TaleSpire cover
TaleSpire screenshot
PC Steam
Genre: Role-playing (RPG), Simulator, Indie

TaleSpire

TaleSpire Release - Seats
Pull up a chair, the Seats feature is here!

Campaigns need people, and seats are a new, optional way to bring those people into your adventures.

Before now, everyone who wanted to join a campaign needed to buy their own copy of TaleSpire. We heard from your feedback, especially those of you running many campaigns, that this wasn’t always feasible for your players.

Now, anyone with a full copy of TaleSpire has the ability to purchase additional seats for guests to use. Your guests then use TaleSpire - Guest Edition, which is free to download from Steam, and they are ready to go!



All features (including modding) are available to guests. The only limitations guests experience are not being able to create their own campaigns or buy seats themselves.

How to get started


We have quick start guides both for getting started as a guest and also getting started as TaleSpire player. If you own a full copy of TaleSpire, then you want the second link.

A few common questions



Q: Can we still get full copies of TaleSpire as we did before? 

A: Absolutely, that is not going away. This is an addition, not a replacement, and if you don’t need seats, you can safely ignore this whole announcement!

Q: My party and I already have TaleSpire. How does this affect me?

A: Not at all; nothing is changing. The Seats feature is just a new tool to help some folks bring in their players.

Q: Doesn’t this mean the GM has to buy seats for everyone? 

A: Mercifully, no. Anyone with a full copy of TaleSpire can own seats, and they bring those seats to any campaign they are in.

Q: I run five campaigns, each with four players. Do I seriously need to buy twenty seats?! 

A: Definitely not! Your seats are infinitely reusable across campaigns. They move with you automatically. That means that four seats would cover all twenty players. Remember also that you don’t need to be the one providing all the seats, anyone with the full game can bring a seat to the campaign.

Reporting issues


While this release doesn’t appear to be that big in the game itself, we have an unrelated but extensive upgrade to the backend landing today.

As always, if you find bugs or experience issues, please reach out to us at https://feedback.talespire.com . We also haunt the Discord server, and there are thousands of lovely folks there who are a wellspring of tips, tricks, and knowledge!

That’s enough rambling from us


We are happy to be providing a new option for getting people into TaleSpire. As with all things, it has its tradeoffs, but we hope this is handy for a good bunch of you.

With seats shipped, we are thrilled to be getting back into features and fixes and to keep driving towards the full release. We have a lot on the roadmap and we are going to deliver on all of it.

Until the next dev-log or patch, Happy adventuring!

Bug Month Patch 6
Today, we tackle a bug that has thwarted the pasting of certain kinds of slabs.

When a slab that combined thin tiles and props was copied, this bug made it impossible to place the slab back on the grid correctly. It would be misaligned.

The following shows the difference before and after this patch.



Along with this, we fixed a case where a malformed slab could put tiles in unsupported rotations. This also allows for some data optimizations later on.

That’s all for this today. We will be back on Monday with Seats and more fixes.

BUILD-ID: 14497681 - Download Size: Win / Linux 2.9 MB / Mac OS 6.7 MB


P.S. We are not going to make a habit of releasing on the weekend. This fix was going to ship on Thursday, but our main build server decided to freak out and mess up the end of our week. 

Remember, computers can hear you, and as soon as you announce a deadline they will do their damnedest to mess that up :p

TaleSpire Guest Edition & Seats ship on Monday 27th
In just five days, we ship a whole new way to bring people into your adventures!

TaleSpire Guest Edition is a free-to-download version of TaleSpire, with the only restrictions being that people using Guest Edition (who we call guests) cannot create new campaigns or buy seats. Everything else, like community-made creatures, Symbiotes, and HeroForge are all available. Guests can even become GMs and help build the campaign!

For a guest to join a campaign, a "Seat" must be available for them.

Seats are a completely optional, infinitely reusable "plus-one" to a campaign. Any person who has a full copy of the game can purchase additional seats for guests to use. Using seats, a party of one GM and four players can play TaleSpire for 60% of the cost of everyone buying full copies.

It's not just about saving money, though. Seats are not tied to specific guests or campaigns, so they can be used across as many different parties as you like. This means you could GM for a hundred parties, each with four guest players, and you'd only need four seats for all four hundred of them!

We are delighted to be getting ready to ship this feature. A big thanks to you all for your patience as we wrestled this thing into existence. We've tried to make something just as useful to professional GMs as casual players. The design came directly out of your feedback, so thank you, and we hope you find it useful.

As always, we are reachable on the Discord server and socials, so feel free to ping us with any questions. We have at least one more patch shipping before the weekend, so perhaps we'll see you there.

Either way, have a great weekend. Monday is going to be fun.

Bug Month Patch 5
Hi again, we come bearing more fixes!

Today, we finally make sure that the creatures that have been knocked down show that state properly when placing.



We also fixed the “rename campaign” dialog so that pressing the “return” key will apply the change in the same way as clicking the button does.

See you in the next patch.

Bug Month Patch 4
Fresh out of the national holidays, we have another patch. This one tackles the following:
  • Entries in the unique-creature panel should be ordered alphabetically. Previous they would go out of order in certain situations
  • Minor performance improvement: avoid re-sorting the unique-creature panel on every change to a unique (such as changing position)
  • Fixed an issue where the first use of the 'sample' tool did not properly focus the entry in the asset browser.
The war on bugs continues in the next episode of Bug Month!

Bug Month Patch 3
Hi folks,

In this release, we are tackling a single bug.

TaleSpire would sometimes place the prop slightly lower than it should when using attachment points. This was cumulative, so over the length of a fence, each piece would be sunk slightly lower into the ground.



This patch fixes this, so subsidence is no longer on the menu!



We will keep finding and fixing more annoyances like this throughout the month.

Until next time,

Ciao.

TaleSpire Dev Log 432 + Patch Release Notes
Heya folks,

Good news from Steam. They gave the “seats” feature the go-ahead. So now we continue setting up the production servers and getting ready for a release. I will get you the release date as soon as the team has had the next seats meeting.

So that’s great, and we also have another few bug fixes for you:
  • We have fixed a case where returning to the main menu broke the build grid.
  • We’ve fixed a potential issue with the “cut region” toggle not working right after returning to the main menu
  • Updating a unique-creature’s position or values no longer collapses its entry in the unique-creature panel.

Have a great day!

TaleSpire Dev Log 431 + Patch Release Notes
Heya folks, After much gnashing of teeth, the "seats" feature is in for review with Steam. Now we wait and fix anything they decide needs tweaking. We’ll let you know as soon as it’s through review and ready for release.

In the meantime, I want to get stuck in our long-awaited “Month of Bugs,” where I just try and fix as much random stuff as I can.

I can’t guarantee it’ll be the specific bugs that you most want to be squashed, but there will (finally) be some visible work from me after a few months of quiet grumbling.

We are kicking off with a little patch courtesy of @chairmander, who fixed these while administering the public bug-reporting site.
  • Fixed a couple of cases where “Waiting on GM” was not updating to reflect changes in the player’s rights
  • Fix a case where clicking on client-portrait was not focusing the active creature
  • fix a couple of typos in an alert message and a tutorial
  • fix a log message

Alrighty, I’ll get back to work. I hope you’re all having a successful day.

Peace.

TaleSpire Dev Log 429 - Costs and Currencies
Hi folks, in this post, we’re gonna talk about various money matters, but let’s not bury the lede; we’ll start with seat pricing.

For the purpose of this post, we will use the USD prices as an example. The prices will then be regionalized for each country. This does NOT mean that the USD prices are just converted to local currency. See further down for info on what is actually done.

Seats


The current cost of the full game is $25 USD.

We will be putting a build of TaleSpire on Steam called “TaleSpire - Guest Edition,” which will be free to download. For the purpose of this post, we will call the people using the guest edition “guests.”

For a guest to be able to enter a campaign, a seat must be available. The guest occupies the seat while they are playing, and they release it when they exit or return to the main menu.

Seats can be purchased by any person who owns the full game. Your seats are moved to whichever campaign you most recently played (or are playing), so there is very little to manage. Seats remain usable even if the owner is offline, so the adventure can continue even if someone can’t make a session. [0]

Seats will be sold in packs.

A one seat pack is $15 USD

A pack of four seats is $50 USD. Which is $12.50 USD per seat, or half the price of a full copy.

The guest edition has all the same tools as the full version, except the ability to create campaigns. Your guests can build and even GM if you want them to!

The real power of seats is that they are reusable across many campaigns, so once you have seats, they can be used for as many campaigns with guests as you like.

For you professional GMs out there, that means you only need as many seats as there are players in a single campaign. Your seats automatically move with you between campaigns so your customers never need to buy TaleSpire themselves.

Regional Pricing



Steam actually explains regional pricing pretty well, so I’m gonna quote from their documentation:

It’s tempting to treat pricing as a simple problem of foreign exchange rates and tie each currency’s price equivalency to the exchange rate. But that kind of strategy vastly oversimplifies the disparate economic circumstances from one territory to another.

…

Rather than just pegging prices to foreign exchange rates, our process for price suggestions goes deeper into the nuts and bolts of what players pay for the goods and services in their lives. This includes metrics like purchasing-power parity and consumer price indexes, which help compare prices and costs more broadly across a bunch of different economic sectors.



The TLDR of the above is that the price of a burger in country A, converted to the currency of country B wouldn’t neccessarily be a sensible price for a burger there, as the value of things depends on a lot more than that.

When we put out the Early Access, we set the US price and then used Steam’s regional pricing suggestions to set the prices for the rest of us.

It’s been some years now and so at some point we probably should normalize the prices again to make sure they make sense for different regions. We’ve not got a plan for this yet though. We’ll post more as soon as do so that everyone is in the loop.

Argentina and Turkey



Steam’s regional pricing has not been all sunshine and roses, though. Last November, Steam put out “New USD Pricing For Argentina and Turkey beginning November 20th”, which switched those countries to using USD citing “Exchange rate volatility” as the reason.

Understandably, this made the game impractically expensive for some folks. We quickly updated the prices to a recommended lower rate as suggested by Steam. However, we had hoped there would be more that we could do, but we haven’t found a way.

We’ll keep an eye on things and post again if we hear of any developments.

And that’s all for today



Every day we are testing and bug fixing the seats system. Progress is good and we’re just eager to hit that point where it feels stable enough to ship to all of you.

More news on that coming soon!

Have a lovely week folks.

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

[0] This post explains a little more of how seats behave.

TaleSpire Dev Log 428
TLDR: Seats won't be shipping next week.

Heya folks.

Testing was successful, but in the sense that we found some issues. We have started fixing those, but we then ran headlong into a problem caused by my not checking the calendar; here in Norway, we have national holidays until Tuesday 2nd.

Naturally, we aren't going to crunch through a holiday, so we are delaying the release of seats. We won't give a new date for now; we'll update you in the next dev-log.

My apologies to those waiting on the original date. Once the bugs are fixed, we'll get this to Steam for review and get it in your hands as soon as possible.

Have a nice Easter.
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