TaleSpire DevLog 434

Hello again, everyone!

Over the last few weeks I've wrapped up large parts of my work on tags - the centerpiece of which are revised lists of tags.

Up until now, we've had a big "main list of tags" that has grown over time, but there never was a planned system behind it. This did work for a long time, but with an ever-growing list of assets and tags, it got hard to consistently tag all "basic" properties (like materials) and even remember what tags we had.

We are now remaking this "blessed" tag list (roughly) based on these main guiding principles:

• Have as few tags as possible
• Only have objectively verifiable tags, nothing subjective: "thick" is not a useful tag
• Tags need to apply to more than one asset
• Tags need to be "visually distinct". We'll never have a tag for every possible thing in the world, so we're going for "more generic". For example, the "platonic idea" of a generic accountant does not look any different than that of any other office worker - so having "accountant" as a tag is not particularly useful to us.
• Heavily utilize relations between tags: If "archer" is tagged, the tags "armed" and "ranged" should always be there.

Note: While these main principles are great, they obviously don't work in many places because, surprise, surprise, nature and language are messy and vague and refuse to fit into neat and tidy categories. This means that striving for a "perfect" tag system is doomed to fail. I have omitted a LOT of detail in this post for the sake of brevity.

As few tags as possible? But how should I find anything?

Mainly, we want to avoid hyper-specific tags. However, we know you still need to search for specific things, so we will add searching for asset names to support that. For example, we don't have a "German Shepherd" tag, but we do have "Dog". If you want to search for "German Shepherd" specifically, you can find it by its asset name.

A "blessed" tag list sounds insufficient, especially for modding

You're absolutely right! Our idea is to have a good tag list that covers most of the stuff most assets would probably need. Ontop of that we allow artists to create their own tags ad-hoc. Of course, we will also work on fleshing out the "blessed tag list" where necessary.

Synonyms and more

We also want to avoid creating many similar terms as tags: "fighter" and "warrior" aren't different enough from each other to have clear, unique and non-overlapping uses. Instead, "warrior" is not a tag but marked as a synonym of "fighter" - any time someone searches for warrior we suggest "fighter" instead^[0].

Questionnaire

Additionally, we want to make it easier for artists to tag their assets consistently by providing a tagging questionnaire. This questionnaire should have straightforward questions for every "basic" thing about an asset. But let's show, not tell:

Note: UI will not look like this once implemented in TaleWeaver; this is a mockup inside a Symbiote to allow us to test and iterate quickly

The idea is to allow artists to have a repeatable and consistent way of tagging the majority of "basic" things. Once they've gone through the questionnaire, the asset(s) they tagged should have the most important tags - and if they then want to add more specific tags manually, that's still possible.

Next, we will re-tag our own assets (starting with creatures) to see if these theoretically great ideas hold up to the real world before subjecting you all to them.

Bug Month

Next to tags, I've also been preparing our now ongoing month of bug fixing. Since I'm in charge of all of the feedback and bug reports you all dutifully submit to our feedback page, I've taken some time to prepare a list of priority tickets to work on this month. As part of that, I've recently introduced so-called "15-minute bugs", which are bugs that can reasonably encountered by a new user through normal and common interactions within 15 minutes of starting TaleSpire for the first time^[1]. If you have a small pet peeve bug that annoys you and haven't found the time to report it yet, now is the best time to do so!

All that prep work has already started to bear fruit in the last few weeks, and you'll certainly see more of it.

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

[0]: We also do a similar thing for sub-groups, like "German Shepherd" suggesting "Dog". This and synonyms have some peculiar (and very funny) UI/UX problems: When searching for "crow", the tag "bird" gets suggested - but also "mammal". What? A bird isn't a mammal! Well, the word "crow" is very close to "cow", and a cow is, in fact, a mammal. We still need to figure out how to present these suggestions properly.

[1]: The "15-minute bug" terminology and approach is something I found and shamelessly copied from the (absolutely wonderful) KDE open-source community, specifically Nate Graham's "This week in KDE" blog. They're doing great work, and the 15-minute bug initiative has served them well in reducing many paper-cut type bugs and drastically improving the new user experience - and I think it'll also serve us well.