Update and Preview build News

Hey Everyone!

We are excited to announce that we will soon be bringing you a new update, that we have named, the Minerals and Craftmanship Update!

The update is nearly ready and the full release will come in a few weeks but in the meantime, those of you eager to take an early look will be able to test some of the new features, in an upcoming Preview build!

More news on the preview build and how to gain access will be coming in the next few days.

Please note: Though custom maps are still available, we are looking to gather focused information and feedback on the new content. Therefore, for testing purposes, the preview build is focused on the Valley map.

If you would like to help out and share your feedback with us, then firstly, thank you! All feedback is very important and useful to us and in the development of the game.

Please let us know what you think of the preview build via this feedback form.

Minerals and Craftmanship Update:
preview build 1.6.0

We are bringing a multitude of changes and improvements in this update and you can check out some of the highlights that will be playable in the Preview Build, below.

Discoverable resources

One of the biggest and most exciting new features coming with the update are discoverable resources that will need to be prospected to know what kind of mineral they contain. Once prospected, you will be able to build a quarry over the mineral source to extract it. Some of these resources will be common and found in multiple nodes however some will contain more rare minerals.

New buildings capabilities

Prior to this update, there were two building types: single buildings and monuments. In this update, they now all have the same capabilities. This means a single building could have parts added to extend its functionalities. The first single building to exploit this new feature is a new one: The Builder’s Workshop.

At last, builders now have their own workplace! This building will be extendable to add new artisan workshops with crafting capabilities, like the scultpure or stainedglass workshop.

Artisan workshops

Parts that need more detailed, artistic work, like stained glass and sculptures will need to be first crafted in artisan workshops from the extended Builder’s Workshop. These artisan workshops will take advantage of the new resources that will be available to you in the discoverable resource nodes and the workshops themselves will allow you to create all new unique parts and Masterpieces for your village.

Masterpieces

Masterpieces are outstanding pieces of art that need to be crafted by artisans and that will provide a lot of splendor. More details on this soon…

New production chains

The workshops are going to require processed materials that will form part of new production chains. One such discoverable resource you will be able to find is gold ore which will require smelting into gold bars via a Goldsmelter before being used in your artisan workshop

An improved role for the Bailiff: The Bailiff Mandates

The bailiff will be introduced earlier into the game than previously and, for a cost, will be able to accomplish mandates for his lord. Among other things, he will be able to prospect for minerals and study blueprints.

Path inside buildings

One feature we have wanted to push for a while is the capabilities for villagers to use doors that communicate with one another. As such, villagers are now able to path through buildings by entering a door and going out from another. For example, Monks will be able to path through enclosed Cloisters, or villagers will be able to access enclosed courtyards via an inner courtyard entrance/exit but only through buildings that they are allowed to based on certain rules.

Multiple gameplay and feedback improvements

The Minerals and Craftmanship Update is a good time to consolidate on the work so far in the game and as such you will find many Quality of Life improvements some of which you will be able to see in the preview build.

There is now a new notification panel that will make it easier to track quests and keep an eye on issues in your village.

As noted above there are new building capabilities. To keep things consistent, all buildings will be placed and built in similar building workflow fashion to monuments. i.e. Placing a building will require that you also choose to start construction. You can still use shift + click to place multiple buildings which will bypass the requirement to click “start construction”.

We have also introduced another new change to the way you create monuments. You will first need to place a building marker before placing any parts to a monument. This building marker can then be moved and in doing so will allow you to move your whole blueprint before final placement and construction.

Grass has seen improvements in this update with a greater variety to shades and depth giving a more realistic look to grasslands.

Other improvements include cleaning up placeholder text, {img1} as well as new sounds and new animations.

New modding features

The new update will bring some huge features for the modding community which will allow modders much more freedom to create new assets, behaviours and also make changes and extend vanilla components and functions.

The preview build will include the ability to create custom behaviour trees and nodes. This will enable modders to use both our existing nodes as well as define their own nodes when creating new behaviours for villagers.

Custom assets, as well as custom structures, will now be available for use by modders. This means that modders will no longer be confined to using our asset types and can now define their own. Complex data related to these assets and components can then be stored in custom structures.

All of these additions and changes will allow much more flexibility for modding. As an added bonus we will also be opening up our own core components to allow some engine and game structures to be extended. This will allow, for example, new bridge building functions or workplace building functions to be assigned to core components.

Can you imagine the potential horrors, such as an “Antenna farm” mod?!

You will be able to see all the new modding changes in the release notes and changelog here, on release of the preview build.

More to come

Although the preview build is already jam-packed full of new content and improvements we will continue to add more as we work toward the full update release.

In the meantime, stay tuned for more information on the Preview build release coming soon.

-The Polymorph Games Team

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

November 15, 2019 by Polymorph Games on Dev News, Update News

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.

https://youtu.be/qXFk0DNUNUA

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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