Tooth and Tail

Tooth and Tail is set during the 19th century[2] in a society where anthropomorphic animals are facing chronic food shortages. Many animals decided to resort to cannibalism to overcome the shortage.[3] The Civilized, led by Archimedes, created a lottery system that ultimately controlled who was eaten. This way of life sparked controversy throughout the nation; the Commonfolk liked neither the idea of being eaten nor the high cost of food. The son of the wealthy merchant Bellafide was selected to be eaten; he revolted, intending to reshape the food-selection system into one based on some version of a meritocracy. The Commonfolk—led by Hopper who wanted to impose a voting system to replace the lottery—also revolted. To overthrow the Civilized, Hopper and Bellafide joined forces despite their different ideals.

The Civilized engaged in the fight to maintain power and the status quo. Though the revolution had thrown the leadership into general chaos, certain military elements remained organized. Quartermaster, the shady and pragmatic head of the late Tsarina's K.S.R secret police, seized control of military elements and supported Archimedes and the Civilized for the time being.

Towards the end of the game, the pigs, who are dying out from the war, tell the four armies they had relayed false information to the three other armies, tricking them into gathering in one location. As the armies fight each other to the point of destruction, the pigs revolt, revealing they had a plan to overthrow the Tsarina and get revenge for the slavery and eating of their kind. A horde of pigs then ambushes the final standing army, destroying it and leaving the fate of the commanders and the rest of the meat-eating animals ambiguous.

Gameplay of Tooth and Tail

A screenshot of the game showing the HUD, along with various structures and units

A demonstration of the game's split screen capabilities

Tooth and Tail is a real-time strategy video game designed for use with gamepads and keyboard-and-mouse setups.[4][5] The game has single-player and multiplayer modes.[6] In the single-player mode, the player progresses through the story by completing levels of increasing difficulty. Each level features objectives with varying degrees of onerousness, depending on the player's advancement. To complete each level, the basic objectives must be met while "heroic" ones—usually more arduous—are optional.[6] Multiplayer mode can be accomplished through ranked or unranked online matchmaking[6] and local multiplayer split screen. Up to four players may play at once, either as teams of two or compete to be the last one standing.[5]

Before a match begins, players must choose a commander from four factions[4] and then draft six units from a pool of twenty to use during the match. Fifteen of these units are offensive and tiered depending on their strength and cost. The other five units are defensive. All choices are final; other units cannot be unlocked during the match. Once all players have chosen their units, they control a commander of an army and must build structures, such as farms, to gather required resources. Most structures can only be built near gristmills, preventing players from building near enemies while scouting or spying. At any time, players can burrow their commanders back to allow them to create structures.[4] Units are produced at structures called warrens, assuming the player has sufficient food to summon the desired units.[6] Depending on the tier, some units cost more than others.[5] Food is a limited resource, meaning players must strategize their attack in advance.[4] Structures called campfires act as a combination of gristmills and farms, allowing structures to be built near them while also producing food. To win, the player must destroy the enemy's gristmills and campfires.[7][4] The map is procedurally generated, implying each player will have different advantages and disadvantages each match.[5]

Following the success of Pocketwatch Games' 2013 video game Monaco: What's Yours Is Mine, the development of Tooth and Tail was announced on March 11, 2014.[8] The game was loosely based on a design Andy Schatz, the founder of Pocketwatch Games, and roommate Tom Wexler had made during college, called Dino Drop.[9][10] As with the development of Monaco, many games with similar mechanics were prototyped. Schatz told Jim Rossignol of Rock, Paper, Shotgun about Dino Drop, which he described as "a split-screen strategy game with autonomous units".[10] Schatz and co-designer Andy Nguyen heavily developed this version of real-time strategy towards the end of Monaco's development.[11] Originally developed under the working title Armada—stylized as [ARMADA]—the game was advertised as a real-time strategy (RTS) game without the necessary micromanagement and high quantity of actions per minute, an issue he attributed to the StarCraft series; Starcraft and Command & Conquer were credited as influences on Tooth and Tail.[10]

Armada was developed to appeal to people who did not usually play RTS games but also had the ability to "play [the] game at a deep level".[10] The game was designed to be controller and gamepad friendly;[5] Schatz implied there had been no "good" RTS games that used them.[12] Schatz compared Armada with Monaco, saying "I want to do the thing with RTS that we did with Monaco, with the stealth genre, and that's constrain the control set in order to make the actual, physical interaction easy to pick up without limiting the complexity of the game itself". He pitched this idea to around forty people at the Game Developers Conference to positive feedback.[13] At this point, there was no timeframe for development[14][15] and no definite specifics (such as the title, theme, and style).[13]

Screenshot of Tooth and Tail when it was titled LEADtoFIRE

The game's title was later changed to Lead to Fire—stylized as LEADtoFIRE—in August 2014.[1][16] Throughout these stages of development, Pocketwatch Games streamed their progress on the streaming platform Twitch. This was described as a "miniature PAX"; a way to show off the development and allow fans to play test the game.[17] It was around this time that the game drew inspiration from Blizzard Entertainment and Hearthstone, a card game in which players build decks and compete against others.[17] This comparison was drawn as Schatz expressed admiration for the ability of Blizzard Entertainment, the developers of Hearthstone, to simplify complicated game genre mechanics for a wider audience, using Hearthstone as an example for card games and Heroes of the Storm for multiplayer online battle arenas. Schatz believed Tooth and Tail could be a similar simplification of the StarCraft series.[11] At this stage, it was planned to have around thirty units and structures to interact and build, and while this was not yet definitive, it was estimated players would be able to choose six-to-eight of them per match. Around this time, Polygon reported a tentative release date of "sometime in 2015"[17]

In August 2015, the game received its official name: Tooth and Tail. The change was attributed to Lead to Fire not boding well with the developers,[18] and believing no one knew how to properly pronounce it.[19] The title is a reference to the tooth-to-tail ratio;[1] the art style was revealed at the same time as the official title. Schatz wrote that like SpyParty, "the game should look utterly shitty until it’s absolutely amazing".[18] The art style was described as a modernized version of 1990s pixel art.[18] Having released the official artwork, the development process became more public and the team believed the game would be released in late 2016, with the possibility of using Steam's Early Access platform.[18][20]

Composer Austin Wintory, who also worked on Monaco, was hired to create the game's soundtrack.[6] Sound design was done by PowerUp Audio, the team behind both Crypt of the Necrodancer and Darkest Dungeon. The game's characters speak a language based on Russian that was invented by PowerUp Audio's Kevin Regamey; Schatz told Louis Brierley of Heavy Mag the in-game language is translatable to English.[21] In July 2017, Tooth and Tail's official release date of September 12 was announced for PlayStation 4, Microsoft Windows, macOS, and Linux.[22] Alongside this announcement was the game's trailer.[23] Since release, the development team plans to continue updating the game with new content.[21]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Tooth and Tail.

• Official website
• Tooth and Tail on Facebook
• Tooth and Tail on Twitter