Meet the Team
Hi!!
Badru: code, art, writing, design
I'm Badru, writing this. I'm an artist who's been making games since the hallowed Flash days of 2009 or so, though most of that work is bad and no you may not see it. I found a voice in games leading the team making Eidolon, a massive, exploratory hiking, survival, and archaeological narrative game we put out in late 2014. I actually started Tenderfoot right after that, if you can believe it! But I took quite a few diversions between then and now, including working on several other indie games (notably Viridi, which people On Here seem to really love!) as well as doing some short programming gigs for big tech, banks, and other vampires. Good Lord I'm glad to be back doing games! I do a lot of the work on Tenderfoot, including all of the code, all of the models and colors, much of the design, much of the team organization, and some of the writing. I love to read (lately obsessed with Ursula K Le Guin) and draw and paint, and also to smoke weed and watch dumb bullshit on youtube (ah, the duality of man). Lately my go-to games have been Battle Brothers (after work) and Fae Tactics (weekend mornings), with the occasional late night foray back into Overwatch.
Actually, much of the rest of the team worked on Eidolon and Viridi too! Isa, Zoe, Michael. Madison first worked with us as far back as the Viridi Steam trailer!
Michael Bell: sound and music
Michael Bell, our musician and all around sound magician, is an attic-dwelling professor from the misty coastal town of Bellingham. Once advisor and now good friend and collaborator, Michael has worked with me since Eidolon. While his affinity is strongest for the chaotic noise of analog synths and distortion pedals, his range shows itself in soothing sounds the beloved Viridi OST. There's room for both sorts on Tenderfoot, and the amount, and quality, of music he's produced for this game is truly incredible. Plus, he knows just which poems to send me when I'm in a deep despair and need a wise word to pull me out.
Isa Hutchinson: writing and design
Isa Hutchinson is an old friend of mine, and truly one of the best. He introduced me to Catan and then a whole world of modern board games back in the early aughts, and continues to be a great game design influence. Isa is my link to the world of soulslikes, multi-hour spreadsheet eurogames, and other cruel and decadent playthings. Isa does much of the writing and a significant amount of game design on Tenderfoot.
Taylor Thomas: ux design
Taylor Thomas is a new collaborator for me (what a thrill!!) and hails from the world of product design, where she's worked on Real, Physical Objects for many years. She brings to Tenderfoot her extensive experience with designing for human interaction, and was crucial to the huge UI/UX redesign we did after the Foreverlands prologue. She's also possibly the most gamer of us all (big respect), plays CoD, watches twitch, and frequently informs me of major gaming trends I should really have heard of already.
Zoe Vartanian: graphic design, voice
Zoe Vartanian, (Borat voice) My Wife, has worked with me on probably everything? But most importantly was the creative lead on Viridi. On Tenderfoot she's done a lot of editing and feedback and uhhh emotional support incidental to living with me, but more importantly and officially, she's done all of the UI work (to Taylor's specs) post-Foreverlands. By day Zoe's the graphic designer for the University of Washington's College of the Environment. By night she's a painter and a cook and a dog enthusiast. She's beautiful from afar but smelly up close. Just kidding she smells nice too. Also, she voices the goblins in the game, mostly!
Madison Pathe: video editor
Madison Pathe, who I've known as far back as elementary school, has made a career as an editor for television, and is applying those skills to help us with our various video needs for Tenderfoot. You'd be surprised how much work it is making trailers and other videos for a game! We're so lucky and grateful to have someone who actually knows what she's doing there. She's a lover of modern board games, and moody videogames, and has a long history with Nintendo games especially, I think, though lately she's been trying to get me into the Witcher III (maybe when this videogame is out I will have time to play a videogame).
Player Two PR
And lately, we're so grateful to have some PR help from Charlene Lebrun and her amazing team at Player Two PR (🙏 Chris Patrick and Adolfo Aguirre 🙏). PR is not a thing I ever wanted to do, but it's so important if you want to survive out here. I can't say how glad I am to have these excellent people fighting for us.
A Brief Development Update
Okay okay, so that's us! Now then - a little update on where we are with development:
We just had our first couple beta testers finish the game (well, reach the ending scene), with each having played 40+ hours! (And they're both still playing!) I believe that's having restarted to try out different builds and playstyles, and a very focused critical path run could probably be more like 10-15 hours, but it's hard to say, and I'm very pleased that the game is holding people's attention so long.
The classes breeds all have solid builds, though we're continuing to shift skills around and hone things in. All of the planned dungeons and towns and artefacts are implemented. Still got some bugs and some vfx to work through, and I'll certainly be refining the systems, but the game is coming together fast!
This is always one of the most exciting times of game development, but especially so for this one, given it's been such a long trek, and has really defined my young adult life. I'm turning 30 next year! Feels like the end of an era, a major accomplishment of my 20s. I barely knew what I was doing when I started this game. Nowadays I'm so powerful I'm practically a God!
Trinkets and Other Things
In the realm of delicious new Tenderfoot media for you to consume, here's a freshly minted deep dive where Isa talks you through some of the interesting special modifiers on trinkets, showing how they let you customize and complicate even the simple abilities of early breeds in the game.
And another new and exciting thing: weekly dev streams! Every Thursday from 4pm-6pm PST, I'll be streaming some live dev work, mostly VFX work for high tier classes, I think, with Isa hanging out with me in chat. The first couple weeks have VODs up on my twitch, where you should most certainly navigate and smash that follow button: twitch.tv/badru
If you somehow missed it, here's our announcement trailer! The game's releasing October 21st! Mark it in your calendars!
Also, we've been posting some breed previews, among other things, to our various social channels. Check it out:
twitter.com/tenderfoot_tact
facebook.com/TenderfootTactics
instagram.com/icewatergames/
discord.gg/B82BDEv
Okay that's all for now! Remember to call all your estranged friends and family and tell them to wishlist our game! Ok bye!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1061610/Tenderfoot_Tactics/