Hello, again folks!

We are still hard at work on TaleSpire and so it's that time again that we talk a bit about what we are up to.

First off, as some of this will be technical, let's start with some bits from the art side of the project

First, we have a warrior from a future Norseman set. He is no doubt going to have to deal with that frost giant from a previous update!

We also have two shots of the manticore mini. First is the WIP version:

... and then the final version in-game.

Great stuff as always from Jason there.

On the technical side, Jonny has kept working on input and the emote system. The emote system is what allows things like the little animations like this...

...which we call active emotes. However, it's also will be what lets you have passive emotes. These are emotes which play continuously and can 'stack', by which we mean you can have multiple playing at the same time. This allows for things like poison or blindness indicators should your game call for that. If you like the classic RPG look you might really like this feature. For those not as familiar here is an old screenshot of some effect indicators from Final Fantasy 9.

Obviously we have nothing officially to do with Final Fantasy. We are just fans :)

Regarding input, the main focus has been solidifying a first version that we can then iterate upon. We have moved to the new Unity's new input system and so some of the time has been finding the best approaches to using that in its current state.

I've carried on with work on fundamental board behavior. I've been writing tests to prove that the network sync of the build actions does indeed result in the same data layout on each machine. This allows us to send only the instruction of what to do across the internet (e.g. copy these 5000 tiles) rather than having to send all the tile info itself.

With all those changes landing I've been able to look into serialization (writing board info to files and/or the format to send it to the server). Because of all the data changes behind the scenes, this was far easier than it was in the Beta.

My focus for the next week is rewriting the code that handles tiles and props which have state (For example, doors and chests need to remember if they are open or closed). The first task is just working out how the data will be stored and then I'll be looking into how to hook it into the board synchronizing code.

I've also been aiming the little grey cells at the issue of 3D fog of war. We need to change this to be line-of-sight based but this has the potential to be pretty expensive both memory and computation wise. During the last week, I think I have come up with a simple way to handle this which will also work well on older machines but it needs some prototyping. To that end, I'm going to be streaming some very basic experiments around the idea this Wednesday. If you'd like to tune in you can find the event here.

Caveats:

It's going to be a coding stream

I won't be using TaleSpire or Unity for the tests as I'm faster in my own tools

All the visuals will be VERY different when ported to TaleSpire

If all that sounds good to you then feel free to stop by :)

That's all for today. To play us out Jason has recorded a halloween'y version of the 'Tavern (Somber)' and 'Blood Harvest' tracks from the soundtrack.

Seeya next time