Black Tallow devlog

Welcome to the Black Tallow devlog

2026-11-05T00:00:00Z

Hi, I'm Tom. I'm a solo developer in Australia, and Black Tallow is the game I'm making.

What is Black Tallow?

It's an old-school co-op dungeon crawler with directional combat. You roll a character the way you would at the table, with stats, race, class, background and burdens. Then you and your party hexcrawl across a grim fantasy world, load up the cart, and head down into the dark. You can play alone or with up to two friends. Other parties are down there too, and what happens when you meet them is up to you.

Characters die for good. The cart, and whatever you've stashed in it, rolls on.

What this devlog is for

I'll post here as the game comes together: what I'm working on, what went wrong, and why things work the way they do. Some posts will get fairly technical, but I'll explain the jargon as I go, so you don't need to make games to follow along.

Two posts go up alongside this one, about what I'm working on right now:

Tuning the swing: making sword fights feel heavy and easy to read.
Getting characters into the game: the new race bodies, faces and clothes, and the small fixes that take the longest.

Where it's at

Black Tallow is in development, and plenty will change along the way. That's part of what this devlog is for: showing the game as it is, not as it will be.

Follow along

Join the Discord, sign up for email updates on the home page, or add the devlog feed to your feed reader.

Tuning the swing

2026-11-05T00:00:00Z

This week has been all about how a sword fight feels. No new features, just tuning: change a number, play, change it again.

How a swing works

Every swing in Black Tallow has three parts:

The wind-up. You draw the weapon back. This is the tell: your opponent can see which way the blow is coming and get their guard up on that side.
The release. The blade is moving and can hit. Once it starts, you're committed.
The recovery. You bring the weapon back under control, and you're open while you do.

The combat is directional. You pick the angle of each swing with the mouse, and blocks work by direction too, so reading your opponent's wind-up matters.

Drags and accels

While the blade is moving, turning your view carries the swing with you. That gives you two tricks:

A drag is turning against the swing, so the blade reaches the target later than your opponent expects, and their block goes up too early.
An accel (short for accelerate) is turning into the swing, so it lands sooner than they expect.

The wind-up tells your opponent where the blow is coming from. A drag or an accel plays with when. That's most of the mind games in a fight.

Longer releases

The first problem: on most weapons the release was too quick for drags and accels to mean much. With the longsword, the blade was meeting the training dummy within about a tenth of a second of the release starting, so even a hard turn barely changed when it landed.

So the longsword's release went from 235 milliseconds (thousandths of a second) to 425. Push it to 500 or 600 and it starts to look floaty, as if the sword is moving through water. The rest of the weapons were scaled up from the longsword, with the heaviest, like the maul, topping out around 600. Heavy weapons are slower, but they still feel like they're cutting through air.

The turn cap

Longer releases brought a new problem. With a fast enough flick of the mouse, a drag could whip the blade right past the target and miss completely. And how far you could drag depended on your mouse settings as much as your skill.

The fix is a turn cap: while the blade is moving, your view can only turn so fast. Each weapon has its own cap, worked out so that turning at the cap for the whole release carries the blade through the end of its arc, and no further. The longsword's is about half a turn a second; a dagger can turn nearly twice as fast, and a maul a fair bit slower.

Why does that help so much?

Drags and accels are readable. The hardest drag or accel changes the blade's speed by about half, slower or faster, and no more. When you're defending, you're making a read, not a guess.
A full drag still lands. You can commit to one without wondering if it'll sail past.
Everyone has the same limits, whatever their mouse sensitivity.
Weapons feel different. A quick blade can twist mid-swing; a heavy one can't.

Of everything this week, the turn cap made the biggest difference.

It also let me remove something. There used to be a safety net for very fast turns, a "glance", where a blow landed while turning too fast did almost no damage. In play it just felt like the hit hadn't happened, and with the cap in place there's no need for it, so it's gone.

Fewer accidental changes of mind

During the wind-up, a quick flick of the mouse lets you change your mind about a swing's direction, say from a side swing to an overhead. It's useful, but it kept catching me out: I'd start turning early to set up a drag, and the game would read that as a flick and change my swing.

Now the swing's direction locks in earlier, 40% of the way through the wind-up instead of 60%. Turning after that point just sets up your drag.

Next: hit stop

Next up is hit stop: the split-second pause when a blow connects. It's a tiny thing, but it's a big part of what makes a hit feel heavy instead of like a blade passing through smoke. Right now it's set weapon by weapon with no rule behind it (the maul's is actually shorter than the longsword's), and none of it feels weighty enough.

The new rule: the more damage a hit does, the longer the stop. Every stop plays as a sudden slow-motion rather than a dead freeze. The person or monster you hit freezes along with you, so their flinch lands with your blow, and the little kick the camera gives on a hit follows the stop.

There's a multiplayer wrinkle too. Every hit is decided by the server: the computer running the game for everyone in the session, which has the final say so that nobody can cheat. When you're playing over the internet, the news that your hit landed takes a moment to come back from the server, so you might feel the stop late, or not at all. The fix is for your own computer to show the stop the instant your blade connects, and let the server confirm it.

Getting characters into the game

2026-11-05T00:00:00Z

Alongside the combat work, I've been bringing a big batch of character work into the game.

Blender to Unity

The characters are made in Blender and the game is built in Unity, so every change to a character means bringing it across again and hooking it back up: the materials, the animation, and what it can collide with.

What came across

This batch was a big one:

Six body frames, from halfling-sized up to half-giant. Each race plays on its own body, so a dwarf really is shorter and broader, with its own reach and its own hitboxes (the invisible shapes the game checks a blade against).
Heads, faces, hair and beards. Rather than a separate model for every face, a head carries shape keys: stored variations of the same model, like a wider jaw or a heavier brow, that can be dialled in and mixed. One head can become a lot of different faces. Body builds work the same way.
Skin tones, painted onto the head and body when the character appears in the world.
Cloth on long hair and hanging beards, so they swing as you move.
Clothes: robes, cloaks, hoods, tunics and gambesons (padded cloth jackets, worn under armour or instead of it).

All of it is put together when your character appears, and it's shared with the other players, so everyone sees the same character. In the character creator, you can step through all of it with a live 3D preview.

The small stuff takes the longest

Most of the work is fixing the places where things don't quite fit. 3D clothes are thin shells over a body, and when two of them overlap the wrong way you get clipping: one poking through the other. This round of fixes:

a hood that pinched in on the tunic's neckline
elbows poking through the back of a cloak
two small gaps at the top of a robe's undershirt
a robe's shoulders sitting inside its own hood

Each fix happens back in Blender. Then the bodies are saved out again, imported again, and checked in the game. It's slow, fiddly work, but it's the difference between a character that looks put together and one that falls apart the moment it turns around.

Next is armour: around two hundred finished textures (the painted images wrapped around a 3D model) and the materials that go with them, so each piece shows what it's made of.