Hello aspiring Tribe Leaders.
Today, we wanted to give you a deeper look into the Tribe Members themselves. On the outside, they are hardy survivors in a harsh and mysterious world, but underneath there are several gameplay systems that make each Tribe Member distinct. With these, we want to create emerging group dynamics that will result in a wide range of situations, so that no two playthroughs feel exactly the same.
Going Mental
The mental state of each Tribe Member is guided by their Needs, Discontent and Fear. The Needs consist of Food, Sleep, Social and Spiritual. Each can be satisfied through different means, which requires you to manage your Tribe and prioritize its production accordingly. Failure to satisfy a Need may lead to punishing Events, but they also feed into the Tribe’s Discontent. Fear, on the other hand, is increased through time spent in Darkness or other traumatic events.
High Discontent and Fear can become a big problem for the Tribe by leading to behaviors such as Riot, Shock, or Tribe Members leaving the Tribe. To avoid this, you will need to keep satisfying the Tribe Members’ Needs and decrease their Fear by ensuring your Fires burn bright enough.
Behave Yourselves
Tribe Members are mostly autonomous. You can assign them to buildings and influence them in other ways, but overall they will do what they want. Their behavior is guided by many factors, most importantly by their Needs and personalities. Behaviors also have an impact on the Tribe Members’ opinions and the Factions that will emerge based on them.
The Big Five Personality Traits
Each Tribe Member spawns with their own Personality Trait values. These Personality Traits are Openness to Experience, Extraversion, Neuroticism, Agreeableness and Conscientiousness. Each is given a value between -3 and 3.
The resulting 16000 combinations make it so that each Tribe Member behaves uniquely and has a set of potential strengths and weaknesses. For example, the right combination of Traits might earn them a valuable Perk or trigger an Event. Personality Traits are also critical in determining which Faction Opinions will emerge within the Tribe. Though the Traits are assigned randomly, you may find ways to manipulate them, and thus affect the direction of your Tribe.
From Fractures to Factions
Another fully automatic behavior type is the Interactions. Tribe Members will interact with each other based on proximity, their personal preferences, and other factors. The result of the Interaction, whether negative or positive, will affect Tribe Members’ opinion both on each other and the ideas they hold.
If enough Tribe Members gain strong opinions on a certain set of ideas, they form a Faction. Factions will emerge naturally as the Tribe grows, and with this, there is the possibility of an Inner Conflict happening. Inner Conflicts pit two opposing Factions against each other in a struggle for power and survival. Your choices and the makeup of your Tribe will determine the result of the Inner Conflict, which can significantly alter the rest of your playthrough.
You can discover the depths of these features and learn to understand your Tribe once the game releases. For this, remember to wishlist The Tribe Must Survive on Steam, and click the Follow button on the store page to receive notifications about our announcements.
Feel free to also share your thoughts about the features! You can do it here or on our TTMS Discord server, where we will share more information and you can get directly involved in the discussions.
And remember; whatever it takes... The Tribe Must Survive!