It’s been over a week since the Steam Next Festival went live - TFM: The First Men was participating in the event with the Demoria campaign. We’ve had plenty of amazing feedback from you all, along with some incredibly helpful bug reports.
Store Visitors : 58,267
Total Downloads : 18,640
Total Wishlists : 17,626
Discord Visitors : 480
The demo is offline now, but don’t worry! - we will be starting a Steam Playtest after making some changes based on the feedback from Demoria. To enter the playtest all you have to do is to join our Discord and show some courage and commitment in our Discord Minigame and become a Champion!
Highlights from the community
It was quite a great experience for us to have a demo live the whole week, we felt that it was a tiny version of an actual release week, which was a great experience for us besides collecting feedback and figuring out which parts of the game the players enjoy or struggle.
We will continue developing the game as we’ve planned, gladly most of the struggles were the things we were already aware of. You could understand that we don’t choose the day for the festival, so we had to go live with whatever was ready at the beginning of last week.
If we summarize the feedback and development plan until the Early Access, we can divide them all into three different categories;
UI/UX Improvements
We’ve separated paths and crafts into two different panels. Paths will require path points again and be only about the character’s development and progression. Moved all of the constructions, doodads, and items into another panel called the Crafts, where you will be able to freely open and craft anything that your characters unlocked as long as you can pay for it.
This will add another level of importance for the character’s progression, and their crafting abilities, while making it easier to use and understand, lowering the confusion and stress of choosing an action either for the settlement or for the character’s own good, you will feel that some of your characters will be more important for your settlement and try to make use of them before they die, or pass their knowledge to the next generation!
We also will be having a couple more changes regarding being able to force undrafted characters, giving them simple assignments like attacking, hauling, or looting.
The whole User Interface will become much clear with additional tooltips, notifications, and replacements, and we will have a campaign called “Tutoria” for the release, which will be an interactive tutorial campaign that will make sure you’ve learned everything.
Refactor and Optimization of current systems
We’ve encountered some bugs during the demo week, most of them were in our schedule but thanks to the participants and our community who’ve used our in-game feedback and bug reporting tool, we’ve caught many more.
Before the Steam Playtest begins we want to clear the bugs as much as possible and make a run again with our champions to hunt even more bugs until the release and make the game as bug-free as possible.
Some design and content optimizations will be happening as well. We plan to make some changes on the pregnancy, infancy, and childhood phases of the characters, will check the element and aptitude traits deeper, and make a lot of additions for the late-game content.
Localization systems
Yes, the demo was available only in English, and we read many of you want it in your native languages, which is why we are doing our best to make it ready for release.
We will be separating all of the text strings into two categories; Feature and Content - and we plan to translate 100% of the features by the Early Access release while we can’t foresee how much of the content will be available for other languages.
TFM has a lot of content and the hardest part is not that, we constantly add and change the content and update the game, so there has to be some kind of a flexible translation system that updates the changes quickly. We plan to use a community translation tool for the content part of things. More of that will be announced later. If you want to help us with the translations, please join TFM Discord Server and click your language’s flag on the translations channel.
Additional highlights and links to enjoy
As Gathering Tree we want to thank everyone who participated in the demo again, we will follow our vision to make a fresh and beautiful strategy simulation game with emergent storytelling and loads of content and strengthen the parts that set TFM apart from all the other games out there.
Splattercat
“I’ve spent about an hour with this Steam Festival and I’m pleased to say it’s an interesting game! It’s saddled somewhere in between like a God game, Rimworld, and RPG.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9NQi18P6J14
Nookrium
“Neat. I want to see more of it. Now that I know what I’m doing - I was very lost for a long time, I went in there with this idea of Rimworld and Colony Sim - that’s what I originally thought, clearly it’s not that.”
“Compared to a lot of the demos I’ve been playing this time around it’s been really good.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KcIELyUrsio
True Achievements
They've kindly put TFM: The First Men in their "Xbox Wishlist" in this post about upcoming Xbox games that are participating in the festival.