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Foundation

A New Era of Organic City-Building Simulation!

Upcoming Content Update News!

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.

New Monument: The Tavern

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.

New Production Chain

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
 
Assigning Monument Functions

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.

New Immigration Factors

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.

 
More Workstation Animations
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.

 
Coal hut workstation animation

Weather variation
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. 

Bridge Improvements
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.

 
 
A Horse of course!

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

And finally…

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.

Release schedule

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

 

Devlog #10

Hey everyone!

In the last Devlog some of the team, were packing their bags and heading off to Köln for gamescom 2019. The team are now back and working hard on the next update and we are 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.

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 we’ll catch you all soon with more news from the team.

The Whole Polymorph Games Team

 

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