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
The evolutions (classes) available in the streamer demo are the set planned to be available to the player straight away from the beginning of the game in the final build: Scout, Knight, Battlemage, Spellsword, Archer, Wizard, Woodswitch.
These have a sort of branching structure from Scout (simple, broad) to Knight (melee) / Archer (ranged) and from those to more aggressive and more defensive ranged and melee spellcasters. In this set of evolutions is a very broad taste of what kinds of abilities are available in Tenderfoot.
After [major story event], the player will unlock ~10 more evolutions, what I've been calling tier 2: 5 each ranged and melee, representing pairings of elements (other than fire/plant, the forbidden flavor). The elements have fairly focused characteristics (water casters are slippery, fire casters are dangerous) that these pairings tend to go deeply into, and in many cases the paired elements have been developed into very specific and elaborate movesets.
For instance the fire/water mages both have electric spells, which tend to be teleports that hurt the caster, start fires where they travel, and if they touch water spread to effect every unit in that body of water. (Slippery and dangerous!)
Or the melee earth/water mage, the Worm, has abilities like Burrow (long ranged teleport that requires the destination to be moist earth), Ram (straight line charge with knockback that breaks brush), and Thrash (AOE that creates water and stacks a damage-buffing 'rage' effect).
I wish we had pretty models and fx done so we could show them off in gifs but you'll just have to wait! For now just trust me when I say: They're SO COOL AND I AM SO EXCITED TO BE MAKING THIS GAME!
The first tier of evolutions is nice groundwork and I think there's a lot to dig into there, but really working out tier 2 has made me so full of enthusiasm for what Tenderfoot's becoming. We also managed to add about 40 new spells in a week of work, including building the systems for major new concepts like status effects (poison, cocoon, blight, etc), terrain effects (lava, ice, etc), and more! There's gonna be an absolute Load of cool shit in this videogame, y'all.
Oh and there's a planned third tier, to be unlocked after [second major story event], which will be ~ single element mages ~ and wow am I excited to get to those. But for now, more broad fixes to prepare for a second streamer demo.
Other things we've been up to:
> Building a story and world for the next demo to be less empty than the first. It'll have a bit of a peripheral story to tell, and some more structure to it.
> Adding cliffs and jumping! So instead of "this terrain tile is too steep so it's now difficult to move on" we'll have "moving from this terrain tile to this requires hopping up a cliff, and costs more move." It's made terrain spells much more clear in their effect, and I think has just been a huge general improvement to the feeling of the game, but it has a lot of repercussions to iron out. Worth the time I think!
> Pre-combat setup! Long planned and long neglected, now (in dev builds) you can set up your initial unit placement and turn order however you like, which makes it much easier to strategize.
And more secret stuff, probably.
Also, I've got a Patreon now, so if you want to help *financially* with this thing, you can do that!
And we've got a Discord, if you want to come ask me questions about the game or just hang out and chat.
Ok thanks for reading and bye! I'll try to post again here soon. I'm so busy making this dang game I don't find enough time to yell about it online, but I'm trying!