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Find out what makes these deadly critters tick.


Looking forward to Tooth and Tail? It's easy to see why: this is a fast-paced RTS starring furious furry animals who will do horrible things to each other for some meat scraps or tactical advantage. Then the questions come rushing in: what kinds of units will I be commanding? How customizable is my army going to be? Can a fox and a chameleon ever agree on matters of political rhetoric?

Andy Schatz, CEO and Creative Director of Tooth and Tail developers Pocketwatch Games, will be joining us in the comments section of this post, today at 8PM UTC, to answer all your questions.
If you have them prepared already, fire away and he will tackle them once he's here.

Have fun, everyone, and remember: no biting or scratching allowed!
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Gaiwecoor: I've been looking forward to this for several months now - excited for next week!

I understand this is designed to support keyboard and controller equally. By directly controlling a single character, it drastically reduces the number of inputs you would need over a more traditional RTS.

Have you (or the early testers) noticed whether choosing keyboard or controller affects gameplay at all? (i.e. is there a benefit to using one over the other?)

Are matches played peer to peer? If so, how much does latency affect the game?
Matches are peer-to-peer, and it uses a Lockstep networking model, which means that in bad connections, it will slow the game down rather than having rubberbanding. It's a very low amount of data passed over the network since all clients simulate locally.
As for keyboard/controller. We have seen some tricks from a couple of our absolute best players that are possible on keyboard and not controller. That said, several of our top-top players use controller and don't use those tricks. So while it's possible that in the top 0.01% of players there will be an advantage to keyboard/mouse, for everyone else it's about personal playstyle. I prefer controller myself.
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Wyzzlex: Does Tooth and Tail support LAN multiplayer?

Btw, thanks for allowing us to play in splitscreen mode! That's always nice to have! :)
Afraid no LAN. We had it at first, but it was a pain to support over the course of 3 years of development since we never used it. If things go well maybe we'll bring it back! But yeah, you got it, split screen is the other long term option for co-local multiplayer!
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ajschatz: We also wanted the world to feel like a real world, so we made the choice to prevent players from picking the same character in the same match.
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Plokite_Wolf: By this, I assume you mean you wanted to prevent mirror matches?

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ajschatz: There's a really interesting talk by the Towerfall devs about how making the character choice be aesthetic only freed players up to role play more because they weren't forced to pick their faction based on function. Google it!
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Plokite_Wolf: Outside of the storyline campaigns, RTS is not a roleplaying genre, really. "Functions" are what keep RTSes (particularly those with weaker storylines) going and prevents them from getting dull quickly. Towerfall is not in that genre, so as a long-time RTS player, I must strongly disagree with their idea in the realm of strategies, though I do agree with some guilty pleasure memories for sandboxes, RPGs and the like ;)

To follow up, which aspects of existing RTS games did you point at and say, "we want this amped up to 11" and "we want this to be thrown out" the most, and why?
No, it wasn't really about mirror matches, it was that there is only one Hopper, there's no Hopper_1 and Hopper_2. You don't have to agree with that design decision, but that is where it came from :)

As for the aspects of RTS that we emphasized and threw out: the big one that we threw out was that we wanted to get rid of the things that often feel like a chore (queuing up new units) and the things that increase skill cap based on one's ability to multitask. We still require players to think about many things at once, but we only require them to *DO* one thing at a time. This cuts down on the mental/physical exhaustion that's inherent in many other competitive RTS games.

As for what we wanted to emphasize: creativity, improvisation, unpredictability being the keys to success. So random maps, customizable armies, lots of hidden information help to make Tooth and Tail all about the mind games.
Post edited September 08, 2017 by ajschatz
Will the game have full Galaxy support (ie cloud saves, achievments, multiplayer, etc)?
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BKGaming: Will the game have full Galaxy support (ie cloud saves, achievments, multiplayer, etc)?
Achievements, Multiplayer yes (in fact it has crossplay with steam, and soon PS4!) No cloud saves at the moment.
Who will win in a fight, an army of mice or Geralt?
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ajschatz: Achievements, Multiplayer yes (in fact it has crossplay with steam, and soon PS4!) No cloud saves at the moment.
Awesome... I wonder if you can tell us. Is the crossplay being powered by the Galaxy backend similar to Gwent for all platforms? :)
Post edited September 08, 2017 by BKGaming
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ZFR: Who will win in a fight, an army of mice or Geralt?
The army of mice would stop fighting to admire his manly physique. I can hardly play the witcher.
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ajschatz: Achievements, Multiplayer yes (in fact it has crossplay with steam, and soon PS4!) No cloud saves at the moment.
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BKGaming: Awesome... I wonder if you can tell us. Is the crossplay being powered by the Galaxy backend similar to Gwent for all platforms? :)
Correct!
Post edited September 08, 2017 by ajschatz
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ajschatz: Correct!
Nice. Glad to see more developers supporting this. :)
Thank you for the answers on my questions. Will you do a stream before release with some more campaign content?
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Matruchus: Thank you for the answers on my questions. Will you do a stream before release with some more campaign content?
I actually just went live!

twitch.tv/pocketwatch
Post edited September 09, 2017 by ajschatz
1. What do you think is the most unique aspect of Tooth and Tail? What sets it appart from other games that may be similar in nature.

2. If someone wanted to get in the bussiness of developing games, what is the main advice you would you give them?
Have you ever tried this game in wine? Including Galaxy and all the shebang needed to play.
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hollunder: Have you ever tried this game in wine? Including Galaxy and all the shebang needed to play.
I havent, but we'll have someone give it a shot over the weekend!
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BKGaming: 1. What do you think is the most unique aspect of Tooth and Tail? What sets it appart from other games that may be similar in nature.

2. If someone wanted to get in the bussiness of developing games, what is the main advice you would you give them?
Well, the three best things about Tooth and Tail (IMO) are:
A) The single player missions are incredibly varied. Once you get two the second of four campaigns, it really starts throwing curveballs at you.
B) The matches are short, but they pack as much drama as a full RTS match in a much shorter package. Means you can get lots more matches in and losing is still fun.
C) The controls and the game desing are built for removing exhaustion and replacing repetitive tasks with strategic choices. Which, to me, is exactly what the genre should be about!

Ah, and as for developing games, I wish I could answer that succinctly, but it really depends on your base of knowledge and experience. Get a job in the industry!
Post edited September 09, 2017 by ajschatz
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Reglisse: Tooth and Tail for Linux on GOG,when?

Already bought and I can play on Windows but Linux is my future...

Thanks :)
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ajschatz: That's not up to me!!! But hopefully soon :)
Can you elaborate a bit about this part please? Are you referring to GOG or someone from your team?

Unfortunately this isn't the first time a Linux game doesn't make it to GOG due to lack of Galaxy and while I understand that your game will be more focused on multiplayer as a final product, Could you please find a way to provide a Linux version on GOG all the same? Thanks
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ajschatz: That's not up to me!!! But hopefully soon :)
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Ganni1987: Can you elaborate a bit about this part please? Are you referring to GOG or someone from your team?

Unfortunately this isn't the first time a Linux game doesn't make it to GOG due to lack of Galaxy and while I understand that your game will be more focused on multiplayer as a final product, Could you please find a way to provide a Linux version on GOG all the same? Thanks
I've gotten this question a bunch, and I know there's a lot of linux users on gog that are super hungry for galaxy/linux. I don't have good answers for you on what gog's plans are wrt linux, so I can't really elaborate beyond... the client isn't available on linux, and so we don't want to sell a crippled version of the game on gog.