TaleSpire Dev Log 472

Hey all,

I’ve felt the urge to drop a dev log for a while, but I’ve kept flitting off to other tasks.

The last couple of weeks are a good example. I got a bee in my bonnet about making the normal play experience better. We have features that we are dragging, kicking, and screaming to the finish line, but small, annoying bugs can languish while that happens. It felt good to squash a few issues I see every time I test the game for release.

The vision limit feature has been in dev limbo for an annoying amount of time. I’ve handed it over to Ree for help with the UX as, while it worked, the experience was really clunky.

For the last couple of days, I have been chasing down a bug in slab placement. These bugs suck. It feels like it should be dirt simple, but there are always some edge cases. Last time I fixed a slab placement bug, I created this bug in the process. This time I’m going to put up a Beta branch so we can all try and break it before I send it out into the world.

Talking of Betas the current one has been going well. We’ve only found one bug in some UI. I’ll fix that on Monday, and hopefully, we’ll ship it on Tuesday. The majority of the changes are behind the scenes, but it allows more third-party content, so that’ll be nice.

Chairmander is doing excellent work on the tagging and search system. The first thing we will ship in that regard is filters for the community content browser. That will give you the ability to filter creatures based on things like AI, 2D, unpainted, etc. TaleWeaverLite (the tool creators use to package up their works for TaleSpire) is getting an upgrade to support tagging and includes a bulk uploader/updater so folks can add tags to hundreds of minis easily.

Searching repositories based on tags will also be coming. And after that, searching your installed content with the new tag system. When things are installed, we can search faster and allow more powerful queries than we can against mod.io.

We’ve felt the pain along with you of trying to navigate the absolute sea of awesome stuff that people have made, so we are dying to get this out. Once all this has shipped for creatures, we will turn our attention to the tagging of tiles and props. We expect to be able to re-use the vast majority of the code that handles the search, but tiles and props require a different style of tagging than creatures do.

I’m skimming the surface here. Chairmander has written some dev logs on this work, and there will definitely be more of those in the future.

Heckbo is back in force, putting the polish on a new sci-fi set. We may have a smaller art release after that to flesh out some sci-fi things before we turn our attention back to the mega-sector. That thing turned out to be a real design challenge, so it’ll be nice to see if a fresh look will yield some answers to the tricky stuff there.

Dwarf continues the quest to make all miniatures designed by our phenomenal Kickstarter backers. The scope of TaleSpire has grown even beyond what they so graciously funded, but we still have many promises to keep. And we will.

Borodust landed a selection of goodies for us on the backend, so I’ll be trying to turn those into features and quality-of-life improvements a few months from now.

Alex has been settling into the project, doing experiments exploring how the particle system will function. I’ve also done some work in this area, sketching out my ideas for the internals and how they will be represented in Unity. It’s fun to see vast numbers of particles shooting around, even if we are very much in programmer art territory :P

Ooo by-the-by, if any of you have good resources on dynamic/uniform control flow within directx 11 compute shaders, we’d love to read them. We do, of course, have what the DX11 spec provides, but that is understandably dense, and it’s nice to read about the subject from a bunch of angles.

This is getting pretty long, so while this isn’t everything in flight, it’ll do for today.

Hope this finds you well.

Peace.

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