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[Craig Stern]

Just a small update for today: the Spirit class now gets Possess, an ability that causes Enthrall.

I will probably still use Mind Control for a particular Mentalist character in single player, but I don't think I'll be giving it to Mentalists in multiplayer--that class gets enough goodies as it is.

[Craig Stern]

I took a few days to finish up a massive article I'd been working on discussing unpredictability, randomness and control in turn-based combat systems. (It's relevant to Telepath Tactics, so I'm linking it here.) A snippet:

A cunning opponent can be hamstrung by an overly simplistic combat system. Consider Tic-Tac-Toe, a deterministic game with (as games go) a tiny possibility space. Every turn past the first presents only a single optimal move. The only option for a clever opponent is to fight the player to a draw. (As Randall Munroe of XKCD puts it: “The only winning move is to play, perfectly, waiting for your opponent to make a mistake.”) Because the optimal counter to every move is predictable, there is no tension in fighting a clever opponent in a game of Tic-Tac-Toe.

Chess and Go, by contrast, have massive possibility spaces. On any given turn, there are numerous viable moves; if there exists a single optimal move, it is obscured by the massive number of choices on offer and the unique state of the playing field. This renders the game unpredictable.

I choose to call this phenomenon second party uncertainty, since it concerns uncertainty about what the second party—the opponent—will do. Second party uncertainty differs fundamentally from the uncertainty imposed by randomized results, in that its tension arises not from whether the game will choose to nullify your commands, but from whether those commands are themselves good enough. To analogize to real-time games for a moment: second party uncertainty is the equivalent of playing a hotly contested match of Super Street Fighter IV and feeling out your opponent for weaknesses while trying desperately not to slip up. Randomized results are the equivalent of knowing that the game is going to occasionally not register your button presses. Both offer tension and unpredictability, but one is of a clearly superior variety.

Here's the full piece.

[Craig Stern]

Made a couple of interface enhancements:

• right-clicking to open detailed character info now keeps the detailed info screen open until you click the pop-up to close it (or until you undertake another action, such as moving, attacking, or right-clicking a different character). This lets you examine info for a couple of characters at once, and gets rid of the problem where the detailed character information window would collapse if the mouse moved.
• pop-ups now have a drop shadow to make them more visually distinct from the background.
• mousing over a character now pops up a health bar. I had tried adding this before, but didn't like the implementation. I just tried again, and it works much better now.

[Moczan]

I'm a huge fan of your game design-focused articles and use them when designing my own game (and it's a turn based rpg), so I'm just dropping by to say thanks a lot for writing it!

[Craig Stern]

Thanks! I'm glad you liked it.

[Moczan]

There is only one concern (or maybe a different view) I have with this one. You can balance negative status effects in 100% deterministic system with mechanics like cooldowns, low range, health costs or other sacrifices etc. They may be even more interesting, because there is more to calculating risk than "ok, I have 30% that this attack will not only hit, but freeze the enemy". With low range stun spell you have to risk your glass-canon to get insta-killed by enemies ganging on it etc. This broadens the state space so much and make more possibilities for different AIs, ones that doesn't fear risking units for reaching the goal, or ones that tries to preserve as much units and health points as he can.

Also, introducing a randomness feature into system that was designed to be deterministic will feel strange. It's like introducing new piece that uses dice rolls to the chess without changing the existing rules.

[Craig Stern]

Gotcha. There are indeed other ways of balancing status effects deterministically, but IMHO they're rather limited in their utility. (For instance: a Stun ability that requires your glass cannon to run right up next to the enemy is almost never going to be used because it will usually mean one dead glass cannon in exchange for one temporarily stunned enemy.)

You also have to remember that Telepath Tactics is designed for multiplayer play. As much as introducing die rolls sabotages player control, preventing a player from actually controlling or her own characters does so even more! It just seemed like a good idea to make abilities that hijack one player's control of a character not be entirely reliable.

This isn't to say that other ways of handling status effects might not work in another game. I'd be curious to see how other devs manage it.

[Craig Stern]

Update: fixed a couple of bugs, including one that had been bugging the heck out of me for more than a month concerning the game's ability to save certain multiplayer match preferences. That's all working again, thankfully!

[Craig Stern]

Global lighting is now supported on a map-by-map basis! You can set the lighting for any map by putting a Global Lighting condition in the map. The game supports the following preset global lighting types:

Dawn
Evening
Night
LavaLight

So if you wanted a night map, you'd use this tag in the map's XML file:

Code:

<Condition>Global Lighting,Night</Condition>

The game also supports custom lighting if you want to do something not in the presets. To use this, set the lighting to Custom, then follow up with R, G and B transform values. This, for example, would give you some nice nighttime lighting by lowering the red and green in the scene by 30%:

Code:

<Condition>Global Lighting,Custom,0.7,0.7,1</Condition>

And finally, in slightly related news: the map editor now plays nice with battle conditions.

[Craig Stern]

So, I was playing around a bit with the lighting code, and came up with one more Global Lighting preset: Sepia. I figure it could actually be useful, if I (or you, or anyone) wanted to make flashback sequence in a campaign. So I put it in the game.

This is how it looks:



Oh, also, a tiny improvement: I made it so hitting Shift + R rotates a character counterclockwise. (Just hitting R rotates clockwise.)

[Craig Stern]

Phew! Yesterday was awesome; we had our bimonthly meeting of Indie City Games here in Chicago. At least four dozen developers showed up, we had some great talks, and then we all set up around the outside of the room and played each others' games. I got some great feedback on Telepath Tactics; folks who liked Fire Emblem were especially impressed by it. I was quite happy.

I took part of today to begin documenting in great detail exactly how to mod the game. (What can I say: I really want people modding this thing!) So far, I've updated the manual with complete instructions on modding in attacks and custom tilesets, as well as updating it with the game's new bevy of status effects. You can read the latest draft of the manual here if you're curious.

[Games Inquirer]

That looks greyscale to me, not sepia.

I see you've made the ground pieces not quite as straight cut anymore, nice

Or maybe they always were like that and I didn't notice because I didn't expand the video.

[Craig Stern]

Yeah, those tiles haven't changed in months.

Good point about the sepia--I think my eyes were playing tricks on me. This is my second attempt, which I think hits pretty close to the mark, color-wise.

[Games Inquirer]

Yeah, that's more like it! But it doesn't seem to apply on the unit colors. Still, I can already imagine some moody battle after/during a dramatic flashback event scene with that kind of color and the sound of fire and war in the background, maybe with floating particles of ash and sparks and foggy smoke to complete the effect.

[Craig Stern]

Environmental particle effects are most certainly on the to-do list.

Yeah, that's more like it! But it doesn't seem to apply on the unit colors.

If it did, you'd have a hell of a time distinguishing the teams.

[Craig Stern]

Okay, I take it back. It actually looks kind of awesome applied to the characters, and you can totally distinguish teams by their colored shapes. Here it is applied to the characters as well:

[Games Inquirer]

I like it

[Moczan]

Hey, on a technical side, do you achieve that effect with standard CPU rendering or on Stage3D?

[Craig Stern]

I achieve the effect by using the BitmapData method applyFilter(). I'm not using Stage3D, since that would require using a version of AIR that lacks Linux support.

[Craig Stern]

I've been having a bit of trouble deciding how I want the lizardmen to fit into the world of Telepath Tactics, and so I sat down to flesh out their language and culture a bit.

The lizardmen are scattered across many islands in many different clans. While they are diverse, their predominant culture is a low-technology warrior culture modeled loosely on the principles of Varzesh-e-Bastani.

Their native language, Lissit, has 80 words so far with connectors, pronouns, a negating prefix, a feminizing suffix, a pluralizing suffix, and a basic pattern of conjugation. However, it's still kind of clunky to write sentences with at the moment.

Some clans will only speak in Lissit--others more accustomed to dealing with humans (or "hesh," as they call them) will have at least a few members who know the human tongue.