Bonus post, July 2025 - The tech of Taival
Hey all,
We wanted to do something different for the bonus post this time around. Something we've never dived into is the external tech that makes Taival possible. Let's get into it!
The majority and main development for Taival is done on the Unity game engine - version 6.1 at the time of writing the post, using Universal Render Pipeline to be exact. We chose Unity as it was the engine we all were the most familiar on, and it has not let us down. It has great customizability, allowing us to build all the custom tools we need for getting the open world to run and to be easy to extend, develop and populate with content!
Using Unity forces us (not that we complain - love the language) to use C# as the coding language for Taival. This has served us really well, with C# having a very modern and clear syntax - Java is what we all learned in the university, so this was also an easy transition to make!
For the creating the voxel blocky models we use MagicaVoxel The .vox files created by MagicaVoxel are then either
A. Imported directly to Unity with an external tool, which automatically converts the voxel data into a game-ready asset with model and texture. This workflow enables very fast iteration and creation of assets!
B. Imported into Blender. This may be needed for a couple of reasons:
Rigging. This is needed to make characters move. We need to add bones to them for them to be able to be animated!
Polishing and non-blocky editing. As MagicaVoxel only allows us to place blocks similar to how you build in Minecraft, we may sometimes need non axis aligned surfaces. For example, if we wanted to make a hedgehog for the game, we'd rather have the (although blocky for style) spikes be rotated to create the spiky back, instead of trying to do all the different angles with individual blocks. This creates a lot cleaner visual, while still respecting the blocky style!
Looking at modding, which we really want to support, being able to import custom player-made .vox files directly into the game for game-ready items would be absolutely fantastic, as MagicaVoxel is a fairly high-level and easy to learn software!
That's the general pipeline for developing the game and the content that come with it. As an additional shoutout, Fish Networking is what we use for online multiplayer networking, and it has definitely got the job done, even for a large scale game like this!
Thank you for reading and all the best,
- Taival team