Happy Thanksgiving and Merry Holiday Season! In this news post we will shed some light on what was going on since we revealed our plans for closed alpha stage 2. Like we mentioned in our previous post, we need to make major stuff like Advisor Quests and new quest location called Opposition Hideout before we will launch the next alpha stage.

The good news is

The fact that we are going well on schedule gives us hope to be able to launch Alpha-test stage 2 before Christmas and make some nice present to those people who will be invited.

I know a lot of Totem Tribe die-hard fans played the first game more than once (and some of them more than dozen times!) and with alternative ways to solve quests you will have more fun replaying the same level several times to see all outcomes. Hopefully increased replayability of this approach will be a nice cherry on top.

What do you think about non-linear quest solving? Is it something you wished in original Totem Tribe when playing through it second time around?

1. New full-fledge Quest Location called "Opposition Hideout". It is already present on the world map, but there is nothing in it yet. This location will be like your typical level in original Totem Tribe where you explore and solve puzzles. It will be somewhat like Herald's Home, except Herald's Home was introductionary and thus  pretty small and basic.
2. At least one random Quest Location on the world map. Random Quest Locations will be similar to regular Quest Locations except they are much smaller and unimportant to your overall story progression  - they only have some challengs and rewards but nothing critical to the story - they will be added to make World Map exploration more rewarding.
3. Advisor Quests. At this moment after the tutorial is over you are pretty much all alone and don't really know what to do. Advisor Quests will be given by your advisors - Bulat and Zweistein and by doing those you will learn how to jump-start your country and manage it properly (at least from the beginning). It will also net you a lot of reward items to speed up your buildings, boost your production, etc.
4. Cash Shop will be added. People will be able to spend their Enkord Cash to purchase useful items and we will test our monetization stuff.
5. Stone Age will be heavily rebalanced. Although I am constantly tweaking time, prices, and other stats of the game, for the next alpha stage there will be bigger changes - different specializations will be mutually exclusive - War, Expansion, Science, Culture, etc.
6. The game will be wiped. All your progress will be lost and we will start on the fresh map. Unfortunately major changes are not possible without resetting your progress.
7. New testers will be invited. We will invite more testers both from people who donated to the game and also among veteran players from our other hardcore online game (GUNROX). We need the latter to see if it will be easy for casual players to stand against hardcore ones as we want this game to be fun for both kinds of people.

I know one major question remains unanswered - when Stage 2 will begin? Unfortunately it is unknown at the moment - there are many bugs found that needs to be tested and these features mentioned above will take some time to implement and polish, so you better stock up with patience again :)

In other news - we've just uploaded a significant bugfix update to the alpha with detailed changes listed in our update log.

So what next? For now we have to take a deep breath and focus on sorting out the feedback and fixing all those bugs found. Alpha testers will see those changes in timely automated updates to their game. We also plan to add new features systematically, because bugs can be fixed endlessly, but new content needs to be done as well.

For today's update we have added portraits to the website, so when you post, your hero portrait will be displayed next to your message. Hopefully this will make the website conversations more personalized and colorful.

As for the gameplay changes - we've fixed the overloaded server bug - hopefully people can create new countries now. Also Idol of Fortune should be fully functional now - with proper set of rewards that change each time, and sequentive play days are also recorded towards Jackpot and Super Jackpot wheels. Let us know if it is working for you now.

I has begun.

The game is pretty rough and has LOADS of bugs, but letting real people in will help us to locate and find those bugs. The game is not by any means represent the final product at this moment, so if you got the invite and not ready for bumpy ride and want smooth gaming experience - PLEASE WAIT at least until beta.

To those who really wanted by haven't got the invite yet - don't worry, we will invite you as soon as technical possibility will allow. We can only let people carefully one by one to gauge the load on the server. Letting too many people too soon will complicate the testing process.

The current alpha version of the game have a lot of limitations. Some of the most notable ones are:

• Story mode is limited only to Tutorial which is about 2 hours long (depends on how you play it)
• We have only first two ages available - Dark Age and Stone Age.
• Possible game resolutions is limited only to a low ones for now.
• You can only start in Nothern or Southern Graasslands - other climate zones are not ready yet.
• A lot of features are not implemented or roughly implemented - they will be improved and implemented over time.
• World map is pretty small - since the alpha-test stage will not involve too many people.

There are still minor things left, plus we will have to do some in-house testing prior to letting people in, but if all goes well, first people from outside of our team will stand their feet in the world of Teya again. Very likely that next news post will be about first people getting in. Are you as excited as we are? :)

In the other news: I've added feature to change your account nickname. It will be able enabled with game launch for everyone (one-time rename), but I will also need to have it tested, so if you want to change your nickname - let me know here in comments and I will enable it for you right away.

In original Totem Tribe we had a lot of animals wandering the islands. There were not too useful and was more like a scenery than something you can interact with. This time around most animals will be useful.

In the previous news post we got some nice ideas about animals and we are glad to announce that some of them will make it into the game!

So what purpose will the animals serve this time around?

Ok, you might ask how can one tame them? Actually there will be more than one way to do that. First of all you can do it the Totem Tribe way - by finding proper items that can win them over. For a dog a simple bone could be enough, but for others it might be something more complicated. On the other side, if your hero is charismatic enough, some animals might join him/her on sight without doing anything!

Furthermore, if you are evil - you can kill them and take their meat. You hero must be strong or dexterious enough to do that and have proper weapons.

From now on for each 10000 Enkord Cash obtained by donation you will also will be able to pick an extra free game from our back catalog. That's in addition to Totem Tribe or Totem Tribe Gold! Basically now donating roughly $10 you will get 2 free games - Totem Tribe, another one of your choice + Enkord Cash that you will be able to use when TT2 will go live.

The list of the games that we give away includes: Aerial Mahjong, Armada Tanks, Clash'N Slash, Clash'N Slash: Worlds Away, Clayside, Emerald Tale, Inca Tomb, Jam XM, Jewel of Atlantis, Jurassic Realm, Svetlograd, and Zodiac Tower.

To obtain your extra free game go to "Downloads" section of your control panel.

First let's refresh in mind what is town in Totem Tribe II: Jotun. The town is a location where you building your structures, mine resources, train units, and so on. You can also explore the surroundings while building your town to find some interesting stuff.

The problem arises when player settles more and more towns - if the location of the town looks the same it becomes boring fast - surroundings of all your towns will look the same. So what should be do? That's where we came up with this "Generated Town Location" concept. The location will be split into set of chunks and proper chunks will be picked depending on surroundings of your town, plus some other factors. For example if you settle your town near the mountain range to the North, your town location will indeed have mountains in it's Northern part and you will be able to mine more stone in such town. If you are up to settling your town on the seashore, you will have Sea in the town location as well.

Of course this solution will not make each location completely unique, but it's a reasonable solution to differentiate and is managable. What do you think about this approach?

Those locations will be populated by random interesting bits - maybe resources scattered on the ground, some chests, roadstones, non-player characters that were passing by, etc. In other words - small neat things that do not require heavy content but are fun to discover. What other small random things would you like to see? I am asking about small simple things, cause more complex things like puzzles cannot be random - they must be well though-out to be interesting.

Therefore here at Enkord we sat down and brainstormed together a list of things that we have left to do in order to launch the closed alpha test. Here's how it looks like:

• Polish the Tutorial
• Polish the game interface (at least those part that will be heavily used in Tutorial and early stages of the game)
• Make visual battles look decent (currenty units fight very schematically)
• Make a downloader/updater which will handle automated game updates.
• Fix the marketplace and trade between players (we had this kinda working back in the days but now it's broken)
• Make the generated town location
• Set the proper stats to units, buildings, etc.
• Hero, his/her items, hero stats and perks, etc.

As you can see the list is not too short, but good thing is we have all of the points done at various progress stages. None of those have to be built from scratch.

And the most important question you are probably asking - when will be the launch date of the alpha test? I think it is realistic to say we will be able to manage all those outlined tasks this Fall. I can't say whether it will be September or November, but I guess it is a safe bet to say it has a good chance to be done in Autumn.

Being said that I would like to ask people who frequent here and waiting for the game - What kind of completion should be enough to let people in?

The work is in full swing lately here at Enkord. All because of the donations you guys and gals generously sending our way. Although the money itself is very important, the donations are most important as a sign of trust. People can tell a lot of compliments, but trusting with their wallets is taking it to the next level. That's why I put this whole donation thing live and it worked. It boosted motivation of my team by showing that people do actually trust in this game a lot. They needed such motivation because working on this game 2 years straight can be tiresome. Huge thanks to anyone who donated so far!

And since the work is humming we have something to show to you.

Here is the detailed picture with the items you can wear.

Player Select Screen

Player Creation Screen

Above you can see a screen where you can select existing Hero/Country or create a new one. You can have serveral countries on your account and manage them at the same time. These screens show what you will see when you enter the game before you dive into managing your country and doing quests.

We would like to thank all those people who helped us to put this FAQ together. Also since the final document is pretty huge there will be mistakes and typos. If you see them, please report them in this special thread.

Website Launch

Migration from Enkord.com

From now on all official news, updates, and communication regarding Totem Tribe II: Jotun (and original TT/TT Gold) will be held here. Forums and blog on enkord.com will be kept for the historic purpose, but in a frozen state. This is not a problem, cause we've transfered all messages, news posts, comments, and account from Enkord.com. If you had account there, use your email address as login and password from the old forum to enter here. If not - don't hesitate and register. You will need to register to play the game in the future, and invites to alpha version will be sent to registered players, so why not register now?

There Will Be Bugs

We managed to put together official website for TT2 which will be available at www.totemtribe.com We will be deploying it next week and after extensive testing will make it available live to everyone. Hopefully testing won't take too much time and website will be available next week too.

You might ask why it took us so long to setup a basic website where there are a lot of website engines and frameworks available, both commercial and free ones. The answer is, because website is built around the game itself and with launching it we are launching part of the game as well (the technical part that handles accounts, registrations, logins, etc.) and website is basically a superstructure on top of Totem Tribe 2 account server.

In original Totem Tribe only towers was upgradeable. In Totem Tribe 2 - you can upgrade any building!

Upgrading buildings takes time and resources but also make the structure be more useful. Take a look at this Crop Shed below:

These 3 buildings are in fact the same building but of different upgrade levels! First one is level 1, second one is level 10 and last is 20. The levels between 1 and 10 and 20 have distinct look too!

This Crop Shed stores Food and the higher level is, the more Food it can store, thus when you have excessive amounts of resources, you can invest them into bigger storage to be able to accumulate more resources.

You can guess who is who. Those advisors will be giving you optional quests on what you should do to improve your current state of the country. When you feel the need of advice - you ask them and they will tell you about your current weaknesses and what you should do to fix them. Bulat will be giving advice about military side of things - how to defend, which units to build, when to attack, etc. Zweistein on the other hand will give hints on what to build and research to improve your economy, culture, tech, etc.

This time we will tell you how we plan to handle endgame.

Despite the fact that Totem Tribe 2 will be an online multiplayer game, it doesn't mean it will be endless pointless game without ultimate goal like number of those games on Facebook.

We plan to have 6 completely different Victories that player can aspire to. Those endings are Adventure, Culture, Science, Wealth, Expansion, and War Victories. Let me tell about them one by one.

Adventure Victory is basically like you end the game in Totem Tribe 1 - you follow the story until the end, beat the final boss in the end and you are done.

Culture Victory involves focus on building buildings that increase culture of your country and when it's high enough, your country will start luring persons of figure and quests associated with them. Once you will have whole pantheon, you win!

Science Victory requires to research every single unlockable thing in the Technology Tree (and that tree is quite big). You will have to focus on having buildings that increase your research.