TaleSpire
The dev-log before Christmas
2023 has been a busy one and ended up being more about building good foundations than it has been about big razzle-dazzle features.
That said this year has included the release of the Mod browser, Mac Support, Symbiotes, and many many assets.
All that building has set us up for an exciting start to 2024 with big performance improvements coming to the backend, the full release of creature modding, and the introduction of Seats all lined up for release early in the year.
We don't want to keep you here any longer than necessary, so let us just say thank you once again for supporting us and for allowing TaleSpire to grow from a fun idea to way more than even we expected. We've still got a ways to go to deliver the vision, and we are thrilled to be making that journey with you.
So Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and God Jul to you all!
See you in the new year.
TaleWeaverLite: The good, the meh, and the future
In preparation for creature modding feature shipping, we are making the tool available so you can try it out, and we can fix any egregious bugs you find.
You can find a guide on how to get the tool and how to use it over here:
https://talespire.com/taleweaverlite-guide
NOTE: You cannot load the mods into TaleSpire today. This is simply a build of the tooling used to make the mods.
What is this (and what is it not)
TaleSpire is going to have a couple of ways for you to add new creatures to the game:
- In-game creature creator: A way of building creatures out of a palette of configurable parts
- Mods: mod-files are composed of pre-made assets outside of TaleSpire
TaleWeaverLite is for the second approach. It is a very minimal tool for composing pre-made assets into a creature mod that is ready to be used by TaleSpire.
It is not a modeling or posing tool. It expects content in specific formats and with specific layouts.
The expected usage is that the mesh and textures are prepared in other tools, such as Blender, and using TaleWeaverLite is the final step in making a mod.
The good
Once you are producing meshes and textures in the correct format, it’s trivial to turn them into a mod. Simply drag them into the Unity project, set the fields in the creature panel, and save.
The meh
We’ve been using Unity for our asset tools for a long time. It handled processing assets for us and gave us a UI we could use to make tools.
This means that to use TaleWeaverLite, you need to install the free version of Unity.
We have mixed feelings about this, as packaging this stuff for public use has not been as easy as we had hoped. Your feedback will help us decide whether to stick with this in the long term or to start moving to a more standalone tool.
The future
We are busy working on the backend changes needed to support the new creatures. Once we have that done, we’ll wrap up the needed changes in TaleSpire and get ready to ship. We are pushing hard for this and hope we can get this in your hands very soon.
By getting TaleWeaverLite out now, there might even be some new creature mods ready to ship the moment that TaleSpire gets the feature!
Until then, thanks for stopping by.
Early Access Content Pack 28: Festive Grab Bag
Seasons Greetings from the TaleSpire team!
As we're winding down the year and gearing up to enjoy some festivities, we didn't want to leave your adventurers bereft of their own fun and merrymaking - so we created this little pack that offers a variety of holiday assets (some in the Medieval category, and others in the Modern/Sci-fi):
- Turkey mini
- Apple Mimic mini
- Apple pie
- Cornucopia
- 2 Snowmen (standing and melted)
- Cranberry sauce can
- Cranberry sauce on a plate
- Box of stuffing
- Plate of gingerbread cookies
We've also been collecting some excellent feedback from the recently released MegaDungeon set that we'll get back to work on regarding tweaks, enhancements, and additions.
We hope you enjoy this holiday pack, and once again, thank you so much for supporting the project!
Mod Browser Tweaks
- We no longer show deleted mods in the "Your published creations" section
- Mods in the "Your published creations" section are now ordered by name.
- We now order mods by "most recent" first by default. Which makes casual browsing more interesting.
- We now order search results by "most popular" first.
That's all for today. See you in the next patch!
Board folder patch
We have a couple of small fixes to the board folders feature today.
- Boards inside folders are sorted correctly now
- We've fixed a case where renaming a board after moving it into a folder would take it back out of the folder
More little tweaks are on the way as we prepare for creature mods.
Enjoy!
Seats - A new way for your friends to play in TaleSpire
Pull up a chair
We will be adding a way for anyone with a full copy of the game to purchase additional "seats," which will allow others to join them in their sessions without having to buy the game themselves.
We will be putting a version of TaleSpire on Steam that can be downloaded for free and will only allow you to join other people's campaigns if they have available seats.
This does not mean that, as a guest to a campaign, you cannot GM. You will have all the same tools and abilities as any other party member, including full mod support.
The motivation
We have heard your requests for some time for a kind of "player-only" version of TaleSpire, but one of our core tenets is that "building and play are one," so making a chopped-down version that didn't include building tools is something we could not face.
Another driving factor is that, for some uses (like professional GM'ing), the current approach is simply not viable. With this new option, a GM can reuse the same seats over and over across different campaigns and parties.
Timeline
We aim to ship this by the end of March 2024. Details, such as the pricing, will be announced closer to release. As always, we'll be writing dev-logs along the way, so you will be able to keep up with progress at https://bouncyrock.com/news
Going forth
This will be a big and exciting step for us. We have a lot coming down the pipe, and we hope this will allow more folks out there to enjoy it all with us.
Thanks for stopping by!
Early Access Content Pack 27: MegaDungeon
This is the MegaDungeon tile set, and with it, you can build boards the likes of which TaleSpire has never seen before.
Seriously! This is the first pack where we are experimenting with diagonal and circular walls. We'd love to hear your feedback on these. We are already thinking about how to improve the tools to make working more fluent with these pieces.
The MegaDungeon release features the following:
- 58 unique tiles
- 5 Doors, including a large double door.
- 2 new creatures (Grick and Otyugh)
- 1 large hooded statue prop and an animated spike trap
This is just the beginning for curved and diagonal walls. Once we see how they fare in your hands, we will bring them new and existing sets. In fact, we intend for the next chunky pack to be MegaSector, the sci-fi companion to the MegaDungeon.
Until then, however, you had better try and find your way out!
Board Folders Released
Here is a quick video showing how it works.
That is all for this release, but behind-the-scenes work is progressing on allowing you all to add your own creatures via modding. If you are curious, you can follow along on our dev logs.
Have fun folks!
Board Folders are now in Beta
This time, we are adding the ability to group boards in folders.
How to join the Beta
The guide explaining how to join the Beta is here: https://talespire.com/welcome-to-the-board-folders-beta
Be sure to read the "Critical Warnings" section before diving in.
How it works
Here is a quick video showing how it works. The guide linked above has some more details if you are curious.
Next up, even more!
Thank you for coming to check this out. We will keep this feature in Beta for one week to give enough time for some real testing.
We have more features and assets coming before the end of the year, so keep an eye out for those!
We hope you enjoy the Beta. And we'll see you in the bug reports!
TaleSpire Release - Voting and fixes
It has been a blast seeing how the community has taken to the slab-browser. So, we've given it a little upgrade and added the ability to vote on mods from within TaleSpire.
As we were already meddling in the browser code, we took the opportunity to fix a couple of bugs.
The first was that we were making too many requests to mod.io, and for some of you, that meant you got temporarily rate-limited. Sorry about that. We have significantly reduced the number of requests without impacting any of the functionality.
The second issue was that the overlay panel only worked for subscriptions if you were authenticated with mod.io. This was definitely not the intended behavior, so we've fixed that.
Lastly, and in keeping with the modding theme, we have a fix allowing Symbiotes to play music in the background as intended (assuming they have the "runInBackground" permission). Soundboards, here we come!
All right! That is all for today. We will return very soon with another Beta for the adventurous to try out.