Note: This article first appeared on our Medium publication (Which we no longer use) on April 20th 2020
Foreword
Since we first started, Tatsu has grown from a small community project into one used by more than a million communities. We’ve enjoyed working alongside the community to implement new features, content, hold events & have fun in general. It has been a journey full of ups and downs for us thus far, and we sincerely thank all of our most ardent supporters who have supported us through the past 4 years.
While we’ve had a lot of fun, it hasn’t been without downsides. Rising server bills meant a huge drain on finances, especially since we weren’t accepting any money initially. The lack of any significant updates for two years also caused some users to prefer other chat bots over Tatsu, even for features we were once known for. In light of these circumstances, we decided awhile ago that it was no longer viable for us to develop Tatsu in its previous state.
• • •
With that, we want to announce that the beta of Tatsu’s overhaul is launching on the 3rd of May, 2020
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Tatsu and The Future
For the past year, we’ve been busy putting whatever available resources we have into launching an update that will lay the groundwork for our future plans. A fully fledged inventory & item system, server-based economy, image rendering tech & improved back-end technology will pave the way for faster & more consistent content updates and enable our team to react to your suggestions and needs in a more timely fashion.
The results of our efforts will come in the form of consistent updates that we want the community to contribute to. We’re opening new voting & suggestions platforms and working on systems to actively include you in our development process.
Don’t want to read? Skip down to the pictures below
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In the process of rebuilding Tatsu, we’ve streamlined what we really want to focus on: engagement + reward tools, and full-fledged games, playable on chat.
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Why did it take so long?
For an entire year, Tatsu was left on the back-burner due to burnout, real-life commitments and developers leaving. After 3 years, what was left of our team decided to pick up the pieces and begin a complete overhaul of Tatsu. This meant completely scrapping our older code base, while still having to maintain feature parity.
Another reason is we wanted to introduce new systems to streamline future updates. This caused us to spend more time working on our infrastructure, but with the benefit of faster & more consistent content updates in the future. After more than a year of development, we are glad to finally be able to give you a proper update on some major features you can expect from our next version.
• • •
Read on to find out what’s in the launch of the upcoming beta. This update is split into a few main categories: General Improvements, Server Ecosystem, and Tatsugotchi & Chat Games.
• • •
There are too many things to put into a single update post, so we’re showcasing only the most prominent ones
General Improvements
Website
One thing we want to improve on is the usability of our previous dashboard. We want to create a platform where people would be able to manage all their Tatsu-related features like item inventories & server configuration with ease.
As our dashboard is still considered early beta, there will be bugs, and many designs, layouts, and animations will feel very rough around the edges. Our UI / UX is still under heavy rework so please be patient with us while we build an even better dashboard!
Redesigned Cards
The older profile, rank, and level-up cards have been redesigned to incorporate more features, as well as display a cleaner & more inviting look.
Server Ecosystem
Since the early days, we’ve wanted to implement a server-based ecosystem that lets communities create a contribution-based economy, build their own points store, and generate content. In this upcoming update, we’ve added the basic functionality necessary to make that happen.
Tatsu’s new server ecosystem is supported by image-generated functionality such as rank cards, a currency wallet, server economy, community-based item creator system (server badges, role items), a reward store, and an enhanced ranking system.
Feature List
- Loyalty Points / Reward Store
- Item Creator
- Accolades (Server Badges)
- Enhanced Rank Cards
- Server Economy
- Server Inventory System
- Chat Activity Roles Integration
- and More
Server Economy & Scoring Customization
2 years after it was added there is (finally) now a use for server points. For people unfamiliar with the system, users can earn server points by participating in chat. Users can then spend points on items available in a server’s reward store.
We’ve also added a few highly requested quality of life features to our current economy system. In the upcoming version you will be able to customize the name of the score system, rename the server currency system, and block point gain by using designated roles.
Reward / Server Store
The reward store will let your community members purchase role items, accolades, and other custom items from the web dashboard or via commands.
Users who have purchased an item or reward can use the server inventory dashboard & commands will let your members manage and use items they have purchased. Speaking of items, we’d better talk about another feature:
Item Creator
The first version of the item creator supports 3 item types, accolades, roles, and custom items. Accolade items can be equipped on the server rank card (aka server badges). Role items give you a role when used and custom items allow you to define any kind of embed or content message to send when used. You can create these items through the item creator on the dashboard.
Server Badges
As part of the update, we’re implementing server-specific badges called Accolades. Accolades are an item type that you can create within the new item creator. Users can purchase server-created accolades from their server’s reward store, or have an admin give one to them.
Hybrid Inventory System
To accompany the server economy and our new games, we’ve also built a way to manage both the global inventory & server inventory from the dashboard as well as commands.
Users can manage items they purchase from a server’s store directly from the inventory available through Tatsu’s dashboard or by using commands. The inventory system will also be used for all of Tatsu’s games, including Tatsugotchi V2.
Server Ecosystem
After the initial launch release of Tatsugotchi, we’ve seen the potential in bringing interactive game experiences to chat-based communities on Discord. While Tatsugotchi V1 was well received, it was nowhere close to what we had envisioned. We realized one thing: communities love playing chat games. We’ve invested a lot of time into growing our game development capability by building different systems that will allow us to create games with proper depth & gameplay, playable directly on Discord communities.
The Redesign
We had to completely redesign Tatsugotchi from ground up in order to implement systems that we wanted. Everything from the pets to the housing system to the UI had to be scrapped and rebuilt.
In the new Tatsugotchi update, you can customize your house with furniture, equip cosmetics on your pet and even collect multiple pets. The new version also brings with it more than 300 pieces of furniture, 6 types of different houses, 50+ pet cosmetics, and more than 90 different breeds of pets.
Feature List:
- Housing System
- Pet Nursery
- Pet Attitudes & Behaviors
- 90+ New Pets
- Pet Cosmetics
- Pet Status Cards
- Global Inventory System
- Global Item System
- Updated Pets UI
- and More
New Pets
There are now more than 90 breeds of cats, dogs, and birds. All previous 40 pets have been totally redesigned with poses & behaviors to fit in with the new version. The pets can be obtained from the capsule system like the old TG.
Pet Behaviors, Attitudes & Emotions
Pets will now have emotions depending on their base attitude as well as stats. In the new version, your pets will still run away if you don’t take care of them, but you’ll be able to pay a small amount of credits to get them back. The price of retrieval will depend on the rarity of your pet. Based on a pet’s behaviors or attitude, they might be more prone to doing different things such as move around the house more or sleep more often. They might even require you to play with them more, or feed them on a more frequent basis.
Pet Statistics & Cards
Each pet will now have a card that displays its level, randomly generated requirements for food, entertainment, energy, and cleanliness. In future modules, generated pet statistics will have more of an impact on the gameplay.
Global Item System
We now have a brand new system that handles items for all our game modules. This allows us to rapidly add new items on the fly and cut down on development time as well as implement new features for existing item-based modules.
Housing System
In the new Tatsugotchi, we’ve implemented a basic housing system which will be used for all future game modules that we release. With housing comes basic customization of furniture & decorations.
Around 300+ pieces of furniture and decorations will be available for purchase from the Tatsu store or obtainable through furniture boxes. We plan to create constant content updates for furniture based on a seasonable and monthly basis.
The future of our games
The Tatsugotchi overhaul is just the first step in our overall plans. We intend to build upon our new platform by introducing more game modules to Tatsu.
Reintroducing pets is just the start; more mechanics & features & modules will be released as we complete them. These will be integrated into existing modules in order to realize our ambition of building a full-fledged RPG within Discord.
What Next?
Thanks for reading this far! After launch, we will be expanding on the creator studio & economy systems with more updates, including more item types and features to help communities create content. Games will also receive constant content & feature updates so please stay tuned.
We hope you’ll continue to join us on our journey of building interactive, community-driven experiences. Our path so far has been a mixture of fun & hectic days filled with many ups and downs. This year will be important for our team as we do our best to stand out among a sea of Discord chat-bots. Together with the community, we will continue working towards realizing our goals of providing a fun and highly interactive community engagement platform. Sometime after launch, we will release our road-map for the year and we invite all of you to contribute to what’s coming next.
Tatsu’s beta will be available on the 3rd of May 2020. Discuss the new update on our Discord server at https://discord.gg/tatsu
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