Thanks! Rest assured that I am and I will.

I've added a new script function to game in-game dialog, "RotateCharToFace." Rather than telling a character to face up down left or right, this has you to tell one character to face another character--the game then figures out the correct direction on its own. This makes it possible for characters to face each other during dialog occurring in the middle of a legit battle (i.e. not a pure cut scene), where the relative positions of different characters can vary dramatically.

With that new functionality in place, I've been working on polishing the Ploutos Weapons Depot battle. I've done some balancing, and also added some dialog and a short tutorial to the battle teaching the player about building bridges. For the finishing touch, I think I'll add in the first boss of the game.

More to come!

[Delay Maneuvers , team number , turn number]

All right, one last thing before I get back to content creation: I've added a new Condition type to single player battles called "Delay Maneuvers."

Delay Maneuvers , team number , turn number - instructs the computer to hold off on offensive maneuvering for the listed team (usually team 1) until the designated number of turns have passed from the start of a battle.

This makes it so the computer will not move its characters at all unless the player moves into their attack range. Once the designated number of turns have passed, the computer will revert to its more aggressive AI routines, pursuing the player relentlessly across the battlefield.

I added this in because the computer's ferocity was making it a little difficult to pace the game's battles without relying too heavily on reinforcements. (Reinforcements are a fun curve ball to throw the player, but I don't want to overuse them--reinforcements popping up right near the player after he or she has advanced far into the battlefield is kinda cheap.)

Directional character facing is now supported for each character's rest pose! (I.e. they won't just go back to facing downward after they stop moving.)

Meanwhile, I've got more ideas for the story in the single player campaign; I'm itching to get back to content creation...

I just got the first complete draft of the Telepath Tactics theme music from Nick Perrin. Holy crap, guys. It sounds so good. I sent him my feedback, and hopefully we'll have a finished version in the next few weeks. I can hardly wait to show it to everyone!

The game now responds appropriately to the death of must-protect characters (i.e. the army tasked with protecting that character immediately loses and is struck from the map).

I've coded directional facing to the character rest poses, though this feature is unfinished pending some fixes to the existing rest pose sprite sheets. (I'd explain, but it's too mundane and boring.)

More to come...

[Fog of War , true / false]

The game now supports battle-specific conditions! Here are the ones fully supported right now:

• Fog of War , true / false - sets fog of war on or off for this battle, overriding default settings for the campaign.
• Permadeath , true / false - sets permadeath on or off for this battle, overriding default settings for the campaign.
• Protect Char , team number , character name - makes it so the designated team automatically loses the battle if the named character dies. This can be a character on the player's team (keep your hero alive), or else a character in an entirely different army (keep the CPU-controlled general alive).

You can set down an unlimited number of conditions. This won't do much with the boolean conditions (i.e. the first two above), but it does mean that you can designate an unlimited number of characters whose survival is mandatory. This will make more of a difference as I add more conditions to the game.

The game now supports "New Turn" as a status effect, which basically means that you can create attacks which give other characters an extra turn. (I've created one such attack, "Motivate," and given it to the General character class. It works like the Heron Laguz / Dancer ability in Fire Emblem.)

Only just saw the footage with the animated sprites. They look amazing. But maybe you should also have idle sprites. The soldiers could be okay still, but the winged/smokey monsters probably should flap/smoke even when not moving.

The movement sprites are the only complete set we have right now; the remainder are all in progress.

As for the blocky appearance of the terrain: it's actually more practical that way. The easier it is for the player to tell where the spaces are and what spots he can position units on, the better.

All right, folks! Next on the agenda are custom rules for single player campaign battles.

Want a particular battle to feature fog of war? Want to designate certain units as hero units who lose you the battle if they get taken out? These will accomplish that.

One question, any particular reason yo went with arrows for directional facing, instead of just having the sprite stay facing a given direction?

Yes: for somewhat boring technical reason, I haven't put the directional rest sprites into the game yet. (If you're really that curious: when Inane created them, he used red team colorations with the understanding that he would then make a variation for each team color. However, we then switched over to using violet colorations with in-engine palette swapping; I'm waiting for Inane to provide an updated, violet set before I stick them in the game.)

[strongly]

News!

First, I wrote a piece the other day about the challenges of writing lots of female characters, as I am doing in Telepath Tactics. You can read that here if you're curious.

Second, I woke up early this morning and recorded a teaser video showing off the new character animations! I strongly suggest watching this one at 1080p so you can see the details:

Phew! Spent a few hours fixing bugs; things are looking pretty good here.

I'll be making a new video showing this off as soon as I get a chance. (Hopefully, that'll be as soon as I get home from work tomorrow. If not, it'll be Saturday.)

CHARACTER ANIMATION IS WORKING!

I haven't tested it on my netbook yet, but so far I don't think there are going to be any performance issues: the sprite sheets load near-instantaneously, and the animations themselves run so fast that I had to put an artificial delay into the code to keep them all from looking like those cornball comedies from the 1910s where everyone runs around in double-time!

I've got the animations working smoothly during character movement now, but I have a few more tweaks to make before I'll be ready to upload video showing them off. Stay tuned!

The latter, mostly.


Small update: I spent some time last night writing some more dialog developing Emma and Sabrina.

This looks incredible, even though I also tend to dislike the full top down view, I don't in this case. But I'm a bad tactician so I probably wouldn't get much enjoyment out of a multiplayer only game like this. Maybe in the future you'll make a single player SRPG with the engine and graphics, something akin to Fire Emblem, Shining Force, or Final Fantasy Tactics, Tactics Ogre, Vandal Hearts, or whatever. Or maybe something like fantasy X-COM.

Please. Will buy

Edit: I just read that post where you discuss player created custom campaigns. So I take it there's single player as well despite the thread title? Sweet! I should read more carefully next time.

Thanks! This game does indeed have a single player campaign, Fire Emblem-style. I suppose I should change the thread title...

Whats the problem with Async loading anyways? It should be easy enough to set a flag, and basically pause/busy wait the game until the flag is unset, and thus get the same behavior as a synchronous action more or less.

I'm a concerned about what's going to happen once I start having a bunch of animations on the screen at once. Am I going to have to check for a flag in every single character on the screen in every frame? (Answer: probably.) Still, this is most likely going to be my next line of attack.

Scratch that--I spoke too soon. For some reason, the png decoder has been putting out garbage for BitmapData. This is how it interprets a sprite sheet--a field of white broken up by some occasional, thin bands of colored pixels:



Looks like I'm going to be doing this asynchronously after all.

I...think it worked?

Hard to tell. There are probably other bugs in there causing problems. Will try to sort it out tomorrow.

EDIT: Never mind, it totally worked! Now I just need to get the rest of the animation system working.

From what I've read, I can load it synchronously through byteArray, but there is no method of then synchronously converting the data into BitmapData. (Loader.loadBytes() is asynchronous, and I need synchronous.)

However, with a little more Googling, it looks like someone has created a PNG decoder that might work synchronously:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11171619/as3-load-bitmapdata-from-jpg-png-bytearray-synchronously
I'm going to give this a shot and see if it works!

Ugh; I just knew this was going to be a pain the butt. Flash doesn't support synchronous reading of external image data into a BitmapData object, which means that either

• (1) the game is going to have to hang for a second every time it accesses a new character animation, or
• (2) I am going to have to find a way to squeeze all animations for every character class into a single sprite sheet, or
• (3) I am going to have to load every sprite sheet for each character class on instantiation, or
• (4) I am going to have to stick all character sprite sheets within the game itself and take them off the table as far as player modding

Option 1 really isn't acceptable. Option 2 would seriously impact my ability to easily add new attack animations to characters of a given class. Option 4 sucks, since I really want all aspects of this game to be open to modders. Which means that I might need to go with option 3, despite the fact that it will be a big freakin' waste of system resources.

Le sigh.

I took a little while today to add something I'd forgotten to put in for team matches: AI players now target characters on enemy teams while treating their allies as friendlies.

With that now complete, I've begun work on coding character animations! Yay!