Indie Dev Blog: Folk Tale

Watching this game develop has been awesome! You folks have done outstanding work! (and you aren't finished yet!!)

Congratulations on getting the Steam "Greenlight", that's an achievement all on it's own!

I look forward to seeing this one come out (and picking it up ).

Cheers,

Galen

 

Latest blog on why Folk Tale passed on starting its funding campaign to coincide with the UK launch of Kickstarter:

http://blog.gamesfoundry.com/2012/11/kickstarter-uk-why-we-passed.html

 

Monastery Of The Mangy Wolf

Our latest update is a mini-feature revealing the overhauled Monastery Of the Mangy Wolf. Home to Rufus Pu and his hairy Were-fu practising minions, the snow peaks of this winter tundra are one of the key locations you will be able to explore in the upcoming demo.

Drawing inspiration from the magnificent Buddhist temples and palaces found across Asia, comparisons will inevitably be made with Mists of Pandaria. The location was written into the Folk Tale script 18 months ago, and rather than remove it we decided to press ahead and include it as an example of the varied and detailed environments you can expect in the final release. It's the final environmental zone to be included in the demo, joining the rolling green hills of the village hamlet, arid desert of the ogre mines, the volcanic old forge, and the goblin swamp.



To pack so many environments into a single level, we've broken the single large terrain into 25 separate chunks, and the total per-chunk texture count reduced from 27 to just 8 to reduce draw calls and ease fill rate issues we started noticing on older GPUs. While this sounds like a step backwards, it's actually allowed us to add more terrain textures than previously. The only downside was that all the chunks needed a complete and time-consuming repaint.



To further push the amount of texture detail, we've added a vertex color blend shader for the Monastery courtyard. This enables us to blend from snow to cobblestone/snow in the grooves, and finally into cobble without having to include the cobble textures in the terrain. It's an old-school technique we'll be using increasingly throughout development.



Looking skywards, the previous static photo skymap has been replaced by a dynamic sky dome system that grants us control over colour gradients as well as moving clouds. Overall the effect is far more consistent with the hand-painted art style.

Tom has been pressing ahead with cut scenes and is now celebrating not only Christmas, but the completion of all the draft versions which marks a significant internal milestone. For a small indie team, the inclusion of voice acted cut scenes is a major undertaking, but essential for story-telling. We just don't like the moving 2D approach that a number of recent AAA titles have taken. It's unlikely we'll include footage from the cut scenes in WIP videos as we don't want to spoil the enjoyment you will hopefully get from the demo.



There's lot more been happening beyond what we've listed here. We've added flow mapping as part of a test to improve the look of liquids such as lava. Hayden is near completion on modelling and painting the kobolds that feature early game as combat practice. In programming, a lot of feasibility work has been done on multi-player including adding a chat server which we're considering leaving in the demo to allow gamers to chat with the dev team. We've also been extending the code for loot attributes which impacts combat and crafting. By adventuring out beyond the relative safety of your village, you'll be able to find magic items that your villagers can equip to better perform their occupations, or transmute into crafting resources to make your own items as you find recipes.

Heading into the New Year, our focus will shift to UI and modelling loot, unlocking a lot of the games written but inaccessible functionality. And then its into testing, launch our Kickstarter campaign, and release the demo. We'd like to thank everyone that has signed up for beta for their continued patience. Things are taking longer than we'd hoped, but Folk Tale really is shaping up very nicely, and hopefully you'll think it's worth the wait.

 

Looks and sounds fantastic, as usual!

 

Fantastic work!!!!

Following this since begining (or at least since you started your blog), i have also been looking ways to model chinese roofs and your video has given me great inspiration for approach.

Keep up the work i think that music will play big role in project like this, i like what i hear so far in latest video.

 

Looks epic! Keep up the great work.

 

While the dev team take some well earned time off over the festive break, I've been tinkering with the main character shader used in Folk Tale, looking at ways we can introduce character customization after we've shipped the demo. This is an evolving post so I'll keep updating it with progress.



One of the design objectives for the final game is to add variety to characters so they don't all look like they came off a drone factory line. While some of that will come from varying geometry such as hair styles, clothing and props, there are a number of simple old-school tricks that I've been meaning to try out at the shader level.

Color Tinting

Both skin tone and clothing colors can be varied by converting areas of the artists original diffuse texture to grayscale and applying one or more tint colors in the shader. By painting vertices in the geometry with differing levels of red, we can determine not only which parts of the model are tinted, but the influence level too. However, this tends to result in a fairly obvious tinted look ( as seen in the middle ), so I plan to add some variety by introducing color tints directly onto the texture map. That way we should be able to get some nice color gradient blends happening on clothing.

Selective Scaling

Using the green vertex color channel we can define areas of influence for scaling out the vertices along it's normal, allowing us to bulk up muscle areas. For testing purposes I've just splashed on vertex color, but hopefully the technical artists ( familiar with painting bone influence weights during the skinning process ) will exert finer control and produce more natural results.

Height Scaling

This is just a float value applied to the height of every vertex. I still need to offset this so that character scales upwards from the pivot point between their feet rather than the center of the character which causes them to scale into the terrain. I'll also replace this with a vector, since only scaling the y-axis can produce unnatural results.

What's Next?

I want to explore how much variation we can get into faces. Being an RTS with quite a few characters on screen at once, we don't have a heap of polys to play with in the faces. DX11 tessellation might help out when the camera is up close, but at the moment we're keeping Folk Tale on DX9 so that's not an option. As part of previous R&D the shader already supports tessellation with a DX9 fallback, but it remains commented out.

The vertex color blue and alpha channels free, so I plan to bring those into play.

I would like to be able to define a hard edge and not have the influence bleed over into the faces the other side of the edge. I've tried flood filling a selection of faces which looks correct in 3ds Max, but it's still not producing the desired results in Unity.

Finally I'll add a scale influence float to provide better control over muscle bulking.


Update



The height float value has been replaced with a vector to allow scaling on all three axis. Because scaling is done in model space, I needed to offset the geometry height based on y-scale and original geometry height so that the characters feet remain in the correct position. The w value of the Scaling parameter is free, so I'll set that when the customized character is initialized.

I've added a Muscle Bulk Factor parameter to allow dampening of how much influence a 100% green vertex color has. This should enable us to vary the muscle bulk per character instance.

I've reverted back to the artist's original diffuse map to see how well a non-grayscale texture combines with the color tint. Seems to work quite nicely, but I'll have to discuss how we proceed with the artists to ensure the system supports their needs. I've also added a lerp for a nicer blend between tinted and non-tinted vertices.

To get rid of the unwanted bleed associated with using vertex colors, I've requested our technical artist Tom adds double edge loops where skin changes to cloth, slightly extruding the cloth. This should significantly reduce the visual impact.

 

I have to say, this project is awesom. I love the models and the textures. keep it up

 

Our latest blog: The Folly Of Releasing Games Too Early

http://blog.gamesfoundry.com/2013/01/the-folly-of-releasing-games-too-early.html

 

In the last six weeks we've completed the assets for all the playable zones in the demo map and in doing so reached the point at which momentum begins to grow exponentially. The final tasks on the to do list can now be started, all of which run in parallel. So from here on in, it's the big push before testing.

Goblin Swamp

An early version of the swamp featured in screenshots some 18 months ago as the first exploration zone to be built outside of the human village. As the months progressed, the Art Team worked their way around the entire map, modelling and hand-painting five more zones. Welcoming in 2013 having completed the enormous task of designing 7 zones for demo, we arrived full circle back with the swamp, which now looked dated and artistically inconsistent. We could have left it for demo, but that didn't feel right, so we made the decision to completely rebuild it:



The swamp is the final zone in the mini-campaign designed specifically for the demo, where Slavemaster Urzal and his bodyguards hold your villagers captive in the ruins of an ancient civilization. The goblin nation is developing along a path that will see them become an AI-driven enemy nation, with the eventual goal to make them a playable race, most probably as DLC. As such, we've expanded the goblin character roster beyond the military, and introduced occupational characters to help bring the zone to life.



Cut Scenes

With the completion of the swamp art assets, we've ticked off the largest task on the project, and the Art Team are now polishing and optimizing what we have. For example, in a push to improve the visual quality of the cut scenes, the goblins featuring in close-ups are having their now quite old textures over-painted and at a higher resolution. We are also stripping cutout alpha from the character shader, so previously transparent areas such as the tips of feathers need to be painted out. The cut scene animations have been complete for a few months now waiting on the swamp zone and Slavemaster Urzal's base in the Temple Ruins to be finished before going through their next iteration of refinement.



Throughout development we've been doing all the cut scenes in the engine. Now we're into the polishing phase, we're adding a number of post-effects including color correction and depth of field. The downside is that to achieve some of these enhanced visuals at a smooth frame rate in 1080p requires a decent gaming PC, turning them off on slower machines. So we're considering recording out the cut scenes using a top end gaming PC on ultra graphics settings, enabling everyone to enjoy the cut scenes looking their best. It's unlikely, but it is an option we are exploring.

Community Translation Tool

Looking ahead to when we release the demo, we want to reach as many Gamers worldwide as possible, and to do that we need to translate the game into multiple languages. Being a small indie development team, we are frugal with the little budget we have and outsourcing localization to a professional agency isn't an option right now, so we're turning to the Folk Tale community for help. To maximise our chances of getting the very best translations, we've designed a simple to use vote-based system whereby the highest quality translations will rise to the top. The web app is open to all who have opted in to receive the monthly newsletter when signing up to beta, and we hope all multilingual followers will take a look and considering helping us improve Folk Tale.

Beta Signup

For those of you visiting for the first time, applications for closed beta are now open. Please don't forget to opt in if you wish to receive the email newsletter.

 

Some new screenshots and our latest blog, "A Tale Of Toast, From Cumbled Beginnings", a look back at the last two years of development on Folk Tale:

http://www.reddit.com/r/IndieGaming/duplicates/1a010o/a_tale_of_toast_from_crumbled_beginnings/

 

It's been a while since our last update, mostly because we've been swamped getting ready for releasing the alpha on Steam Early Access on 31 May. In preparation I've narrated a gameplay walkthrough video:

We've also been blogging a fair bit on how we've approached various aspects of game production, including some of the lessons we've learned along the way. Hopefully they will provide for an interesting read, especially if you are new to game development:

Storytelling in Folk Tale
http://blog.gamesfoundry.com/2013/04/storytelling-in-folk-tale_30.html

Designing Game Logos ( Gamasutra Featured Post )
http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/SimonDean/20130425/191184/Designing_Game_Logos.php

Designing UI For Hybrid Genre Games ( Gamasutra Featured Post )
http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/SimonDean/20130321/188971/Designing_UI_For_Hybrid_Genre_Games.php

From Rags To Britches
http://blog.gamesfoundry.com/2013/03/from-rags-to-britches.html

( Folk Tale is developed using Unity Pro )

 

Looks awesome! Congrats on the Steam Early Access!

 

Wow... I'm reallu surprised. This game looks really good. I love the art style and the idea.

I think I may be a bit confused about Folk Tale though. Does the player control a group to raid dungeons, etc, similar to something like starcraft? Then to manipulate one character specifically you click them and that bottom left bar will populate with the correct skills?

Also, by making a sandbox world, what will change? Is the story somewhat linear right now (you can only go visit certain areas after you've explored others)?

Again, loving the game.

 

Folk Tale is multi-genre including city building and management, and RPG/strategy/adventure elements that sees you advancing in quest lines based both inside the city you build, and the wilderness beyond your city walls. To achieve the latter, you can control groups of units for mass movement, tabbing/hot-keying to select individual units or clicking on them to access their specialist skills. We're also considering adding default response modes for unit auto-AI.

Folk Tale originally began as a campaign with linear storytelling. Following Steam Greenlight we asked an expanded community what they really wanted from Folk Tale, and the overwhelming response was for it to become a sandbox game. All the work completed has become a nicely packaged mini-campaign tutorial to introduce the player to major gameplay elements and lore. The main sandbox game will feature random events within a dynamic storyline sitting within the lore, and make use of everything we've created thus far including content and systems, as well as the new things we'll be working on throughout the remainder of development. The change in direction has understandably lead to some confusion, and with each video we hope to increase clarity of the final vision. But its better for everyone if we deliver a game that the community really wants.

 

Just checked out Folk Tale on Steam. I love the adaptation of multiple genres and look forward to the finished product. I had fun playing the current revision.

Notes if you're interested:
Liked the following:
-Great Art style
-Great Graphic and audio quality
-Base mechanics work well
-Included genres properly and well intermingled
-Clever humor (and some bad puns) go a long way. It's great to see a game that really wants to be fun and enjoyable.
-Stories are fast-paced and fun without getting tedious.
-Cut scenes are clean, humorous and not eye-gougingly long and boring to watch. This has apparently been a major issue for certain developers.

Issues, some of which I'm sure are already in the works or have been noted by others:
-Tooltips for resources at top
-Current/max population listing needed
-Means to select/cycle through idle units of each type (most notably peasants for training new units)
-Would be helpful and smoother if the mini-map rotates with the camera
-Means to change unit behavior (passive/aggressive) - this especially becomes an issue later in the tutorial where units are running every which way to attack nearby enemies even if they haven't been alerted to player unit presence.
-A change to move/attack on right-click suggested. Left click movement differs from most RTS games and makes it difficult to select units during combat. Found myself moving units when trying to select them/attack a specific target and chain pulling many enemies losing all units.
-Unit/group tactics AI. Possibly options for defending a specific unit (as the mage NPC) and orders to concentrate attacks on specific enemies in a group
-Option for attacking enemies on the way to move order. If the game leads to micro-managing multiple groups, would be optimal to be able to send a group to a specific location, engaging any enemies along the way rather than running past getting hit. Possibly an addition of an indicator letting the player know the group is engaged in combat. Clicking the indicator would take you to the combat.
-A menu for showing grouped units for management and for selection purposes.
-NPC's such as the mage keeping levels gained if they die or only taking a penalty? (ex losing 1 level instead of all)

Thank you for taking the time to read my input. It's great to see developers making inquiries of their fans/customers. (Though hopefully not trying to make everyone happy. A certain game I can think of tried that and became one of the most massively boring multiplayer online games I've ever played.)

It's nice to see well-thought out, fun to play affordable independent games taking the stage over $60 cut-scenes interspersed with pseudo-gameplay of the occasional click. It's also become insulting on top of this to see increased intrusions into player privacy to protect the copyrights on what is essentially a $60 cartoon choose-your-own-adventure.

I enjoy games. Independent developers such as yourselves are helping to bring them back to gamers. Thank you.
-

 

great job!

just picked it up on sale and loving it

 

Looks very cool