If you have been keeping tabs on the development of TagTime, you are well aware that we have been working on a major visual update to the game. While our current graphics have served us well in prototyping the gameplay, the visuals lack the fidelity, aesthetic, and narrative quality that we want this game to have.

What this means is that we basically have to rework the entire visual foundation of the game and rebuild it from the ground up. While the bulk of the work is actually producing the visual assets (sculpting, rigging, texturing, etc.), one must not underestimate the work that goes into fleshing out the design of the game world: Where are we? Who are we? Why are we competing? 

The design of the game world is an ongoing task, and honestly, there is still a great deal of the world, its culture, history, and inhabitants we haven’t figured out yet.

The complete visual overhaul encompasses everything from UI to characters and environmental assets to visual effects. Reaching that complete state of visual zen is still merely a mirage on the horizon. Nonetheless, we feel like we will be ready to publish a patch containing our new environmental assets and our two new character designs (the wolf and the pig) in a few weeks or so.

The default map in a new vs. old comparison gif

We have also begun scratching the surface of the sound design of the game and aim to incorporate a simple set of sounds and ambience in the game, complementing the new visuals in the upcoming patch. Stay tuned for more on the sound design in a later post.

Following this upcoming patch, we will update our visual presence on our public channels and storefronts. We plan to release a new gameplay trailer as part of this update.

On the less flashy side, we are putting in great effort to refine the netcode to make the game less prone to errors following player disconnects and bad connections. We are well underway, but there is still a ton of testing and debugging that has to be sorted out before we make the leap to our new codebase.

That’s all for now. In our next dev log (two weeks from now), you can expect us to reveal an exact publish date for the 'visuals' patch. And as always, if this biweekly dose of chatter about TagTime does not satisfy your hungering curiosity, join us on Discord and Twitter where we more frequently share updates.

Thanks for reading!