TaleSpire Dev Log 459

Greetings all!

I want to check in with everyone by talking about "gestures, pinging, and intent." One of the most requested features on our feedback board is Player/GM presence tools: Link  While Baggers was visiting here last week, I started playing around with ways to get this feature in and got a bit carried away.

This video shows some of the features, namely gestures and pings. I want to discuss these a bit.

Gesture

Gesturing is the simplest form of showing things to others. It takes the form of a sphere, as seen in the Video. By going into "gesture mode," you can simply point at things, and everyone can see it. Players can choose their own color, which will carry over into the other parts of this feature.

Pinging

Somewhat inspired visually by some older RTS games, ping-ing is how you leave a temporary mark that will grab some attention. While in "gesture-mode" you can click to leave a ping. What is seen in the Video is only part of this, though, as if the ping is not on screen, you will get a UI element pointing toward the ping. Clicking on it will then take you to the ping Location and/or Creature to see what all the fuss is about.

Intent

Intent isn't featured in the Video at all, and it might not fall under the gesture umbrella. But being able to send GM Requests for "arbitrary" actions not only when opening a door or attacking. Getting a word in during excitable narrative exchanges between the group can occasionally be challenging. I've long wanted to implement almost like a point-and-click adventure game style "Look at", "Talk to" etc allowing players to show intent. So before action pushes everyone down a bottomless pit, the GM can glance up to see if any players have pending requests. 

So yeah, that is Gestures, ping and intent.

Thank you very much for reading!

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