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[Soulliard]

Those are fantastic. But for some reason the crossbow looks a little small.

[Craig Stern]

Thanks!

But for some reason the crossbow looks a little small.

That's what she said?

[Craig Stern]

Implementing save/load functionality for campaign mode is taking a little bit longer than expected. In the meantime, why not read this lovely new article I wrote about ways to improve turn-based combat systems?

[Craig Stern]

I did an interview earlier in the week with 8 Bits and Pieces talking about Telepath Tactics. About halfway into the interview, we start talking about AI and unit balancing, which may be of particular interest to my fellow devs. Check it out: http://8bitsandpieces.com/?p=313

On the game progress front, I've fixed a variety of small bugs related to use of the new hotkeys. Meanwhile, work continues on saving and loading!

[Craig Stern]

I just added a few dozen new transition tiles to the Castle tileset, in case you feel like sticking a castle in the middle of water or lava. You can see me fooling around with some of them in the map editor here:

[Craig Stern]

Save and load are now working for the single player campaign! The game autosaves at the conclusion of each battle, then uses that data to carry over level-ups and other changes to your characters for subsequent battles. There is now also a Load button that lets you resume your campaign from wherever you left off, also using that same autosave data. Handy!

In the future, I'll be adding more save slots for voluntary (i.e. not auto-) saving.

[eobet]

Apart from the (lack of) interface, my main problem with seeing this game is that the sprites look like they are from one game, and the background looks like it's from another game... and the game with the background graphics doesn't look all that nice or compelling.

I hope I'm looking at placeholder graphics?

[Craig Stern]

The parents are visiting me this week, so work has been sporadic, but I have managed to find the time to fix an issue that was bugging me. Previously, in cases where every character but one had finished its turn and the last character to move attacked and leveled up, the game would obscure the level-up info behind the "Next Player's Turn" pop-up. Now, the game intelligently calculates how many frames it will take to display the level-up information and delays the pop-up by that number.

eobet: That's a shot of the map editor. The sprites are supposed to stick out from the background like a sore thumb in the map editor for usability reasons. Go back a few pages to see what the actual game looks like. The actual game's interface graphics are currently all placeholder; the characters are in the process of being animated, and are therefore also "placeholder" in that limited sense.

[Craig Stern]

Another quick point:

Telepath Tactics lets you mod the tilesets. It lets you mod the destructible object graphics. It lets you mod the character graphics. You can even customize the game's character shadows if you want! In short: you can basically remake the whole game's graphical scheme in any way you like.

So if you're displeased that the grass tiles are vibrant and rich in detail, or that the character shadows aren't blobs with uniform opacity, or that the characters themselves are...whatever it is you think they are...then redo them. Really. I don't mind. I went to some trouble to allow you to do that, and I'm actually pretty curious to see all of the cool graphical mods people come up with!

But I can't justify spending the time and resources to try to satisfy every last person's individual tastes with the default graphics. Even if such a thing were possible (it isn't), I'm one guy funding this game out of his own pocket. Ultimately, I'd much rather use the limited time I have available to polish the hell out of the game's mechanics, design and UI than spend it tilting at aesthetic windmills.

[Craig Stern]

Phew! That week was insane. I somehow managed to squeeze in a couple of small improvements over the course of the week regardless:

--fixed a bug in the autosave where it would save your progress at the end of a battle even if you lost, causing you to move on the next battle upon loading.
--began working on support for player-created campaigns.

This week looks to be busy as well, but I should have at least a little more time to work on Telepath Tactics. Also, it looks like we'll have walking animations done in all four directions for 10 of the game's character classes soon. More to come!

[Craig Stern]

Work continues on player-created campaign support! The game now has a Campaigns sub-directory with campaign-specific .xml files for the maps, character classes, items, etc. This architecture will make it really easy for players to download new campaigns: just drop a new campaign into the Campaigns folder and you're good to go. No worries about compatibility with the changes other mods have made to the master .xml files (which are now accessed purely for purposes of multiplayer play).

[Blodyavenger]

Look out, look out--the animations are coming!

  SLICK!

[Craig Stern]

Thanks!

[Craig Stern]

I've just hired a musician by the name of Nick Perrin to come on and help out with the soundtrack! Nick is super, super talented; check out some of his awesome work (especially this, if you're any sort of Castlevania fan).

[Craig Stern]

The game now supports "scrolling-text against black background" cut scenes, configurable via external .xml files. This is in the service of officially supporting player-created campaigns (which, incidentally, I am very close to completing).