Work on Folk Emerging has steadily progressed over the summer, and it's almost time for the next milestone...
Playtesting
Before releasing a public demo or sending builds to publishers, it's important to get the game into the hands of trusted players and get feedback. It's where the rubber meets the road, where the game makes contact with reality.
What works and what doesn't? What doesn't makes sense? Which parts are fun & interesting? These are all crucial questions that these private playtests will start to answer.
I would have liked to do this much sooner, but a 4X game juggles many systems, each of which needs to be fun and coherent on its own, while also combining with all the other systems to create an overall experience that is fun and coherent too.
It's tough to playtest a game like this until most of the components are relatively complete and inter-connected. Well, that time is nigh!
Recent Work
Here are some updates on the work done in the last couple of months.
Victory conditions & playstyles 🏆
I've been thinking a lot about what the win conditions should be. As Soren Johnson (designer of Civ 4, Old World) points out in his excellent talk "Games and Meaning, or You Have No Idea How Hard It Is To Run a Sweatshop", the entire player experience hinges on what they are told to aim for.
Even if a game is intended to be "about" the unfortunate terrors of war, if a player is simply given an army and rewarded for conquering the world, then the game is actually "about" the thrill of conquest. They may still have a great time playing the game, but if the designers' goal was to have the player come away with a nuanced perspective on the matter, this is unlikely to happen.
For me, Folk Emerging is about the complex relationship between the individual and the collective, and about how humanity functioned before sedentism and centralized power. I don't want it to be about imperialist factions cosplaying as prehistoric tribes.
So, I've been reading a lot of great perspectives on how to give strategy players a range of satisfying ways to play, e.g. rushdown / econ / defense, early / mid / late-game wins, tall vs wide, aggressive vs diplomatic, etc.
For now, I've decided to set a simple goal of "be the first to reach X population", and give the player multiple routes to achieving that. It enables playing with different social structures, cultural norms, and technologies, which can result in a wide variety of human experiences & societies.
I'm curious to see what the playtesters have to say!
Health ❤
If the goal is to grow your population, then it's crucial that the health & mortality of your people work intuitively, and any changes need to be easy to track in the UI. Various events / states can affect HP, so I've tried to make all this easy to parse, both on an individual and collective level.
Plant & Animal Domestication 🌾🐖🐺
Humans have been domesticating other species for a very long time, with varied success. Domestication of plants began long before the agricultural revolution—it was just difficult, inefficient, inconsistent. Only after many thousands of years of struggle, innovations, and trial & error did we eventually enable a consistent food surplus, large populations, and sedentary settlements.
I've added this process of gradual domestication to Folk Emerging. You can domesticate certain plants and animals from the start, but with little to show for it. The more experience your bands gain with each species, however, the better they'll get. Certain late-game technologies, combined with this hard-earned experience, enable massive increases in food yields from these domesticated species.
With enough of a food surplus, maybe your nomadic hunter-gatherers can finally afford to stick around for a while... but is their society ready for it?
Social Norms ⚖️
As a band's population grows larger, resources are spread thin and they have a choice to make:
- do they split up into 2 smaller bands and go their separate ways, to ensure everyone's survival?
- or do they stick together and weather the storm together?
Each of these paths brings its own challenges, and requires different social norms to support it.
If they choose to split up, how can they survive with dwindling ranks? Fewer mouths to feed also means fewer hands with which to defend your people. Can they maintain a connection to the family members and friends they've left behind? What is the cost of survival?
If instead they stick together and find a way to generate enough food for everyone, can their collective way of resolving inter-personal conflicts sustain a larger population, or will a more hierarchichal system be required? If an Individual is to be given the power to decide what's right or wrong, who should it be? What is lost in the process?
Production 🔨
I've finally implemented a much-needed Production system. For a long time I avoided it, because each turn is 1 year of all the characters' lives, and I thought it would be weird to focus all of a band's efforts on 1 thing for multiple years. However, Civ gets away with cities "producing a Swordsman" for like 400 years so I guess anything goes!
Production is one of the main ways to give the player agency, and it can be framed as choosing what the band collectively puts their primary focus on, not that they aren't doing anything else during that time. For now, a band can "produce" the following (unlocked via the Tech tree):
- specialized areas of their campsite,
- improvements/upgrades to these specialized areas
- certain collective actions (e.g. scouting expedition, combat training, hunting exercises, etc)
- specialized combat units (each of which consists of 5 of your deeply simulated characters with personalities, skills, families, etc)
Inter-Cell Features ⬢
Rather than have 1 feature per tile, there are now up to 6 potential features per tile, as the features are placed at the 6 points of each hexagon. It also means that each of these feature borders 3 hexagons, so up to 3 different nomadic bands can gather around it.
For example, 3 bands can gather around a Stone Deposit and have simultaneous access to Stone (an important resource in the game). Such a layout brings bands close together, enabling more interactions than just fighting over who gets to occupy a tile.
RPG-style Events & Special Items ✨
Certain inter-cell features provide an opportunity to trigger an RPG-style event with various outcomes. For example, if you find a Cave and send a scouting party, they may find special Items, which you can choose to salvage and keep (for their various ongoing effects) or trade with other bands... hopefully the Cave doesn't collapse and fatally injure anyone from your scouting party 😱
Diplomacy 🤝
I've implemented a basic trading system, via which bands can barter Resources (e.g. Food, Stone, Wood, Pelts) and Items (e.g. Obsidian, Amber, Shells). I'm planning to extend this system in various ways, and to enable some unique diplomatic options for those who pursue that playstyle.
Combat AI ⚔️
For the playtests, the AI doesn't have to be amazing at combat, but they need to have some basic competence and unpredictability. Currently it's at a decent place with simple rules that work well enough for now.
Detailed Tooltips & Notifications 📃
There's a lot going on under the hood, with many values affecting many others. I want it to be as transparent as possible without being overwhelming, so I've added on-hover tooltips wherever I can, with detailed breakdowns of how everything is calculated. I'd love to enable nested tooltips, but that's a nice-to-have for later.
I've also added notifications that inform you of important changes that happen throughout your turn and in the simulation between turns.
My goal is to enable players to easily understand the consequences of their actions and create their own fun & interesting strategies.
Stylized portraits & terrain 🎨
In early trailers/screenshots, the character portraits were 3D and colorful, but that didn't really fit the rest of the aesthetic. They are now stylized as charcoal drawings on slabs of stone, while retaining the complex (and heritable) facial features of the 3D models. Still need to make the eyes less creepy :)
I also added a subtle paper texture to the terrain, which helps the vibe I'm going for: hand-painted illustrations from childhood history textbooks.
Save/Load System 💾
Lots of us, myself included, love to take our time with these games and enjoy them over more than one sitting. It's a "simple" and expected feature but with complex simulations it can be a tough nut to crack — thankfully, 'tis now cracked.
Efficient content pipeline & potential moddability ♻️
I've set up the game's content in a way that makes it very easy for me to tweak/add stuff, and leaves the door open for making the game moddable down the road.
Performance Optimization ✈
I've implemented multi-threading to process the intense simulation that happens between turns (with great population comes great frame-droppability), which keeps the game running at a steady ~60 FPS, at least on my machine (the playtests will show how it fares elsewhere).
What's Next?
Hopefully in a couple of weeks I'll be ready to start reaching out to gamer/gamedev friends (and others if they're super interested) to start playtesting! I'm very excited to get that started :)
This will help me sort out the biggest issues and have a build that can be sent to publishers. I'll gradually open up the playtests to a wider audience with the goal of polishing the game for a public demo.