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[Craig Stern]

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.

[Games Inquirer]

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. Is the ground style finalized? The sprites and other objects like trees look a lot better than the ground. Maybe It's just how square it all is and if you made new tiles for the corners to round them out so they look more natural (at least for the ground, not the bridges) it would be okay.

[Craig Stern]

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.

[Craig Stern]

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.

[Craig Stern]

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...

[Craig Stern]

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!

[Craig Stern]

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...

[Craig Stern]

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.)

[Craig Stern]

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!

[Craig Stern]

Thanks! Rest assured that I am and I will.

[Craig Stern]

The first boss of Telepath Tactics, Garrett the Impaler, is now in the game! He appears with some reinforcements a number of turns into the Ploutos Weapons Depot battle, says some dialog, and then makes a beeline for your army. When you beat him, it ends the battle. (He even has a cool little dying monologue when you take him down! )

I did a full playthrough of the game earlier and fixed a few minor bugs in the presentation and character dialog; on the whole, I'm quite happy with the way things are progressing, both from a story and a gameplay perspective. I did find two bugs in the combat engine that I need to fix, however. I'll be working on those today and tomorrow (mostly tomorrow, as I have plans for this evening).

I should also be getting the final draft of the new title screen music from Nick Perrin soon as well; once I do, I'll need to add that to the game.

More to come!

[Gregg Williams]

Hows the MP side coming along?

[Craig Stern]

Quite well! Most of the stuff that needs to go in for multiplayer (e.g. remaining character animations, sound effects, updated UI graphics) is shared by the single player side as well.

The only system left to code that is purely multiplayer in nature is over-the-internet play. (Though I'd like to provide support for co-op campaigns at some point, in which case this would be a single player feature as well.)

For now, I'm focusing on the other stuff because the other stuff can displayed on a single computer. Having that stuff helps me to build anticipation by showing off new music and art and story; but there's nothing really to "show" by adding over-the-internet multiplayer just now.

This will, of course, change once I move into alpha and start making the game available to outside testers. That is still a couple of months away, however.

[Craig Stern]

Added a new feature while on the train ride from work: attacks can now have multiple status effects at once! If you wanted to be a huge jerk about it, you could now easily make something like the Marlboro's Bad Breath from Final Fantasy.

There is also a new status effect: Softened. A Softened character gets his or her resistance to Slash, Pierce and Crush attacks reduced by 25% for 5-7 turns. Also: Softened stacks, so you can make a character as weak to physical attacks as you want, provided you have the Energy.

I was concerned that Heat and Cold attacks had more devastating effects than Shadow and Light attacks, so I made it so (1) Shadow attacks now inflict both Slowed and Softened (though each is determined independently, so it could inflict both, neither, or just one); and (2) Blinded status is now more powerful (reduces base chance to hit to 25%) and prevents a character from dodging attacks.

[Craig Stern]

I just got the final draft of the Telepath Tactics theme from Nick last night; and folks, it is freaking fantastic. I've now incorporated it into the game; you'll now hear it whenever on the title screen or campaign / match select menus.

[Craig Stern]

I have added another status effect to the game: Enthralled. An enemy unit that is Enthralled will follow your orders for the remainder of the turn as if it were your own unit. The true owner of the unit will still be able to issue orders to the character on his or her own turn, however, so beware!

[Craig Stern]

Phew! I just fixed a whole bunch of bugs, including one particularly annoying one I'd been meaning to fix for a month or two where the game would fail to retain information about any character no longer in your party. That is fixed now, however! So you can remove characters from the player's army, then add them back later, and the game will remember all their stats.

I also added a new type of status effect: Hardened. It's the opposite of Softened, essentially, adding 25% to Slash, Crush, and Pierce resistance. I've added two new attacks to the game as well: Frost Armor and Mind Control, which produce Hardened and Enthralled status effects, respectively.

[Craig Stern]

I made a tactical error last night: I began working on overhauling the dialog scripting system, and started trying to fix too many things at once, then had to leave for the evening with the game broken. It bugged me during my entire night out. I have a few hours to try to get everything in working order again: wish me luck!

[Craig Stern]

Phew! All right: I've successfully overhauled the dialog scripting system. Scripts are now placed on the line of dialog where they execute. (Originally, they appeared on the line before; my thinking was that scripts would represent what happened during the reply, but it turned out that this was actually much harder to visualize than just sticking scripts alongside the dialog they accompany.)

I've also added a few new script Actions:

• MoveCam - this overrides the automatic camera panning to the speaker, and insteads moves the camera to whatever coordinates you designate.
• AssignSpeakerAtCoords - ordinarily, during a line of dialog, the game finds the character whose name matches that of the speaker, then highlights that character and auto-pans over to him or her. This overrides that function, instead panning over to specified coordinates and highlighting whatever character happens to be standing there. I've found this is necessary to give generic enemy units (which lack unique names) dialog in single player.
• EndConvImmediately - this basically lets you run a whole bunch of script actions at the end of a conversation, after the last line of dialog is spoken, in a placeholder dialog branch that won't be displayed to the player and won't require them to click again.

[Craig Stern]

I've now added a "targeting mode" attribute to the game's attacks. Most attacks use constrained targeting, meaning that you can only target along a straight line in the four cardinal directions. However, the game also supports free targeting, which permits diagonal targeting of attacks.

Free targeting currently works in the game, but there are caveats. It can cause problems if used with asymmetrical AOE attacks in a perfect diagonal direction, since the game will just automatically select a facing direction for your character (and therefore, the AOE pattern rotation). Line of sight is also not robustly supported for free targetting yet; free targeting attacks will be shut off by walls, but they currently have a tendency to round the corners of walls in a way that is not very realistic.

In other news, I've also changed the base success rate for Enthralled to 70%, in line with -1 Counterattack, since--like -1 Counterattack--it's used with attacks that otherwise do nothing to the target.