Update #39
Aug 16 2016
A new game, and the future of Telepath Tactics
Hello there, Telepath Tactics backer! It is I, Craig Stern. This account has been quiet for the past year or so, and I figured that you might appreciate an update on what I've been up to during this time.
First, let's recap a bit. As you may recall, Telepath Tactics released in mid-April of last year. It was critically acclaimed for its mechanics and excellent level design, but (quite unintentionally) was also saddled with lots of bugs, nearly all of which were first revealed to me in the form of a tsunami of written complaints beginning the day it hit Steam.
Nearly as bad, I quickly learned that I had vastly underestimated what it would take to get Steam to play nice with the non-Windows versions of Telepath Tactics. I could use words like "byzantine" and "archaic" to describe Steam's pipeline for packaging and uploading games, but frankly, that would be soft-pedaling it. You literally have to use a
DOS prompt, if that gives you any indication--and that's for the Windows builds, which are a dream to prep and upload compared to non-Windows builds! The fact that I was using Flash made this problem even worse, as none of Steam's bizarre work-arounds for getting Mac and Linux games working with it were created with Flash in mind. I purchased a Mac Mini, nearly zeroing out my checking account, just so I could get the Mac version working on Steam--and I still couldn't get it working.
From the day of launch onward, I spent about
6 straight months obsessively hunting down and fixing every bug and every issue that I could, using every spare moment not devoted to my day job (I do have one of those, unfortunately). This meant ignoring my friends, pissing off my girlfriend, and generally working myself into something that--in retrospect--approached a state of nervous exhaustion. It was, to put it simply, not good.
It became increasingly clear to me that I needed to take a break from programming in order to salvage my mental health. So I switched gears and threw myself into a short board game project,
True Messiah:
I mean, okay, I'm far too into complex strategy games to ever undertake a
truly short project--but by comparison to my usual games, this has been a really quick one to develop! (It helps that I first developed it 13 years ago, and had it sitting around, ready to complete.) I'll be
launching True Messiah next month; and once it's out, I'll be ready to dive back into making video games.
"What is True Messiah, anyway?"
A strategy board game and deck-builder of surreal religious horror for 2-4 players. This should give you the gist:
There's a lot more info over on the game's
official page, though, so if you want to know more, go ahead and
check it out!
"So what does this mean for Telepath Tactics?"
Good question!
There are a few bugs I was never able to fix in Telepath Tactics despite many months of trying--and to be frank with you, that really bothers the hell out of me. I tried so many different things to fix those issues, all to no avail; I've concluded that I may have simply run up against some of the limits of Flash (the engine I built the game in).
At this point, a game developer interested in things like "making smart business decisions" would probably just say, "Oh well, I guess those bugs are just there to stay," then reuse the existing Telepath Tactics engine and cough up a sequel or two to help defray the years of investment it took to build that engine in the first place.
But I am not that sort of developer! Instead of doing the rational thing that basically all of my developer friends have been urging me to do, I've instead been quietly, simultaneously teaching myself both a brand new programming language
and a brand-new development environment, and remaking the Telepath Tactics engine in it (only better, because I learned a lot during the process of programming this game the first time around). Mind you, I was doing this
at the same time that I was completing development on True Messiah.
It's still early days, but here is what I've got so far:
Now, understand: it'll be a good long while before this is ready to roll. We're talking years--the Telepath Tactics engine was complex and difficult to program even when I was working in a development environment I knew really well, and I'm still figuring out how to do certain things in this new environment (like palette swapping sprites and syncing up sounds to animations)! That and, y'know, I still have a day job sucking up 9+ hours out of every weekday.
So don't expect anything too soon on that front. I just wanted you to know that I'm
far from done with all this.
Yours in tactics,
Craig Stern