Tenderfoot Tactics News

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 it’s 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.


One long-held plan for this has been to have collectible herbs and other plants naturally grow in specific biomes. We plan to have sort of side-quests where a goblin craftsperson can make you a useful equip out of certain plants, and to fulfil that you could take a leisurely boat around the safe periphery, gathering what you need from where you need it. Sounds pleasant!!

(ignore our temp ui lol)

On first implementation, the herbs grew in the fog as well, which is fine, but takes away the specialness of having a healthy and happy area clean of the fog, where useful things can grow.


We've also been having a second design discussion around skill swapping. In the prologue, skills can be freely forgotten and relearned at will. It's appropriately fun and fast for the chaotic, brief experience of the Foreverlands, but it leads to your gobilns feeling kind of interchangeable and amorphous and forgettable. We wanted to find an elegant solution where players who want to respec need to spend some time and intention making it possible to do so.

What we've done is made it so that any herb that would grow in a foggy area instead grows in as 'fae weed', a sort of fog-corrupted plant analogous to the fog-goblins. Fae weed can be plucked and equipped like other plants, but it also serves the purpose of being consumable. Your goblins now forget skills by eating fae weed. I like the logic of this. It makes some fictional sense that the fog, which brings some sort of self-identity-collapsing chaos to the goblins it touches, also sucks the color from plants in the area - and those plants become infused with that mind-erasing power.



Currently at least, we've also made it so that plucking fae weed knocks the fog out of a large area nearby - the same thing that happens when you defeat a fog spirit. It's nice because it feels like weeding to maintain the land's proper biome, keeping the fog at bay, without combat.

But of course it, like everything else, could change. 🙂

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1061610/Tenderfoot_Tactics/