Tenderfoot Tactics News

This is probably the thing I've posted most actively about post-Foreverlands, on Twitter anyway, because I find it really cheesy and annoying and fun, in a community of other developers, to be spending time on a system that feels completely out of genre and overscoped for the game we're making.

But it isn't! It's central to what we're making, actually. Tenderfoot's a TRPG, sure, but it's also, deep, deep in its heart, a game about nature and place, exploration and adventure. One of the very first, guiding decisions in Tenderfoot's development was the decision to ditch the conventional map overworld and lean into a fully 3D one.

I went this direction for the same reason we did so with Eidolon, Tenderfoot's predecessor: perspective is an excellent design tool. We have this built in logic to The Way Vision Works that justifies having objects hard to decipher when far away but richly detailed when close up, and gives sensible logic for a smooth transition between. In a game about travel, exploration, and discovery, of COURSE we want the feeling of seeing something interesting but unclear to investigate from far off, making the long and intentional journey there, and then finding out what it is in full detail at the end, with the ability to look at any props from all angles, and physical access to any goods discovered.



One of the things we learned through the making of Eidolon was that in a game that spends a lot of time on navigation, the means of navigation become super important. We were so happy we leaned into physical maps, the compass, the binoculars, to give the player the experience of performing navigation themselves. Something we realized by the end of Eidolon's development, but never delivered on exactly, is that Eidolon is also significantly a game about the traversal of landscapes - and that part, which I thought of at the time as the 'micro-decisions' of play (do I go around that tree to the left or right), was mostly neglected, filled in by having collectibles scattered everywhere (I'll go left because I can pluck that mushroom to the left of the tree that way). But I always regretted not working in more playful traversal.


I usually end up being a contrarian jerk when it comes to big budget corp-games, but I actually thought Breath of the Wild was fabulous in a lot of ways, especially when it came to exploration and world traversal. Especially traversal. With climbing and gliding, elevation change becomes so important, and the decision about how to get from one place to the next is filled with interesting little decisions, tiny arcs of narrative build and satisfaction.

Something that stuck in my mind as especially brilliant in BotW was the way the horse would autopath along roads, giving you time to look around with your spyglass. The feeling of making progress along a journey while scoping out the area nearby was really wonderful, and not something most games afford. So I borrowed that design.




Looking at Tenderfoot with Eidolon behind me, it felt important to suffuse the landscape with gameplay meaning, to make it so whatever visual/logical/narrative changes there are across the surface of the world, those things have meaning to the gameplay system of traversal.

One of the first decisions on that front was to make open water safe, fast. Like with BotW's horse, the canoe in Tenderfoot picks up speed and maintains it. Like with the main roads in BotW, the water is a relatively safe zone, meant for rapid travel, combat-free.

In place of a scope, Tenderfoot has birds. On canoe trips, a player can take to the sky, surveying nearby islands or behind hills, finding places they might want to divert to later on.

And because of the functionality of the canoe, the map is cut into interesting route decisions: do we cross that relatively thin body of land to make a straight-shot to our destination, risking combat, or worse, becoming disoriented in the fog, or will it end up quicker and safer to take the long route around it in a boat? What can I see that I might encounter on that longer route? Maybe an island I haven't explored yet, or even some distant boxy shapes that might be a structure of some sort.




One result of the canoe's functionality in Tenderfoot is that going uphill means going further from the safety of sea-level.

Something I loved from BotW is the natural narrative cycle of struggling up a steep cliff followed by the release and freedom of gliding down. We're mirroring that somewhat with our slide system. A player struggles up a hill, moving slowly and having to be very careful not to be seen by any roving enemies. And at the top, they crest to see the other side, and then plummet down at high speeds to return to the freedom and safety of the open water.

The result of adding crouch-sliding to Tenderfoot has been tremendous. It feels playful and joyful. It creates small natural cycles that do a Lot for the pacing of exploration.




Death Stranding is a game I'm playing currently that is absolutely excelling at playing with these sorts of systems, that turn the shape and texture of the landscape into meaningful interactables for the whole play experience, rather than just for the eye.

I've been saying this since BotW, but I think that for a certain branch of 'walking sim' descendents, the sort interested in evoking the feelings of travel across a landscape of some kind, this is going to be an area of design worth delving deeply into over the next 5-10 years. It's been so interesting seeing the way DS leans a completely different direction from BotW, and I can see so much room in all directions around. It's an exciting time to be working in games, for sure.

Until next time! Thanks for following along while we make this unbelievably grand and complex thing.

- Badru

This is probably the thing I've posted most actively about post-Foreverlands, on Twitter anyway, because I find it really cheesy and annoying and fun, in a community of other developers, to be spending time on a system that feels completely out of genre and overscoped for the game we're making.

But it isn't! It's central to what we're making, actually. Tenderfoot's a TRPG, sure, but it's also, deep, deep in its heart, a game about nature and place, exploration and adventure. One of the very first, guiding decisions in Tenderfoot's development was the decision to ditch the conventional map overworld and lean into a fully 3D one.

I went this direction for the same reason we did so with Eidolon, Tenderfoot's predecessor: perspective is an excellent design tool. We have this built in logic to The Way Vision Works that justifies having objects hard to decipher when far away but richly detailed when close up, and gives sensible logic for a smooth transition between. In a game about travel, exploration, and discovery, of COURSE we want the feeling of seeing something interesting but unclear to investigate from far off, making the long and intentional journey there, and then finding out what it is in full detail at the end, with the ability to look at any props from all angles, and physical access to any goods discovered.



One of the things we learned through the making of Eidolon was that in a game that spends a lot of time on navigation, the means of navigation become super important. We were so happy we leaned into physical maps, the compass, the binoculars, to give the player the experience of performing navigation themselves. Something we realized by the end of Eidolon's development, but never delivered on exactly, is that Eidolon is also significantly a game about the traversal of landscapes - and that part, which I thought of at the time as the 'micro-decisions' of play (do I go around that tree to the left or right), was mostly neglected, filled in by having collectibles scattered everywhere (I'll go left because I can pluck that mushroom to the left of the tree that way). But I always regretted not working in more playful traversal.


I usually end up being a contrarian jerk when it comes to big budget corp-games, but I actually thought Breath of the Wild was fabulous in a lot of ways, especially when it came to exploration and world traversal. Especially traversal. With climbing and gliding, elevation change becomes so important, and the decision about how to get from one place to the next is filled with interesting little decisions, tiny arcs of narrative build and satisfaction.

Something that stuck in my mind as especially brilliant in BotW was the way the horse would autopath along roads, giving you time to look around with your spyglass. The feeling of making progress along a journey while scoping out the area nearby was really wonderful, and not something most games afford. So I borrowed that design.




Looking at Tenderfoot with Eidolon behind me, it felt important to suffuse the landscape with gameplay meaning, to make it so whatever visual/logical/narrative changes there are across the surface of the world, those things have meaning to the gameplay system of traversal.

One of the first decisions on that front was to make open water safe, fast. Like with BotW's horse, the canoe in Tenderfoot picks up speed and maintains it. Like with the main roads in BotW, the water is a relatively safe zone, meant for rapid travel, combat-free.

In place of a scope, Tenderfoot has birds. On canoe trips, a player can take to the sky, surveying nearby islands or behind hills, finding places they might want to divert to later on.

And because of the functionality of the canoe, the map is cut into interesting route decisions: do we cross that relatively thin body of land to make a straight-shot to our destination, risking combat, or worse, becoming disoriented in the fog, or will it end up quicker and safer to take the long route around it in a boat? What can I see that I might encounter on that longer route? Maybe an island I haven't explored yet, or even some distant boxy shapes that might be a structure of some sort.




One result of the canoe's functionality in Tenderfoot is that going uphill means going further from the safety of sea-level.

Something I loved from BotW is the natural narrative cycle of struggling up a steep cliff followed by the release and freedom of gliding down. We're mirroring that somewhat with our slide system. A player struggles up a hill, moving slowly and having to be very careful not to be seen by any roving enemies. And at the top, they crest to see the other side, and then plummet down at high speeds to return to the freedom and safety of the open water.

The result of adding crouch-sliding to Tenderfoot has been tremendous. It feels playful and joyful. It creates small natural cycles that do a Lot for the pacing of exploration.




Death Stranding is a game I'm playing currently that is absolutely excelling at playing with these sorts of systems, that turn the shape and texture of the landscape into meaningful interactables for the whole play experience, rather than just for the eye.

I've been saying this since BotW, but I think that for a certain branch of 'walking sim' descendents, the sort interested in evoking the feelings of travel across a landscape of some kind, this is going to be an area of design worth delving deeply into over the next 5-10 years. It's been so interesting seeing the way DS leans a completely different direction from BotW, and I can see so much room in all directions around. It's an exciting time to be working in games, for sure.

Until next time! Thanks for following along while we make this unbelievably grand and complex thing.

- Badru

(1) Something I love from Final Fantasy Tactics is the way it encourages you to train a job you might not use otherwise, in order to get a specific skill synergy with the job you know you're headed for. It feels like charting out your own education or personal growth, making sacrifices to complete it deliberately over time, and in the end you've built something specialized out of your own creativity and willpower. This is something I felt was seriously lacking from the Foreverlands version of Tenderfoot's evolution system.

(2) I also felt that classes in Tenderfoot were a bit too tightly designed, and wanted to leave room for players to build something we didn't expect.

(3) Finally, we got some helpful feedback from the prologue that it felt bad to evolve a goblin and have them completely reset their progress. This makes a lot of sense! In an RPG, you want to feel character continuity and growth, and the full-reset evolution system spoiled that.


As a resolution to the above, we've added to all units a single skill slot which lets you load any known skill from any class. It costs no points to use and is free to swap out any time (out of combat only, of course). We're calling it, for now, a 'genetic memory' slot.

(ignore the clumsy temporary UI while we polish up our new look!)

It's an important balance that goblins do become somewhat weaker when you switch them into a level 1 evolution. It forces you to not become too reliant on over-leveled units, foregrounding whichever goblin hasn't evolved yet as the most powerful in your party.

With the new system we get a little bit of both - you lose all but one of your old skills, forcing you to treat the newly evolved goblin as a weaker unit in the next fight, but in choosing your favorite/most-used skill as a memory, you end up preserving some of that unit's character and bringing it into its new shape.

We also already are seeing some really interesting incidental builds. Archers that round out their effective range with Shortbow. Knights with Song or Grenade. Wizards with Frag Lance.

The most exciting thing about this is that it's naturally multiplicative. There are about 150 planned unique skills in the game, and about 30 evolutions, putting the potential combinations of (memory skill x evolution) in the thousands.



We might not yet be exactly where we'll end up, and certainly aren't promising we'll ship this system in this precise state, but some lightweight multiclassing like this feels like the right direction to be heading to take the promise of the prologue and turn it into something richer and fuller.

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)
  

We've since added two new collaborators:

Zoe Vartanian you might know as the creative director, artist, and UI designer from Viridi - or from her role doing the UI for Eidolon. She's coming on to make beautiful UI for Tenderfoot. She also did all of the voice acting for the goblins, haha. Zoe is always amazing to work with. Having her on the team actually means that the entire Viridi team is now working on Tenderfoot, which is pretty cool!! Getting the band back together 🎷

Taylor Thomas is a new collaborator I'm really excited to be working with - she comes from the world of industrial/product design, and is helping out with a major UX overhaul. Gonna fix all our silly unusable UI from the prologue - which we got a ton of useful feedback about, thank you so much!

UI/UX have been really complex and large parts of this project, and as we're falling into a more solidified version of the combat and overworld systems, it's a fabulous time to bring fresh eyes to it. We've been working on it for a month or so, and I can't wait to get to the point where we can show more screenshots! It's all so much better!!

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/