It Takes a Tribe

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• Announcements·11 Aug 2026Official

  Dev Diary 2: Fire, Spirits and a Moving Tent

  Fire crackles, sparks climb into the dark, and around it the bodies move. Sparks dance, shadows dance, humans dance. The movement isn't just motion following the drums and the sound of the flames. The movement is a bond, it is identity and connection with forces beyond our understanding.My name is Blaž, and for the longest time I had a dream of designing a game that was different. Not a fresh blend of familiar mechanics with a new twist, but something truly its own. Ever since I took a few anthropology classes in college, I've been fascinated by early human societies. Long before writing, before cities, before all the rest. When humans used their wit to make sense of the world around them. When lightning was a message from an angry god and not charged particles moving through the air. Reading everything from classical anthropology to esoteric speculative literature on shamanism, I started building a picture in my head: a game set in prehistory, when people were not conquerors but humble storytellers.The vision was clear. A strategy game where you don't conquer, own territory, fight your peers or research ever more advanced ways of killing each other. Central to it was a feeling that the tribe is small and insignificant against the world. Even at its largest, the whole tribe could perish before a single herd of hungry sabre-tooth tigers. These people don't develop technology so much as culture, and even the technological advances they do make are more conceptual than practical. That's the part that matters most to me: their most valuable breakthroughs are, more often than not, new ways of seeing.Early humans lived in small groups. Private property didn't exist even as a concept. They had no kings, no warlords, no established priesthood. The only ones set apart were the storytellers, the shamans. Those with a stronger connection to the spirit realm beyond the thin veil. People listened to them more intensely, trusted them and followed their advice. Shamans saw the wor...
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• Announcements·19 Jun 2026Official

  Dev Diary 1: Building a Living Myth

  Welcome to the very first It Takes a Tribe dev diary. Pull up a log, the fire's going.If you've wandered past our earlier posts, you already know the shape of us: a very small team building a stubbornly large game. Over the coming months we'll be trekking through all of it. The living ecosystem that hums along with or without you. Tribal life from the morning hunt to the midnight ritual. A spirit world that regards your tribe roughly the way weather regards a hillside. Stories that outlast the tribes who told them. And, naturally, the many, many headaches involved in getting any of that to behave.Before the deep dives, though, we want to show you where the game actually stands today, and the trail we're following toward a build you can put your own hands on. What we already haveWe've spent the last few years quietly laying down a world, and the good news is that it already breathes. The engine is alive and ticking, the internal build does an impressive amount of living on its own, and the core pillars from our store page are not promises but active systems.Rather than a collection of isolated mechanics, the game already functions as an interconnected web. The procedural engine generates an indifferent, shifting landscape that refuses to let you settle, driving a full ecosystem of animals to migrate, breed, and hunt based on changing seasons and dwindling resources. Your tribe is dropped right into the middle of this food chain. But unlike the animals, your people don't just survive: they remember. They take the trauma of a harsh winter or the triumph of a hunt and carve those memories into figurines or tell them around the fire. This creates a culture that carries real, mechanical weight out in the wild. Your shamans, meanwhile, perform rituals that protect you from predators, explore unknown terrain at distance or bargain for survival when the season turns cruel.The piece tying all of this together is a turn system designed to separate intent from reality. You plan...
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• Announcements·7 Jun 2026Official

  Welcome to It Takes a Tribe

  For a long time we’ve wanted to make a strategy game that wasn’t about building bigger walls, bigger armies, or bigger empires.We wanted to make a game about people.About the stories they would tell each other around a fire.About the weird masks they carved after surviving something terrible.About their culture serving not merely as decoration but as the very essence of their survival, identity, and bond with the spirits.That eventually became It Takes a Tribe. It’s a turn-based strategy game where you lead a nomadic tribe through a harsh mythical world. You hunt, migrate, perform shamanic rituals, survive brutal seasons, appease ancient spirits, and shape your tribe through the art and stories born from your journey.Over the coming months, we’ll be sharing:- simulation system details- gameplay mechanics deep dives- worldbuilding and lore- art and visual design- development progress- behind-the-scenes chaos- and probably at least one terrible jokeThanks for stopping by this early. If this sounds like your kind of journey, please consider Wishlisting the game and clicking Follow so you don't miss the next steps of our adventure.What stories will your tribe tell?
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• Announcements·7 Jun 2026Official

  Meet the tribe behind the Tribe

  Welcome, Wanderers.Over the coming months we'll be posting about the things that have eaten our years. Before any of that, it seems only fair to introduce the shamans most responsible for the ritual.We're Bad Cog, a studio founded by a programmer, a professor and a professor turned programmer. Yes, the core team consists of only three people who've spent an unreasonable number of years quietly making It Takes a Tribe. We share among ourselves 2 PhDs, 5 children and an unhealthy number of tribal masks.Blaž – Game design & art directionResponsible for the way the game works and feels. He designs the rules of the game and the simulation, shapes the visual feel of the world, and has been overcomplicating systems since his first interaction with a system. A university psychology professor who can explain, usually at length and with footnotes, how the simplest of rules, set against one another, conspire into behaviour that nobody explicitly wrote. He has been thinking about making this game for the better part of his adult life. He insists that this is dedication, not a diagnosis.Norman – Systems implementation & loreBuilder of systems, keeper of lore, architect of spiritual weirdness. Responsible for much of the game’s simulation logic, mythology and interconnected systems, as well as the kind of conversations that begin with prehistoric migration patterns and somehow end in metaphysics of cosmic horror. Myths and algorithms are the same to him, as he finds beauty in both complex systems and engaging narratives. He really sucks at visuals, though.Alan – Graphics, engine & UX/UIThe man who hauls the game's deep and intricate simulation up into the daylight. All that quietly beautiful machinery, assuming you're the sort inclined to find machinery beautiful, he converts for everyone else into a world you can see, a camera you can move and controls that don't fight you. He also keeps three stubborn people roughly aligned, which is its own kind of engineering and just might b...
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