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

Hey everyone! Welcome to Devlog #08

When Crops Go Bad

As mentioned in the recent July Content Update News we will be introducing a new weather system. Bad weather is going to affect the yield of your crops. To start with this will be limited to wheat fields but will be expanded on in the future.

It would be easy to just have those crops disappear or just less production but we want to heighten immersion. With this in mind, Claudine our Senior Artist has been working on rotten crops. Nice!

Below you can see the contrast between a healthy crop and a rotting wheat field during bad weather.

Fish Schools

How on earth do those fishermen and woman find those fish that they bring back? It’s a good question and more importantly how do you, as a player, know the best place to position a fishing hut? This is something that Loup-Gabriel (FX Artist) has been recently working on. In the future you will be able to identify fishing spots by the schools of fish and plan your production around them.

Resource Analytics

The upcoming update will bring with it a number of balancing changes. To help with this, Christopher (Game Programmer) has been working on a Resource analytics tool which will allow us to track the overall cost and revenue of every resource in-game.

We have had a lot of feedback from the community and this tool will prove invaluable to help get the balance right and fine tune the game. 

Balancing

With the aid of Christopher’s new Resource Analytics tool, we will be able to balance production costs and trading values much more easily and efficiently. Phil (Creative Director) and Nicolas (QA Manager) have begun to work on the balancing of the estate progression costs as well as looking at balancing for the new weather system. 

Timeline Tool

Ben, our new Engine Programmer has been working on improving some internal processes with the aid of a timeline tool. This tool will allow the artists to easily transition and blend between animations/FX. Previously this would have required a Game Programmer to write any changes into the code. 

With this tool, there will be much less requirement for the Game Programmers involvement in the animation/FX process which will help to streamline workflow.

As an example, the new weather system will require a transition between sunny and rain effects. The timeline tool will allow a more automated process which can be changed on-the-fly to see the changes and effects of any animation or FX.

Military Animation

A future update will be looking at the military quest system and we are also looking at some more visual improvements for the soldiers. Michaël (Animator) has been working on some new soldier training animations.

Soldiers will not always be training though, you will also find them patrolling your cities

Improving Particle System Performance & Functionalities

To better support the new Weather System Léo (Technical Director) has been improving and optimizing the Hurricane particle system. 

The Weather system has required the addition of new particles, with these additions he has also been working on optimization to reduce the load on your PC from the particle system. These optimizations will help to offset the new additions so you can all get to see the gloomy ambiance when the bad weather hits.


There will be more news soon on the July Content Update ETA so keep an eye out for announcements.

The Whole Polymorph Games Team

Hey everyone! Welcome to Devlog #07!

What We Are Working On

With the introduction of the recent content update, we will next be focusing on improving the core experience. Here are a few of the things that we have been working on.

How Is The Weather Today?

Eagle-eyed players might have noticed weather effects in the Early Access trailer… These weren’t just for show and we are currently working on the introduction of the first weather system to Foundation. Of course, we like to tease a little, so you might be interested to know that weather won’t be purely aesthetic!

Attention!

We have previously mentioned that we are working on an updated mission system for the Kingdom Estate. We will be looking at this for a future update but we have started work on the concept art for soldier levels. 

Balancing

As we add more production chains through development we will need to constantly update balancing in the game. There is still much more balancing to do and it will need continuous tweaking during development. For this end, we are working on an internal tracking tool for the cost per resource, which will help us for future balancing of the game.

It’s All In The Detail

The level of detail in Foundation (call us biased if you like) is already quite incredible but we are striving to always increase the level of immersion. We are currently working to improve and increase this with more detailed and varied construction steps.

Bug Fixes and Patch

New updates do, of course, inevitably bring with them new bugs. The community have been feeding back to us any issues created by the last content update and we are currently in the process of preparing a new patch for release in the next few days. We will announce more details and changelog once the patch is ready for distribution.

Final Words

Part of the recent update introduced many new modding features, including the possibility for modders to create their own monuments. The modding community have risen to the occasion and have themselves been working hard on new mods since the update. Check out this creation from Paddy Fitzgerald using the new ‘Stone Gate Set’ mod by vjraymon

If you have created a mod for Foundation in a previous version please don’t forget to update your mod and change it’s status to ‘public’ for the newly released update.

We hope everyone is enjoying the new Wine update! Feedback has been very good and the community have been sharing their creations on Discord. These screenshots from Milinia and SLy particularly caught our eye!

Thanks for checking out this weeks’ devlog and we shall see you soon for more news on development.

The Whole Polymorph Games Team

Hi everyone and welcome to Devlog #06!

Let’s dive straight in to the news…

QoL Poll Results

As you may have seen, last week we submitted 10 community Quality of Life suggestions for you to vote on. The results came in and work is already under way to implement your chosen suggestions:

• Button to pause production in production buildings

A great suggestion and one that will make managing resources easier. To add to this suggestion paused buildings will have their maintenance cost reduced by half.

• Add ‘unemployed only’ filter to worker assignation drop down
• Villager Pane displays the Workplace/Home Distance

Managing your villagers work/home distances and optimising travel distances will be much improved with these suggestions. Great choices!

• Return resources for buildings that have building work cancelled

We have taken this suggestion and plan to expand upon it. When destroying buildings you will get 50% of the resources back that were used in the initial construction.
Additionally placing a building accidently will no longer be a drain on your gold reserves. Cancelling a construction that has not yet started will return the gold outlay for that building.

• Farms have separate fields defined

Another great suggestion which will allow you more control over the placement and segregation of your fields. We are also reworking and optimising the production cycle of fields and we will hopefully add this to the QoL update depending on testing.

Modding Preview

We continue to work on modding functionality. We are changing when mods are loaded so rather than being loaded as Foundation starts they will be loaded at the same time as a save game, additionally we have been working on more changes to allow mods to be loaded mid game as apposed to the current situation where once a game has started no more mods can be added.
There are also still a few optimisations being worked on to ensure mod dependencies are handled correctly as well as a few bugs that needed to be fixed.

If you would like to try your hand at modding you will need to use the Lua programming language to create any mods in Foundation. Documentation for the Modding Preview (1.2.0) can be found here.

You can also join in the modding chat on our Discord server.

Wine Production Chain

As you saw in Devlog #05 we have been working on some new farms and fields. The two crops that you saw in the last devlog were grapes and hops. Well done to those that guessed correctly!

Further work has been done on the wine production chain, including the Vineyard building which is currently being worked on

Here is a first look at the Winery! It’s soooo cute!!

Of course wine needs a suitable storage vessel. We are not talking wine bottles here, we are talking bigger scale storage! Below you can see work in progress on the Cooperage.

Thanks to everyone that got involved in the voting last week and if you have suggestions that you would like to share you can add them to our tracker here.

The Whole Polymorph Games Team