TaleSpire Dev Log 427

Heya folks,

I’ve been hiding away recently, so let’s briefly remedy that with a dev log.

Seats

Seats are progressing well enough. Two factors have made it a little harder than anticipated.

First, I hadn’t considered Steam needing five days to review the build before we could put it live. So that immediately took a work week away from us.

Next was that my design for managing seats had a critical flaw. Luckily, in discussion with @Ree, I realised that one of the aspects I thought was mandatory was not, so we got to go back to a more straightforward design.

The behavior now is expected to be as follows:

• Whenever a person who owns seats enters a campaign, their seats are attached to that campaign.
• The seats stay there until they play a different campaign (at which point their seats move to that campaign) or they are kicked/banned/remove-themselves from the campaign.

At that point anyone using the unpaid version of TaleSpire can join the campaign and use one of those seats. When they disconnect from the campaign, they immediately return the seat to the campaign.

That is a lot of words, but the TLDR is “person with seats goes into a campaign, then a person using the unpaid version can join.” If all goes well, it should feel very simple.

The backend portion is rapidly coming together, so a big shout-out to @borodust there. We’ll be testing that early next week. I’ve been on the TaleSpire side doing UX, and that is bumbling in the right direction.

We are now expecting to ship a Beta in the first week of April. It’ll all depend on whether Steam says we need to change anything before we can put it live, though.

Creature Mods

Holy cow, folks, over one THOUSAND creatures already?! That’s insane.

We are blown away by your response and feel VERY sheepish that we can’t start working on all the things you have been reporting.

Here are a few things that are on our minds:

Search is rough

We want to look into what we can do here. We know we will have tagging in the future, but even before that, some searches are skipping items you’d think would match.

Content policy

We don’t support mature content on the official repository right now. We need to look into whether we would want to allow the tagging of some mature content, what our policy around that would be, and how players would control that from inside TaleSpire.

Also of critical importance is whether that would affect the age rating of TaleSpire as a whole. We are not willing to compromise that, so if it would, we’d need to look into other approaches.

We have always known that there would be plenty of stuff better served by community-run repositories, so we need to get moving on the API, too.

Mod packs

Being able to bundle mods into packs is very much something we intend to support in the future. We’ve got some things to work on first, but it won’t be forgotten.

TaleWeaverLite improvements

We definitely need to get back to TaleWeaverLite and make it easier to make mods. Two things that have been mentioned that we definitely want to look into are:

• Allowing you to specify which channels and files you want to use for which texture map. This means you don’t need to pack your AO, roughness, etc., into a texture before importing it into TWLite.

• Adding support for emissive textures. So you can have (fake) glowing parts of your creatures.

Wrapping up

That’s all for today. It’s time for a weekend. Have fun folks