Poking Water Games

Tribe Of Pok: Changelog for Alpha 6

This update focuses on improvements to the Combat user interface and mechanics. Although fighting is not a major focus of the game, it’s still important that combat feels solid, given how important it is for hunting animals and protecting the tribe. A full change log is listed below. Firstly, here is a screenshot of the new main menu with a beautiful background by our artist Alfonso:

Alpha 6 Changelog

New Features

Implement animation for mosquito and fish school
Added clay as a resource
Added clay statue and clay necklace items
Diseases on/off toggle on Generate World Page
Entering/exiting combat mode is more prominent (UI changes and music added)
Added battle damage reports under human thoughts query panel
Bipedal animals get randomly selected proper names instead of being numbers
Added tutorial for query panel
First implementation of query panel filtering (only vital statistics show up unless filter unticked)
Added music volume slider on options page
In combat mode, player units and enemies differentiated by green and red text
Added ability to select all Warriors from side menu in combat mode
Added short tutorial for entering combat mode
Implemented new main menu background/music
Added path building for increasing movement speed

Gameplay Changes

Reduce frequency of fish and mosquito creation
Changed ant mount generation from completely random to forming in patches
Ant mounds no longer take up space (volume = 0)
All animals now have a body, not just bipedal animals
Damage amount of variation is dependent on strength of damage
Added natural pierce, slash, blunt protection for animals
Added damage to clothing durability when body part hit
Replace attacking cool down green bars with blue bars
Removed tribe member’s sickness/disease from prosperity calculation
When in combat mode and selecting Pokians, query panel now autodisplays random selected Pokian
Implemented variable attack speeds for different animals
Bow reimplemented, creates arrows automatically
Arrows disappear through decay after small amount of time
Changed sleep progress bar from zZz to blue moons
Combat dodge chance varies depending on stamina
Stamina reduced by fighting
Added aggression comparison to fight or flight AI to decide which animal flees
Tweaked plant harvest chance growth so higher in summer/spring and decreases in autumn/winter
Tweaked some symptoms effects for more fun

Fixes

Fixed mini-map clicking not going to the correct location
Fish school image adjusted so it appears underwater
Fixed animal fat using fish image and fish using animal fat image
Fixed bubble text alignment
Fix tool-tip going too far left when off screen
Removed redundant minor/major injury designations from query panel
Fixed animal attacking itself after another animal begins attacking it
Small tweak to global enemy targeting to stop premature “No more fighting” comment
Fixed warriors running away when still in combat mode
Fixed tile map not drawing bounds correctly
Tweaked combat mode so Pokian doesn’t switch between attacking and running away rapidly
Tweaked input processor to stop camera jumping around when assigning movement in combat mode
Game window only edge scrolls when it’s in focus
When entering/exiting combat mode, close query panels and map menu
Fixed sprite getting stuck as explosion cloud
Fixed flying weapons not showing up and aligning properly
Fixed UI combat arrows not aligned properly for attack
Realigned panel summary info to be below top menu
Tweaked UI side menu sprites for meeting point and start fire
Fix exiting UI state via side menu not removing centered text
Slight changes to which thoughts show up on screen
Fix text going out of bounds in notes
If Pokian in middle of task and decides to do something more important, will put task back on queue for others
Fixed destroying animal while fighting causes winner to be stuck in loop

If you would like to support development you can purchase and play the Alpha or sign up to the newsletter

Twitter – ParsleyPWG
Website – PokingWaterGames.com

By Parsley|June 4th, 2015|GameDev|0 Comments

Activity Summary Week 22, 2015

For the week from 24 May to 31 May I’ve been working on:

Slight changes to which thoughts show up on screen
Fix animations not working
Fix text going out of bounds in notes by removing colouring words
Changed sleep progress bar from zZz to blue moons
Change red colouring for combat thoughts to ochre
Fixed events panel text going out of bounds at certain UI scales
Proper labels for notifications arriving
Combat dodge chance varies depending on stamina
Stamina reduced by fighting
Added aggression comparison to fight or flight to decide which animal flees
Tweaked plant harvest chance growth so higher in summer/spring and decrease in autumn/winter
If Pokian in middle of task and decides to do something else, will put task back on queue for others
Changed building and combat mode side menu UI sprite
Tweaked some symptoms effects
Fixed query panel click processed twice when tribe panel open
Implemented new main menu background with lighting effects
All main menu pages display within a box
Added functionality for buildings to modify movement speed and cost
Added path building which increases movement speed
Refactored the way animal movement speed is calculated
Fixed destroying animal while fighting causes winner to be stuck in loop
Implemented rotation for assigning building sprites

By Parsley|June 1st, 2015|Activity Summary|0 Comments

Activity Summary Week 21, 2015

For the week from 18 May to 24 May I’ve been working on:

When entering/exiting combat mode, close query panels and map menu
Add values for natural protection on all animals
Implemented variable attack speed depending on animal
Re-implement drowning animal looking for nearest land and navigating to it
Refactored object sprites and animations
Fix sprite getting stuck as explosion
Fix flying weapons not showing up and aligning properly
Fix combat arrows not assigned properly for final attack
Realigned panel summary info to be below top menu
Tweaked sprite colour change due to weather to be consistent with new game speeds
Bow re-implemented, creates arrows automatically
Arrows disappear through decay after small amount of time
Added ability to select all Warriors from side menu in combat mode
Added short tutorial for entering combat mode
Tweaked UI side menu sprites for meeting point and start fire
Fix exiting UI state via side menu not removing title text

By Parsley|May 25th, 2015|Activity Summary|0 Comments

Tribe Of Pok: Improvements made to the combat UI

Been working on battle reporting lately. When a Pokian swings an axe, throws a spear, causes damage or gets attacked the event is recorded. Information about each hit can be found by hovering over the actions in the query panel. Damage to weapons and clothing durability are also recorded.

To go with this, I made some combat mode improvements to how unit and target selection work. You can now also specify which Pokians you want to choose to move, even if there are multiple standing on the same tile. Right-click the name to de-select that Pokian.

Then when you click on a hex with possible targets, a pop up appears allowing you to select which animal to attack

It’s also more obvious when you’ve entered Combat Mode now. Battle music will start playing and the UI changes colour. I’ve also made some menus and panels auto-close when switching between modes to keep things clean.

Some other improvements to combat:

AI improvements. When you select a target for your Pokians to attack, they will keep attacking it until they are too weak, even if you exit Combat Mode. Previously if you exited Combat Mode while they were still fighting, they would run away immediately.
All animals now have natural slash, blunt and pierce protections, so some weapons are more effective against certain animals
All animals now have a body, not just bipedal animals (means front paws can be damaged separately from the head for example)
Damage is not fixed anymore, instead it varies around a base level. This is to overcome the 20 pierce defense clothing providing immunity from the 20 pierce attack weapon problem

By Parsley|May 20th, 2015|GameDev|0 Comments

Activity Summary Week 20, 2015

Many changes to combat mode this week, which has required a lot of internal testing. For the week from 11 May to 17 May I’ve been working on:

Fix tooltip going too far left when off screen
Removed redundant minor/major injury designations from query panel
Fixed Pains in querypanel tooltips showing up in other tabs
Put damage summary for each combat event in tooltip in query panel
All animals now have a body, not just bipedals
Refactored damage calculations
Small tweak to global enemy targeting to stop premature “No more fighting” comment
Added battle damage reports under human thoughts query panel
Added tooltips for battle reports with more details
Each damage type amount of variation is dependant on strength of damage type
Add disease and family tooltip on Tribe setup page
Fixed animal attacking itself after another animal begins attacking it
Bipedals get randomly selected proper names instead of being numbers
Add weapon durability information to battle reports
Updated the way bruises and cuts calculated for more variability
Added natural pierce, slash, blunt protection for animals
Added clothing damage when hit and wearable on body part
Create arena mode to internally test out combat
Refactored AI to make fight or flight choice clearer
Fixed warriors running away when still in combat mode
Fixed tilemap not drawing bounds correctly
Animal and human defenses show up in querypanel
Added more actions to battle report
Tweaked combat mode so Pokian doesn’t switch between attacking and running away rapidly
Replace attacking cooldown green bars with blue bars
Make UI transition to combat color a gradient of change
Implemented main menu and battle music
Added tutorial for query panel
First implementation of query panel filtering
Query panel only exposes vital details at any moment and hides excess details
Removed tribe members and sickness from prosperity calculation
When in combat mode and selecting Pokians, query panel now autodisplays random selected Pokian
Map menu shows selected humans as green text in combat mode
Tweaked input processor to stop camera jumping around when assigning movement in combat mode
Added music volume slider on options page

By Parsley|May 18th, 2015|Activity Summary|0 Comments

Activity Summary Week 19, 2015

This week is split up into two parts to separate the changes in Alpha 5 from the work I’ve been doing in the unreleased Alpha 6. For the week from 04 May to 10 May I’ve been working on:

Alpha 5

Fix opening mapmenu then changing gamestate causes unable to get rid of mapmenu
Change diplomacy panel elements to be more consistent
Fixed some lingering UI scaling issues
Added fishing error tipstring if no fishing at location
Added click sound for successful gather/extract/fishing/build assignment
Fixed panel summary positions not being set on game start
Fixed ticking/unticking tribe panel misaligns legend equipment
Fixed deleting horizontal button causing other buttons in list to misalign
Added survive and prosper clause to tutorial
Disabled tradepost/trading until it can be improved
Added “click to change” hint for Pokian names
Fixed backspace in textbox not working
Added influence area shrinking notification
Refactored human effects display
Fixed tribe panel display summary

Alpha 6

Implement ground effect animation for mosquito and fish school
Reduce frequency of fish and mosquito creation
Fix mini-map clicking not going to the correct location
Fish school image adjusted so it appears underwater
Add clay object to XML
Fixed animal fat using fish image and fish using animal fat image – whoops
Fix clay remaining when all is extracted
Added clay statue and clay necklace
Diseases on/off toggle on Generate World Page
Fixed bubble text alignment
Changed ant mount generation from completely random to forming in patches
Ant mounds no longer take up space
Entering combat mode changes UI colour
Moved copyright to declutter main menu
Refactored human thoughts to be separated into types

By Parsley|May 11th, 2015|Activity Summary|0 Comments

Tribe Of Pok Demo and Purchase Available!

Greetings everyone! It’s time. Time for what? For the first proper Alpha release (to be called Alpha 5 due historical reasons)! The past month and a half has been spent play testing, fixing obvious issues, improving the user experience and setting up the deployment process for future Alpha versions. However, being a one-man studio means there are likely still problems I haven’t found, so please consider downloading the Alpha 5 Demo to see if the game works on your system. Bug reports on the forum are also appreciated. You can purchase the game via the Humble Widget on the Poking Water Games website.

Some mechanics are bare bones and require more work to be done, for example Diplomacy. Other mechanics have undergone several iterations and work well, for example gathering/extracting resources. A road map showing the progress of each feature can be found on the demo page.

I was hoping to get a trailer done but that would have taken another few weeks – time I would rather spend developing the actual game. I did record some footage, which I might edit and post one day.

I look forward to future development with feedback from the community!

By Parsley|May 8th, 2015|GameDev|0 Comments

Activity Summary Week 18, 2015

This week was mostly spent updating external libraries and a massive overhaul to get the UI scaling. For the week from 27 Apr to 03 May I’ve been working on:

Update mingw to 4.81
Update boost to 1.58
Update sfml to 2.2
Fixed some texts not showing up after update
Cleaned up deploy to Release process
Cleaned up shader reading implementation
Added UI scaling adjustment to options menu
Fixed a hundred different scaling issues
Fixed text jumping for sidemenu buttons
Buttonsliders show two decimal places

By Parsley|May 4th, 2015|Activity Summary|0 Comments

Activity Summary Week 17, 2015

For the week from 20 Apr to 26 Apr I’ve been working on:

Add notification for campfire extinguished due to rain
Fix tribe panel clicking multiple tribe members crashing
Aggressiveness in animal querypanel
Querypanel for task has cancel option
Refactored UI weather display into separate class
Added storage of past data for map humidity
Worked on UI chart functionality
Worked on graph to plot humidity over time
UIChart can take data within a range
Added attack option to querypanel
Reduced evaporation contribution to water vapour increase
Implemented temperature graph
Implemented temperature reduction when raining
Fixed light source not disappearing when fire went out
Added end of demo warning notification
Added main page note for save/load disabled in demo
Disabled arctic biome until it actually works
Implemented stockpile tutorial
Butcher tutorial activates when animal killed
Make default animal aggressiveness 20
Fixed extracting resources not using up tool durability
Fixed loading game caused active cook meat tasks to fail
Fixed progressbar textures not set on game load
Fixed textbox sometimes not showing up
Querypanel most objects showing forbid/reserve status
Added tutorial for prosperity
Fixed same stockpile point being added multiple times by putting in check
Fixed UI not immediately repositioning when window moved
Genworld page can select number of starting families
Genworld page made map and tribe tabs more prominent
Worked on making text sizes more consistent/scalable in future
Fixed crashing when no saved games to load
Added warning when loading game that does not exist

By Parsley|April 26th, 2015|Activity Summary|0 Comments

Activity Summary Week 16, 2015

For the week from 13 Apr to 19 Apr I’ve been working on:

Added cooldown for GoalEquip
Fix tribepanel extra members not displaying
Changed object humidity effect reading waterdecay value instead of bacteriadecay
Removed bags decaying due to water
Fixed crafting some buildings causes crash due to unset craft time
Change fish piece to edible in xml
Added slider for max animal aggressiveness during worldgen
Fixed ant mounds immediately wiped out by changing decay status for unsheltered objs
Dataoverlay shows number of gathers remaining instead of % chance to gather
Plant querypanel now shows harvest % chance success
Make ground extraction deterministic instead of probabilistic
Updated gather/extract tool tips
Fix notifications position not set correctly when first created
Moved tooltip out from UI so can be activated from genworldpage
Refactored game engine
Genworld page tipstring implemented
Harvest growth speed setting on worldgenpage
Fix in tribepanel clicking querypanel not registering
Tweaked hunger/thirst desire so less likely to starve to death while sleeping
Fixed non-hunger reviving edibles in pit stopping humans from finding hunger reviving edibles
Added sound for swinging weapon
Randomised fertile grass harvest times
Fix mapmenu in tribepanel not working
Fertile grass can appear on any organics level of grass
Fix gravel not extractable
Disable WASD when on managepanel
Added new method for grass to grow into fertile grass
Store harvest produce succcess/fail string in xml
Fix ant harvest availability not decreasing

By Parsley|April 20th, 2015|Activity Summary|0 Comments

Recent Posts

About Parsley

Tribe Of Pok: Changelog for Alpha 6

Alpha 6 Changelog

New Features

Gameplay Changes

Fixes

Activity Summary Week 22, 2015

Activity Summary Week 21, 2015

Tribe Of Pok: Improvements made to the combat UI

Activity Summary Week 20, 2015

Activity Summary Week 19, 2015

Alpha 5

Alpha 6

Tribe Of Pok Demo and Purchase Available!

Activity Summary Week 18, 2015

Activity Summary Week 17, 2015

Activity Summary Week 16, 2015