witch and Warlock profession ( enchanters who live at the Crooked Kettle );
- Crooked Kettle building;
- Bazaar/Marketplace human building;
- Allowing players to specify which crop is grown in a field: Wheat, Pumpkins ( Vegetables ), Herbs ( for Apothecary potions ), Cotton ( for clothes );
- Adding crop blight;
- The addition of Belief Points ( generated through prayer at the Monastery driven by the need for worship/faith ) which can be spent on Miracles such as Bountiful Harvest;

In The Distant Future

- Crafting;

- Enchanting;

- Dungeons;

- World Map;

- Heroes;

- Special Abilities;

- Sandbox save games;

Current Priorities And Goals Summary

At the time of writing the programming team are engaged in a series of short sprints aimed at reaching Patch 0.3. Sandbox Player is approaching a stable state, and the addition of basic combat will add another aspect to gameplay. Once combat is in and a few more buildings and professions added, we need to give resources a more important role, and at that point we should have a playable sandbox experience.

The message that we need to increase patch frequency came across loud and clear in the survey. To address that I've reassigned one of the artists from the downstream content team ( who worked mostly on RPG content ) to assist with the Human professions. We have a backlog of human buildings that are ready to ship, but are currently missing profession characters. The extra pair of hands will have an immediate impact and we should be able to include four new buildings and associated professions in the next patch.

As we strive for increased patch frequency, gameplay elements may creep into builds in a very early state, for example combat. In the current dev build we're able to select several monsters and actually control them in a similar manner to villagers, except that they will attack your villagers ( who fight back ). This enables the testing of combat mechanics and monster movement, and we're going to leave it enabled in Patch 0.2.6 so that you can tinker.

As we continue to expand the village and economy, gameplay duration is going to keep extending, and with the lesson learned from the Tutorial, we're going to add sandbox load/save in the 0.3.x release cycle, hopefully in time to prevent players going stir crazy.

Thanks once again to the survey, you told us that RPG gameplay is equally as important as city-building, and it won't be overlooked. However with a limited team size and a need to ship playable content now, I'm making city-building, economy and RTS elements the short-term priority. Once those aspects of gameplay reach a decent state, we can gradually shift development focus over to RPG.

And finally, once we refresh the website, we'll be publishing a product path so you can see what we're aiming to deliver in each patch over the coming months.

I hope this new mini-blog format goes some way to providing more information to those who expressed a desire for it. Please join the debate over in the Steam Forum on ways that we can improve the format.