An Open-World Folktale Fantasy Real-Time Strategy City-building Game

Latest devlog post:

The roadmap to v0.9

By May 20, 2020

Explore

The world of Trollskog is an endless dark forest, teeming with mythical creatures: some friendly, others not.

Out of every interaction emerges a delicate system, while a dangerous new force threatens to destroy balance.

Build

In Trollskog, your villagers can be socketed to buildings to harvest or refine resources, produce equipment and weaponry, or conduct trade.

Plan your settlements well, and reap the rewards.

Expand

Build settlements deeper into the heart of the forest, or go where your quest takes you.

Restore the order that has been lost... Or create a new balance that suits you better.

Developed by Andreas Carlson, with music composed by Shane Rutherfoord-Jones, and sound effects by Tyler Kerr and Daniel Wallén.

If you'd like to know when the game is released, add it to your Steam wishlist or sign up for the (spam-free) mailing list:

Recent devlog posts

The roadmap to v0.9

Since the early access release, I've had my nose buried in my keyboard, fixing bugs and not posting too much about upcoming updates and features - in part because there's been a major backlog of bugs to work through, and because future features have a tendency to change. Now, with the game rapidly approaching a stable state, and with a clearer view of the updates ahead, it's time to share the future roadmap with you.

Pathfinding fix

I'd say the bulk of my development efforts since the early access release has been iterating on the pathfinding, but at last, it is just around the corner. In the dev branch (and in a few days, on the steam build), units no longer get stuck on terrain or buildings. I’m still dissatisfied with group steering, especially in combat - fighting units tend to trip over each other and struggle to get into melee range. I'm looking to resolve this before releasing the next patch.

Improved AI - Attacking, expanding, trading

This is being worked on. As far as rabbit holes go, this one is deep. I’ll be making incremental improvements rather and releasing them together with other new features. Expect the AI to become a little more competent and engaging with every new patch.

New units

There’s some new combat mechanics waiting in the wings, such as buffs and debuffs, auras, armor and damage types. I’ll be unrolling these together with new units that make use of these mechanics in interesting ways. The new units in the pipe are the Slinger (a tier 1 ranged status caster), as well as the Seider, Skalder and Noaidi (Tier 2 and 3 aura-casters)

Food rework

As I’ve mentioned in a few other places, the food mechanic needs some love. I’ll be adding more food engines (rather than the dummy simple “put grain in bakery”) and adding a survival mechanic.

Tier 3 rework

It’s no secret that the last tier is a bit of a placeholder still. This will be fleshed out with more resources, buildings and units.

Harvesting rework

The current harvesting mechanic - specifically, the dotted line around each city - was not really intended to be in the game for this long. The new design will revolve around building specific structures to collect different resource types, such as granaries and lumber mills. I’m not entirely finished with the design on this one, so the dotted harvest radius line will remain for a while longer.

Main Quest Chain

Not going to spoil the plans for this one, but there will be group of procedurally generated “main quests” that can be completed to achieve sweet victory.

Save rework

Currently, every patch breaks existing save games, and each save file is on the order of several megabytes. This makes autosaves an unappealing concept. To fix this, I’ll be replacing the current serialization layer (Protobuf) with flatpak, and separate the serialized gamestate from the data-model that’s used in-game.

Future roadmap from 0.9 to 1.0

With the above features in place, the game will be in a good spot to be taken from Early Access to released. It's too early to give specific details here, but in all likelihood, when we get past 0.9, I’ll start marketing the game again, focusing on a Mac and Linux build, as well as the holy grail - Multiplayer. The big roadblock for this one (on a technical level) is the “Save rework” bullet point mentioned above. As it looks today, the serialized gamestate is a bit too cumbersome to be transmitted over the wire. Hopefully those pieces will fall into place as the patches roll out.

Want to share your thoughts? There's a discussion thread on the steam forums or you can hit me up via any of the social media links in the page header.

Early access on August 19!

For the first time, Trollskog is swinging open its doors and inviting you to share in the experience. On August 19th, the game will be available world-wide on Steam for Windows PC.
This is an early access release, which means the game is not yet content complete, but it is in a stable and playable state.
If you would like to participate in the community as the game continues to grow, you are welcome to join us!

Unit showcase - The berserker

The berserker is a new addition to the earlygame, capable of quickly engaging ranged enemies and delivering solid damage.
Equip him with a blunt club for an immobilizing stun, or an axe for maximum damage.

Steam store page opens up!

Some time ago, Trollskog was greenlit on steam. Finally, the store page has been published.

There'll be more details to come on this site, but we're open for wishlisting!
Additionally, the next test release will be moving on to the Steam platform, so the alpha accounts on this site will be replaced by steam beta keys.
If you registered an account here previously, you should be expecting an email within a few weeks.
If you didn't register, well, it's not too late...

To the walls

Walls and towers are a staple of real-time-strategy games, and Trollskog wouldn't be complete without them.
Here's a sneak preview of this latest feature:
(Click the image for full-res)

Placing archers on the walls will help keep those frontier settlements well-defended.