Wildflower is being worked on by the team that made Tenderfoot. It builds on Tenderfoot's combat systems and takes them in new directions, focusing on scale (some units many times the size of others), visibility and stealth, and emotional manipulation. Additionally we've gone from a 12x12 grid to a 64x64 one. It's gonna be wild and excellent and we think you'll love it! Wildflower situates these combat systems in a broader, story-based RPG that includes gardening, cooking, and foraging, but is highly player-directed (like Tenderfoot) and so lets players focus on what they find interesting. I expect we'll have a public demo / prologue (and maybe even early access) period so please do follow the project if you find it interesting! https://store.steampowered.com/app/1764340/Wildflower_From_the_Embers/

6953036 Fixed a bug where Sony controllers did not have a default keybind for "Action 2". If you play with a Sony controller please go to your keybind menu (in the Settings menu) and assign Square to "Action 2", or reset it to the default preset. This input is useful for leaving caretakers in towns and, most importantly, for focusing on hovered goblins in combat and viewing their skill tooltips.

Localization! Plus a variety of UI tweaks, some new music, quality of life for streamers, etc.

• Full localization for Simplified Chinese, Spanish (LATAM), Portuguese (BR), German, French, and Russian.
• Various tweaks to the UI and text styling.
• Added a 'Borderless Fullscreen' mode (just fullscreen but doesn't confine the cursor to the game) and made the game stay active when unfocused so streamers or other multi-monitor players can click around with less bother.
• Assorted bugfixes and minor optimizations.

Hi all! Just a quick announcement to say that Tenderfoot Tactics is now available in a handful of new languages. Thanks for taking a look! Enjoy! - Badru twitter.com/tenderfoot_tact facebook.com/TenderfootTactics instagram.com/icewatergames/ discord.gg/B82BDEv

Hi goblins! We're real excited to announce that, coming very soon, you'll be able to play Tenderfoot Tactics in any of the following languages:

• Simplified Chinese
• Spanish (Latin America)
• Portuguese (Brazil)
• German
• French
• Russian

Quick fix for a variety of small bugs.

• Worm 'Ram' and Polearm 'Charge' now cause knockback in the direction of caster movement, even if the charging unit ends up on the other side of the hit unit.
• Fixed a bug with Polearm 'Charge' that was preventing it from displaying tooltips dynamically added by equipment, e.g. the +knockback from a pearl.
• Fixed a bug with Polearm 'Charge' that was causing it to 'hit' the targeted unit even if the Polearm's charge would be blocked.
• Removed newlines from status effect descriptions. Multiple effects from one status are now separated by commas.
• Fixed a bug with Freezing Ray 2's damage not upgrading.
• Bewitch 2 and 3 can now be self-targeted and only hit enemies.

Quite a few notable changes in this still-smallish patch. Wave fights will be a bit less frustrating, as incoming wave direction is now telegraphed. Fog goblins will include a variety of playable classes now as you level up. Frost giants got a nerf. A handful of tweaks to old abilities, and some new upgrade options to abilities I thought were a bit underused on average.

• Beginning around the level you start seeing trolls, enemy goblins will now have a chance to be any playable breed you've unlocked. Goblins spawned from behemoths will still always be unevolved goblins. As you level up, you'll see advanced goblin breeds more and more often.
• Incoming waves will now telegraph their source direction using the same display as 'incoming fog enemies chasing you' (soft red lines).
• Newly deployed enemy waves are no longer purely random in their insertion into the turn order, will always make sure the player gets a couple turns mixed into their first few turns.
• Fae Tree waves are now slightly harder. Used to be 50% of the player party's normal difficulty level, raised to 60%.
• Waves in custom encounters other than Fae Trees are now slightly weaker. Used to be 100% of a normal party strength, reduced to 90%.
• Frost Giants had their challenge rating increaseed slightly (you'll get more experience from them and they'll show up in smaller groups on average).
• Added Shatter (Lich) and Immovable (Battlemage) as learnable abilities for Frost Giants.
• Fixed a bug causing Frost Giants to always have Breaker (it's still a learnable ability as they level up though).
• Party Menu music now only interrupts and mutes ambient world audio if you're in the fog.
• Healed some cursed objects that were vanishing when viewed from certain angles.
• Added a 'retries permitted' setting to the difficulty settings. This is disabled in 'iron' and 'bone' difficulty modes. You'll still be able to cheese retries by closing the game and rebooting it, but that's true on most ironman modes, so I think it's alright.
• Added a general warning about (/recommendation against) messing with the difficulty settings on your first playthrough.
• It will now rain less on average.
• When inspecting/focusing a goblin's abilities during combat, using gamepad, status effect tick counts should show (they hadn't been previously).
• The 'Burning' status effect now generates 2x the amount of heat it did previously, to increase the odds that it starts fires under affected goblins.
• Fixed a bug where taunted units would have their taunt target changed when someone applied a non-taunt status effect to them.
• Minor AI bugfixes.

• new: Anesthetize 2 (+25 healing upgrade)

• new: Scamper 2 (adds 480 ticks of regen to hit units)
• new: Clear 2 (removes status effects, +5 healing upgrade)
• Flourish got a +5 healing buff

• new: Skewer 3 (+10 dmg upgrade)
• new: Repulse 2 (+10 dmg upgrade)

• new: Blood Curse 2 (shape upgrade from point to cross)
• new: Freezing Ray 2 (+10 dmg upgrade)
• Blood Curse tick duration increased from 500 to 1000

• Tend 2/3 got a +5 healing buff

• 'Flash' base damage raised from 5 --> 10, but now applies 'Burning' to caster.

A lot has changed since launch! I think the game is much stronger because of early player feedback. Thanks so much to everyone who helped out!

Major Updates Roundup

• Keymap / rebinding menus
• An option to skip the intro and instead start in a random location, for people returning for a 'new game+' experience
• Difficulty settings with some funky challenge modes for people who want to spice up their new game+
• Significant improvements to the AI
• Improvements to enemy variety, especially in the mid-late game, with enemies now leveling up and learning new abilities
• Improvements to major mechanics (fire/burning)
• New abilities and ability shapes (long cone!)
• The ability to hide tutorials
• And a bunch of bug fixes, quality of life stuff, and broad gameplay tweaks

A Preview of What's to Come

• Incoming waves of additional enemies now telegraph their source direction while they're counting down turns-until-entry
• Newly deployed enemy waves get inserted into the turn order in a more fair, less purely-random method, to make sure players get a chance to react
• Further improvements to enemy variety: beginning around the level you start seeing trolls, fog goblins have a chance to be any playable breed you've unlocked

• Fixed a bug causing the (X) close button in the keymapping menu to not show up if you entered the keymapping menu from the pause menu.
• Scooched the settings menu slightly to center it better.
• Fixed a bug where you could click through the difficulty menu to the pause menu if you clicked in just the wrong place.
• Fixed a bug causing the skill tooltip display to remain up indefinitely if you paused while hovering a skill in combat deployment.
• Turn order shuffling at combat setup is now pseudo-random, guarantees the player's first goblin goes either first or second, attempts a somewhat more even distribution as the initial order.
• Added tooltips to the difficulty settings. (Only accessible with cursor currently, sorry gamepads!)
• Fixed a recently introduced bug making scrollwheel not work with memory/affinity selection.

AI should be dramatically less stupid, especially ranged AI. This might make the game harder across the board, but it will also make it less annoying as ranged AI wont turtle so often. Enemy classes will have some skill variety as you get higher level than them, and encounters will be more varied between hordes-of-low-level and fewer-high-level types.

• You can now click away / click nothing to hide the memory selection window in the train menu.
• Changed the way the game handles you reaching the plateau at a low level. Old behavior: would show you the single lowest level enemy team comp that spawns on the plateau (archers + embers). Now: always includes the first 20 or so plateau comps (so will have a chance to spawn trolls, faeries, imps, behemoths).
• As you grow higher level than enemy classes, you'll begin to see them learn new skills and level up. This already happened with enemy goblins, but now you'll see it happen with more classes, and you'll see higher level enemies rather than huge hoards of enemies more often, although the game will try to generate fights of either type based on random rolls. Added a significant amount of alternate abilities (taken from playable breeds) to various enemy classes so they become more complex and less samey as you get used to their standard builds.
• AI learned about damage over time, learned to like applying Marked to enemies, and that possibly deploying a Shadow is at least as good as 10 extra damage.
• Reduced Spellsword 'Nightmare' base damage from 60 to 50.
• Fix to one(1) bug causing turn order display portraits not to render correctly sometimes during deployment.
• AI now prefers being nearly in range of attacking you even if it can't quite get into range, and ranged AI now prefers staying as far away from you as possible while still remaining in range.
• Gave The Trickster an alternate version of Vortex with reduced dmg (40 --> 30) and increased range (5 --> 7)
• Fixed an AI bug causing it to very often not see standing still as a viable option.
• Fixed a bug causing the 'Retry' button that appears after you flee or lose a combat to result in you fleeing home anyway.
• Fixed a bug causing the title screen to frame the camera in the wrong place often when you quit to title after playing some.
• Added 'NOT RECOMMENDED' warnings to some of the more experimental difficulty settings.
• Fixed a bug with the 'max team size' difficulty slider that was causing it to skip '2' as an option.
• Potentially-significant performance improvements game-wide.
• Fixed some visual bugs where the screen would crossfade to/from 'black' twice when loading directly into a combat.

Look for the difficulty settings menu in the pause menu after loading a save file. I don't recommend messing with them much unless you're looking to change the gameplay up to make a second playthrough fresh. Maybe if the base game is a little too hard or easy, try adjusting the 'difficulty modifier' slider slightly. Also, if tutorials are annoying you, there's now a tickbox to disable them in the tutorials section of the pause menu.

• Fixed a bug causing the overhead healthbar dmg preview to often be wrong when a goblin had Lofty.
• Tweak to floating dmg/heal numbers in combat. Will no longer show overhealing, but will still show overkill dmg because it feels good.
• Caretakers will now be counted towards the Master Breeder achievement.
• Fixed a bug causing start-of-game herb placements to sometimes be inside buildings or in other unreachable places. Should retroactively destroy any herbs that spawned inside of buildings in your game on load.
• Fixed a bug forcing joystick controls during combat deployment.
• Added a sniffing-distance pointer to the first map by your start spot so new players are more likely not to miss it.
• If you've [spoiler]visited Rutabaga or claimed the castle[/spoiler] on a save game on your machine, when starting a new game you'll have the option to skip the intro scene. If you do skip the intro, you'll start in a random location.
• Fixed a bug causing speech bubbles or narrator scene text to overlap the pause menu.
• Cinematics will now pause when you pause.
• Difficulty settings menu now available in pause screen.
• if you have no goblins remaining (only possible with permadeath enabled currently) you are now free to fly forever as a bird. if you land near a fog goblin you should have an interaction prompt that will let you claim them. (Note: not sure how recoverable a game is at this point since playing as a solo goblin is maybe really hard.)
• There is now a tickbox in the tutorials menu that you can use to disable (or re-enable) tutorial pop-ups. This is a system-wide setting and not per-savegame. Tutorials will be automatically disabled when you start a new game and choose to skip the intro.
• Difficulty settings now automatically pop up when you start a new game (if you've [spoiler]reached the castle or Rutabaga[/spoiler] and so have access to intro-skipping).

Biggest thing is the key mapping menu has finally made it in. (Look for it in the settings menu.) Also important is that fire, instead of dealing 1 damage directly every tick, now applies a short term debuff 'burning' which deals 1 damage per two ticks but takes time to expire and can be refreshed by new fire. Burning goblins can also spread fire if they walk into dry grass.

• Keymap menu available within the Settings menu.
• Previous/next map buttons are now by default assigned to the shoulder buttons on gamepad (rather than dpad L/R).
• Fire now applies a 'Burning' damage-over-time debuff rather than dealing damage directly.
• Pit Fiend 'Marked' will forcibly trigger the 'Burning' debuff on hit even if the afflicted goblin is in non-burnable terrain. (Used to add heat to the simulation, but the ground would often not catch fire so it felt ineffective.)
• Added a 'no mouse' keyboard input scheme (not ideal as is but it's a start). Using 'move' buttons in some menus or 'rotate' buttons in the overworld (i.e. things that you would otherwise use your mouse for) will cause the game to switch to joystick-like controls for menu navigation even when not using a joystick.
• 'Regen' now lasts 720 ticks (up from 480).
• Bog body attack now applies poison.
• Bog body base health increased from 25 --> 30.
• Possible fix to the headbanging bug.
• Fixed a bug causing Spellswords to revert to their feral bodies on death.
• Fixed a bug causing bosses to explode on death.
• Various 'press x' type displays will now attempt to auto-update and display whatever your current keybind is for that button.
• Tweaks to behavior of combat radial action menu that allows left stick to be used the way dpad is used to navigate (i.e. tapping left/right to move through actions if you mis-select with your first radial direction).
• Fixed a bug that was causing feral teams to occasionally be only 2 goblins even at mid or high levels.

Bugs bugs bugs, plus some love for ranged cone attacks.

• Hopefully final fix to that incessant resolution reversion bug.
• Fix (possibly only partial) to a bug that allowed you to access two memories at once.
• Improvements to consistency in the code for combat turn order UI portraits. may fix some bugs and slightly improve performance.
• Added up/down arrow keys to Bird's Eye tutorial.
• Hopeful fix to the bug causing combat setup to get confused if you start an interior encounter right as a group of fog goblins attacks you.
• Added support for +range trinkets interacting with cone shape spells like Dragonbreath, plus some VFX work to make it look right.

Just bugs and QoL.

• The load system will now gracefully handle situations where player data corrupted such that your save location has NaNs in it. If this happens to you, you'll find loading your save that you're back at your most recent home (or if your home's location was corrupted as well, at a randomly chosen home).
• Fixed a couple bugs with inventory scrolling that were only showing when there was a single extra row needed for display.
• Fixed a bug causing the 'consume fae weed' dialogue to not autoselect properly on gamepad.
• Fixed a bug causing the cancel button (B/Circle on gamepad) to close the party menu entirely when you really just wanted it to deny the 'consume fae weed' confirmation dialogue.
• Scooched the 'X' close button in the settings menu so it's easier to select without turning the volume up.
• Added a confirmation dialogue for when you try to create a new game in a used save slot, so its not so easy to accidentally overwrite your data.
• You should now be able to fulfil the PILGRIM achievement by beating the game, if you skip the quest segment that normally fulfils that achievement.
• Fixed a bug causing graphics settings to revert to CRUNCHY 180p if you saved and reloaded with CRUNCHY 1080p.

First off, thank you so much for playing!! It's been SUCH a great few days since release. Reviews are still 100% positive (????!!!), press reception so far has been overwhelming (did you hear the Waypoint Radio snippet? So good!) and sales have been good enough that I'm confident about continuing to support this game. Thank you all so much for supporting us in this! It's been a long long (6 year) road to get here, and we're just feeling so proud of having pulled it off. Okay so what I actually want to talk about in this update though, is where we're headed with our post-release support plans for Tenderfoot. I'm breaking this into a couple sections, and mostly I don't want to make any promises just yet! Making this game has turned me into a chaotic goblin creature and I simply cannot be expected to plan that far in the future. But here's where our heads are at:

CONTINUAL:

• bugfixes, quality of life, and settings needs
• balance tweaks to playable breeds and enemy types

SOONISH:

• keybind menu
• new game+ challenge modes

LONGER TERM HOPES AND DREAMS:

• more variety in enemy types, especially in endgame play
• more variety in starter goblin stats: different goblins have unique traits and different skill options available in their default breed
• (maybe) one or two more advanced hidden playable breeds
• resting places / small homes update with interior battlefield shape variety, distinct architecture, residents when safe
• better synchronization between overworld and combat, especially with foliage placement, so you can 'line up' fights the way you want them by running to a good spot in the overworld
• fishing and/or other chill minigames

Significant changes (good ones!) to Battlemage and Lich. Also, continued bugfixes and quality of life stuff. BATTLEMAGE:

• all ranks of Surge now have knockback 1
• Surge 1 damage buffed from 30 --> 35
• Surge 2 damage buffed from 45 --> 50
• Surge 3 damage reduced from 60 --> 40, + reduced to match Surge 2, but now has LONG CONE shape
• Thirst 1 shape changed from CONE to FIXED LENGTH (2) LINE
• Thirst 2 damage nerfed from 35 to 25
• Thirst 3 damage nerfed from 45 to 25, but now has SQUARE shape
• new ability Stalagmite 2: increases range from 1 --> 2 over base spell
• new ability Stalagmite 3: changes shape from CROSS to SQUARE
• Immovable is now available as an affinity option for earth affinity breeds

• Dragonbreath 3 damage reduced from 60 to 40 but now has LONG CONE shape
• new ability Leach 2: reduces damage from 40 to 30 vs base spell but changes shape from NONE to CROSS
• new ability Leach 3: increases range from 2 to 3
• new ability Nimble 2: upgrades +move from +1 to +2

• fix to a bug that mightve caused flickering or misplaced pointers
• fixed a bug causing the 'goblins rescued' ui to not autohide when entering the party menu or a new combat
• fixed a bug causing 'crater' to not hit the caster
• status effects in the overhead display will now autohide while in combat completion so they dont obscure exp numbers
• fixed a bug causing the loot display to not show the 8th item. additionally loot will now be sorted by quality/tier so that when there are too many items to display in the current UI, which only has 8 slots, the least interesting items will be the ones hidden.
• added (experimental) support for DX12 as a fallback for cards that don't support DX11 for whatever reason (should have no effect on you unless you're having trouble launching the game)
• fixed a bug causing spirits to sometimes spawn on top of buildings
• fixed a bug where if you started a combat in the middle of a big collider (like if you managed to worm your way on top of a building or something), it would essentially break your save. If you had a save file stuck in this broken-combat-setup state, loading it now will send you home. In general starting combats in these impossible locations will send you home in the future.
• added a note 'hits entire battlefield' to the tooltips for relevant abilities
• fixed a rounding error causing the scrollbar in memory selection to not show up until you had one row + 1 extra memory to display.
• you now get pointers to the nurseries (when nearby) if you skip the memory quest and go straight to the castle

Continued bugfixes and quality of life stuff in response to early feedback.

• Caretakers will no longer always be right where you left them when you return to town. (fix for folks who got their caretakers stuck on rooftops etc)
• Nerfed the healing granted by the +regen armlet item so it's 1 per 8 ticks, matching the healing and tickrate on regen skills
• Fixed a bug with the way non-stacking status effects are refreshed that was causing passive effects to be overriden by timed effects.
• Fixed a bug that was causing caretaker pointers to get mixed up and point to the wrong location
• Fixed a bug that was causing your goblins to stop following you sometimes after you drag-drop rearranged them in party menus
• Hopeful fix to the bug causing your jump button to sometimes stop working (I believe this was happening after you won a battle and then dismissed the 'rescued townies ui' by entering the party menu, rather than with the dialogue buttons)
• The 'deep water' X graphic is now cleaner (wont distort to match the surface of the water so much) and also more visible in a wider variety of regions (now renders with a gradient of ui colors so it should show better against different water colors)
• Fixed a bug where when you drag-drop swapped your party members in the train menu, the skill chains wouldn't always update and would sometimes show the wrong party member's skills
• Minor tweak to the location of one of the Xs marked on Hork and Noggin's maps, so it's hopefully easier to find the site it refers to
• Fixed a bug with spellsword bedlam/nightmare where they weren't breaking destructible objects, despite saying they would in their tooltips
• Pointers will now update while you fly around in bird mode so you can more easily scope out hidden locations

Mostly small quality-of-life requests from new players. Won't change your experience too much.

• updated some text (side story dialogue stuff)
• when you unlock a new class, the randomized starting ability will now pick exclusively from non-passives
• new secondary keybind for bird (and for zoom in combat): arrow key up/down
• check the settings menu for a new 'y axis flip' setting
• tutorials will no longer auto-hide after viewing
• the map tutorial will now wait for you to close your first map before auto-showing
• audio will continue when the window loses focus now
• while fullscreen (or while holding right click to rotate while windowed) the game will now lock your cursor to stay within its window

Just cleaning up the things that were bothering me while I streamed! Hello new players!

• Fixed a bug where the camera would pop when moving over some objects (ice, stalagmites) in combat.
• Fixed a bug causing water weirdness during simulation in interiors on edges.

Good morning!! It's time for a dev stream!! I'm planning on starting a new game and playing from the beginning. I'll try to be attentive to chat and answer questions if you have them. Thanks for sticking with us through development! We're so proud of this game, and we hope you have a great time with it. - Badru

Hi everyone, Zoe here! Badru is a little busy putting some finishing touches on Tenderfoot so I thought Id update you on how things are going and tell you how excited we are for release this week! On release well be setting you up a sweet 10% off Tenderfoot, so be sure to get it while its on sale! Like I said, Badru has been glued to his desk trying to complete the miles and miles long task list, sending harried emails, trying to fix water flowing uphill (why), and various other things that I dont even want to know about. If you havent already, wishlist Tenderfoot Tactics so you can be the first to play it on Wednesday. Tell your mom, tell your cousins, tell your boss over Zoom! If you wanna hang out with the team, join us for a virtual release party around 6pm PST where well be streaming, chatting, and telling each other what were having for dinner. Check for a link in our socials. Again, were extremely excited for release and I will be very pumped to see all the nice things you have to say in your reviews ;) Well see you on Wednesday! https://store.steampowered.com/app/1061610/Tenderfoot_Tactics/ twitter.com/tenderfoot_tact facebook.com/TenderfootTactics instagram.com/icewatergames/ discord.gg/B82BDEv (Badru poking my head in at the end here to say that water was only flowing uphill for like an hour between patches!! Also! I've been playing a lot and the game is great and I'm really hyped for you to play it!)

Join Isa as he plays the new prologue! Rescheduled from 10/7 --> Sunday 10/11 at 10 am PDT. Steam servers were having some issues. Wish us luck! Also, of course, wishlist our game! https://store.steampowered.com/app/1061610/Tenderfoot_Tactics/ twitter.com/tenderfoot_tact facebook.com/TenderfootTactics instagram.com/icewatergames/ discord.gg/B82BDEv

It's fall in the archipelago and the fog has come calling. Experience a single endless combat with some early to mid-tier goblin mages from Tenderfoot Tactics.
Tenderfoot Tactics: The Fall will be playable during the Autumn Steam Game Festival, starting October 7th. This demo showcases the terrain manipulation and dynamic natural systems that make Tenderfoot so unique. Since it skips past the first section of the game to show more advanced breeds, expect it to be a little overwhelming. Tactics fans, don't miss this one. Fight as long as you want. The enemy only grows stronger. Tenderfoot Tactics is coming out October 21st. Wishlist and follow! https://store.steampowered.com/app/1061610/Tenderfoot_Tactics/ twitter.com/tenderfoot_tact facebook.com/TenderfootTactics instagram.com/icewatergames/ discord.gg/B82BDEv

A new prologue is on the horizon! Prepare yourselves! Join us for a dev stream just TWO WEEKS from our release day! 5-6pm PST on Wednesday October 7th. Be there! Also, wishlist our game. https://store.steampowered.com/app/1061610/Tenderfoot_Tactics/ twitter.com/tenderfoot_tact facebook.com/TenderfootTactics instagram.com/icewatergames/ discord.gg/B82BDEv

Hi! This week I thought I'd talk a little about the overworld exploration half of Tenderfoot. Here's an unnarrated, unedited gameplay video showing a good little snippet of it: [previewyoutube=ZtKo0XljaoA;full][/previewyoutube] A rapidfire overview of some of the overworld systems, in the order they come up in the video:

The Boat

Maps

The Bird

Impulse Markers

Herbs

Crouch Sliding

Bird Nests

Towns

Resting Places

The Fog

A Brief Development Update

• added 10 new 'dungeons' where you'll be able to unlock the most powerful breeds
• added 2 new enemy types, wind sylphs and shadowmancers
• a lot of new spell vfx
• the OST is done and we're hyped to start showing some previews on social media! I also did a no-mic dev stream over the OST the other day if you want to check out the VOD: twitch.tv/badru (I stream dev every thursday at 4pm pacific)
• a lot of balance changes
• a lot of bug fixing
• a lot of optimization
• some really exciting new abilities for even the early breeds
• more extensive 'multi-classing': mage breeds can now unlock an 'affinity' slot that will let them remember a spell from another breed if it falls within their current breed's affinities (e.g. a lavamancer has an affinity for fire and earth spells)
• some new special abilities on artefacts

Meet the Team

Badru: code, art, writing, design

Michael Bell: sound and music

Isa Hutchinson: writing and design

Taylor Thomas: ux design

Zoe Vartanian: graphic design, voice

Madison Pathe: video editor

Player Two PR

A Brief Development Update

Trinkets and Other Things

Big hype!! New trailer on the store page with a bunch of previously not seen stuff in it! Tenderfoot Tactics is coming out on Steam on October 21st! - Badru https://store.steampowered.com/app/1061610/Tenderfoot_Tactics/

Hi Steam! Been a minute. We've just announced that we're going to be showing something new and big in GamesRadar's Future Games Show this Friday () so you should probably be excited about that!! Inevitably we'll update you over here too, but it might be fun to watch it live. Also, enjoy this freshly minted gameplay deep dive, in which Isa plays an early game combat, talking through some of the different basic systems in the game and how they impact strategy. We hope to do more videos of this kind, so let us know what you like about it, and what you'd like to know more about! [previewyoutube=HyY2YETVDsc;full][/previewyoutube] And finally, we've also recently announced that we're now running a private beta on the Ice Water Games discord. We'll be letting just a few people in per week from now until release. If you'd like to help out, head over to the discord, assign yourself the tenderfoot role, and look in the pins of the #dev chat to find our volunteer-soliciting post. https://discord.gg/vGZtZW3 Okay that's all for now! The game's getting *real* good. Can't wait to show you more. - Badru

Come chill with us while we play through our demo and answer questions! Isa (Systems Design, Writing) will be playing, and Badru (Code, Art, Writing, Design, Project Direction) will be hanging out on voice chat. Other team members may or may not attend. A mystery!!! Ok see you soon! - Badru

Festival of the Spirit is a short (maybe a couple hours) demo of some of Tenderfoot's core systems, themed as a short prequel story that takes place long before the events of the main game.

Featuring:

• Our novel grid-based combat system, inspired by Final Fantasy Tactics
• Songs that grow plants, fire arrows, and other nature-manipulating abilities
• Preview of Tenderfoot Tactics' town system, including a town hoard and dyers
• A small island of the archipelago, covered with herbs and berries to pick

Join Isa and Badru for a livestream on 6/16 at 4pm PDT! We'll be streaming straight to the game's Steam page, but feel free to join us on Discord to discuss before and after the event!

It's the yearly Festival of the Spirit and this time, the grand prize is yours, you just know it! A small prequel story to Tenderfoot Tactics, an open world tactics RPG. [previewyoutube=QW7FQIIA1sE;full][/previewyoutube] Festival of the Spirit is a short (maybe a couple hours) demo of some of Tenderfoot's core systems, themed as a short prequel story that takes place long before the events of the main game.

Featuring:

• Our novel grid-based combat system, inspired by Final Fantasy Tactics
• Songs that grow plants, fire arrows, and other nature-manipulating abilities
• Preview of Tenderfoot Tactics' town system, including a town hoard and dyers
• A small island of the archipelago, covered with herbs and berries to pick

Hello!! We've just announced today that we'll be self-publishing Tenderfoot Tactics through Ice Water Games. This might not seem like a big deal, idk. It's a big deal for us though! Ice Water Games is a label that most of the Tenderfoot team has been a part of since it was first founded to publish Eidolon. It's a collectively owned and democratically run project, and publishing through it rather than signing with someone else means betting on ourselves and investing in a communally owned resource. IWG's history has been artier and less dorky than Tenderfoot, and by doing this I hope we're both saying: Tenderfoot is arty, actually, in the ways that matter and also, arts outlets should be treating 'lowbrow' fantastical genre work as serious and worth playing. Probably more exciting, our Steam page has all new screenshots and a fresh gameplay recording with the new UI. Check it out! https://store.steampowered.com/app/1061610/Tenderfoot_Tactics/

https://store.steampowered.com/app/969540/Pattern/

In the prologue, there's some difficult memory game required to keep straight which of your goblins is which. You can tell who's what evolution obviously, but then how to remember which of your scouts is a strangler vs a grenadier vs a singer? Obviously real important, just for basic gameplay purposes! I also missed a feeling from early on in development, of playing dress-up with your little dolls. Back then, in the elden days of 2018, you used to be able to put different clothes on your little mans (not yet canonically little gobs), and there's something thematically really appropriate with that feeling. (If you're one of those people that sees early dev screenshots and gets too many ideas DON'T look below!! This image is from mid 2018!!)
Here's a quote from early design documents about your relationship as a player/spirit to your gobilns: Goblins are your soft, strange body. You think of them as a toy you can play with, and they are in some ways beneath you and your level of understanding the world, but simple and chaotic things have a sort of intelligence of their own. Wild goblins might wear whatever they like, but claimed goblins wear just what you want them to. The clothing is an expression of dominance over them. We cut the dress-up functionality in order to instead have clear and descriptive silhouettes, which makes gameplay significantly more readable, and lets us do more interesting things with body shapes (complex body shapes * dress up with 3D meshes = a big mess). There's also a sense in which this highly descriptive fixed-look direction is appropriate for our narrative goals. Here's the end of that above snippet, from our current production document: The clothing is an expression of dominance over them, and its important that the clothing simplifies them to functional archetypes. For the game - claimed goblins should have clear outfits with clear origins that exemplify the functionality of the evolution to the spirit.
A wizard is a tool that serves a purpose, and as both the maker and user of that tool it makes sense you would shape it in a way descriptive of that purpose. But still, it was kind of a regret to not get to try on different hats and skirts and swords and such. So when we talked about customizing your unit's look with color at least, it felt worth doing the work to make that viable.
In the prologue, there's a 'rename' menu already. We've now expanded that to a broader 'groom' menu and added a variety of skin/fur colors to swap between freely. Goblins start with a random skin color but that can be reassigned. It makes it quite intuitive to remember - Pascal is my teal scout, the singer, my red scout Willow is the strangler, etc. In addition, the herbs I've talked about before a bit (you can collect fae weed to forget skills) - well, when those plants grow in safe areas outside of the fog, they can become a variety of different herbs, fungi, and other foliage, depending on the region of the archipelago they grow in. Some of the plants in the game now: blueberry, juniper, madder root, dyer's mazegill, mint, horseradish root... there are about 20 of these so far. Many of them have properties that would be useful in natural dyeing. And while that's not the only way you can use them - they're also equipable, and some NPGs (non-player goblins) will trade you for them - it's certainly the most glamorous thing to do with a plant.
One of the features of goblin towns that makes them worth going out of your way to visit is their dyers. Dyeing is a complex process that benefits from skill and the proper setup, not something to be done willy-nilly on the road. But bring dyers some pigmentation and some binding mordant and they'll happily help you out. Some towns may even have some regional pigmentation or mordants in their town hoard, if they like you enough to let you use some, and some dyers may specialize in certain colors as a result of local fashion.
On the development end, dying was really fun to delve into. My background, before game programming, is in painting, with a special focus and interest in color. The granular details of color mixing with physical pigments is something you never really have to understand when working digitally. I'm going to explain it badly, but still probably more accurately than your high school art teacher did. WARNING: Badly over-explaining light and pigment interactions for the rest of this post. Materials take in light, let it bounce around within them, absorb some parts of the color spectrum better than others, and then the light bounces back out of them and into your eye, and the remaining light, having changed in weight of spectrum, is assembled in the viewer to become a specific color. Shine a white light (a light with a high amount of a broad spectrum of colors represented equally appears white) on a red material and it'll absorb much of the non-red light, and reflect the remaining (red) light back into your eye. Your eye and brain together interpret the light and understand the color as red. Imagine pigment like a liquid filled with little flecks of different colors. A red-fleck-filled pigment will absorb non-red parts of the light spectrum and reflect red parts. Mix that with a blue-fleck-filled pigment, and what you have isn't purple flecks, but actually a liquid with both blue and red flecks. The blue absorbs some non-blue light, and the red absorbs some non-red light, and the light that escapes, which has some weight in the blue part of the spectrum and some in the red, is understood by us as purple. If it was the case that the blue flecks actually absorbed _all_ non-blue light, and the red flecks absorbed all non-red light, you can imagine that no light at all would remain to escape, and the object would appear black. But that's obviously not our experience! And the reason why is that these pigments aren't pure in their absorption, but are instead best understood as having a sort of 'reflectance curve' - maybe this blue pigment reflects only 15% of orange-yellow light, absorbing the other 85%, but reflects more like 50% of red light.
One way to simulate the mix of two pigments to rough out these reflectance curves for each pigment and then average them. The result is a good approximation of what a mixed pigment's reflectance curve would be, which then, when mixed with whatever light you're shining into the pigment, can be used to decode a local color: the thing we actually need to represent the object digitally. In digital space, we just have red, green, and blue lights and we mix them to get a final color. The saved color has no information built in about how, were it real, its reflectance curve would function against light. So I really hoped, at first, that I could fudge this. That I could somehow average colors hues and saturations and in so doing get an okay rough estimate. But it just doesn't work out that way. Everything I tried would end up with bizarre resultant hues that were just intuitively, obviously wrong, until I had such a dumb quilt of 'sorta' approximations that it just made no sense to continue that way. My current implementation is still a hack, but it mimics reality enough to have satisfying results. I have hand-authored reflectance curves for imaginary pure red, green, and blue pigments. When I add a dye to a mixture, I build an approximate reflectance curve for it by averaging these R, G, and B reflectance curves in the amounts indicated by that dye's RGB color. I then average these curves for all the dyes present (weighted per dye, as some natural dyes are more persistent than others, and also by amount added, as you can add say 7 blueberries and 1 acorn, for a different color than 3 blueberries and 6 acorns). Then I sample that averaged reflectance curve at a bunch of points along the light spectrum, essentially simulating shining a white light into it, summing up and averaging out those samples to get a final local color. The results feel naturalistic and a bit chaotic, which is perfect for a gameplay simulation of natural dye mixing as performed by goblins. I'm quite happy with how special it feels to mix a unique color for a particular gob.
Okay well that's enough of that. Sorry for letting myself get into it so far, haha. Next time I think I'll talk more about towns and the reputation system? We'll see. And soon enough, look for us to announce a release window, and... some other stuff. Ok bye! Tell all your friends to wishlist our game! Thanks! https://store.steampowered.com/app/1061610/Tenderfoot_Tactics/

In the Foreverlands prologue, experience works like this: at the end of a battle, if you won, the game calculates how difficult that battle was for you, by comparing your 'total party level' with the fight's 'challenge rating.' It then takes whatever experience value that fight was worth, and grants it in full to each of the goblins who were still conscious at the end of the fight. The biggest piece of feedback we got about this was that it felt overly punishing to fragile breeds, like Spellsword, who are more likely to die before the end of a fight. Actually, Spellsword is an especially good example, because that breed is very powerful when used as a sort of bomb - using Breaker to jump behind enemy lines and then self-immolating with Nightmare. But doing so gives it no experience whatsoever. This system encourages really defensive play, which personally I love the more high risk, high reward style of play, and I want it to be viable. As I've been working on the overworld and getting a sense of the broader design for Tenderfoot, I've been thinking a lot about pacing, and this is another issue with the Foreverlands system. For skillful players who play defensively, the above described system results in large numbers of your units levelling up completely in sync with each other. So after one fight you'll have no new skill points to play with, and then after another you'll suddenly have 4 level-ups to slowly shuffle through menus and attribute. It sucks! The Foreverlands has an accelerated levelling system, too, and in the main game, where levels are further between, having all of your units synced up in exp means long periods of play where there's no change in your playstyle. It's alright, honestly, but it's obviously not ideal! My go-to for solving design problems, stealing solutions from FFT, was a non-option this time, unfortunately. FFT's experience system, which grants exp per action successfully taken, encourages incredibly boring cheesing, spamming haste, punching yourself to heal yourself next round, etc. We talked through quite a few other games' implementations, trying to find something that felt rock solid. My favorite discovery from these conversations was brought up by an old friend and collaborator (worked with us on Eidolon), Jacob Leach, who explained Chrono Cross's experience system. That game essentially does away with grinding entirely, instead granting level ups after boss fights. So at any point in the game, you're exactly the level they designed the content for. This seems so smart and cool and I wonder why more games don't try it. Tying narrative moments to system progression. However, that's not the direction we're heading with Tenderfoot. I like the sloppy openness that we get from having grindable fog like we do. The whole map is designed around giving paths for players who prefer to grind easy fights _and_ paths for players who prefer to rush the hard fights early. I don't want to ditch that design ethos. So, long story aside, sorry, here's where we've ended up.
When you knock out a fog-goblin in a battle, their bones clatter to the ground, and left behind is a lingering cloud of spirit. That cloud lives on that grid space until you move a friendly unit on or through it, at which point the cloud's held experience (calculated based on the killed unit's challenge rating) is immediately granted to that unit. Spirit clouds also heal a small amount, and if the unit levels up in combat from the experience, they're healed to full. Any leftover experience clouds at the end of a battle are distributed among living goblins, with goblins nearer the clouds getting proportionally more of the experience. I LOVE the way this plays out. Players have a lot of control over which of their units gets experience when, but there are a ton of complicating factors. The units closest to danger, most unlikely to get experience at the end of a battle (due to having been knocked out), are nearest to the clouds. And if they're actively taking damage, you're encouraged to use the clouds' healing to try to keep them alive. Aggressive play is rewarded by the healing bit especially. The clouds being tied to grid spaces, and being granted to units moving through them and not just onto them, really dramatically changes the meaning of specific move actions taken in battle. Important to note I'm not the only combat designer (thank you Isa), but my personal ethos when it comes to Tenderfoot's combat has been to design actions that both alter and are altered by the board state, so that every system interacts with and complicates every other system, and decisions have cascading side-effects you always need to consider against their primary effect. Experience clouds obviously fit so nicely into this framework, creating new cascading side effects that make you care where enemies die, how you can control the areas of the map where clouds live, how you can safely move the right units through those clouds to either heal or distribute experience where you want it.
Feeling

Tenderfoot Tactics has a huge open world. Like irresponsibly huge, for the size of our team. There will be a lot of open, undesigned wilderness. This is good, not accidental, not regrettable - Tenderfoot is very much about naturalness, and undesigned spaces are an important piece of how we're embracing that. They're quiet bits, important for pacing.
But still, we don't want that natural space to be empty of anything interesting. Within the fog, this isn't a problem - the world will be full of horrible things to sneak by or fight through. But we want people to love spending time in the areas they've cleared fog out of. We want those places to feel alive, happy, and worth visiting. Have it be a triumph to have returned the world to a wild state, have that place feel like a place that you're glad exists.

Herbs! Herbs! Herbs!

Forgetting

An Exploratory 3D Overworld for a Strategy Game?

Breath of the Wild & Meaningful Terrain

The Open Water

The Crouch-slide

A Final Note: The State of the Industry

Several Interrelated Issues

Introducing: The Genetic Memory Slot

Hi all! Up until last month, the team for Tenderfoot Tactics had been:

• Badru (me! project direction, art and code, design and writing)
• Michael Bell (sound and music)
• Isa Hutchinson (design and writing)

Tenderfoot Tactics: The Foreverlands is live now: https://sonofbadru.itch.io/foreverlands
The Foreverlands is an ancillary tale told in the world of Tenderfoot Tactics. It also serves as a demo of the first handful of classes and the combat systems in their current state (still in development). Thanks for looking! https://store.steampowered.com/app/1061610/Tenderfoot_Tactics/

The Foreverlands - a prologue to Tenderfoot Tactics meant to introduce the world and showcase a slice of the still-in-development gameplay - will be releasing for free on itch.io this Monday, the 23rd of September. Keep your eyes peeled!

TENDERFOOT TACTICS: THE FOREVERLANDS

DEVELOPMENT UPDATE

• Expanded and refined the first tier of evolutions - those that will be playable in the Foreverlands - with a bevy of new skills, a first pass at sound and visual effects, some tweaks in general appearance.

• Built a system to associate overworld biomes with different combat map types, enemy types, enemy team compositions, and natural system settings. So for instance an arid, rocky biome might now: have large rocks instead of trees in combat, start with no water or plants on the map, have a very low rate of moisture input from map edges (normally soil moisture is replenished from the edge of the map to replace the moisture extracted by growing plants - now, a low moisture zone won't naturally support plant life unless you bring a lot of water into the map with spells), have maps that start with more cliffs, and feature a certain subset of enemy types, like our new 'ember' enemy, arranged in team compositions designed for a certain player level range. This adds a lot of texture to exploration and progression across the map.
• Made a huge amount of quality of life updates. Added UI displaying more specific information about the simulation state, clarifying time passage during actions. Improved keyboard/mouse camera feel. Added hotkeys for the action menu. Et, cetera.
• Expanded our cast of non-playable enemy types!

• Enemies in the overworld now have a wider aggro radius when you're significantly lower level than them, and a very narrow radius when you're higher level, making low level zones easy to traverse as you level out of them. Enemies also now 'leash,' eventually giving up if you run far away from where they originally saw you and started chasing you.
• Finished replacing our 'steep ground is difficult' system with cliffs, and subtley modified the way earth spells interact with those cliffs for more naturalistic effects.
• Added a 'jump' button in the overworld because, I don't know, I have a grudge against games that don't let you jump, and I don't have anyone to stop me. Very seriously planning on adding a 'crouch slide' button when I have a manic moment and can allow myself to do something so nonessential.

You last heard from me when we put out the World Teaser a couple months ago. Making that involved a lot of work on the story and overworld systems, but since finishing it I've been back focusing in on combat again. There's a huge number of quality-of-life improvements we've been making to the UI/controls/etc, from feedback we got with our first round of streamer demos back in late spring, but that's not very fun to talk about, so instead let's talk about the most fun I've had in a while: implementing the whole next tier of evolutions!

Evolution Tiers

Other things we've been up to:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1061610 I haven't been very loud about Tenderfoot until now because I've been waiting to get this teaser together to show off the open world, which is part of what makes it stand out among TRPGs. (I mean, also the combat is super deep and interesting and fun.) Anyway I'm really excited about it! It's a small team but all of us also worked on Eidolon and Viridi. Wishlist it! It really makes a huge difference! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYRQDGzXjZY

Hi folks! First of all - I've started (slowly and individually) distributing access to our pre-alpha combat demo to streamers who play other games like it, or seem interested in the genre. If you know of anyone who might like Tenderfoot, let me know in the comments or at hey@badru.graphics. Now, I'd like to talk a little about the state of the combat systems as they live in that demo. I'll try not to go overly specific, but it'll be hard for me because I'm neck deep in it!

Turns

Turn Order

Side Effects + Natural Systems

Hi y'all! As a very first update over here, I thought it'd be appropriate to give an outline of where the game is currently, and where I think it's heading. Let me know in the comments whether, for future updates, you'd rather see more raw development notes, world/story teaser features, design deep-dives, etc. But for now ~

WHAT WE'VE GOT

• a robust combat system
• interesting and performant natural systems for terrain shaping, soil moisture, water volume and velocity flow, plant growth, heat and fire
• plans for 27 playable evolutions
• prototyped designs for 13 of those
• implemented designs for 7 of those
• menus for learning and swapping skills, evolving and renaming gobs
• a vast overworld with lush regions and surreal transitions between
• first implementations for a couple goblin towns, with plans for many others (as well as being story locations, these will be places to snag new units)
• first implementations for several spirits (which will be custom encounters with interesting enemy compositions, and also a route to unlock new evolutions)
• a draft for the full scope of the story of the thing

WHERE WE'RE GOING

Hi! I'm Badru! I started Ice Water Games, lead the Eidolon team, did a bunch of colors and design and code on Viridi, and uhh did some other stuff too!! I just made a Steam Creator page for myself here, if you want to follow my work:
And hey also! I'm working on a new thing with some past collaborators (which may or may not end up coming out under the IWG label) - Michael Bell's doing the music and Isa Hutchinson's helping a bunch with design. It's a big open-world TRPG about wizardly goblins and fae spirits and elemental magics. Wishlist it if you're into the stuff we've worked on in the past? https://store.steampowered.com/app/1061610/Tenderfoot_Tactics/?curator_clanid=35059002 And also give it a follow! I think I'll be posting development updates over there very soon :)