March 7, 2020 by Polymorph Games on Dev News, Devlog

Devlog #12

Hey everyone, welcome to Devlog #12!

With the Winter update and bonus Anniversary update now out and running smoothly, you are probably wondering what is next for development. The next update will be a good chance for us to consolidate on the work we have already undertaken and with this in mind we are looking at many Quality of Life improvements and minor bug fixes. There will be more content to come, of course, and we will be bringing more news on the next update in the coming weeks.

So, on to the devlog! Let’s find out what the team has been working on for the last few weeks.

Update planning

Phil, our Creative Director, (and CEO) has been busy planning and designing the content for the next update as well as refactoring the event system, a long due task, to make it more user-friendly. He has also been working on ‘some boring admin stuff’.

Statues and new production lines

Loup-Gabriel has been working on new production lines, that center around quarries and new extractable resources. Those quarries will be a major part of the next content update. Stay tuned for more details soon!

You may have noticed the new statues in the recent anniversary update, these statues not only add aesthetics to your villages but also increase the desirability of an area. More statues are still to come and Loup-Gabriel has been at work on a whole selection of new statues covering the 3 different estates.

QoL improvements

As mentioned above, we are looking at QoL improvements and Christopher has already made great progress on improving and fixing many of the in-game notifications.

These improvements will, for example, allow the player to easily focus on and cycle through villagers that are lacking housing or cycle through workplaces that have no workable zone, more easily identifying workplaces that require the player’s attention.

The immigration notification has also been adjusted to pop-up when new villagers reach the village centre rather than when entering the map. The Global Happiness tooltip has also been improved to show every factor affecting happiness.

Chris has also been working on expanding the Bailiff’s functionality to give it more depth. This is still very much at concept stage and there will be more news on this in a future communication.

Animations

We are always looking to improve on the (not so) little details that bring your villages/cities to life. A big part of this immersion comes from the animations and Michaël has been busy on new animations for workplaces and more finer details.

The sawmill will see new hewing and saw animations. The Charcoal hut now has workplace animations for both shoveling and process monitoring with a 3rd animation in the works.

Monks will now take care of their bees and hives in the Apiaries.

He has also been working on those finer details such as animated cloaks for the envoys as well as animations for an upcoming feature which we have already hinted at in the Audinity Q&A feature recently.

Villager life cycle

Those of you that have checked out our updated Roadmap may have spotted the entry for Villager Lifecycle and Aging. Though still in its infancy (pun intended), Vincent has been working on both the older generation of villagers and has now moved on to the younger generation. With new facial aging and hairstyles, your villagers will become more diverse and varied. As mentioned this feature is still in the early stages of development and will be for a later update.

New UI

Work is continuing on a large project that will bring a fresh new look to Foundation. The new UI is coming along well and Ben has been working on improvements to the Hurricane engine to facilitate the creation of the new UI design, as well as allowing for quick styling changes and future improvements.

Claudine has also been working on preparing the new UI, testing new concepts, color variants and cleaning visual elements as well as other work on improving in-game textures and other concept art and feedback on new assets.

Modding improvements

Modders will be happy to hear that more modding improvements are coming. Maxime has been working almost exclusively on exposing more features and improving modding capabilities.

We have previously introduced the ability for modders to create custom components and now we are looking to expand upon this by allowing modders to create more custom features such as custom workplaces. In order to do this, Max has been working on creating custom modding classes as well as exposing more classes and features for modders.

Hurricane engine improvements

And finally our technical director, Léo, has been working under the hood, improving the engine. Improving performance as well as adding to the aesthetics of the game. Improvements to grass are underway and Léo has been experimenting to improve the near/far blending and handling of more grass diversity for an improved landscape.

– The Polymorph Games Team

December Update News!

Hey everyone!

We have some news on the next content update!

… but first we would like to take this opportunity to thank every single one of you!

We have recently surpassed 200,000 sales of Foundation and thanks to all of your support and feedback we are able to realize the game of our dreams, and hopefully yours too.

From the whole team… Thank you!

The December Update

As you can probably tell from the title we are planning to release the next update before the end of the year. We will bring you more news and more details on the update once we are closer to release but in the meantime here are some of the things that will be making it into the next content update:

Villagers will move house when too far from their workplace. The lord will also have the authority to force them to move.
Jobs will be directly linked with villager status where you as the Lord will have more control over status promotion.
Improved military system with stats, levels, and equipment.
New production chain with two new buildings; The Hop farm & the Brewery.

New buildings parts and function for the Wooden Keep.
New Character visuals including new job outfits.

New weather visuals.

New sounds including workplace animation SFX as well as UI SFX.
New modding capabilities: Custom components and behavior trees .

The changes to job roles and villager status will be major and due to this, we are planning to release a preview build in order to test and gather player feedback on the new feature. Keep an eye out for further announcements on the preview build release.

We have even more planned for the December Content update and we will bring you more information soon.

And finally…

We are excited to announce our attendance at MEGA & MIGS 2019 this coming weekend!

If you are in and around Montreal this weekend then you can check out more here.

We look forward to seeing you there!

-The Polymorph Games Team

October 30, 2019 by Polymorph Games on Devlog

Devlog #11

Hey everyone!

Welcome to Devlog #11, where I will be giving you some insight into what the team has been working on since the last update.

I don’t often do this but let’s kick off by talking about me! Well… not so much me but at least what I have been up to.

In the last update we introduced a way for players to create their own custom maps that can be uploaded to mod.io for everyone to play. With this in mind, I have been learning some basic modding and creating a custom map that is available now in-game. I have then gone on to use this map as a template for a custom map tutorial video which can be found on our YouTube channel.

Check it out if you fancy making your own map.

For any queries and help with map modding we have a very knowledgeable modding community over on our Discord server that will be more than happy to help.

For those that would prefer to wait for a map generator, it will come before the full release, in fact, over the last couple of weeks, Ben has started work on an early prototype for a procedural map generator.

Moving on to Vincent, who also hasn’t been mentioned in a recent devlog, but for good reason, as he has been hard at work on job outfits for villagers. This has been no small task with multiple job roles for both female and male villagers.

You can see a few examples below of the new outfits:

More recently Christopher has also been working with Vincent on villager outfits, though for Christopher he has been looking at the villagers themselves and allowing for the integration of all the new outfits as well as hair styling. Alongside this, he has been working on some performance optimizations for villagers which should hopefully see some fps improvements in the future.

I know this one will make you happy… one further thing that Christopher has started initial work on is the possibility to force villagers to move home!

Having done some great work on the new workplace animations in the last update, Michaël has also been working on the villager job outfits, in his case he has been looking at skinning the new outfits on the 3D villager models.

Needless to say, the villager outfits are coming together well.

Claudine has begun work on some visual research for new environment biomes, creating mock-ups and sample textures for visual reference. Here you can see a couple of mock-ups of how things might look:

She has also been looking at a ways to improve and polish some of the current in-game assets and textures, such as improvements to trees, water and ground textures.

Some time ago we teased the Brewery and now we have a Tavern but no beer. Never fear though, Loup-Gabriel has been working to complete the brewery as well as working on the hop farm.

Loup has also been working on a new production chain but there will more info on that in a future news update, however he has also been working on some new decorative items that will work with the new production chain, so I’ll leave that one to your imagination for now.

Maxime has been continuing work on improving performance for low-end systems, as well as general optimizations, when generating models, and improving LOD generation.

He has also been working on ways to provide pathing feedback to players when placing buildings and creating the dev tools required to configure this in our Hurricane engine.

Nicolas has, as always, been thoroughly testing improvements and gathering information from the community regarding any bugs and feedback.

As well as this he has been working with the engine programmers investigating possible performance optimizations, one of which was released in a hotfix patch last week to improve performance for larger cities.

Talking of large cities and performance, Phil has been looking at ways to improve villager needs efficiency. This, tied in with villagers moving home will see some major improvements to your overall village/city efficiency in future updates.

Finally Léo has been looking at many aspects of the Hurricane engine, working with and helping the team.

In no particular order he has been looking at

Improvements to our shader system
Improvements for our skinning system (new villager outfits)
Investigating RAM usage with an eye to improve memory allocation tracking
Undertaking performance analysis between updates
Prototyping terrain improvements that support more ground types and vegetation (Biomes)
Improving the dev tools including the in-house Hurricane editor. For example we now have a new Asset Preview allowing the team to easily explore game assets.

I hope you enjoyed the read! We have a lot of improvements coming and work is well underway for the next update but there is still much to do.

Until next time…
Cheers!
-Ash (Community Manager)

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