Oh man, there’s like a billion things to talk about, and I know I’m supposed to keep this cohesive and press-releasy, but there’s like four narratives here so screw it.

the TL;DR

Tooth and Tail is what we call an Arcade-style Real-Time Strategy Game – which means that it’s easy to learn, simple to control, and quick to play (5-12 minute matches). TnT is a game for people who want to focus on strategy, not micro. More real-time chess, less competitive cow-clicker.

YES, we renamed the game! It was originally code-named [ARMADA], and then we announced the official title as Lead to Fire. But the damn name sat in our stomachs like a bad gyro, meaning who the fuck knows how to pronounce that shit. So hey, now it’s called Tooth and Tail, which has a fun hidden meaning and is kinda catchy. Yay!

Totally new art – Inspired by the RTS games that we grew up on – early 90s pixel art meets THE FUTURE.

Ooh, new art and a new name means a fresh logo and a new website. The landing page is now toothandtailgame.com.

… and of course we still livestream on Twitch every Thursday at 2PM PST. We’ll be showing the game art live for the first time on today’s stream! Join us and click Follow!

Ok, now for the tl; part of the tl;dr…

SHOW ME THE PRETTY

Ohh darlin. The game is dripping with visual honey now. Tons of shader-driven visual effects, hand-crafted pixel art (like, with an actual chisel), big beautiful painted art. HNNNGGGG volumetric lighting.

When we set out to work on the game, we wanted to try open development. It’s been amazing – we have players in our private pre-alpha with hundreds of hours in the game (lookin at you Deadbones (670 hrs? dang son), YouthfulIdealism, MrNasalCongestionMan, Braude, Zanaro, Laremere, Hoxeel). But there’s one thing we haven’t done in the open – the art. We subscribed to the SpyParty philosophy – the game should look utterly shitty until it’s absolutely amazing. People will always assume that halfway-decent programmer art is the final visual target.

And it finally looks great! (or at least we think so). Inspired by the RTS games that we grew up on – we wanted to take the pixel art from the early 90’s and modernize the heck out of it. Pixel, meet shader!

To that end, we brought in a long-time collaborator and the primary artist from all of Pocketwatch’s games, Adam deGrandis as our Art Director. During the edumacational part of the year, he teaches at Maine College of Art, and on his weekends he runs his own little game studio, Chickadee. He’s gonna be a regular face on our livestreams from this point forward. Say hi Adam!

And of course, we’re still working with our brilliant painter, Jerome Jacinto, who we found from his impressive collection of Redwall fan-art.

IN CASE YOU’VE NEVER HEARD OF TOOTH AND TAIL…

If this is you:

“I loved [POPULAR RTS] but after a long day at work, doing more high stress 110% focused work and getting creamed just doesn’t sound like anyone’s idea of fun. ”

Or

“The biggest problem with [POPULAR RTS] is the user interface. It makes the game a lot more micro intensive than it needs to be. The game has too much focus on APM and hotkeys.”

We gotcha, boo.

Tooth and Tail’s interface is dead simple; you can play at a competitive level after just a game or two. Complexity in TnT comes from an emphasis on improvisation and reactive play over practiced build orders. The tournaments on our twitch livestream have often been real nail-biters.

What makes TnT unique?

Maps are randomly generated – players must change their strategies based on the unique circumstances of the world

Every player can mix and match their own faction of up to 7 units or structures. No two games will be exactly the same.

Like with Monaco, we focused on simplicity of controls. Your commander controls your army indirectly – two analog sticks, ABXY, and two triggers are all you need. I like to say that if you can get the controller out of the way, the player can more directly interface with the fantasy and their strategy. Yup, it plays just as well on kb/m, but we really like using the controller as a design constraint. And for the record, fuck shoulder buttons. Those things are terrible.

ABOUT THE NAME CHANGE…

We screwed up on this one. When we announced that the game would be called Lead to Fire, we thought we came up with a title that was soooo clever. It had like 8 meanings, depending on how you pronounced it, or whether the words were verbs or nouns. Lead to Fire. Lead to Fire. Lead to Fire. See? All different.

But complexity was also its weakness. Lead to Fire doesn’t have a consistent meaning. It doesn’t even have a consistent pronunciation. When people asked us how the game was going, we found that they were reluctant to say the name because they didn’t know if it was LEED or LED to fire.

Beyond that, it was just kinda word soup. Three common words mushed together like a peanut butter and butter sandwich. Here’s some free advice: if you want to make a memorable sandwich, throw a sardine or some awful shit in there. Hard to forget about a peanut butter and sardine sandwich.

We made a bad move. So we turtled up, re-teched, and now we’re comin’ atchya. All about the Tooth and Tail train.

WHAT’S NEXT?

Now that we’re done turtling, you can expect us to be a lot more open and active with our development. There’s still a lot of art to add, and we STILL haven’t addressed the “new player experience”, which is gonna be the next big milestone. Once we tackle that (tutorial, sandbox, more functional UI), hopefully we can get a hands-on out to the press. Hey, on that note, if you are press and you are interested in the game, please do email us at support@pocketwatchgames.com, and maybe we can talk about future coverage. Don’t be shy!

Oh, also:

We still don’t have a release date, but expect 2016 unless we do early access.

PC for now, but it would really be at home on consoles too. Nothing is locked.

Social media: Twitter, Facebook, Twitch, presskit, and here’s the game’s website!

Again, we’ll be showing off the new art on our twitch livestream today at 2 PM PST. Twitch.tv/pocketwatch. Come say hi!!

Adios amigos,

Andy Schatz