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[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).

[Craig Stern]

Player-created custom campaigns are now fully supported in Telepath Tactics!

[Craig Stern]

Update: you can now define individual character and object inventories in battle maps!

This means you can now have characters start out battles with certain items already in hand; it also means that you can now effectively stick items inside of barrels, treasure chests, or other destructible objects. (Alternately, you can just have the items lying around the battlefield, waiting to be scooped up with minimal effort.)

[Craig Stern]

Another small update: character inventories now carry over between battles! This means that you'll be rewarded for capturing and conserving items during the single player campaign.

[Craig Stern]

Another update: I fixed a bug in the computer AI that was causing it to sometimes move characters normally even when it should have detected that they were on water or lava tiles.

I've also tweaked the game so that at the start of a player's turn, it focuses on a space that is the average of all positions for characters taking environmental damage from water or lava,  so you can see at a glance everyone who's taking the hit. (E.G. Bob is floundering in the water at at 4,4; Sue is stuck in lava at 16 , 16. The camera will pan to 10 , 10 so you can see them both onscreen as they take environmental damage at the start of the turn.)

[Craig Stern]

The monthly update post is up! Click for some beautiful pixel animations.

[Craig Stern]

It took most of yesterday to get done, but at the urging of Ross Przybylski and with some helpful advice from Lars Doucet, I've implemented real-time palette swapping to Telepath Tactics!

This has two big advantages for the game:

(1) It will be much easier to add new units to Telepath Tactics now. Since the game now automatically palette swaps colors for the various teams on the fly, you'll only have to create one set of sprites rather than going through and laboriously creating variants for every possible team.

(2) The game will use much less memory. The memory savings are fairly insignificant right now, but once I start adding in all of the units' various pixel animations, the difference is going to become quite significant. (This is particularly key for running the game on mobile devices.)

More to come!

[Son of Bryce]

Dude, this looks great. I checked out the video in the first post and it looks like something I'd like to play.

Who created the artwork?

[Craig Stern]

Thanks, man! That would be Lorne Whiting (known as Inane on these forums.)

[Craig Stern]

I spent yesterday working on the plot of the game's primary single player campaign. Will there be political intrigue? Oh yes there will!

...I won't say any more, because spoilers are bad.

[Houndninja]

Political intrigue?? yes pls!!

[CaoMengde777]

this game looks SOO awesome, its like what I was going to make, before I changed the way I was going to do it lol... this game looks BAD,ASS!!!  really nice! 

so you are still doing this all in flash?
thats cool, cause thats what my plan with my game is going to be,
thanks for the ... encouragement, knowing what can be done, sometimes I feel daunted by the work ahead of me , rock on dude!