Development

[icycalm]

I had to show this to you. It's the castle Istallri has been building. It is built according to medieval European specifications. If you watch his building streams (which I forbid you to if you're playing in my world), you will see him talking about his research. At the level that he's creating, this research is absolutely essential. You can't just drop into TaleSpire and design something like this without knowing anything about the subject matter. You won't even be able to design a cool house, let alone a castle.

If it looks small to you, you don't understand the scale. That front gate is 5-10 times the size of a human miniature.

In our world, this will be the castle of the king of Riven, if you remember the city from my intro to the West Marches campaign: https://www.patreon.com/posts/63789736

That thing is so detailed inside it has a stunning greenhouse, bath rooms, captain's quarters, it's insane. It's so complex you could run an entire adventure inside it without anyone getting bored. And it's just a TINY part of the region lol; Riven utterly dwarfs it.

There has NEVER been a more detailed videogame world than I am building in TaleSpire right now. So please continue being patient with me as I build it, as you have been doing.


P.S. The terrain around the castle isn't done, that's why it's just green slabs. The entire thing is still WIP.

[ysignal]

I checked up on the mods for the first time in a while today, and it looks like the Hero Forge update broke just about all of them. Many of them are still broken, including the custom mini plugins. I fixed our base hiding mod, and I also tried it out with the official Hero Forge import, which works fine. However, while doing this I noticed that TaleSpire doesn't import custom bases. They're visible in the thumbnails for the minis in TaleSpire, but when you spawn a mini in you just get the regular base.

[icycalm]

Istallri has finished his castle. It's the biggest and most detailed castle in TaleSpire yet, with over 60 rooms.







It's too bad he doesn't include minis in the pics for scale. One character is about the size of those two barrels in the pic above.

Check out this interior pic:



There has never been a castle this realistic and detailed in a videogame before. Not even in Life is Feudal. We're talking kitchens, baths, libraries, greenhouses: it has everything a castle has. Videogame castles in stuff like Devil May Cry are just a bunch of empty corridors, stupid dungeons with no purpose. This is a real castle in which hundreds of characters will live and real dramas can take place.

You have to watch this trailer:

Hightowers Castle - [Trailer]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8G-Ol8oBkBU



Two builders worked on it btw, Istallri and Scarnor, specializing on different aspects. The whole thing even comes with a small village just outside the main gate.

More amazing stuff has been posted on Tales Tavern recently, including some great work by BrotherHanan that has blown me away. You will encounter all of it in the game.

We're very close to starting. All I need at this point is to sit down for two full days, and we're ready to start. I hope I can do this within the next 7-10 days maximum.

This is the future of videogames, and it's coming soon, only on dndbattlegrounds.net.

[icycalm]

Keep of the Voidstone Periapt
https://youtu.be/f8Lj52v-GV8



Show me a CRPG that has anything on this scale and detail. Even in Game of Thrones there’s nothing so cool, and I am not even showing you the coolest stuff I have lol. And TaleSpire has just begun lol. It isn’t even out of Early Access yet and practically no one knows it. But it is Insomnia’s 2021 Game of the Year.

This is also in Riven btw.

We start soon.

[icycalm]

Terrific assets. And keep in mind that the Bouncyrock-made scenes are never anywhere near as impressive as what specialist builders make with them on Tales Tavern. We're about to be blown away by massive sci-fi cities and locales the likes of which have never been seen in videogames. Starfinder players are in for a treat, and even better will be our integration of Pathfinder with Starfinder via TaleSpire. I am kind of bummed that all this effort isn't going towards fleshing out the fantasy assets more: I mean imagine if all these new assets were made for fantasy, it would DOUBLE the complexity of what I could deliver in our West Marches campaign. But that complexity is coming anyway, as they will be supporting both fantasy and sci-fi from now on. And anyway, we DO have more than enough fantasy assets for a full West Marches campaign already. Anything they deliver beyond this point will be just a bonus.

I can't wait for this update. And I will do whatever I can to make sci-fi unlockable in Battlegrounds as early as possible. The official way to do it is via the Iron Gods campaign, but I may include a shortcut in the world somewhere if you can find it...

https://bouncyrock.com/news/articles/cy ... ess-report

Cyberpunk Content: Progress Report



Hello folks - we hope you’re all doing well these days!

It feels like time has flown by since our last progress report from the art side of things. As some of you may know, a cyberpunk content stretch goal was hit during our Kickstarter campaign and we've been hard at work on these assets. This dev log will focus on where we're at and where we want to go.

First, let’s break down what’s finished and what's in progress:

• For tilesets, we’re testing, expanding, and refining an assortment including City Streets, Concrete, Sci-Fi, and Industrial.
  
• Prop count is over 200 and growing!
  
• We have about 20 minis, ranging from corporate wage slaves to law enforcement to street gangs.

And here are some things that still need doing:

• Finalize the above sets ( more tiles, etc )
  
• Even more props ( moar )
  
• More minis ( at least 30 for the release )
  
• New music ( synthy goodness )
  
• New Ambient SFX ( at least one for each set )
  
• Create UI to nicely handle both genres in-game

After we push this giant pack out to you all, we’ll continue working throughout Early Access, releasing free content packs for both Fantasy and Futuristic settings.

Thanks for your continued patience and support. We really appreciate it!


P.S. We’d like to leave you with some WIP shots that we hope you enjoy.

[icycalm]

I am working feverishly on the West Marches campaign, which will start July 10, or the first day thereafter that leccosta is available. It's too bad I can't show you anything big, but at least I want to show you something small so that you'll get an idea of the insane degree of detail that this game will possess—unmatched by any game.

Here's one example among countless: https://talestavern.com/slab/show-me-yo ... th-scarnor





When you find some coins on the ground, what you see is what you get (WYSIWYG): you can count them on the floor for yourselves. And if you find a chest full of them, you won't know instantly how many there are. You'll have to take time to sit down and count them. Hauling away a treasure trove will require a massive operation with carts, horses, people, etc.

By the time Owlcat releases their next CRPG (which won't even by Paizo-licensed, just some crap they made up themselves [ > ]), we'll have animated spell effects and weather and ships with naval battles with dozens of ships, and Owlcat's games will seem like mini-games. Owlcat will still be running a singleplayer engine, and we'll be playing with multiple parties and dozens of players.

Incredible stuff are being posted on Tales Tavern, but I can't show them to you. Every week our world becomes richer and more complex, and I am integrating EVERYTHING. I haven't even talked to you about the soundtrack yet. Every single scene will have its own ambient sounds by a dude who only does this, and his content is blowing up. I will be showing him to you soon.

Stay tuned.

[icycalm]

Polymorph Wip
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2C49FD3e0_w



Polymorph is being added to TaleSpire. Not among my top priorities, but nice to have nonetheless. Also shows they're committed to adding spell effects. Magic Missile is already in, but that's the only spell that's in. I hope it won't take too long to put a few more. They'll make the world so much more alive with bolts of lighting or whatever flying around in full 3D.

Bonus Greek lesson: Polymorph is a Greek word. Poly means "many", and morphe means "form". Many forms.

[icycalm]

Jesus christ in heaven!

https://talestavern.com/slab/icewind-da ... rk-duchess



A location from Rime of the Frostmaiden.

They did this with no naval assets at all. Imagine what we'll be seeing when the naval assets hit!

[icycalm]

A TON of modded TaleSpire spell effects: https://youtu.be/ZZdncLL94Bc

Many of them look professional-grade. The most striking was a kind of smog that engulfed a large area. Note also that he’s using a mediocre map and hasn’t taken the bases off the minis. If you can imagine a 300-unit war atop and around say Istallri’s castle with minis without bases and all these spell effects, not to mention the upcoming weather effects, I think you should be able to see why I am so excited by the prospect. No traditional videogame can match this vision or will ever match it as long as programmers are in charge of game design, and TaleSpire finally rids the industry of them.

[icycalm]

I just realized something. Within a year or two maximum, you’ll be able to build all of New York or any other modern city in TaleSpire. That’s a given. And Marvel’s new RPG rules [ > ] are in testing right now and should be released by then. Meanwhile Firaxis’s Marvel game will be a stupid small-scale tactics minigame that you finish in 20 hours and never touch again, but all the models should be extractable and usable in TaleSpire. So there’s nothing preventing you from running say 17-player Marvel megacampaigns with multiple teams of all the Avengers spread across NY and the US. Even better would be half the players playing the villains.

This will be a reality on Alex Kierkegaard’s Battlegrounds within the next few years, mark my words. And all made possible by TaleSpire. Do you see why it’s 2021 Game of the Year? And unless something better comes along, it should be game of the year every year. It practically already is, since 2022’s Game of the Year—my West Marches—runs on it lol.

[icycalm]

Istallri made a village from Curse of Strahd called Vallaki. There's no harm in seeing it, you just have to see how awesome it looks and how much the atmospheric settings (sun angle, mist, etc.) change the quality of the scene.

https://twitter.com/ArkhanTheBlack_/sta ... 1249835009



This is a 1440p screenshot. Don't look at in on your phone, zoom in on a large display. It looks like a painting. Pay attention to the light and shadows around the guard in front of the gate at the bottom-right.



Unparalleled immersion: the entire town modeled down to the individual bricks, so that anything at all can be played out. Look also how thick the forest is in the northwest and southeast.

One more Curse of Strahd location for which we have both the Foundry version for maximum cinematic power, and the TaleSpire one for maximum simulation.

[icycalm]

https://twitter.com/realSabertore/statu ... 9182815238

TaleSpire is so cool for DnD

https://twitter.com/ChewyMTG/status/1546442253912231937

First session of @PathfinderRPG using @talespire to track combat. I think I need another screen?

https://twitter.com/MrZtong/status/1546091912192483328

@talespire i think we broke your game ... :(

https://twitter.com/lawnin_torgjp/statu ... 2934630400

TaleSpire。 DM用のバーチャルテーブルトップ・アプリ。ローカル環境なので一番レスポンスが良かった。操作を覚えてないので、タイルの並べかたも消し方もわからないがレスポンスは良い。デフォルトのクリーチャーの格好良さは趣味外の俺でも満足するレベル。

Machine translation:

Tale Spire. Virtual tabletop app for DM. The response was the best because it was a local environment. I don't remember the operation, so I don't know how to arrange or erase the tiles, but the response is good. The coolness of the default creature is a level that even I, who is not a hobby, will be satisfied.

There are a few Japs on Twitter who post about TaleSpire. Not all Japanese are braindead men-children who play JPRGs.

https://twitter.com/HolderKeystones/sta ... 1253795840

It's dnd day! Today we are adventuring using talespire! #dnd #ttrpg #DM

[icycalm]

Public Test of Cyberpunk / Sci-Fi
https://steamcommunity.com/games/720620 ... 4690608113



Sci-fi assets are now being tested in the beta branch, and they should be live in the regular game this week!

We can expect more cool fantasy scenes to be made with these assets as some of them like e.g. the red brick set will work well with fantasy, plus of course a slew of sci-fi sets. Above all though, I am glad this is out of the way so that the devs can get their 1 artist back to working on fantasy stuff for us.

[icycalm]

This is an actual TaleSpire screenshot from a board we won't be using, because it's not good. But the screenshot is insane. It's 1440p, enlarge it and check the shadows and lighting and detail in the fallen rocks. It looks like the most realistic, atmospheric dungeon ever because every rock is hand-placed and can be moved.

[icycalm]

Istallri shared this image in our Discord from one of his upcoming sci-fi sets. As you can see it blows away all isometric CRPGs ever with towering buildings and cityscapes of stunning detail. A new era of sci-if roleplaying begins soon on TaleSpire, probably even within the next few days.

As a side-note, I have eased the requirements for access to space in Battlegrounds recently. It definitely won’t take us a decade to get there. Two years tops I would say, and it could even be considerably less under certain circumstances.

I can’t wait to see more of this stuff. I already have the core idea for a sci-fi West Marches and I’ll be working on it in the background all the while we’re playing the fantasy version.

[icycalm]

Btw, to see how stupid Robomoo is consider that he’ll be working for years on his crappy Tiny Metal clone with its stupid programmer-ruleset and inferior art direction while I will have the stunning TaleSpire engine and Istallri-et-al sets and uber-complex Starfinder mechanics to build a sci-fi tactics roleplaying game that will utterly ridicule Robomoo’s efforts. And he thinks it’s HIS throwaway tactics game that will “advance civilization” and not mine lmao.

This is the level of stupidity we’re dealing with. And note that all this AFTER I have spent TWO FUCKIN’ YEARS painstakingly explaining everything in countless essay pages. Imagine if I hadn’t even explained anything to him lol. He’d probably be making an Among Us clone and fancying that he’s a genius.

I remain stunned that such stupidity is possible in the universe. And in my own clan? After all the effort I have expended to explain all these things to people? Unbelievable.

[icycalm]

AWAITING.. TaleSpire.. DATA.. UPDATE..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8O1oBUq2P88



Teaser by Istallri of his upcoming sci-fi city set. It's insane how good it looks even though it's zoomed in to basically first-person, and you're NOT supposed to be playing TaleSpire in first-person. It's an isometric overhead engine like classic CRPGs and yet it still looks great zoomed in all the way to first-person. Imagine how good it will look in its intended viewpoint. The world isn't ready for the content that's about to drop. Who the fuck will need Fallout from now on? TaleSpire is bringing Starfinder to life, and Fallout is a handheld minigame in comparison.

[icycalm]

From the comments:

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I've watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in the rain.
But not if you acquire TaleSpire, for only $24.99

We never had a Blade Runner CRPG, but with TaleSpire and this we will: https://www.bladerunner-rpg.com

[icycalm]

https://twitter.com/thanksmister/status ... 3091768322

Another D&D adventure. This time we made our own figurines using @HeroForgeMinis imported into a @talespire board. I’m really surprised how much the kids love the storytelling aspect of the game. We did a 3 hour campaign with one snack break!

I love washed-out pics of TaleSpire like this one. The lighting dulls the rough edges and makes everything look so much more alive and videogamey. Every single piece of wood on the ground there can be picked up and moved. The scene is so interactive and real. Anything at all can happen next.

[icycalm]

https://www.reddit.com/r/talespire/comm ... s_you_will



https://www.reddit.com/r/talespire/comm ... ing_boards



Let me know if programmers ever give you scenes of such epicness and beauty in CRPGs.

[icycalm]

TaleSpire Sci-fi is OUT!!!
https://www.patreon.com/posts/70263192

It happened just MINUTES ago! Clicky on the trailer above!!

[icycalm]

Missed this incredible image that was posted in the Bouncyrock blog and Twitter, and I've now added it to my article:



There's no extra info on the blog and Twitter, but here's the link if you want it: https://bouncyrock.com/news/articles/cy ... s-now-live

The detail and scale in that screen is mind-blowing, and the dev update screens are ALWAYS far worse than what the creators make afterwards. I'll be refreshing Tales Tavern ten times a day from now on, and I'll be showing you much cool stuff here (as always, don't go there yourselves if you're playing with me).

They must have been insanely hyped to push out the update, because they did at like 4 AM Norway time. There's not even any money in it for them, since it's not a DLC or anything. My kind of people.

And now, it's over to you. Whether corporate megalith or back-alley bar, scrappy mining vessel or starcruiser, we can't wait to see what you create!

Indeed!

[icycalm]

There’s one dude on the TaleSpire Reddit who has been working on a scene for months now. Every few weeks he posts an update to show us how he’s doing, and in this latest one he reached 400 hours of work. He says he’s 80% done and will be done by mid-September. Istallri’s biggest sets take him maybe 40 hours in comparison. The thing this guy is making is insane, and it’ll be a central piece of our West Marches campaign (though we don’t need it to start as it’s quite far from the starting town).

Just wanted to give you an update in case you thought I’d given up on this. It’s true I am bogged down, but I’ve been bogged down worse before, and still came through in the end. And now with the latest Menyr videos and news I am seeing [ > ], plus all the new sets being published for TaleSpire, I am more determined than ever to move forward. There’s no way I am missing out on this revolution, and I want us to have at least a couple TaleSpire campaigns under our belt by the time Menyr has enough features and assets to be properly used, which should take a year or two from now, and will be MUCH tougher than TaleSpire to prepare for and run. So we NEED the experience to do it justice, plus I think I would like to keep using both VTTs for different campaigns simultaneously. TaleSpire has its own charm that’s undeniable, like a 2D versus a 3D game, and I am sure in time different types of campaigns will be developed to suit each program’s strengths.

More soon.

[icycalm]

Brand-new fantasy monster drop mere days after the sci-fi update, and they're of terrific quality!

Early Access Content Pack 13: Monster Mash
https://steamcommunity.com/games/720620 ... 9651572556



8 New Minis:

• Hydra
  
• Gorgon/Medusa
  
• Ogre
  
• Ogre Spellcaster
  
• 2 Satyrs
  
• Death Knight
  
• Cloaked Nightmare

2 New Props:

• Statue, The Offerer
  
• Statue, Broken Warrior

I think the creature number must be nearing 300, including the about 30 sci-fi minis. That's about how much the typical RPG bestiary contains. Of course, Pathfinder has half a dozen bestiaries plus countless creatures introduced in random adventures and sourcebooks, but the 5E "Monster Manual" for example has 500 creatures and you aren't supposed to use all of them in a single campaign, let alone a single adventure. So at least monster-wise, TaleSpire is fully playable right now, and character-wise it's also fully playable as long as you don't mind dropping a lot of money on Hero Forge. Everything they release beyond this point is gravy, and they haven't even got out of Early Access yet. When they do get out, and start selling creature "booster packs" for money, I even expect them to increase their efforts because they'll be getting reviews for every single pack, and asking people to open their wallets for them. A couple of years from now I expect TaleSpire to rival full-blown RPG systems for creature variety, and a few years after that I expect it to rival Pathfinder 1E itself.

Meanwhile, Menyr is starting from scratch with fully-animated high-fidelity creatures and characters.

What a time for a gamer to be alive!

[icycalm]

Teaser screenshot from Alex Kierkegaard's West Marches.

Too bad there's no character on it so you can see how enormous this thing is. And every rock can be moved.

Nothing like it in any videogame ever.