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[Christian Knudsen]

There's a quotation mark messing up the YouTube subscribe link.

[Craig Stern]

Kickstarter doesn't let you edit updates after 30 minutes post-posting. Oh well.

[happymonster]

I'm sorry to hear that Telepath Tactics didn't meet the Kickstarter goals. Glad to see you are so positive and looking forward to trying again soon.

[Craig Stern]

I put the December update up yesterday, and finished up dialog tree support yesterday evening.

Notably: because dialog trees are working, that means branching campaigns are now working as well!

[Craig Stern]

More updates: I've been working on the AI. The computer now factors in the amount of friendly fire damage an attack will do when deciding which attacks to use. That's in and working.

Next, I'm working on a heuristic by which the computer will decide whether to use inventory items in the possession of CPU characters. That will be followed shortly thereafter by code that actually makes the CPU characters use items they think are worth using, followed by a routine for CPU characters to actively pursue and pick up items on the battlefield. More to come!

[Craig Stern]

I've temporarily put AI improvements on hold pending a recoding of certain aspects of the engine to speed up certain routine processing actions. Notably, I've recoded a bunch of the game's big arrays as vectors to speed things up. Predictably, I'm now wading my way through a bunch of bugs for my trouble, but I'm sorting them out bit by bit.

In the meantime, my (extremely talented and awesome) friend Jamie Sanchez helped me redesign SinisterDesign.net--it's now much, much nicer looking! I dare say it even looks professional. Things are looking good.

In other news, I'm not now** on the hunt for another pixel artist. Want to help out with character animations in exchange for gold* and glory? Drop me a line!


*More like American dollars, probably, but hey: whatev.
**Well! That was a typo that rather changed the meaning of the phrase, wasn't it?

[Craig Stern]

Update: dialog now supports a new action, SkipToBranchIfGone! This lets you skip past branches of dialog spoken by characters that are not present on the battlefield.

SkipToBranchIfGone has two parameters: branch and character name. The game searches the battlefield for the named character; if it can't find a character with a matching name present in the battle, it then advances to whatever branch of dialog you specified. Handy if you want to go the traditional permadeath route in your campaign, or if you want to include a lot of dialog in the middle of battles involving characters that may or may not be on your force at the time.

[Craig Stern]

I've updated the game's AI again, this time with three significant improvements:

• enemies now seek out and grab item sacks lying around within movement range if they don't have any other, higher priority tasks;
• enemies now intelligently use items in their inventory based on the properties of each item and what state the enemy is in;
• enemies now have multi-stage turns.

There are still some bugs to be worked out, but on the whole I'm happy with the new behaviors; they definitely add extra challenge to multiplayer matches against the computer!

[Craig Stern]

All right! I've been working on AI routines for preferring spaces that enemies can't reach with their attacks, but I haven't had a solid block of time to get it done just yet.

A lot of my time lately has been taken up interviewing artists to come in and help me finish up the character animations. I've heard from a few really talented folks so far, and am pursuing the most promising of these leads to see if it works out. Hopefully, this should significantly accelerate the pace at which character attack animations get done!

[Craig Stern]

All righty--it looks like I'm going to be bringing Tyvon J. Thomas on board to help speed up the production of character animations. (You might know Tyvon as the talented fellow behind the revamped character sprite animations in Defender's Quest Gold.) Welcome to the team, Tyvon!

On my end, I've been reworking the reward tiers in anticipation of a second go at Kickstarting Telepath Tactics come March. I'm also continuing to work on the AI, and find myself reworking the game's plot progression in my head.

Currently, the plot starts a little slowly for my taste. There isn't enough development of the main character, and there isn't any good spot to introduce the main villains just now. So I'm thinking of having an introductory chapter where you play the main character as a child, introducing you to her past and her history with the game's villain(s). I think this will pay dividends in terms of raised dramatic stakes when the villains are re-introduced later in the game!

Of course, to really do this right, I need more sprites (for the children and their parents, in particular). This means I need a budget, which in turn means I need a successful Kickstarter. *Le sigh*

[Craig Stern]

I took a break from programming AI and stuck support for simultaneous character movement in the engine. This means you can move multiple characters at once during cut scenes; it also means that I'll be able to support AOE knockback abilities and a Rally function.

Speaking of which: I added in support for AOE knockback abilities last night as well! To do this, I had to fix an issue where the game would check for whether it could move targets in an arbitrary order, meaning that multiple objects in front of or behind one another--objects that should have theoretically all moved simultaneously--would oftentimes instead end up registering as blocking each other. That's fixed now, though.

Because that's now fixed, I was able to add a Pull attack into the game, where the character and whatever is in front of that character each move back a space. I'd been wanting that in the game for some time, so I'm pleased that it's now supported.

Next, I should finally be able to finish coding the Rally function. Once that's done, I'll get back to further improving the enemy AI.

[Craig Stern]

Hm, looks like it's bug-fixing time--something I did in the last update or two is evidently causing enemies to randomly stall during their turns. It's always fun discovering something like this when demoing the game at a public meeting, as I was yesterday. Luckily, I had a stable build available elsewhere that I was able to fall back on!

Anyway, I'll post again when that's sorted out.

EDIT: Ha, that was fast! I'm getting pretty good at squashing these bugs.

Okay: onward to finishing up the Rally function!

[Craig Stern]

So! I got a lot of work done on Rally last night; it now works in battles where there is a single character. Theoretically, it should work in all situations right now, but there appears to be a bug of some kind interfering with it at the moment; I'm going to try to figure it out over the next day or two, as Rally-style movement will really be a huge time saver in battles on larger maps.

[Eclipse]

tried the demo, it's quite good!
It lacks a way to save during the game but maybe it will be there on the final game?
You should lock the camera so it never goes past the map boundaries, it's kind of weird starting the game on the lower right part of the map and seeing all that black everywhere. Polishing aside, it's shaping up really well and it's already quite engaging, great job

[Craig Stern]

Thanks! I appreciate the feedback.

The game currently autosaves; discretionary saving is going to be a thing in the final game, but I haven't had a reason to add it just yet.

[Craig Stern]

I've spent the past couple of days fixing bugs and making various improvements. I've reduced the amount of text at the start of the game to help improve pacing, added another tutorial prompt based on confusion I saw among certain new players, and--just for fun--added in a new type of item, the Grapple Chain. (The Grapple Chain lets you grab and pull an enemy toward you from 2 spaces away.)

Based on feedback I've received, I'm going to lay out character attacks in a bar at the bottom of the screen so the player won't have to click as many times to launch an attack. I'll be showing what this looks like in a future update once I have it done.

[Craig Stern]

The attacks bar is now in-game! It's a nice improvement over the separate attack menu, having all skills and attacks available alongside all the other actions. (It's possible that I might turn it into an all-purpose Actions Bar at some future point, to eliminate the click involved in going from Move mode to Actions mode as well.)

[Craig Stern]

I had a good playtesting party last night (and by "good," I mean "uncovered only half a page of bugs instead of 1-and-a-half pages or more). Here is me writing down one of the bugs:



The game is steadily getting more and more stable even as its feature set fills in. I'm pleased with the progress. Today (and probably the next few days after) will be dedicated to squashing various issues uncovered during testing. I've already killed a few, and have about a dozen left to go. Wish me luck!

[Craig Stern]

I fixed 8 or 9 bugs yesterday. The full list:

--the game wasn't properly selecting the windowed mode background for the title screen after quitting a battle;
--certain attacks weren't properly clearing the undo stack;
--multiplayer matches would fail to load under certain circumstances, but would still strip the listeners off of buttons, effectively stranding the player in a certain menu;
--the game would treat computers with touchscreen support like tablets and fail to load all of the mouse listeners during battle;
--the game would flip out when a character carrying items was killed and the game had to spawn an item sack on that space (this was thing I'd fixed before but inadvertently broke again somewhere along the way);
--explosive charges had become bugged (AGAIN);
--the game was adding attacks in the wrong spot, leading to gaps in the attack bar and certain number key shortcuts for attacks not corresponding to attacks properly.

And finally, my personal favorite bug,
--using a spirit to Enthrall your own unit on your turn would render that unit immune to being Enthralled by an opponent on the opponent's turn.

All of these bugs are now fixed. There remain about five or so more bugs to look into; I'll be trying to fix at least some of those today.

[Craig Stern]

More things fixed! Specifically, some AI bugs and an issue with Rally.

Oh, and speaking of Rally: I finally got around to recording some video showing the Rally function in action. Check it out!