Tame - Open world survival, monster taming and colony building

Welcome to the world of Tame

Tame is a top-down open world survival and colony building game.   It's still in fairly early development but we want to start getting feedback and possibly a fanbase before we release the game.


About the game:

The setting is primarily a vast desert in a sort of Arabic inspired fantasy world although eventually you'll be able to venture into massive caves, large forests and boneyards filled with all manners of terrible monsters, both dead and alive.

You play a nameless, faceless hero trying to firstly survive then to carve out your place in these harsh, unforgiving lands.  In order to do so you'll need help from the beasts and wandering travellers throughout the world. 

The beasts: Tame wild beasts to use as mounts or to fight alongside you, or simply slaughter them for food.  Track beasts by following footprints through the desert, but be sure you know who's footprints you're tracking.  Many of the wild beasts are massive, ungodly creatures built for hunting prey far more capable than humans.  With the ability to tame even the most legendary of these creatures you can rule the desert as a beast-riding warlord or simply use the animals to haul goods and earn a living trading between randomly generated villages.

The nomads: Along your travels you'll not only encounter beasts of all sizes and temperaments but also other travelers.  Many of these people make their living trading between villages and would be willing to buy your resources in exchange for food or coin.  Aside from traders you'll also find small settlements with peaceful inhabitants whom you can recruit or hire to join you and your allies.  Or if you're feeling particularly merciless, rob them from their coin or enslave them to do your bidding.  With a fully interactive world you play any role imaginable by making real gameplay choices with every new encounter and pay the consequences as you go.

The factions: Along with peaceful traders and citizens within the towns you come across you're also bound to run into those who wish to take what you have, even if that's simply your life.  Entire factions exist within Tame.  Every character who exists in the world will be aligned somehow to a faction.  This means that with every play-through you'll encounter different groups of NPC's with different motives and moral alignments.  You may find yourself trading with a wealthy faction interested in helping those with coin or defending your allies from a band of cuthroat mercenaries who could use your settlement to expand their operations.  This also means smaller groups of bandits, raiders or highwaymen can be real threats to players just beginning their life in Tame.

The colony:  At the heart of Tame are the colony building features.  You'll use landmark flags to claim territories to call your own.  Within these territories you can use your gathered resources to build stables for your animals, homes for your colonists, barracks for your guards and even slave quarters for your slaves if you choose to cross that line.  Build your village, town or city as large as you want, spanning the entire desert if you can.  Hire settlers as guards or laborers to help protect and expand your reach.  Tame beasts to work for you, hauling resources or guarding your settlement, or order your guards to patrol the city mounted to give them the upper hand against threats.  The world is yours for the taking, however you wish to take it.

Images

Everything's so tiny!:
Our vision for this game was based on many things, including the theme of "tiny worlds".  We chose to leave all our pixel art at a 1:1 scale to not only represent a large world around the player, but also to better portray massive scale beasts yet to be released.  We know the humanoid characters are small, but we have little to no customization planned for them which makes their details less important.  The beasts and settlements/colony are the main focal points in the game and once you've grown your presence to a good size, you'll be glad you can see so much screen.  Also keep in mind that the images here have been resized to fit the forum thread better.  The game is designed for fullscreen gameplay.

Pre-world generation screenshot:


Final build menu screenshot:


Current in-game beasts:


Notes:  We are Everbrave Interactive, LLC. and were previously known as Siren Games.  We're responsible for the unfinished Easy RPG Creator along with many Stencyl games like Shelter (prior to the Steam game of the same name) and The Dungeon (Both available on Newgrounds, Kongregate and many other flash portals).  We changed our studio name several months ago in order to better represent ourselves as game developers.  This is our first announced title since the name change.

We want you to know that though many of these features are already in the game, it's continually evolving during the development process as any game does.  Any and all information here is always subject to change until the game is released, so please feel free to make suggestions and try not to get attached to any features (and we'll do our best as well). 

Feedback:  Please feel free to leave feedback, suggestions, comments, ideas or any other form of constructive communication.  Any unnecessary negativity is frowned upon, but please don't hesitate to be blunt about your feedback, within reason.

We want our development process to be very transparent.  We plan to release this game to Steam and that means we need support and feedback to shape the game to a state that the players want, regardless of our original vision for it. 

Testing:  If you're interested in testing the game during the development process, have more questions or want to help us market and advertise for the game for a revenue split, please feel free to contact us.  PM us here (Your best bet for an answer) or email our studio at pr@everbrave.net

Thank you for taking the time to look at our game.  We're very excited to bring our vision to life.  Help us do that by contributing your ideas and thoughts to the project.

cool.
the game could be nice on an ipad too.

Thanks for the reply.  We actually are focusing more on desktop because we use a lot of keys and hotkeys for functionality.  For example, F toggles all allies and mounts within your vicinity for follow mode.  E is the action button to harvest resources and open the action menu (where you can set up jobs and train skills for your allies and mounts) and R lets you mount your beasts.  We also use W to move forward and S to move backward and use the mouse as the aim system.  Though it'd be nice to release this as a mobile game, we design around desktop for functionality and we don't think a game of this magnitude would work well on a touch screen. 

Thanks for the suggestion though.  We want to design this game around the help of our players and fans so any and all feedback is welcome.  Of course we can't guarantee we'll utilize all of it and as you can see we do have technical limitations for things like platforms, but we still appreciate all your ideas, nonetheless.

10/19/15 Update:

Just thought I'd post some progress on the game along with some future goals and plans to keep this topic updated.

Newly added features:
 - Build menu complete
 - Fences are now in-game
 - Tents are now in-game
 - Storage chests are now in-game.
 - All build items can now be placed and rotated freely

Art updates:
 - Began work on new desert flora
 - Began work on new ground textures
 - Began implementing new biome art
 - Finished animations on Onych beast
 - Adding recolors of beasts and travelers

News:
 - Interviewed a candidate for Marketing and Media Manager (outcome pending)
 - First official trailer for Tame will be ready for the public by November 1st
 - Beginning work on the Steam Concept page
 - Beginning work on Kickstarter campaign

Looking for closed alpha testers (No NDA) - Message us or leave a comment here if you're interested in testing the game before the public release.

Sweet!

Looking really good!

Very cool idea. You mentioned open world survival but I'm curious whether the game-play would be enough to engage a player for hours/weeks/months. Are there going to be victory goals, story line, or a super enemy to overcome? Or is it a keep on building and expanding type of game.

Very cool idea. You mentioned open world survival but I'm curious whether the game-play would be enough to engage a player for hours/weeks/months. Are there going to be victory goals, story line, or a super enemy to overcome? Or is it a keep on building and expanding type of game.

Thanks for the query and sorry for the late reply.  Been busy over here.

The game is very much a "choose your own goals" type of game.  The survival aspect increases exponentially each time you take on a new beast or colonist because they also require the same amount of food as you, or more (especially for beasts).  Surviving will be important, but mid to end game content will be primarily based on building more and expanding in order to supply your colony with food and resources.  The end-game goals will include taming the most danerous of monsters in order to destroy opposing factions.  These factions are randomly generated as the game is played and will be different each play-through.  There will alsways be at least one unfriendly faction with the possibility of new factions emerging every time a new humanoid is spawned into the world. 

In essence, the game is very much a creative "craft your own adventure" type game that requires players to create their own goals and possibly even moral laws.  Do you keep slaves or free men?  Do you crush your allies to take their supplies and territory?  And in the end, maybe you just want to play as an adventurer taking on monster hunting contracts rather than rule your own civilization. 

These are the types of choices we hope to pass onto the player with a huge sandbox of opportunities and tools at their disposal.

Hi, i would like to make a suggestion, looking at the screenshot everthing seems too small and some things became a little too difficult to perceive when you see, like the 3 sand wolfs  i only saw them after 4-5 looks, so maybe some zooming feature for the player when he wants a more general look or a more close-up.

This is really cool!  Looking forward to following your progress on this.

Really good idea! I'm excited

Hi, i would like to make a suggestion, looking at the screenshot everthing seems too small and some things became a little too difficult to perceive when you see, like the 3 sand wolfs  i only saw them after 4-5 looks, so maybe some zooming feature for the player when he wants a more general look or a more close-up.

Hello, for your game in response to this quote you can check out the below post. It contains my Zooming Behavior that I have made. Depending on how your project is setup, it maybe of use.

http://community.stencyl.com/index.php/topic,45775.0.html