TaleSpire Dev Log 500

Hello again,

Last devlog, I talked about how we found some UI issues with the new search systems while reviewing and testing, so let's talk about what I've done about that.

Let's start with the visually most fun ones, the bugs:

These should be fixed now (though I'm sure I'll find one or two more before release) - the first one was surprisingly annoying to fix properly. On the bright side, the fix did require me to refactor some code I didn’t particularly like anyway and now it's a lot cleaner!

Now let's get to the more nebulous issues: The "eeeeeh, I guess it works, but it doesn't feel particularly good". Starting with how we display synonyms, I've added a minor "stripe effect" to the background color for synonyms to make it subconsciously a bit more different from "real" tags.
I'm not 100% happy yet because it's a bit too understated and hard to notice, making it not help much. I may tweak this a bit more, or leave it for a later release; we'll see.

Finally, there's name search. In my last devlog, I talked about how we noticed during testing that it wasn't clear what was happening when entering text in the library search field, because we don't expose asset names in UI.

More specifically, I said we currently don't expose asset names in UI.

Note: Here you can also see the striped background on all the synonym matches. This one is a bit of an unfortunate example for a UI showcase since it only includes synonyms, but oh well.

Since then, I added "name plates" to the asset library, which appear for the first entry while typing in the search input field. This immediately shows the name of the best-fitting result as you type, which closely matches the current text input. This, in turn, should allow an intuitive understanding of what's happening after at most a few searches.

After having done the work of creating this UI, I also exposed it when hovering over an entry with the mouse. We know some of you have been asking for this for a long time and it will finally happen soon.
Unfortunately, it will still include the main annoyance that was part of the reason we didn't do this sooner: especially for tiles and props, some of the names just... aren't great names. They weren't really designed to be shown "externally" to players^[0]. However, that's something we can work on later, most likely when we get to re-tagging all of our tiles and props.

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

[0]: A few choice examples being: "Tavern Roof flat weaving 02", "shogun_roofCornerBottom01" or "Moorgoth Wall/Floor With Curtained Window 01"