Since our launch on September 12, 2017, Tooth and Tail has seen over 100,000 copies sold, a resilient competitive community, 16 major patches with bug fixes, balance changes, and feature additions, numerous award nominations, and a growing mod community.

Looking to the future, we know we have some challenges ahead of us. Our player community is still very active via our discord channel, but the active Steam/GOG player base has been trending downwards. We still have a number of major bugs on the PS4 version. And the Story Mode content is still receiving complaints about inconsistent difficulty scaling. Let’s take a quick look at the story so far and then figure out where to go from here!

Dont forget, you can follow development via our public roadmap or say hi to the devs in Discord!

Here’s a recap of major developments and accomplishments since launch:

Launch Day

Season One

(WARNING, strong language in this video)

Total Biscuit and Artosis develop a rivalry, Artosis cleans up.

Our largest community tournament has 40 entrants and is won by ChipFromSpace.

Tooth and Tail launches in Chinese and Korean, and later adds Spanish, German, and Italian. Brazilian Portuguese, Polish, Russian, and Turkish are in progress.

Community members Glyde, BestTeaMaker, and Delthius show up to help us out as we demo the game at TwitchCon in Long Beach

End of Year



Let’s just show off the 2017 nomination list:

2018 Independent Games Festival - Finalist: Excellence in Narrative, Honorable Mention: Visual Art, Audio

IGN - Nominee: 2017 Best Strategy Game

The Game Awards - Nominee: 2017 Best Strategy Game

PCGamer - Nominee: 2017 Best Strategy Game

PC Master Race - Nominee: 2017 Best Strategy Game

Hardcore Gamer - Nominee: 2017 Best Strategy Game Total Biscuit - Top Ten Games of the Year - #8

Season Two

We launched Ranked Season 2 on December 19th with an MMR system closer to traditional Ranked ladders. Other major developments:

The Tooth and Tail Official Soundtrack launched on CD and Vinyl (also available digitally directly from Austin Wintory or on Steam

We launched GOG/Steam Crossplay, which is powering development of PS4 to PC crossplay, and hopefully more platforms to come!

We’ve been featured in four major Steam sales (Winter, Midweek Madness, Lunar New Year, and an IGF nominee sale), a Chrono.gg sale headlined by Total Biscuit, and one major sale on PS4 (Outside is Over-Rated), bolstering our player community. You can bet that there will be more to come!

Campfires, new tiles sets, and a revamped world generation algorithm were added to ranked and unranked play.

Story Mode was completely rebalanced to bring it in line with current multiplayer balance.

ToothAndTailTV, a fan-run channel, casts a massive North America vs Europe tournament, which culminates in a final game matchup of the titans, ChipFromSpace [NA] vs ArbuzBudesh [EU]

What’s Next?

With Tooth and Tail starting to enter its “long tail” life cycle, we’re taking a broad approach to keeping a healthy player community.

Crossplay We’re finally moving towards combining our PS4 and PC communities via crossplay, powered by GOG Galaxy. This means that anytime there is a sale on any platform, the increased player count will benefit all platforms.

Mod Support

(Modded units by Glorious AYY FB)

Our latest patch (1.1.4: Eat Crow) was largely inspired by a balance mod that our player community put together. I hope that our community can continue to help us balance the game, as well as create and test new features, including new units.

In fact, a new Hedgehog unit is currently being developed and tested by community members. All of Tooth and Tail’s assets are in human readable XML files and PNGs, so adding new stuff or modifying existing units is accessible to everyone.

Community Tournaments and Games via our Discord Channel

We have possibly the most tricked out Discord channel in gaming, due to the efforts of our community, lead by community manager, Brian Franco (mastastealth). The short list of Discord features:

Pocketbot (a Discord bot to help the community learn about the game and keep the server in order)

Automated weekly PB Cup tournaments

Support for player-run tournaments

ReplayUltima (replay analyzer)

In development is Pocket World, another Discord integrated tool that will allow players to fight for the four in-game factions simply by playing the game. Players will take and lose territory for their team as they play.

New Platforms

Still nothing to announce, but yes, we’re investigating new platforms for Tooth and Tail. Stay tuned.

New Feature – Standard Seeds in Story Mode

The Story Mode balance still needs quite a bit of work, and I’m determined to make the campaign be something that garners universal praise – it’s very close, but with a few things that can just ruin the experience for some people. So I plan to rebalance things again, and offer the ability to play each map on a “standard” – and fair – seed. I hope to add leaderboards to the standard seeds as well.

Balance

You all know that I pay a lot of attention to the game’s balance and I like to tweak it. Sometimes for the better, and sometimes for the weird. Expect this to continue.

A short history of the patches and their notable changes:

What do you want to see?

So what do you want to see out of Tooth and Tail in the months to come? What was your favorite balance patch? What kind of mods would you like to see? Let me know in the comments!