Hello everyone! I am continuing to stream weekly on Friday afternoons to discuss recent development progress on TagPro, answer any and all tickets posted to our feature request tab on the homepage, and build/troubleshoot features that will be added to the game in the future! Tune in to twitch weekly at 1:00 PM Eastern for ~90 minutes or catch the recording later on! All past recordings are stored on youtube and are posted to the subreddit weekly as well.

Submit a response to this form to have your question answered on stream!

Cheeze's summary:

Mostly a non-dev updates week, but we are still moving forward on the development side! We really really need more input in the megathreads so please weigh in if you haven't yet. Most of our focus is preparation for the redesign, ensuring it works, that we can track progress, and that we aren't adding clutter as more features work their way into the game. Also I'm not sure what has gone wrong with youtube but these used to upload in 2 hours and now they are taking 6+, sorry about that.

AI's summary:

Intro:
0:00 - Future Group Friday Intro & Stream Overview

Game + dev updates:
1:52 - Dev Updates: Disco Flare Team Cap Animation Bug Fixed
3:18 - Dev Updates: Aggressive Replay Scraper Hotfix
4:01 - Dev Updates: Spectate Button Hang Fix Scheduled for Next Release

Non-dev / redesign updates:
4:41 - Non-Dev Updates: Brand Assets Megathread Now Live on Reddit
6:52 - Non-Dev Updates: KPI Meeting & Simplifying the Homepage for New Players
10:43 - Non-Dev Updates: Creative Committee Meeting & Scope Discussion
13:00 - Non-Dev Updates: Steam Page Setup Coming This Week
13:33 - Non-Dev Updates: Nerfed Event Lobbies Brainstorm for New vs Veteran Players
15:14 - Non-Dev Updates: Interactive Tutorial Structure Finalized
16:21 - Non-Dev Updates: Page Organization & Combining Community Tabs

Feedback forum:
19:29 - Switching to Discord Community Feedback
20:14 - Feedback: Commendation System for Recognizing Good Players
22:30 - Feedback: Italicize Muted Players on Scoreboard While Spectating
30:00 - Feedback: Ghost Row on Ranked Leaderboard for Inactive Players
32:47 - Feedback: Muted Player Indicator & Default Chat Macros as a Better Solution
37:03 - Feedback: Send Message to Team Excluding One Player
39:17 - Feedback: Replace Group Description Messages Instead of Stacking Them
41:50 - Feedback: Disable Splats or Add Splat Opacity Slider
43:55 - Rendering Flares & Animations Outside the Game Using PixiJS
49:17 - Where to Display Group Capacity Without Cluttering the Chat
51:36 - Feedback: Let 360 Degree Players Choose Their Displayed Degree in Gold
54:58 - Concerns About Gold Degrees & Smurf Perception for New Players
58:32 - Closing Out: Why Customizable Degrees Don't Benefit the Community
61:21 - Feedback: Casual OT Ranked Redirect Bug Still Happening
62:34 - Feedback: Birthday Hats for Account Anniversaries

Q&A:
69:27 - Q&A Form: Tag Coins for Mini Games
72:49 - Q&A Form: Mini Game Coin Rewards & Bucketed Queue System

Feature building:
75:41 - Feature Build: Revisiting the Interactive Tutorial Spec
77:55 - The Tutorial Needs a Hook, Not Just Information
80:29 - Tutorial Portal Design: Is It Too Boring for New Players?
85:22 - Adding Background Bots to Make the Tutorial Feel Less Dead

Wrapup:
87:20 - Stream Wrap Up: Megathreads, Release Timeline & Closing Notes

I only got to play this old map I made once with other people. Inspired by Pac-Man mazes, it has lots of boosts (pac-man pellets) and power ups (pac-man power-pellets). It was really fun boosting around the maze... the concept had potential but I recall rounding up testers was hard.

Many of you know that Cheezedoodle has been subject to a year long, intense campaign by Keyser Soze to implement the brilliant new Hot Dog flair.

To repay Cheezedoodle for his patience and collaboration with the TP community in this matter and so many others, I suggest a flair to immortalize his legacy in the community: The Cheese Doodle Flair.

I propose the date of implementation to be March the 5th, National Cheese Doodle Day.

I will not take no for an answer...

July 27th to be exact. I'll be expecting the same level of excitement as all of you put towards the hot dog flair. And a brand new special event flair.

That is all.

Anyone been getting worse server latency over the past week, especially to SF or Chicago? I went from routinely around 30ms to typically 70+.

Signups are OPEN for NFTL Season 12!

You can message !nftl to the TToC_BOT in the competitive TagPro discord to sign up. The tentative schedule is attached below, subject to change depending on number of teams (Championship would be the 20th if only 6 teams). Please DM fender or myself if you would like to be a captain or GM, or if you have any trouble signing up. The number of teams and if there are two tiers will be determined by the amount of signups. This WILL be a 3v3 league again.

Key dates:

• Signups Close - July 24th
• Draft - July 26th
• Championship - August 30th
• Games every Thursday AND Sunday

TagPro's redesign has started and we need your input! Below is an anything-goes forum for sharing thoughts, ideas, mockups, and anything else relevant for us to take into our design decisions. We have provided categories and some leading questions to consider.

For more context, see our initial announcement. For help finding each question, see the pinned Index post. For upcoming Megathread topics, see the proposed outline. Each new thread will be posted after 1 week.

We encourage constructive responses to answers, iterations on ideas, and even additional questions, but please note that top-level comments will be removed to avoid clutter.

A reminder that all donations received during this process go towards the redesign process! Overflow funds will be applied to the marketing campaign going live with the Steam release.

Hello everyone! I am continuing to stream weekly on Friday afternoons to discuss recent development progress on TagPro, answer any and all tickets posted to our feature request tab on the homepage, and build/troubleshoot features that will be added to the game in the future! Tune in to twitch weekly at 1:00 PM Eastern for ~90 minutes or catch the recording later on! All past recordings are stored on youtube and are posted to the subreddit weekly as well.

Submit a response to this form to have your question answered on stream!

Cheeze's summary:

Soooo much to update! Summary on our audit/consult from earlier today, next steps for redesign and structural changes happening alongside the redesign, megathread planning, and also the usual development stuff happening alongside it all. Stream did crash twice but I've spliced it all together (video froze at the end, what can you do). Also when I need to splice the video it takes youtube 5x as long to upload the thing, sorry for the delay!

AI's summary:

Intro:
0:00 - Future Group Friday Intro & Redesign Post Overview

Game + dev updates:
2:31 - Dev Updates: Neutral Flag Handoff Behavior Now Live in Group Settings
6:38 - Dev Updates: Ranked Spectator Wait Fix Merged
7:31 - Dev Updates: Disco Donor Flare Live & Team Cap Animation Bug
8:44 - Dev Updates: Versus Profile Stats & Reserve Name Privacy Fix
9:36 - Dev Updates: Group Preset Links Going Into Next Release
10:57 - Dev Updates: Spectate Button Hang Fix & Chicago Lag Hotfix

Non-dev / redesign updates:
12:16 - Non-Dev Updates: External Site Audit Meeting Recap
13:19 - UI UX vs Design: Breaking Down the Two Sides of the Redesign
14:21 - New Player Onboarding: Simplifying the Homepage for First-Time Users
17:27 - What Are We Actually Tracking? Site Metrics & A/B Testing Plan
19:05 - Grouping Site Tabs by Theme to Reduce Option Paralysis
21:38 - Steam Page Setup Coming Soon: Wishlists & Dev Log Legitimacy
23:03 - Community Megathreads: Brand Assets, Mock-Ups & Iterative Design
25:31 - Ruling Out Scope Creep: Groups Page Not Part of Redesign
27:49 - Internal Structure Changes & Creative Committee Update

Feedback forum:
30:00 - Feedback: Show Coin Cost on Shop Reset Button
31:42 - Feedback: Ranked Queue Bug During Casual Overtime Still Occurring
33:03 - Feedback: Better Visual Indicators for Flag Grabs & Caps
36:25 - Reactive In-Game UI Elements to Be Added to Redesign Megathread
40:21 - Feedback: Link Other Tutorial Videos in YouTube Descriptions

Feature building:
43:43 - Feature Build: Saving a Flare in the Shop from Refreshing
50:08 - Does Saving a Flare Undermine the Incentive to Play More Games?
53:06 - Alternative: Require a Game Quota Each Week to Keep Your Saved Flare
55:49 - Other Options: Random Drop Save, Achievement-Based Saves & Rare Flare Lock
58:58 - How Does a Saved Flare Affect Next Week's Shop Rotation?

Q&A:
61:53 - Customizable Ball Trails & Other Future Shop Items Discussed
64:38 - Post-Game Celebration Animations & End-of-Game Flow Discussion

Wrapup:
65:35 - Stream Cut Short: Recap of Next Steps & Upcoming Megathreads
67:01 - Hot Dog Flare Reminder: Play One Game Before July 15th
67:20 - Next Release Preview: Video Export, Friends Feature & More

As was briefly hinted at in a previous post, there is a new annually recurring flair coming up this Wednesday, July 15th, in celebration of National Hot Dog Day! The hot dog flair is counted as an event flair, meaning all players who currently have the Event Master flair must obtain it in order to keep or re-earn the Event Master flair. So come play some pubs next Wednesday and celebrate together with Keyser Soze and co!

https://github.com/homekhomek/HeroBasedBallCTF

Awhile back, I made a TagPro clone called "Poppin'". While ambitious, my interest in maintaining it has since fallen off. I've made the source code public. It has the following features:

- Standalone web-client built on Reactjs and PixiJS + WebSockets + ProtoJS for the game client
- Manager: Manager hosts a web api that interfaces with a MongoDB for account management. It also hosts a simple in-memory state for managing lobbies and matchmaking, aswell as lobby chats.
- GameServer: Game servers are instances that run the backend physics and logic for the games. The manager will pass off clients to different game servers. (this would be like "chicago" or "US East", essnetially servers that are responsible for running the actual game of TagPro). These servers provide updates every tick as opposed to async input updates. They use ProtoJS to shrink the packets dramatically.

Poppin' was a very fun experiment. It adds hero abilities to TagPro, with 6 playable heroes currently implemented. It loads maps of FortunateMaps. It's a pretty faithful recreation of TagPro, and it'd be sick to see people expand on it.

Thank you to the multitude of community members that helped me make it tweak it.

Excited for the TagPro facelift!

// HOMEK

TLDR: All donations between now and July 31st go to a full site audit and redesign. New donor flair available!

TagPro’s visuals need some attention. This isn’t a secret, we’ve all said it at some point, but for years this has been an unreachable goal due to the size and complexity of the task. Today, we start to change that! Included below is our schedule, plan, and summary of how we will spend all funds raised towards this project over the coming months. As always, feel free to reach out with any questions!

Why now

Initially teased as a high priority item more than 2 years ago, we have struggled to find the correct way to fit a site redesign into our timeline. Small changes were proposed, meetings were held, and a sort of “incremental progress” approach was started before the idea was tabled until it could all be tackled in one go. Over those last 2 years we have been collecting themes, visual effects, audio changes, UI/UX suggestions, and anything else relevant for a redesign with the expectation that eventually we would be able to pull them all together. That starts now. In order to maximize the effects of the upcoming steam release, we have decided that a visual overhaul of the website is our last step before presenting TagPro to the largest gaming audience available, and we would like the community to be a part of that plan. 

How will it be done

The start to finish will be broken into 4 phases:

• Phase 1:  A brief, paid, external site audit
  • Will be completed with the goal of identifying the biggest areas for improvement, proven strategies we are missing, or bad practices we fail to notice after years of looking at the same website. We have already initiated this process behind the scenes with a few promising candidates.
• Phase 2: Community feedback and brainstorming
  • Throughout July, we will be posting 3 unique megathreads. Each thread will be a single theme (e.g. “Brand Assets”), have top level comments for a larger piece of that theme (e.g. “The Logo”), and second level comments with guiding questions (e.g. “Should the logo include TagPro elements in place of letters?”). 
  • Community members can respond to guided questions, ask questions of their own, submit mockups, or brainstorm broadly around an idea.
  • After ~1 week, the next thread will be created and a committee will convene to refine and summarize the community’s perspective for phase 3.
    • Each committee will be composed of Steer Co. members and noteworthy community members visible in the threads, so speak up if you want to be more involved!
  • To help with organization and finding relevant topics, a separate “Index” post will remain pinned with links to each prompt in each megathread (more info in the comments).
• Phase 3: Hiring a web designer or design agency (donations needed)
  • Using our existing notes, the refined community feedback, mockups, and the contents of several upcoming meetings, we have appointed FLY to communicate directly with our hired help. This will ensure we can give quick responses to questions and not excessively draw out the process waiting to reach consensus.
  • Who or what will be hired is still an in-progress decision. If you or someone you know might be interested in taking this on as a paid project, please contact a member of the Future Group with your resume/portfolio/etc. by the end of the month to be considered alongside our other choices. If you do not know any TPFG members, feel free to leave a comment and we will reach out!
• Phase 4: Implementing all changes
  • Like any other release, we will post a Community Update summarizing what has changed, next steps, and open the floor to feedback. The redesign will likely be isolated from any ‘traditional’ feature additions to avoid confusion early on.

Donations

• As an additional thank you to our top donors, a new flair has been added for $750 in total donations! This flair features a special secret capture celebration!
• The budget for this project will be determined by donations received from now through July 31st. A higher budget means more options to compare, more iterations to refine graphics, and more assets we can use or save for future use. 
• Any donations received which are not spent on this project will be passed on to the marketing budget ear-marked for the steam release (more on that later). 
• As always, donations can be made through the Donation page. We sincerely appreciate everyone who has contributed!
• TagPro is an entirely volunteer based project. All donations, at any point in the game’s history, have gone directly back into the game. This time is no different.

The first megathread is scheduled for the end of this week, and we plan to begin the hiring process in the first weeks of August. See the comments below for a preview of the megathread format. As with anything else, let us know if you have any questions, concerns, thoughts, or are as excited as we are to be stepping into a new era of TagPro!

- The TPFG

Hello everyone! I am continuing to stream weekly on Friday afternoons to discuss recent development progress on TagPro, answer any and all tickets posted to our feature request tab on the homepage, and build/troubleshoot features that will be added to the game in the future! Tune in to twitch weekly at 1:00 PM Eastern for ~90 minutes or catch the recording later on! All past recordings are stored on youtube and are posted to the subreddit weekly as well.

Submit a response to this form to have your question answered on stream!

Cheeze's summary:

I think I forgot to turn my brain on today, it is HOT. Sorry for the scattered thoughts! We finally got to a feature building session this week but I think I picked a bad one, probably could have been a single ticket after all. Anyway, very important site redesign stuff on the way!

AI's summary:

Intro:
0:00 - Future Group Friday Intro & Stream Plan

Game + dev updates:
0:54 - Dev Updates: New Donor Flare Progress
3:03 - Dev Updates: Neutral Flag Contact Check Branch
6:43 - Dev Updates: Hotfix Bundle Ready for Monday Silent Release

Non-dev updates:
7:44 - Non-Dev Updates: Site Redesign Post Going Live Monday
9:15 - Community Megathreads: How Redesign Feedback Will Be Collected
11:18 - Steam Publishing Requirements Review
12:31 - Interactive Tutorial Discussion: Needed Before Steam Launch?
16:21 - Non-Dev Updates: External Site Audit Process Started

Feedback forum:
17:01 - Switching to Discord Community Feedback
18:35 - Feedback: Show Key Presses of Balls During Replays & Spectate
22:49 - Designing the Key Press Display: Profile Setting vs In-Game Toggle
26:36 - Feedback: Show Team Totals for Stats on the Scoreboard
30:54 - Feedback: Filter Casual Games by CTF or NF Like Ranked
31:51 - Bug Report: Team Switch Doesn't Remove Ranked Ready Indicator
34:57 - Feedback: Vote Ban Games Should Not Count Towards Affected Players Stats
40:02 - Feedback: 0.25 Second Grab Delay on Flag Tile Feels Unintuitive
42:45 - Should the 0.25 Delay Be Displayed? Designing a Visual Indicator
48:20 - Discussing Whether a Pizza Timer or Flash Effect Makes More Sense
52:20 - Ticket Created: Visual Display for 0.25 Flag Tile Interaction Delay
54:17 - Feedback: Save Macros to Account Instead of Browser Cookies
56:34 - Should Multiple Macro Packs Be Supported?
59:09 - Feedback: Show Number of Players Who Own Each Flare on Hover
60:54 - Feedback: Show Flare Ownership Count on Hover
62:30 - Feedback: Send Low Win Rate Players a Coaching Discord Link
66:03 - Better Solution: Improve In-Game Tutorial & Homepage Coaching Resources

Feature building:
70:33 - Feature Build: More Granular Shop Flare Pricing
71:45 - How Would We Determine If a Flare Is Under or Overpriced?
74:27 - Could Flare Pricing Be Automated Using Head-to-Head Purchase Stats?
78:27 - Conclusion: TPFG Adjusts Pricing Manually as Needed

Wrapup:
81:14 - Stream Wrap Up: Monday Release, Redesign Announcement & Impersonation Policy