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About

About Tailraise

Tailraise is a project that is being developed by Taw, also known as a_bat.

The game is a project made in Unity which uses Inkly to handle narrative dialogue, with many custom features built on top to handle the progression system, character attributes, content loading, and so on.

The game uses C#, as well as a custom parser system for the text that dynamically changes based on player attributes, progression, and so on.

History

2017:

The project originally was meant to be an online multiplayer website, sort of a mix between Gaia Online and Neopets. The project was launched and a lot of world building was made and some initial prototypes and a few basic game prototypes were made, but the project didn't move forward due to lack of programming experience at the time.

2020:

The project was attempted again with a small team. One of these members was Kihari, who founded Weasyl with Taw in 2011. The project was named 'Shifted' at the time and an original prototype with the choose your own adventure style gameplay was included in a mini game demo.

The project evolved a few times over the next year, moving to a new format that was a top-down pixel game, somewhat similar to Stardew Valley in terms of visuals.

A proof of concept was built, with working multiplayer and item sync between the players and server. However, due to limitations with browsers and performance, this project didn't get much further and was shut down.

2023:

Taw attempted to start up a prototype of Tailraise for a few months using React and building it as a browser game. This project was worked on for around four months before shutting down due to lack of experience with web knowledge and databases.

Current:

With Taw now having experience with making game mods (one with over 2.2 million downloads) and using Unity more frequently for small projects (Vampire Survivors clone, I'm on Observation Duty clone, etc.), Tailraise was made starting in April 2025 and launched officially on June 2, 2025.

Development is actively ongoing and the game is planned to be supported long-term for several years.

The history above is included to show that a project can take many forms, start and stop, and massively change over years. If you are in the process of trying to build your own game, please see this as a reason to not be discouraged and keep trying, keep learning, and take things one step at a time.

Trivia

  • The Unity project for Tailraise is titled 'Foxwood' before the name Tailraise was decided on.
  • A different project started in 2018, titled "Windswept" was also worked on, which was a rogue-lite game with mechanics similar to Wind Waker.
    • A few pieces of game lore stem from the world building from this project. This project had a small proof of concept for the water, cell shading, and random generation for each island, but it never progressed further.