Developer Updates February 2024

In this post, we'll update you on our current whereabouts. We have some exciting news to share!

Screen Queensland Support

For starters, we are now supported by the Queensland Government through Screen Queensland’s Games Grant program.

We're very excited about this support!

Expanding Team

We've hired a professional pixel artist to help us get TFC to v1.0.

The artist is an experienced pixel artist who was part of the team behind the amazing and successful game Unpacking.

Discord Developer Updates

Recently, we started sharing snippets of improvements coming to the game for our Discord community more regularly. However, we know that not everyone prefer to use Discord, and so we're sharing it with our Steam community as well here.

Arabian Ostrich

2024 kicks off by showing some more hints at what's coming. The Arabian ostrich was an important subspecies of ostrich in The Fertile Crescent. Sadly, it went extinct around 1966, but will be featured in the game.

Buldings seperate into Civilian and Military buildings

We're also busy implementing general improvements!

As an example, we've ran out of space for building icons in the construction menu.

Therefore, we have split construction into two categories: civilian and military buildings, and drawn some new art for these.

Rivers

"For seven years, my feet have wandered, traversing endless plains, with only flat horizons stretching before me. Land, both fruitful and arid, offered the sole variety. The vast openness seemed unending!!! Yet today, a revelation unfolded. My eyes beheld something unfamiliar. A glistening, flowing substance. 'Is it a river? And a path to traverse it?' I marveled. Have I truly arrived? Will there dawn a day when walls need not encircle our entire village for protection?"

Food Trend Indicator

The food trend indicator is making a comback!

In the past, TFC used to show if your food gathering was higher than your food consumption in general. This way (in theory) you would get a better idea if the amount of foragers and farmers were enough to sustain your population or not.

It hasn't been easy to provide a good representative for this, since it keeps varying based on villager walking distances, etc. The previous solution didn't work as well as we wanted, and so we ended up abandonining it altogether.

Since then, we've given it another attempt to implement this, and we're much happier with the new solution!

There will be up to 3 arrows up or down based on the speed of increasing/depleting your food stock.

Visible Counter System

We'll talk more about new modes and features at some point, but for now, here's another "general improvement" that we've been working on.

There's a few things to notice here!

For one, we've seperated melee armor and ranged armor in this panel, whereas now this panel just shows if a unit generally has good or bad armor. The reason for this change in 1.0 is that the disctinction between melee and ranged armor will become more important.

Another is that you'll get hints about what units it generally counters and gets countered by. These are not VERY hard counters like in comparable RTS games, but they are a good guide, and there will be further balance changes to make these counters slightly more profound.

The last thing to notice is the ?. What's this unannounced unit that counters slingers? Stay tuned!

Improved AI

Another area that will see some improvements is the AI. As an example, AIs on higher difficulty levels will now make additional granaries when farms are not close to any delivery points. This will boost their late game economy and make them a more formidable foe.

That's it for now! Of course, these snippets are just a small taste of everything that is to come.

Stay tuned for more updates on TFC: The Fertile Crescent!