TALES OF THE TOWNSHIP
UPDATES, NEWS AND DEV BLOGS
ATT Released on the Quest!
by Victor
Hello peeps, Victor here bearing good news! After a long year of silence, suspense and mystery, we’ve announced that we were officially working on porting A Township Tale to the Oculus Quest back in March.
Quest - Post Early Access Update
by Boramy
So today has been a little bumpy to say the least. We know some of you have been having issues with the game, and we’re doing our best to fix things as fast as possible for you. Alta is a very small team, and we’ve been completely swamped the last eight hours, but we are working through all of your issues as fast as we can.
Pre-Order A Township Tale on Quest!
by Boramy
Howdy, folks! Two weeks ago we announced A Township Tale is coming on Quest!
ATT On Oculus Quest!
by Boramy
Hey everyone! I hope you're enjoying the new website! This marks a new dawn for us here at Alta, especially since we've just announced **A Township Tale is coming to Quest!**
Blog Post!?
by Joel
Hello! While we've been focusing on development, many have commented on our blog being left untouched for quite a while. This has been in part due to our focuses elsewhere (eg. Youtube, Discord, and the game itself), but also due to some technical issues with our blog system, which we haven't found the time to resolve. In fact... I'm manually editing server files just to get this one online!
An Optimization Tale
by Victor
Hey there, Victor here. For the past few updates we have slowed down the works on new content and prioritised the much needed Performance Optimisation. But what does that mean? What are we actually doing? I'd like to share a bit of what I learned with this project and discuss some of the optimisation techniques delivered in our recent updates.
Character Customization
by Joel
Character customization is an extremely important part of RPG’s like A Township Tale. From day one, we’ve wanted to allow everyone to create characters that reflect themselves, or forge an entirely new appearance. We’ve learnt a lot from the first version of character customization, and are super excited to release the next version into the wild. In this post, I’m going to go over some of the features available today, what’s happening with armor, features coming soon, and the long term goals of customization.
2019 Sneak Peek
by Boramy
Wow wow wee wow, would you look at that? Another year goes by! Last year, we had another blog post that looked as to what changed with the game since our first public appearance ages ago. Now, we have so much more to celebrate, thanks to you! Here are some fun stats! You've become masters of the game, clocking in a total of 11,800+ hours of game time.
New Lighting System
by Boramy
Hello, once again. Today, we're revealing one of the components of our next update, and that is our lighting model is being changed. This is more of a technical thing, and we're talking about it now and showing you what to expect, so that you can look out for it when it rolls out.
Quick Look: Lock Boxes
by Boramy
Eyy, what's going on. Holy Racoons, it's me again. Today I figured I'd go in deep about the lockboxes in our game. Their interaction is actually so simple, press and hold over this area, and then we trigger or move some objects. But because everything in the game uses physical actions, we actually never had this option to play with.
Unlimited Craftworks
by Boramy
Hey everyone, it's update time. Today, I want to talk a bit about crafting, and crafting weapons in particular. For those of you who don't know, in A Township Tale you make weapons by attaching blades, axes, or hammers to handles. Some of these can have guards, and pommels, which as of the last update add durability to your handles. But as we watched you play, we found there was a bit of a 'trend' in what weapons were made.
Durability is Back, Back Again
by Boramy
Hello, I'm doing alright, thanks. We want to start talking about updates a little more, so here is a bit of insight as to what the changes in the game mean for the grand scope of things. Usually that's somewhat described in our blogs as they follow features and videos, but here we're going to be a bit more direct.
A Story About Crafting
by Boramy
Hello everybody, guess who? Last time I talked about how interacting with your hands is really what the game is all about. You can read that HERE if you haven't yet. Today, I thought we could talk about what crafting means in A Township Tale's VR RPG world.
It's All About The Hands
by Boramy
Hello everybody, it’s me again. I guess I’m writing most of the blogs. One of the fun challenges we have is coming up with ways to describe the game’s core. And in some very baseline sort of way, this video describes it.
What Profession When?
by Boramy
Prior to the Chiseling update, you had to find every handle you wanted to use, and it was simply more loot to collect. We quickly knew that we had to give this control to you, so that you could go through the process mostly off your own hard work, or in combination with others. The natural order of the game demanded this be a thing, and for the most part that’s quite easy to predict.
Quick Look: Books and Pages
by Boramy
What is reading in A Township Tale all about? Well, it's not quite reading since there are no words. It's more like a cryptic picture book, that takes a bit of connecting two and two. And that's the best part.
Quick Look: Blacksmithing
by Boramy
Hey everybody, We've talked a lot of about blacksmithing as it's one of the first professions in the game. It really encapsulates many of the philosophies we have about VR. With physical responsiveness, some slight abstraction for quality of life, and some amazingly custom end results.
Streaming a Physical World
by Joel
This week we'll be releasing an update (0.0.5.0) where we've really started to address some issues around low FPS and lag problems, so I thought I might write a bit more of a technical blog post than usual to talk about one of the problems that we face. I will do more of these posts in the future if many of you enjoy it.
What Comes Next?
by Boramy
Hello everybody! Now that we’re officially releasing updates to the game, I wanted to give everybody some insight in how we decide what comes next. We’re learning a lot about the nuances of the game, the bugs and issues that need squashing thanks to you. But, there’s also the grander vision of the game at play, these are sometimes the juicy features that we’ve been teasing, but at other times they may be updates that are less predictable.
Quick Look: Woodcutting
by Boramy
Hello everybody, we're back today with a video showcasing some woodcutting fun! From now on, most of our blogs will be supported with a video, and to kick things off we're going into some fun details and try some random challenges with Timo.
The Pre-Alpha!
by Boramy
As a purely physical video game, it's easy to not know how to perform some of the more abstract features. In this video, I go over some of the basic controls in the game.
A Township Tale - 2017 Recap
by Boramy
Hello everyone, Merry Christmas and happy holidays. Or happy Christmas and merry holidays...or holidays Christmas and merry happies. But that’s NOT what this post is about. Instead, we look at what this last year has meant for us, starting from right where we began.
Quick Look: Inventory
by Joel
One of the first questions we asked ourselves, was how would you manage resources in a VR survival game when everything is so physical. We made inventory specifically for multiplayer, and for easy handling of massive stacks. Here’s a quick look into A Township Tale's inventory!
A Township Tale The Game
by Boramy
Often we are asked what the game’s end goals are, and I guess they haven’t been explained very thoroughly. So here, we'll go into a deep dive into what drives you as a player in A Township Tale. We design this game to accommodate various play-styles, so there are what we’ll call peaceful and adventure oriented goals.
Battling Other Players in VR
by Timo
You probably have a few favourite sword fighting scenes from various movies or TV shows. Several Game of Thrones scenes, Troy and even Star Wars come to mind. Now try to remember the reason exactly why you love these scenes. Chances are it's down to the more unconventional moves that the characters pull off and often the way the environment and surroundings are used in the fight both as weapons, obstacles or diversions.
Deeper in the Caves
by Boramy
One of my personal favorite real life experiences is to go caving. Growing up, exploring caves in the jungle was so much fun. We’d go in with a torchlight, and look at the stalactites, the dips and crevasses in every cavern. We’d have to watch our footing, sometimes we’d need to crawl through openings and taking my face out of bat dropping-infested water, I’d be psyched to see where this path took us.
PvE Combat!
by Victor
All right, picture this: you are in the middle of the forest.
The Games Within The Game
by Victor
People play games... Many types of games came up across history and every nation has their own traditional games. So we should definitely expect townsfolk in A Township Tale to play their own games as well!
Smelting, Forging & Crafting
by Boramy
At long last I’m excited to share with you how Blacksmithing plays out as a role. It’s quite simple, really when you think about it, and we’ve spent time in the little details to make it a fun experience. To begin with you need ores.
Creating the Virtual You
by Serena
Virtual Reality is hands down the most immersive experience a gamer can have, so it seems obvious to make an RPG, spending most of your time as the character you’ve created.
Let's Go Spelunking!
by Joel
One of the many roles in A Township Tale, is the Miner. It’s probably no surprise to you, that, like many RPG’s, mining is one of the core ways of gather resources.
Then, There Was Fire!
by Boramy
A Township Tale at it's core is an RPG survival game. With an open-world, a day/night cycle, and a variety of dark and bright locations we need an easy lighting system.
First Hours in A Township Tale
by Boramy
When someone describes A Township Tale it can sound like a big bubble of fantasy content, and we’ve never really gotten into the nitty gritty of the game, what actually drives you in this open-world environment?
The Journey So Far
by Joel
Almost a year ago, we began working on A Township Tale. Boramy and I started playing some Virtual Reality games, and experimented around within our own project.
Introducing A Township Tale
by Boramy
