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Latest Updates from Our Project:
Summary Week 45-47
over 3 years ago
– Tue, Nov 24, 2020 at 08:33:11 PM
Greetings everyone!
This morning I figured it would be a good time to do another summary update thinking a couple of weeks had passed since the previous one. I quickly realized a third week had made its way in there, making this update much overdue! But, here goes.
It is very much in an early form but immediately helped with asset discoverability.
Work on the newly dubbed: Chimera build
Baggers came down for a week to focus on getting the new Rendering/Physics engine into a playable state. The week turned out rather fruitful as dice started rolling and creatures started moving again under the new Physics Engine.
Heckbo finished her Laboratory extension set, which also gave us Screen-Space-Reflection to provide us with nicer metals and exclude sky reflections from occluded areas.
And finally, another Miniature Booster Pack from Ðwarf. Eldrich Foundry released their new Dragon Avatar, which opened up for TaleSpire to introduce Dragonfolk into the game. There are four so far, two Melee Characters and two spell casters.
That's it for this summary. We hope everyone is enjoying the new content!
Till next time!
Summary Week 43/44
over 3 years ago
– Tue, Nov 03, 2020 at 01:17:33 AM
Hello everyone!
Time for another Summary, this time for the past couple of weeks. Since our delay announcement, we've had a few updates come out. Some features and a bunch of new assets to play around with.
Booster Pack
To start the Summary, we released an Enchanted Forest Booster Pack. This contains four creatures requested by the community or observed (missing) on streams. In short, A Treant, Giant Toad, Fairy and a Magic Weapon (Hammer)
As foretold in an earlier update, we released water in its most basic form. Complete flooding! Basically, being able to set a water-level-height on a Board. With this being the first iteration on the water, over time, we'll look into adding more liquid types, as well as "Water volumes" (in some form) once we get going on the terrain system post initial Early-Access Release
A couple of days after the water released Biomes of Ice & Dust, which featured tiles to help set adventures in more extreme environmental circumstances.
And late last week, a new batch of NPCs and a couple of heroes were added to the game. We once again took full advantage of our excellent partnership with Eldritch Foundry, speeding up the creation process significantly. They've been adding a lot of new content to their editor. Feels like every time we login, there is something new equip!
And something for today!
Finally, the most recent update, which kind of falls outside the scope of the Summary. But here we go anyway! We're talking TaleSpire Custom URL Support. This allows URLs starting with talespire:// to launch the game and execute commands. At the moment, only DiceURLs are supported, but that enables you to set up dice to roll in-game, as shown in this video and update:
If your game is up to date, you can also test this by going to the Patch Notes:
It will be exciting to see what the community does with this new power!
That's it!
At least for this Summary. Thank you all for checking out the update and for your continued support!
Till next time!
The delay announcement dev stream
over 3 years ago
– Fri, Oct 16, 2020 at 01:21:08 AM
Thanks to everyone for all the super supportive feedback. We're looking forward to getting you the new goodies next week.
Ciao
Early Access Delay
over 3 years ago
– Fri, Oct 16, 2020 at 12:59:00 AM
Hi folks,
Today we are unfortunately announcing that we are delaying the Early Access release until early next year. We will explain all the news and details below, but first, let's have the bullet point version:
Early Access delayed to early 2021
Terrain/water system moved to after Early Access release to minimize risk
Next week, we will ship basic water support, along with desert and snow tiles, to hold us over until the full terrain/water system arrives (see below for more on this, including videos.).
We made our roadmap based on some fairly optimistic predictions of not only our own timeline but also the timelines of software we rely on. These have not panned out, and, as you may have seen from the dev-logs, we have had to build a lot of additional systems we were not expecting to. These are working, but the process has put us a good couple of months behind where we wanted to be.
Behind the scenes, we've been pushing hard to see if it was feasible to make up that time, but obviously, that is only sane to do for a little while. After regrouping and looking at progress, we saw that the planned tasks are taking the expected amount of time, and so the delay isn't going away. This makes sense, but it was worth checking.
What is the new date?
We are saying 'Early 2021' but not picking a specific date. There are two reasons for this:
The first one is that Covid is ramping back up again and, while we are taking precautions, we can't pretend to make guarantees around that.
The second, and arguably more important one, is that last year we set a date for the Beta and pushed way too hard to hit it, with one of us getting very ill. We will make mistakes, but we strive to make sure they are at least new mistakes each time.
Is all this engine work really needed?
Yes. The engine we use has done a remarkable job with all that we throw at it but to get to what we promised in the Kickstarter, we need to run faster, with bigger boards, and on a wider range of hardware.
The good news is that it is already showing results. Here is a stress test of a stupidly high tower so you can see the frame-rates in the two versions. It's not finished, nor scientific, but it gives the idea.
We have another code improvement that gives significant improvements over this. However, we are still ironing bugs out of that version, so it didn't feel right to show it yet. We'll post more on that in the dev-logs as it matures.
Why not ship just the current version now?
This is a great question, and it was an option we also considered and discussed heavily
The first issue is that, without getting too technical, the current code has bugs that are addressed in the new version. Trying to fix all these issues in the current approach would add more work rather than reducing it.
Secondly, the servers are not ready to handle a large number of additional players. We are blessed that so many people want to play the game. However, if we let them in and the servers fell over, we made our situation worse rather than better. We also know that, once we release, we will need to take time to provide support and bugfixes. Given the work we need to do, this would again delay the version we are trying to reach.
Next, some features which we feel are critical to a healthy builder community, like board sharing, are not feasible with the current approach. The new board format we are using will support board sharing in a way that doesn't result in tonnes of additional data. This is also important for our running costs.
In the end, releasing something is a whole bunch of work. If we try and make the current version something that we can ship to many people, we would essentially be building and supporting two products at the same time. We feel that adding another product doesn't feel like the right way to hasten the development of the one we really need to make.
There is a lot of talk about the engine, but are other features still progressing?
Absolutely! You've probably already seen the compass, photo-mode and improved settings that have been shipping recently. Lots of work has already been done behind the scenes preparing for customizable controls, a richer emote system, and the new prop system.
The prop system has an almost mythical quality at this point. It has been through many revisions and prototypes, and we've been talking about it being close to ready since the alpha. This time we'd like to finally show some of it in action. Many of you will be happy to see that it supports free placement.
For those of you interested in the technical side, we made this feasible by saying that props can't be dragged out in huge numbers like tiles and that we will have a density limit so that there can never be more than a certain number in a given area. We will tune this value so that in typical cases, this limit will never be an issue.
What was that about shipping water and new biomes next week?
You have all been super patient as we kept saying that water was coming with the new terrain system. With that delayed, we really wanted to give you something to tide you over until it ships.
Water, desert, and snow biomes are among the most requested things (other than just releasing the game already :P), and so that felt like the right thing to do.
We have put together a basic set of tiles and props for those environments. Of course, the plan is still to get to the terrain system as fast as possible, so we aren't planning to make every possible snow and sand tile variation. However, we hope this will fill the gap for now.
Here are a couple of shots made using the new tiles
And here is a little video of the water in action.
We call it "basic water support," as you only control a single water volume covering the whole board. The goal of the terrain systems is to allow ponds, lakes, and rivers at various altitudes. However, this version still has a lot of scope for underwater encounters.
Weren't there good reasons not to use tiles for terrain? Why the change of plan?
There definitely are. Our goal from the beginning has been to reach the point where we could support truly huge boards. We've known that that wouldn't be feasible with just the tile approach, and so the terrain system has been part of our plan to reach the goals we laid out in the Kickstarter.
Those limitations have not changed and making large terrains out of tiles definitely isn't the right way to do this long term. However, it's the only way we've given you to build, so this isn't making the current situation any worse!
Once terrain arrives, we will work out how best to deprecate these tiles. We will not be breaking those boards. We will just be giving better tools and making sure they are the obvious, visible way to get things done.
How's the team doing?
We are doing ok.
Having to delay the release feels bad, and we are naturally a little nervous about doing this. When you make a Kickstarter, you don't have many daydreams that involve writing updates like these.
It's stressful because it makes you feel like you are losing ground, which makes you want to throw yourself at the problem even harder. On the other hand, we know that we have to take our health seriously and that you have collectively told us the same thing many times (which we very much appreciate).
Other than this, however, we are doing well. Progress on both art and code is as high as it's ever been, and it's great seeing a lot of the investments paying off. This all combines to make a rather bizarre feeling.
What is the Twitch stream about?
With this news, it felt right to make ourselves available. Whether you have questions, comments, or complaints, we will be there to hear them.
Just to once again say thank you for giving us the chance to make this game. Being able to work on a game without compromise is a true privilege.
Update from behind the scenes
over 3 years ago
– Wed, Oct 07, 2020 at 12:12:15 AM
Hi again everyone,
It's been a very cool couple of weeks. We've had the first big hero pack where we got to leverage Eldritch Foundry in our art pipeline.
In the game, we added new UI scaling controls. These are experimental, but we'd love to hear your feedback on them.
We added a photo mode, which includes a top-down orthographic view for all of you who have asked for that! You can see Ree give a tour of that feature in this video:
It can also capture images at 8x resolution of your monitor, which is great for making beautiful 4k desktop backgrounds :D
Work is well underway for well underway for two more asset packs.
The rendering portion of the engine work has finally come together. It is paying off (more details on this in another post), and work in continuing in earnest of everything else. The engine difficulties, both expected and unexpected, have put us at least a couple of months behind schedule. We are pushing forward but will be sitting down to take stock in the coming weeks. If we have to make any adjustments to the plan, we will lets you know as soon as possible.
That said, we hope you are doing well. As always, we are happy to answer any questions here and Discord where we can be found much of the time.
