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[Craig Stern]

Thanks! Development was pretty sporadic until about 6 months ago, honestly, but I suppose you could say that I've been at it for about 2 years if you count my first dabblings with building the engine.

[Gregg Williams]

Well it seems to have come quite a bit along at any rate.

Our next project which I hope to be able to start development on in a month or two from now is also a tactics/skirmish type war game, so its always nice to see other people making progress in the same general genre. I'll hopefully also be doing a dev blog here about it eventually.

[Craig Stern]

Telepath Tactics has definitely come along quite a bit--but there is still so damn much to do! (Not that it helps me to think about that fact.)

Anyway, I am now officially back home from Indiecade! Man. Indiecade was amazing. I ran into the guys and girls behind all kinds of awesome indie games constantly. "Oh, who are you?" "I'm the guy who made Vessel." "And who are you?" "We made Qube." "We made FTL." "I made Basketbelle." Seriously, it was just nuts. I even learned that Tale of Tales consists of two individuals: an attractive black woman and Daniel Day Lewis.

But! Don't think that I spent the whole time networking--only, you know, 90% of it. I still actually got quite a bit of work done, fixing a few major bugs that had crept into the game with the last few updates. Notably, the loading of custom maps and campaigns now works without a hitch in both Campaign mode and Multiplayer. (Custom maps and campaigns are now kept in My Documents > My Games > Telepath Tactics in Windows, and in the appropriate analogous location in Mac OS and Linux.)

Indiecade chose not to feature Telepath Tactics as a selection, with judge feedback citing some difficulty in grokking the UI and the need for more polish. The polishing thing is pretty much a "no duh," considering that the game is pre-alpha--but the interface stuff...that, I can do something about. Over the past few days (with some helpful input from some fellow developers at Indiecade--thanks guys!), I have made some much-needed interface improvements.

First, I removed the individual character "Done" button, which didn't really serve much of a purpose. After all, Telepath Tactics lets you swap back and forth between characters as much as you want, revisiting characters you've moved previously and moving them again/attacking/rotating/etc. All the character-specific "Done" button really did was screw people who clicked it by accident. So that's now gone.

I also increased the size of GUI buttons a bit to make them easier to see/click; removed behavior that caused you to deselect a selected character if you clicked the character a second time; and made a couple of other tweaks.

While the UI isn't perfect, I actually think most of the confusion around it came from lack of explanation moreso than bad design. Past the first battle, in-game tutorials were incomplete and occasionally legitimately unhelpful--and I've yet to write a section on actually controlling the game in the manual! To rule out the possibility that the UI confusion was caused by poor explanation, I've rescripted the second tutorial battle to teach the basics better, and will be revamping the third battle soon. I will also be creating a dedicated in-game tutorial (i.e. standalone, not as part of the single player campaign) to cover everything much more quickly and thoroughly.

I still have a pretty substantial to-do list sitting in front of me. Weirdly, fixing the game-crashing bug in Multiplayer that sprung up after I rewrote the XML loading function meant temporarily disabling the code that saves your selections from previous multiplayer matches. (I have no idea why, but removing it stopped the crashing.) So I need to go ahead and rewrite that functionality--I'll probably have the game save preferences in an xml file rather than saving it as an sol this time.

Anyway, that's all for now. More updates to come!

[Craig Stern]

Today, I fixed an issue where the game would freeze if the folder path to the custom maps and custom campaigns directories didn't already exist. Luckily, this was an easy fix: AIR has a createDirectory() function associated with the File class that's super simple to use, and is intelligent enough to only create the requested directory path if it doesn't already exist. I told the game to run this when the game starts--if it ever boots up without those directories existing, it'll create them. Done and done.

[Gregg Williams]

Windows won't let you save files in the program's install directory. Like, at all.

What windows is this? Our released games have been saving to the programs directory, and I don't recall any issues across XP -> Win 7. Is this a limited user account issue?

[Craig Stern]

You can save new files to the game's install directory (in Program Files or Program Files x86), but you cannot save edits to any files once they're there (see e.g.).

This problem appears in both Vista and Windows 7, and seems to be independent of user account control. There are complicated workarounds, but the whole point is that I want to support easy modding. Moving the mod files to another, unprotected folder is by far the most user-friendly way to handle it IMHO.

[Gregg Williams]

Ah I see, thanks for the explanation. Makes a lot of sense really, our game re-creates our save files and such so I guess it gets around this whole issue. Though wouldn't a map editor likewise be able to modify and re-save out player made maps and such? I guess this just applies to by hand edits more or less?

[Craig Stern]

Nope, the map editor has issues saving files in the install directory for some reason. And in any event, maps are just the tip of the iceberg: players can also edit attacks, destructible objects, character classes, dialog, and so on. Most of that will happen by hand.

[Gregg Williams]

Its cool that your taking modding so far, hopefully a lot of people take advantage of it and its worth the effort needed.

[Craig Stern]

I certainly hope so!

Small update: I've fixed a couple of purely cosmetic bugs, and I've updated the Telepath Tactics Manual with a detailed explanation of in-game controls.

[Craig Stern]

I've updated the manual again, this time with an introduction explaining what makes Telepath Tactics unique among turn-based tactics games.

[Craig Stern]

Another update! I've just added in the capacity to define attack-specific accuracy bonuses/penalties. What this means: if you want to create a campaign where players have a choice between weaker-but-more-accurate attacks and stronger-but-less-accurate attacks, that option is now available to you.

(Me, I prefer to use differing Energy costs to balance weak attacks against strong ones--accuracy is not going to be a factor in the Telepath Tactics primary campaign. That said, it seems worthwhile to build some flexibility into the engine in case anyone wants to go the other route when creating their own campaigns.)

[Craig Stern]

Updates!

First, I fixed a few bugs that appeared after I added the accuracy modifier attribute to the game's attacks. No biggie.

Second, I have more to report on the art front! I got another shipment of character sprites from Inane yesterday. Maddeningly, we're now just one character class away from having complete walk animations in all four directions. I'm chomping at the bit to get them all so I can start working on a system for blitting the sprite sheets, but it seems there's no rushing perfection.

I do need to get the game out sometime during this lifetime, however. To that end, I finally caved and hired a second artist, Benn Marion (you might know him as the dude that did the art for Organ Trail: Director's Cut). He's hard at work creating title screen art. Here is a totally sweet concept he did of the lizardman:

[Craig Stern]

The only character class left to do walk animations for is the Assassin. Where is she, anyway? Spirit, Bronze Golem, Lizardman, Engineer: maybe you guys can find her.

        

[Moczan]

 

Technically it's not a walk 

[Craig Stern]

OR IS IT?

...

...yeah, okay, it's not. Fine. You win this time, Moczan!

[Craig Stern]

This most recent set of updates was focused primarily on functionality and user-friendliness:

--I updated the map editor to load user-created objects and characters from the new user campaign directory.
--The default army color for the enemy in the single player campaign is no longer black; it is now yellow. (I found that new players would oftentimes confuse their own, grayed-out characters for the enemies, which were black and charcoal gray in color. This change should fix that!)
--Dialog boxes now have "Click to continue" text in the bottom corner.
--fixed an issue where the right-click menu wouldn't always display the correct options after a character's action.
--fixed a typo in some of the dialog.

More to come!

[Craig Stern]

Small updates today:

I fixed a couple of bugs, added scripting to existing cut scenes (characters now walk around and rotate to face the people they're talking to), and added a little "BACKSTAB!" pop-up that appears one character backstabs another. The pop-up is satisfying to see, and will make it easier for new players to figure out the mechanic.

I also had a nice phone chat with the artist doing the title screen art; I'm really excited to see how this comes out! He wants to have the screen animate in parallax, which I think would look pretty awesome. We'll have to see how it turns out.

[Craig Stern]

I've updated the game's "Create" attack functionality. It now selects randomized names properly when summoning a character (not when summoning an object). The game now also supports summoning of multiple creatures/objects at once. (Just for fun, I tested this out by making a new attack called Summon Stone Golem Band that creates 9 brand new Stone Golems on your team!)

I'm now in the process of adding free-for-all / 2 v 2 / 3 v 3 as options in the multiplayer match select screen.

[Craig Stern]

I've finished programming the UI for alliances (free-for-all / 2-v-2 / 3-v-3).

If the player selects 2-v-2, the game groups the first 2 players into a "red" alliance, the next 2 into "blue," and the final 2 (if any) into "yellow." If the player selects 3-v-3, it groups the players into either a "red" or "blue" alliance, respectively. The colors have no impact on the game: they're just there as a placeholder effect to visually distinguish the teams on the player setup screen; they'll remain until I think of something better. (I'm considering making an "Eagle Alliance," "Wolf Alliance" and "Snake Alliance" with feathers, fur and scales for their UI textures, respectively.)

It is entirely possible to create lopsided games if the players want. For example: you can easily create a 3-against-1 match if you like, or a single team of 2 against two other unallied, independent players.

However, the game does prevent you from choosing certain alliance settings on maps with insufficient numbers of spawns. If a map only features 3 or fewer players, you can't select 3-v-3. Likewise, if a map supports only 2 players, you can't select 2-v-2.

With that all working, it's time for Step 2: make the alliances actually do something in battle!