TaleSpire Dev Log 376

Hello everyone!

Thanks to the ticket backlog finally being under control, I've been free to tackle other tasks - and in the spirit of "a lot going on in the background" that Baggers mentioned in the DevLog earlier today, here's what I've been up to: Symbiotes!

In some previous DevLogs (#374, #373, and the introduction of it in #371), we have already elaborated on our upcoming web-view-based modding feature. Since then, we have figured out a lot of the basics to get up and running, and we're now well on our way to fleshing out an API for communicating between Symbiotes and TaleSpire.

I'll keep this short(er) as there is still a ton of work to do and bringing up specific API features of what will be possible and what not is an exercise in futility because nothing is set in stone yet.

However, I can already tell you that we plan to provide several example Symbiotes. In conjunction with documentation, this should show some of the possibilities with Symbiotes as inspiration and provide a starting point for people to see how the API is used in "real applications". These examples are not meant to be "production ready" and will only be as complete as is necessary for a proof of concept. A significant benefit of creating them this early in development is that we get a feeling for how people might want to use the API first-hand, which should result in a more usable and complete feature set.

With that out of the way, here are some examples in action to give you an idea of what kind of possibilities we imagine there being. Do keep in mind that these are all mockups using mostly faked API calls^[0] instead of implemented features, which is why you see a browser console in some of them instead of the Symbiote actually sending and receiving data.

Generic Character Sheet Symbiote

Symbiote for handing out stylized notes to players

A chat symbiote that allows sending messages in specific languages to players garbling the messages for the ones who don't know the language.

A dice roller symbiote that allows to roll with advantage or disadvantage

Disclaimer: This DevLog is from the perspective of one developer. It doesn't reflect everything going on with the team

[0]: The dice roller example is the one that could be considered the most complete as that actually runs in-game and talks with TaleSpire, but even that is just a preliminary implementation with missing features.