TaleSpire News

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.

[h3]Seats[/h3]
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.

[h3]Regional Pricing[/h3]

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

Originally posted by author

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.

[h3]Argentina and Turkey[/h3]

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.

[h3]And that’s all for today[/h3]

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.

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.

This is a cross post from our dev logs that are posted over here: https://bouncyrock.com/news

Heya folks,

I’ve been hiding away recently, so let’s briefly remedy that with a dev log.
[h2]Seats[/h2]
Seats are progressing well enough. Two factors have made it a little harder than anticipated.

First, I hadn’t considered Steam needing five days to review the build before we could put it live. So that immediately took a work week away from us.

Next was that my design for managing seats had a critical flaw. Luckily, in discussion with @Ree, I realised that one of the aspects I thought was mandatory was not, so we got to go back to a more straightforward design.

The behavior now is expected to be as follows:

• Whenever a person who owns seats enters a campaign, their seats are attached to that campaign.
• The seats stay there until they play a different campaign (at which point their seats move to that campaign) or they are kicked/banned/remove-themselves from the campaign.

At that point anyone using the unpaid version of TaleSpire can join the campaign and use one of those seats. When they disconnect from the campaign, they immediately return the seat to the campaign.

That is a lot of words, but the TLDR is “person with seats goes into a campaign, then a person using the unpaid version can join.” If all goes well, it should feel very simple.

The backend portion is rapidly coming together, so a big shout-out to @borodust there. We’ll be testing that early next week. I’ve been on the TaleSpire side doing UX, and that is bumbling in the right direction.

We are now expecting to ship a Beta in the first week of April. It’ll all depend on whether Steam says we need to change anything before we can put it live, though.
[h2]Creature Mods[/h2]
Holy cow, folks, over one THOUSAND creatures already?! That’s insane.

We are blown away by your response and feel VERY sheepish that we can’t start working on all the things you have been reporting.

Here are a few things that are on our minds:

[h3]Search is rough[/h3]
We want to look into what we can do here. We know we will have tagging in the future, but even before that, some searches are skipping items you’d think would match.

[h3]Content policy[/h3]
We don’t support mature content on the official repository right now. We need to look into whether we would want to allow the tagging of some mature content, what our policy around that would be, and how players would control that from inside TaleSpire.

Also of critical importance is whether that would affect the age rating of TaleSpire as a whole. We are not willing to compromise that, so if it would, we’d need to look into other approaches.

We have always known that there would be plenty of stuff better served by community-run repositories, so we need to get moving on the API, too.

[h3]Mod packs[/h3]
Being able to bundle mods into packs is very much something we intend to support in the future. We’ve got some things to work on first, but it won’t be forgotten.

[h3]TaleWeaverLite improvements[/h3]
We definitely need to get back to TaleWeaverLite and make it easier to make mods. Two things that have been mentioned that we definitely want to look into are:

• 
  Allowing you to specify which channels and files you want to use for which texture map. This means you don’t need to pack your AO, roughness, etc., into a texture before importing it into TWLite.
  
• 
  Adding support for emissive textures. So you can have (fake) glowing parts of your creatures.
  

[h2]Wrapping up[/h2]
That’s all for today. It’s time for a weekend. Have fun folks

With this release, bringing new creatures into your stories has never been easier.

With three clicks, you can not only add a community-made creature to your campaign but also ensure it is downloaded for all your players, automatically and totally for free.

We’ve known for a long time that any VTT or game like TaleSpire must provide deep, robust ways for the community to grow beyond its own limitations, and we are delighted to be taking one more step in that direction.

Community-controlled content ensures your stories and ours will continue to grow well beyond the scope of what Bouncyrock could ever make alone.
[h2]How do you get started?[/h2]
The best way to dive in likely depends on your role.
[h3]Game Masters[/h3]
If you’re a GM, the best way to start is to open the Community Mod Browser and click around! You might also find these guides helpful:

• “Using Community Made Creatures” This guide shows how to use the Community Mod Browser to add creatures to your campaigns.
• “Playing in Boards with Creature Mods” shows how you and your players will be notified about missing content and how TaleSpire can fetch it for you.
• “Adding creatures from .tsMod files” It’s possible to skip the online repositories entirely and just use local files. This guide shows how.

[h3]Players[/h3]
While you can’t add creatures to the board alone, you can browse what is available. You might find something you’d like your GM to add. We also have a little guide showing available settings and how to fetch missing creations: “Playing in Boards with Creature Mods.”
[h3]3D artists[/h3]
You are the stars of the show here. Once you’ve had a chance to check out the Community Mod Browser, we’d recommend the following guides:

• “Making Creature Mods” This guide introduces TaleWeaverLite. This is the tool used to take a 3D model and package it up as something TaleSpire understands.
  
• “How to upload your creatures to the official repository at mod.io”: This guide shows you how to upload your creations to our official mod repository, making them available to the whole TaleSpire community.
  
• “Adding creatures from .tsMod files”: Maybe you have creations you would like to share with your friends, but not the whole world. This guide shows you how.
  

There is also a growing gang of friendly folks on our Discord helping each other make creature mods. You can find the discord here, and the channel you want is #creature-modding
[h3]IP rights holders[/h3]
We at Bouncyrock believe adamantly about the rights of creators. If you see your work being misused on our official repository, please file a DMCA report against that mod, and it will be handled.
[h2]What’s next?[/h2]
SEATS! The “seats” feature ships at the end of March, allowing any TaleSpire owner to purchase seats so their friends can play without having to buy TaleSpire themselves. The seats will be cheaper than full copies and reusable, so if you run two campaigns of four players, they don’t need eight copies; four seats will do the job!

After that, we are considering taking a month to work solely on bugs. Adding the features for you folks is fun, but TaleSpire must still be solid enough to rely on.

After that, we have plenty of ideas, but we’ll save that for the next community chat on the 12th of April. Hope to see you then.
[h2]Wrapping up and thanks[/h2]
This is a big, scary milestone for us. There is still a bunch to do to make it live up to our ambitions, but it feels great to be this far along.

While we’ve got you here, we want to give a big thanks to all of you for supporting us and getting the word out there about TaleSpire. Seeing your builds and hearing about your campaigns is such a motivator to have when we sit down to start work each morning. So thank you!

As always, you can find us on the Discord server, and feature-requests and bug reports are very welcome over at feedback.talespire.com

Happy building!

Good morning creature creators!

Today’s patch is focused on the behavior of the Community mod browser. We have:

• Fixed a bug where scrolling back and forth could apply the wrong icons to an item in the mod list.
• Made slightly better UI for mods that are missing but that have become unavailable from a repository.
• Fixed how the stand-in icon and hourglass behave.
• Fixed an exception that could occur when scrubbing the list fast when the description box is open.
• We also now remember the scroll position per category. Before you’d end up scrolled to odd positions, which was confusing.

More news coming very soon.

Ciao.