Firstly, here’s a short video demonstrating some of the new features in the game. If you prefer to read, the fuller description is below.

Some work has been done on improving the balance and functionality of the different biomes. In particular the beach biome, where I’ve made adjustments to the spawning parameters of crab holes along the beach. Crab holes now only spawn once the tide goes out, and are destroyed as the tide comes back in. So your best time to extract crabs will be at dusk or at dawn.

There are quite a few new tribe options now, the main ones being hair colour selection and trait selection. Much like tribe colour, hair colour affects foreign tribe’s relations towards your tribe. So you can have a foreign tribe that likes your tribe colour but dislikes your hair colour.

Traits give the player some customisation options if they prefer playing a certain way.

As I approach the end of Alpha, I’ve added more visual effects to make identifying what’s going on easier for the player. You will see decay lines coming out of items and carcasses on the ground that are losing durability.

When a Pokian is wet and thus more susceptible to hypothermia, you will also see water dripping from their body. Older Pokians and other humanoids have their hair turn grey and shrivel up slightly as they age. Below you can really see the effect when the ageing process is sped up.

The probability of new Pokians arriving or being born is displayed on the tribe panel. Previously there was nothing to tell the player how likely they were to arrive, and you would get a surprise visit from new Pokians without having time to prepare clothing etc.

The charting functions have also been improved quite a bit. You can see foreign tribe’s prosperity over time on the statistics page once you have fully discovered the foreign tribe.

That’s just a selection of the changes in this update. I did quite a bit of game balancing and bug fixes as well. Here’s the full list below.

Features

• Selectable tribe hair colour
• Hair colour turns grey as Pokians age
• Pokians start shriveling as they approach old age
• Added influence border selection for player
• Added keyboard rebinding on Options page
• Added options for Fahrenheit and imperial weights
• Task panel and query panel now show name of object being crafted, harvested, extracted or stored
• Added timeline events for main objective and tribe relation discoveries
• Add probability of foreign raid in next 24 hours to diplomacy panel
• Removed harvest growth speed option on world gen setup
• Added craft panel categories for trinkets and components
• Add option on world gen for number of neighbouring tribes and average prosperity
• Add functionality for multiple datasets in one chart
• Add foreign tribe prosperities on stats page
• Add chart for tribe size on stats page
• Add display for total play time to stats page
• Added go to location buttons for failed tasks notifications
• Added tutorial for object decay after main tutorial
• Tribe panel prosperity breakdown includes trinkets as separate category
• Added vfx to indicate items on ground decaying
• Added vfx for wet humanoids
• Crafting panel includes clothing needed by Pokians
• Add probability of nomads and pregnancy in next 24 hours to prosperity panel
• Added partner query item to query panel for humans
• Added news item when a new family is formed
• No food or no water flashes in panel summary

Gameplay

• Removed ability requirement for building monuments
• Moved tendons into fibre category and changed crafting requirements
• Hair colour has relations effect with other tribes
• Modified animal kills relation so only accounts for kills in past year
• Reduced chance of catching disease by 75%
• Reduced magnitude of colour different effect on foreign relations
• Implemented traits for player tribe that affect various aspects of gameplay
• Every time foreign tribe attacks, reduces hatred by 20
• Probability of a foreign raid is proportional to relations, with 100% chance of attack at -200
• Limited maximum positive relationship to 200
• Necklaces require any fibre for crafting
• Added totem pole building
• Added charcoal formation as fires burn
• Removed weakness disease effect
• Increased tendon output from butchering carcass
• Re-enabled prosperity changes for foreign tribes
• Change rain to snow if rain starts falling and temperature goes below 0 degrees
• Decreased chance of getting hypothermia/hyperthermia when too hot or cold
• Tribe possible requests stay up for 3 days instead of 1
• Improved foreign tribe prosperity fluctuations to be more natural
• Extracting herbs provides guaranteed herbs compared to harvesting
• Increased maximum number of members per family to 8
• Made monuments passable but with high move cost and low speed
• Halved animal spawn rate in Tundra and Semi-arid biomes
• Increased cactus fruit yield to 2
• Changed maximum age of starting tribe from 40 to 26
• Resources now take 3 days to regenerate instead of regenerating straight away
• Added requirement for minimum water present for crab holes to spawn
• Reduced rate of sea shell spawns
• Reduced impact of night time on desire to sleep so tasks more likely to be completed
• Rebalanced regeneration rate of all resources
• Allow animals to sleep under bushes or on ground

Fixes

• Fixed duplicate first names for bipedals
• Removed some stats from win page and added others
• Fixed large object images being unintentionally shrunk slightly
• Fixed rare river generation crashing bug
• Weight query displays in kilograms
• Fixed dodge chance too high
• Fixed Pokian names not assigned properly
• Changed object collection tutorial to require object in influence area instead of in Pokian hands
• Reduced variation in animal base weight to avoid extreme anorexia
• Added info in tutorial about finding fibres for clothing
• Snow shows on minimap now
• Fixed query panel not remembering last selected tabs correctly
• Fixed bleeding effect stopped showing
• Fixed rare plant loading game crashing bug
• Fixed chart mega slowdowns when played for a long time and lots of points
• Fixed ambient sound volumes not affected by options when game already started
• Fixed constant timeline printout of main objective
• Fixed object stretching in hands from height differences
• Fixed shaman making rain call lots of times
• Fixed foreign tribe raids only spawning males
• Fixed monument relations influencer counting large monuments 7x
• Fixed Tundra biome can’t extract ground
• Fixed new adult bringing spouse into existing family instead of creating a new family
• Fixed children sprite not properly changing to adult sprite
• Added check for potential spouse being an adult
• Switched two starting tutorial notifications so they make more sense
• Added check for processing designate tool tip only when mouse not over UI
• Fixed horse carcass image is human carcass
• Fixed crafting panel filter not recognising “any” name for materials requirement

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Website – PokingWaterGames.com
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In this update we have lots of changes, including graphics replacements, more visual effects, a new tribe name generator, user experience improvements, more tutorials, I could go on and on!

Firstly, graphical updates. The Pokian figures have been replaced with proper characters. They match the rest of the game better now. You can still select their tattoo and colour, and foreign tribes will still be generated with a random tattoo and colour. More of my lingering placeholder UI has also been replaced with visuals that match the game better, like the weather and season sprites. Finally, the terrain transitions have been improved so there are no more sharp divides between hexes.

Fish have been added as a resource that can be extracted from rivers (requires water to be flowing to spawn fish). Also, mosquitoes spawn in areas of the map when the humidity and temperature are high enough. They can give your Pokians malaria if they hang around infested areas for too long. To accommodate these two “resources”, I’ve made some underlying changes to the resource generation system, so you might notice resources spawn slightly more/less than in the previous version.

There were some parts of the tutorial which needed improvement, in particular the stockpiling tutorial. Stockpiles are a very powerful tool and I don’t think that came across clearly enough, so I’ve modified it to better show what you can do with them. There’s also a tutorial for the task panel, where you can now set the priorities of different tasks. While I was looking at this, I also improved task assignments. Tasks are now done in order of assignment after they are sorted by priority.

The last thing I’ll talk about is the epic tribe name generator! It picks a random word from three lists and combines them to give tribes their names. You can still rename your own tribe of course, though foreign tribes will now be more memorable with names like “Crimson Foot Lovers”. I might have to come up with a similar system for human names.

Here’s the full change list for Alpha 15.

Features

• Add shivering visual effect for anyone who is cold
• Display total change of relation/discovery effects on diplomacy panel
• Added sound for human dying
• New task request created an icon notification on task button
• New relation influencer creates an icon notification on diplomacy button
• Add current human abilities to status page of query panel
• Human query panel stays on current tab when switching between humans
• Add stockpile button to side menu to replace map menu stockpiling
• Added average durability of food to charts
• Added epic tribe name generator
• Added items hair string and flax fibres (no use yet)
• Add temperature/humidity/water range functionality for when resources can appear
• Added gaining/losing a sickness to timeline
• Ability requirement added to tooltip for extract/gather/butcher
• Implemented new human sprites with colour changes and tattoos
• Added tracking of certain player inputs
• Added objective descriptors to xml file
• Added tutorial for storing objects and material collection
• Implemented better transitions between terrain tiles
• Added changeable task priorities from task panel
• Added tutorial for task panel
• Added tutorials for building materials requirements
• Added functionality for events panel closing triggering next tutorial

Gameplay

• Make plants/resources much less likely to grow on influence hexes
• Disallow children from performing any tasks
• Balanced tribe relations effects so will no longer have all good/bad influencers
• Made most items decay in water
• Foreign tribes select random homo species and name when generated
• Removed restriction from extracting from deep water
• Added fish spawning as resource
• Added mosquitoes with malaria sickness
• Removed restriction requiring large area for meeting point
• Changed stockpile tutorial so need to create a pile that stores wood
• Modified task queuing so less frequent shuffling of jobs in queue
• Added current pregnancies to prosperity check for future pregnancies
• Massively reduced the number of checks per day for getting pregnant
• Implement hourly and daily temperature fluctuations from the average
• Added extra cost modifier to Pokian pathfinder for water

Fixes

• Fixed raids being launched from two different functions
• Fixed Pokians fleeing from foreign raids instead of helping fellow tribesmen
• Fixed selection box jumping around sometimes when objects moving
• Fixed query panel can’t scroll list of thoughts
• Fixed flashing when snow melting
• Fixed animal sound effects when fighting not playing occasionally
• Fixed the long-standing malformed characters bug for random text (finally!!)
• Fixed hut request counting already constructed huts, instead of only newly constructed ones
• Fixed pregnancy news item keeps reappearing and making noises
• Changed out of stamina thought bubble to be animation
• Fixed activating renaming Pokians textbox causes shortcut keys to stop working
• Added preventative measure to avoid phantom sprite bug for objs outside FOV
• Refactored resource spawning for more flexibility
• Added initial image randomiser for animated objects
• Fixed certain variables in spawndata not being saved
• Fixed Pokians losing skin colour when underwater
• Made default food stockpile more obvious and apply to all new storage buildings
• Refactored starting fire and placing buildings functionality
• Fixed tattoo scroll buttons so they are more responsive
• Fixed objects in left hand not facing correct direction
• Fixed clicking outside game window assigning tasks
• Fixed charts not scaling properly with UI
• Fixed loading game sometimes crashing due to visual effects
• Fixed allowing butchering and stockpiling carcass at the same time
• Fixed cancelling task from taskpanel causes priorities list to double-load
• Tweaked hunger and thirst algorithm for better AI when both values are low
• Added check for number of Pokians before automatically creating store object tasks
• Fixed bug with animals navigating to wrong hex sometimes

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Twitter – ParsleyPWG
Website – PokingWaterGames.com

Continuing on from my last video, here is a new one on prosperity, influence and crafting in Tribe Of Pok:

This update is mainly about adding functionality and fixes rather than gameplay changes. You can now select the colour of your tribe members and give them a tattoo to distinguish them from other tribes’ members. They can be any colour you want simply by adjusting the RGB values on the World Generation page. The tattoo can be selected from a range of presets (currently using placeholders).

At this point I thought it would be interesting to turn this “tribal colour” into another layer of gameplay. When your tribe meets a foreign tribe for the first time, the tribes know nothing about each other. They make judgements based on first impressions, which is where their colour comes in. Diplomatic relations are affected based on the difference between the two tribes’ colours. The larger the difference, the larger the penalty. For example a pure red tribe would tend to dislike a pink tribe, but not as much as they would hate a pure blue tribe. Of course, you can overcome these natural relations penalties by performing actions the foreign tribe likes, as I discussed in the last update.

Lastly, let’s talk about charts! I enjoy looking at numbers and statistics when playing games, which is why this game itself is so simulation-heavy. Now I’ve added history charts that track food and prosperity so you can see how they are changing over time. You can access them by clicking on the small panel at the top that shows your current water, prosperity and food supply. I should be able to add more charts e.g for tribe relations without too much trouble in the future.

Here’s a full list of changes for Alpha 13:

Features

• Add cactus tree to semi-arid
• Implemented statistics page
• Added tracking for objects used/created by humans
• Added chart for prosperity history to stats page
• Added query box for quick ground details
• Added categories in crafting menu
• Added colour picker tribe members
• Added functionality for tattoos on bodies
• Added tattoo selection to GenWorld Page
• Added functionality for relation effect based on colour
• Added foreign tribe member display to diplomacy panel
• Added sprite indicator for where craft tasks will be assigned on map
• Can access statistics page by clicking panel summary
• Added chart for food history to stats page

Gameplay

• Foreign relations affected by tribe colour differences
• Foreign tribe colour and tattoo slowly revealed as discovery level increases
• Increased jaggedness of default map

Fixes

• Major optimisation of snowing effect
• Fixed snow not loading straight away when loading game
• Fixed various variables not loading correctly when loading game
• Change task panel materials to read from owned objects instead of nearby objects
• Fixed animals slightly lagging behind their clothing when drawn
• Fixed not all bodies displaying clothing at start
• Fixed crashing bug when loading game due to VFX vertex positions not reset properly
• Tweaked day/night shader for a bluish hue at night
• Fixed tribe colour changing when night/day changes
• Fixed unable to extract herb bush

Twitter – ParsleyPWG
Website – PokingWaterGames.com

For this update I’ve been mainly working on a major overhaul of the diplomacy system. I think it now fits in better with the direction the game is going, I’ll talk more about that in a moment.

In the previous system we had sending scouts off the map, and buttons to perform “Actions” like taunting or attacking other tribes. It was becoming very complex from a programming perspective, and I found it wasn’t very engaging from a gameplay perspective either. Sometimes you would order a person to go scout, they would have another more urgent desire along the way (like being attacked by an animal) and it would cause edge case AI problems that took ages to troubleshoot. The interface required for diplomacy missions would also have required a lot more work as more Actions were added. It started to feel like a separate system from the rest of the game, rather than an integrated part of it.

Discovery

So I threw that away, salvaged what was still useful and built a new mechanism for diplomacy with neighbouring tribes. It’s a two-stage system that I think is pretty unique. The first stage is Discovery. This is when your tribe doesn’t know about the existence of other tribes. You have to do certain things within your tribe for these foreign tribes to notice you and increase their discovery level.

Each foreign tribe has a set of ‘influencers’ that affects how quickly they discover your tribe. For example, one tribe might have smoke from fires as an influencer, so the more fires you start, the faster their discovery level increases. Another tribe could notice there are less animals in the area due to your overhunting and decide to investigate (well, they don’t actually investigate but their discovery level increases).

Note that all these influencers are tied to things you can affect on the game map. It builds on the core game mechanics like starting fires, hunting, etc which I think works way better than the previous system.

Relations

Once a tribe’s discovery level reaches 100%, the second stage commences. This is the relations stage. The influencers that previously affected a tribe’s discovery rate now affect how that tribe feels towards you. For example, let’s say the number of fires is an influencer in the Discovery stage. Does that tribe feel inspired by your control over such a force of nature, or threatened by your pyromaniac tendencies? This will affect whether they like you more, or hate you more.

So that’s the big change in this update. I’ve also made various balance changes, visual improvements and the usual bug fixes. A full change log is listed below.

Alpha 11

Features

• Added x button to close management panels
• Sort stockpile panel by most to least stuff
• Add sleep vfx
• Added flashing for notifications when they appear
• Separated building menu into groups of buildings
• Added raindrop animation
• Added close window button to query panel
• Add movement speed increase reward
• Change blood layer into animation that slowly fades away
• Number of relation influencers increases as discovery level increases

Gameplay

• Achievement massacre wood requirement scales with prosperity
• Achievement Great hunt scales with prosperity
• In satisfying hunger, human will immediately seek food again if not fully satiated
• Reduced food supply contribution to prosperity from 5 to 3
• Reduced rate of influence shrinking when prosperity too low
• Added ability to deconstruct buildings using extract button
• Wild animals now avoid larger area around human influence
• Cooked meat provides much more hunger revival than fruit
• Overhauled foreign tribe discovery mechanics
• Foreign tribes have 3 randomly selected discovery mechanisms
• Overhaul relation modifiers with foreign tribes
• Foreign tribe relations based on likes/dislikes from discovery
• Improved raiding party AI behaviour

Fixes

• Fixed placing buildings task being cancelled by humans
• Added cooldown for failed tasks so not constantly reattempting them
• Properly space Objectives, active and news on right side depending on window size
• Fixed various problems with notifications
• Fixed if clicking on same notification twice, will not create another one of same type
• Fix stockpile panel scroll button not working and add columns
• Fixed human standing in water when idling and getting wet
• Fix multiple humans going after the same piece of food
• Fixed button array scrolling issue when over > 2 pages
• Fixed crafting objects even without required materials
• Fixed non-humanoid mammals not burning when on fire
• Fixed great hunt objective completion not triggering
• Fix not cooking some meats randomly
• Fixed incorrect image for vfx when loading game
• Fixed same reward choices all the time appearing
• Fixed make object task failing due to unset position
• Fixed crafting objects reset after Pokian abandons task
• Removed redundant scout profession
• Moved blood layer to between ground and object layer

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Twitter – ParsleyPWG
Website – PokingWaterGames.com