All right--the undo stack is complete! It correctly undoes all movement, in order, including use of movement abilities like Leap and Shadowport. It's pretty awesome.
(As before, though, you can't undo past a non-movement event like attacking, grabbing an item, healing, revealing fog of war, etc.)
Meanwhile, I recorded a more up-to-date multiplayer video than the one from July. In it, I explain the wide variety of customization options available in the game, then play a 2-vs.-2 local multiplayer match with one CPU ally against two CPU enemies The video is currently rendering; I'll have it uploaded tomorrow.
Next on the agenda will be fixing an issue where multiple characters with death monologues are killed in one AOE attack; once that's sorted, I'll be finishing up the Rally function.
Whoa! Yeah, it looks like that just happened today. Huh. I wonder why that is? Both of our games are still on the first page of "Most Recent." Well, whatever. I guess I'll just have to start pushing Greenlight a little more actively.
All right, on to substantive stuff! I just implemented an undo stack, meaning that you can undo multiple moves--as many moves as you have characters that have moved, theoretically, though the undo stack will clear if you do anything like attack or heal. I still have a few changes to make to it, but it's currently functional and pretty darn cool.
I've also laid some preliminary groundwork for a Rally function, where the computer will auto-move all of your characters toward a point you specify. (I imagine this will be useful for speeding up positioning during turns where the enemy isn't anywhere near you.)
A few improvements, folks! Beyond instituting a small mountain of bug fixes based on reports from folks playing the demo, I've added a couple of features I'd long been itching to get into the game:
You can now give characters suicide attacks that aren't in their normal attack arsenal. So, for instance: you can create a class of character that explodes upon death, even if Explode isn't normally a selectable attack for them. Pretty cool, I think.
Even cooler than that, however, I finally sat down and got explosion chains working.
I've also made item drop behavior better: dropped items now land on the same space as the character dropping them. (If there is already an item sack there, they are added directly to that item sack instead.)
I've added some new functionality to the dialog scripting system; two new Actions are in, PlaySound and PlayMusic. These do exactly what it sounds like they do.
Notably, the addition of PlaySound means that it is now possible to mod in voice-overs for character dialog. I'm not going to have voice acting for the main campaign, but anyone that wants to record their own can plop 'em in without much trouble. (And of course, anyone creating their own campaign can add voice-over dialog to that as well!)
The Kickstarter is coming along, albeit in fits and starts; we're now past 400 backers and past $7,000 raised--which is to say, we're about 28% funded with 3 weeks to go, or slightly ahead of the curve.
Meanwhile, the news on Steam Greenlight is more unambiguously good. Four days after we launched on Greenlight, we're already 30% of the way to the Top 100, with upvotes consistently blowing away average upvotes for games in the Top 100! Here's a screencap I took last night, if you don't believe me:
(We launched shortly before midnight on Sunday, so that tiny green sliver on Sunday represents less than an hour, not a full day of voting.)
On the development front, I spent the last few nights fixing various bugs that I'd stumbled upon or had had reported to me, mostly involving swimming (though one involved characters that had been grayed out regaining their color upon being shoved). Most of the bugs are now dealt with, though a couple remain.
Additionally, race and gender are now distinct definable attributes for characters, each of which are now fed directly into the name generator. Gender may be defined as "Male", "Female" or "Either"--in the event of "Either", the game will select one, with a 50% chance of male and 50% of female.
The one thing I haven't done yet is rework the name generator to automatically match player-defined Race and Gender attributes with the XML tags in CharNames.xml--once I do that, players will be able to create their own races with their own unique race-and-gender-specific name tables.
I've updated the Telepath Tactics alpha demos! They now have the following requested features:
- the second battle is rebalanced to be more challenging; - items are now stored in the game's destructible barrels; - you now have the option to set character walk speed to Normal, Double or Instant in the options menu (F1); and - the computer no longer cycles through every character when ending its turn without moving.
The Greenlight page is going surprisingly well so far; since I posted it yesterday, it's already "14% of the way to making the top 100 list." Pretty neat!
The comments I've been getting there are great, too. Tons of enthusiasm, and a much lower ratio of bitching-about-the-graphics to compliments than I ever could have imagined. This is currently my favorite comment:
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Instant thumbs up and favorite. I love turn based tactics, and this looks like an absolute gem. Probably the best greenlight game I've seen so far.
So that's pretty awesome.
In the meanwhile, I've been dutifully listening to the feedback I've received on the demo. So far, the number one complaint seems to be the very angular water/dirt and water/grass transitions; I'm going to see if I can get some more natural-looking, less blocky versions of these transitions made.
Meanwhile, I'm working on some useability improvements based on feedback I've received:
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(1) making it so a Delay Maneuvers condition has the computer skip its turn entirely rather than shuffling through each of its characters and doing nothing with each;
(2) adding settings for 2x walk speed and near-instantaneous walk speed for character movement occurring during a CPU player's turn;
(3) making it so double-clicking the ground deselects the currently selected character.
Telepath Tactics Kickstarter Update #4 is up, providing an introduction to the world of modding. We learn the basics of how to make your own single player campaign, and in the process, we learn a bit about the map editor, learn how to mod in new characters and character classes, and learn how to string together maps.
Funding has slowed a bit; it's nothing I didn't expect, of course, but it would have been nice to have instant, explosive success so I could relax a little. I just recorded a video this morning walking through the basics of creating a new, custom single player campaign in Telepath Tactics; I'll have that up pretty soon!
Phew. I spent a little time today working on a new battle map, but by far most of today was spent managing the Kickstarter, responding to messages, and promoting the campaign. I'm starting to understand why people say running these campaigns is a full-time job...
On the plus side, as of the time of writing, the campaign has now broken $4,000.00, which is pretty frickin' swell for one and a half days of fundraising. (By my standards, anyway.)
If you're interested in the single player campaign's story, by the way, I suggest reading Update #1: it's chock full of juicy info.
Phew! We hit 10% of our funding goal after all. What a crazy day this has been.
Just now, I took an hour away from answering messages and marketing and made a couple of small improvements to the game:
--Paul Greasley pointed out to me that the outdoor battles didn't look like they were occurring in daylight due to the coloration of the vegetation. To test his theory, I created a Daylight lighting preset that makes everything about 20% yellower. Below, you can see the map without daylight lighting and with it:
I think it improves the look of the daytime outdoor battles quite a bit, myself!
--I also fixed a rather nasty bug wherein the AI would sometimes lock up after a turn involving character dialog. I had only just caused this bug in the previous update, though, so it wasn't too hard to find the culprit.
Right now, about 8 hours after the campaign's launch, the Kickstarter campaign has 98 backers and $1,922 pledged, or 7% of the project goal. I don't know enough about Kickstarter numbers to know if that's good or not, but I can't say that I'm entirely comfortable with the thought of ending the first day with less than 10% of the funding goal. I'm starting to get the feeling that the next 30 days are going to involve lots and lots of marketing to push the campaign to its goal.
Speaking of which! If you're reading this devlog and you haven't backed Telepath Tactics yet, please do so, and then please tell your friends to do so as well! As explained in this post, the future of this project depends upon the success of this Kickstarter campaign.
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Well, whatever. I guess I'll just have to start pushing Greenlight a little more actively.
