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Latest Updates from Our Project:
Scaling up high quality miniature production with Eldritch Foundry
over 3 years ago
– Sat, Sep 19, 2020 at 02:08:36 AM
It's with a lot of excitement today that we announce our partnership with Eldritch Foundry! Integrating their tooling into our asset pipeline will help us to scale up our production of miniatures and deliver the variety of characters that people are waiting for.
We have long loved the idea of working with Eldritch Foundry and have been talking with them on and off since the Beta was released. They have an excellent range of races with fantastic attention to detail that really shines through in their printed miniatures.
Naturally, we have been testing integrating Eldritch Foundry in our pipeline and the results have been excellent. By using such detailed sculpts as a base, we've seen reductions in the time required to make a miniature of up to a third. The following screenshot represents about a week and a half of work from one artist working part-time.
To the fans who had noticed our focus on monsters recently, this was why. We knew that we would soon have much better tools for making heroes and so we were holding off until that time came. Thank you for bearing with us!
The question of how we would handle scaling up our asset production has been raised many times in and out of the community. It's a real pleasure to present the first substantial part of our answer to that.
Catch-up time again!
over 3 years ago
– Tue, Sep 15, 2020 at 01:34:04 AM
Hey everyone, Baggers here.
Another week has sped on by and so it's time for a recap.
We have shipped the flying feature and soon we'll be shipping an asset update that adds flat roof tiles into the mix, so thanks to the community members who requested those!
Minature production has continued in full force but we'll save most of the screenshots until our update later in the week. Ree did share a shot of his wip Gnoll so here it is.
Gnoll
Speaking of Ree, he has been working hard on props, making sure the tooling is as stable as possible before we begin the process of integrating props into the board systems that run behind the scenes. I've just been down at Ree & Heckbo's place this last week so I can say from seeing in in action that not only is it going to be addressing some building issues people have reported since we shipped the Alpha, it's going to be pretty damn cool as well. He's also putting together a compass which you can see an early version of here:
I've continued work on the engine, most of which has been rather technical so I'm going to post a bunch of dev-logs over the next few days talking about that.
As we head towards the end of the year it's going to get increasingly stressful and exciting. Lots of good stuff still to come and we'll keep you posted along the way.
Until next time,
Seeya!
Tents, flying, and general updates
over 3 years ago
– Wed, Sep 02, 2020 at 12:26:29 AM
Holy moly, I looked up from the code, and two weeks have passed without an update. Let's fix that.
Yesterday we shipped the Merchant Expansion Set. This includes a whole bunch of stalls, ware, and tent tile pieces. We're already seeing new creations incorporating this set, which is super exciting
Here is the release image
And here is a shot of all the tiles on their own (credit goes to Istallri from the community for the screenshot)
The art team has been doing a cracking job and is now gearing up for a big push making heroes. Lots of fun stuff to share here as we run up to Early Access. Watch this space!
Next, Ree has (amongst many other things) been working on flying for creatures. This has been a surprisingly elusive feature when it comes to how it should feel, but it's really coming together these last few days. You can see it in action in this tweet
I've been making slow but steady progress on the code behind the scenes. As we mentioned in the update stream a month or so back, we overestimated the rate at which some features would progress in the game engine we are using. This meant that when it came time to work on performance, many things we would need were not ready. Please note that this is entirely our fault as there had been no timeline promises from the other side. The upshot of this is that we have had to make many components that we believed would be available off the shelf, and this amounts to about a month of unexpected additional work.
Clearly, a number of our (and especially my) estimates being very overly optimistic, so that's something we will be working on in the future. Thanks for bearing with us as we feel this out, and sorry that it's meant that things have taken longer than all of us would like.
With all that said, work on integrating the new physics engine is going well. I should have some little things to show over the next week (not shipping, just little progress gifs).
That's all for today. Best regards to you and yours.
Weekly Rundown
over 3 years ago
– Thu, Aug 13, 2020 at 12:05:19 AM
Hi folks, with so many things happening last week, things have settled down again this week, and we've all been heads-down on our respective projects.
Modeling for the next asset set is progressing well, and as I'm writing this, I'm listening to the draft of a new piece of music for the soundtrack!
On the code side, Ree has continued to work on the props system, which has also led to promising developments in the building experience. I personally can't wait to see how this turns out.
I've been working on the engine and have seen some promising results with the new animation system and scripting changes. I've made a write-up of that over here, but the pretty bit is this video of lots of animated objects, each with their own script driving the animation.
This isn't something we've done a lot, but we want to highlight another project in this update. Popup Dungeon was released today, and as another indie, Kickstarter funded, tabletop project, we wanted to celebrate their milestone.
If you're not familiar with the game, its a tabletop, deck-building experience, with a papercraft aesthetic and has been shaped by the same sources that inspired TaleSpire. It's got singleplayer, local-co-op, and a whole lot of modding. Its range seems impressive, and there is already community-created content that completely transforms the game.
Dwarf and Ree had the pleasure of trying it a bit early and are enjoying it a lot, so there is a good chance some of you might as well! If you fancy you can check it out over here.
With that, I think we'll wrap up this update. It's exciting to see that release and think about us being able to open the gates on our daft project down the line too.
Have a great week everyone.
Weekly catchup
over 3 years ago
– Thu, Aug 06, 2020 at 02:52:12 AM
Heya folks, the last week had quite a range of stuff in it.
Firstly we shipped the rulers feature, which seems to have been well received. Seeing them used in streams has been great!
We have another smaller asset pack read to roll. You should be seeing that tomorrow if all goes well (Jason had the assets ready a few days ago, but us folks in charge of the releases are still catching up). It's a mushroom focused pack with a couple of minis, including this guy!
Rooster Teeth also just announced that the next series of their acclaimed RWBY show will be using TaleSpire! As modding tools aren't out yet, we've helped them get some of their models into the game, which was fun. You can read more about that over here.
Behind the scenes work is going well on the next asset pack, Ree is prototyping props and tools, and I've been up to my eyes in engine code. So much good stuff still to come. It's gonna be a fun year :)
