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 us to catch you all up on what the team have been up to in the last few weeks.
Environment and ambience
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!
Vehicles concept
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.
Animations
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.
Character visuals
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.
Villager immigration improvements
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.
Assignable Building Functions
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.
The Great Hall
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.
Hurricane improvements
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.
Stay tuned for announcements as we will be bringing you more news during gamescom.
The Whole Polymorph Games Team