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[Craig Stern]

Okay, as promised! Here is footage of some Stone Golems and Mentalists throwing people around onto the ground and into water. For the water landings, I'm considering adding some secondary "spray" particles into the mix to make it look less clean.

[Craig Stern]

Last night was mostly dedicated to fixing bugs and making more types of attacks "shake the screen." Screen shaking really gives the attacks an "oomph" that helps the game's feel considerably, I think. I've also added a "shadowType" attribute to the XML documents for units and objects that lets you customize the kind of shadow they throw in-game (i.e. it's not hard-coded into the game anymore).

Oh, also: I briefly tried making it so a health bar appears whenever you mouse over a unit, but it turned out to be far more annoying than helpful. Maybe I'll try another implementation of it at some point, but for now, it's out of the picture.

Final, interesting fact: I switched over to Fraps from XSplit recently, and the quality of my video increased pretty dramatically. Compare teaser #2 with teaser #3--the fps difference alone is pretty striking. The particle effects in the XSplit video are scarcely even visible at times, whereas you can see them running smooth as silk in the Fraps video. Conclusion: Fraps may be a pain in the butt, but I will be using it for all videos I make from here on out.

[Moczan]

About the throw, it looks like a shove now, so either make particles come on every tile, or make the throw actually throw characters in air (if it's not on a TODO already).

[Craig Stern]

Yeah, that's already on the to-do list.

[Craig Stern]

Update: leaping characters and characters that are thrown now move in a parabolic arc rather than moving in a straight line from space to space. That was easier than I was afraid it would be.

[Craig Stern]

New teaser up showing parabolic character movement.

[Moczan]

Looks good, just make the shadows render properly and you are done with that!

[Soulliard]

The throw looks good. Has a nice oomph to it. It looks like you will be able to throw your own units into a better position, too, which is a nice touch.

[Craig Stern]

We had a meeting of Indie City Games yesterday, and one of the folks in attendance was good enough to record the proceedings. I demo'd Telepath Tactics there--you can see the video of that right here. (Sorry in advance for the low volume and horrendous sound quality.)

The throw looks good. Has a nice oomph to it. It looks like you will be able to throw your own units into a better position, too, which is a nice touch.

Thanks! And yes, you can throw your own units into a better position, which makes the Stone Golem especially handy.

[Craig Stern]

Looks good, just make the shadows render properly and you are done with that!

Good catch: I just fixed it so the shadows stay on the ground when the character is up in the air. It makes the arcing motion look much more "real."

[Craig Stern]

So, I just tested out the explosive charges and realized that I'd broken them. AGAIN.

One hour later, I've figured out the culprit and they're working properly once more. As a bonus, they now add smoke particle fountains to every space they hit when they explode, creating a really neat "explosive" visual effect. Now that I have the method down, I am going to add individualized particle effects to more of the game's various attacks.

[Craig Stern]

Here's video showing the latest improvements. (As a bonus, you get to see the Crossbowman use her Powder Bolt attack to set off explosive Charges!) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wj9hU0uyFxc&feature=youtu.be

[Franklins Ghost]

Looking great and a lot nicer now with the shadows staying down for jumps.

[Craig Stern]

Another small update: I fixed some bugs and reordered the actions menu. "Done" and "Rotate" (which are always options) are listed first; that way, you'll always know where they are in the list. The others are context-sensitive, so they come afterwards in rough order of how often they appear.

Looking great and a lot nicer now with the shadows staying down for jumps.

Thanks!

[Craig Stern]

Small update: I went in and made some minor balance tweaks. I reduced the Spearman's strength, removed the Stinger attack from the Cavalry (a left-over from when I had him riding a giant scorpion), and gave the Stone Golem a Toss attack that is sort of a mid-range compromise between Shove and Throw.

I want to finish the alliance system soon, then get back to completing the play-by-email system and improving computer AI.

Meanwhile, Inane has gotten me the swordsman rest sprite facing in all four directions, and it looks great. I'm pretty excited to get the rest of them!

[Craig Stern]

New ability added: swordsmen and lizardmen can now Sprint! This takes 2 Energy and prevents them from attacking that turn, but increases their move range by 35% for the turn. (Good for beating a hasty retreat or making a last-ditch attempt at flag capture.)

Also, here are the swordsman's four-direction rest poses:



Finally, the diplomacy menu is underway: it's selectable from the right-click menu or the 'D' hotkey. Currently, it appears onscreen, opens and closes. I'm still deciding how I want it to function before proceeding further. The current plan is to have two drop-downs: one drop-down list of potential allies to offer an alliance to, and a second list of current allies to break off an alliance with.

[Craig Stern]

Had an idea on the train today: why not add in some items that give characters new attacks? So I coded that in and now it's working. The two items that give new attacks at present are the Kite Shield (gives the wearer Defensive Stance) and the Runner's Cleats (gives the wearer Sprint). Both appear routinely in random item drops.

[Craig Stern]

Some updates:

--characters can now target unoccupied bridges with attacks. (It seems I accidentally broke this back when I prevented characters from hitting both a bridge and its occupant--this is fixed now though.)
--I raised the Sprint move bonus to 40% from 35%.
--I fixed diplomacy menu positioning on the screen--the game now pauses whenever the diplomacy menu is open.

More to come!

[Craig Stern]

More updates! With Indiecade's final submission deadline closing in, I'm focused on bug fixes and useability improvements. Among the latest:

--character graphics are no longer baked into the game; they're now all loaded dynamically at runtime. This has dramatically improved build times for the game, from a few minutes down to just 34 seconds. This will allow more rapid iteration as I continue to work on the game. Just as importantly, however, this will allow players to mod in their own custom character graphics. Combined with character classes being defined entirely in external XML files, this means the game now has complete support for new, player-created character classes!

--smoke particles now billow up whenever a new character or object spawns on the battlefield. It's a nice visual that obscures the "pop-in" effect.

--there is now a mandatory second-and-a-half delay between a player finishing her turn with a character attack and the game moving to the next player. (I've put this in to prevent the game from zooming off to the next player before fully displaying the results of an attack launched by the last character to go on a team.)

--fixed an issue with item "uses remaining" erroneously transferring between different instances of the same item.

--Assassins can now Leap a single space, so as to easily get on top of boulders, trees, or other objects without having to back up first.

--the diplomacy menu now figures out all potential allies on the battlefield, then sticks them in a drop-down list; it also finds your current allies, then puts them in a separate drop-down list. The diplomacy system is coming together, slowly but surely.

[happymonster]

I'm surprised you had the graphics pre-baked into the build all this time.

Sounds like you are making a lot of progress. Well done!