This is a quick update on some of the latest progress in the development of Folk Emerging.
♾️ Infinitely Nested Tooltips
The game now has nested tooltips (and they really can go on forever). It's the best way to learn the game at your own pace and discover the deep connections between systems.
🛠️ Band Specialization
Each Band now elect one of their Tribe's three Clans to lead them, giving them that Clan's special bonus/ability.
🌱🐄 Domestication
Domestication is back! Tribes learn to domesticate wild plants & animals, which generate Items to equip in Structures, e.g:
🌱Crop Seeds➡️Farms
🐄Domesticated Animals➡️Pastures
Each species will generate unique Items, allowing a broad range of agriculture & pastoralism.
🌍 Global Climate Change
There are now periods of global climate change (e.g. Ice Ages), which alter conditions everywhere and force tribes to adapt.
⛈️ Weather Events
Dynamic weather events also pose a risk to tribes, forcing you to reckon with the elements.
🧪 Expanded Tech Tree
The technology tree has been significantly expanded, fleshing out the mid and late game content, and creating more varied paths. Folk Emerging ends around where Civ starts, so I'm focusing on the many steps between Controlled Fire and the start of the Bronze Age.
Here's a sneak peek:
What's Next?
Over the coming weeks and months I'll be working on the following gameplay features, whose design is mostly complete but remains to be implemented, in roughly this order:
Unique Clan-Clan synergies
Other hominin species besides Sapiens
Modular portraits
More narrative events
After that on the horizon are features like:
Diplomacy updates
Loyalty & Cohesion
Tribe-level Climate XP
There are other features I'm excited about and designing at the moment, but which I'm not yet ready to share, as I want to first be sure they are a good fit for the game.
I'm doing the first public beta test super soon! I'll make a separate post about that with details, but sign up to the newsletter to get a reminder:
Follow me on Bluesky for more frequent updates (which is also a great place to check out the #TurnBasedThursday community and our weekly threads).
Cheers :)