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KickStarter Telepath Tactics Liberated - deterministic tactical RPG inspired by Fire Emblem

Craig Stern

Sinister Design
Developer
Joined
Feb 15, 2009
Messages
398
Location
Chicago
Heh, so, I did a thing I'd been wanting to do for a while: I gave every class in the game a branching promotion! When characters promote, they can now pick from one of two prestige classes that extend the character's stats and/or abilities in different ways to give them a differentiated role on the battlefield.

With 24 base classes and every prestige class a unique (i.e. no two base classes share any one prestige class as a promotion option), this now brings the game to 72 character classes.
 

Craig Stern

Sinister Design
Developer
Joined
Feb 15, 2009
Messages
398
Location
Chicago
I've posted this year's end-of-year round up on Kickstarter! Destructible defensive terrain; UI improvements galore; new status effects, weapon properties, and character classes; and the campaign creation suite now has all of its various editors! Clicky to read.
 

Craig Stern

Sinister Design
Developer
Joined
Feb 15, 2009
Messages
398
Location
Chicago
In case you missed it, here's the full text:

Hello, friends! It's been just about a year since our last round-up, and that means another post tallying up our progress!

I've been putting hundreds of little touches of polish and dozens of quality of life features into the game, including: character attack animations, a visible space selector, movement sound effects, UI sound effects, improved particle effects (e.g. there are now fireworks when you win a battle!), mouseover tooltips explaining the game's different stats, continuously playing music (or music fade-out) between scenes, a prompt asking if you want to end your turn when everyone's gone, and warnings for when you do dumb things (like leave deployment spots empty, give someone equipment but don't equip it, or try to buy a weapon no one can use).

I've also been adding lots of cool new features and content! This includes, but is not limited to:

  • space stat modifiers are working! (Snow and water tiles, for example, boost heat resistance.)
  • the game now supports destructible defensive terrain! Parking a character in long grass, for instance, will boost their physical defense and give them a dodge chance. (Though long grass is, of course, itself easily chopped down or burned if you want to keep an enemy from setting up in it...)
338efba301dc65ba1b99f005d7e9a7d0_original.png

Terrain effects!
  • the AI is smarter than ever! it will take advantage of defensive terrain when it can, and will just generally position itself better to avoid unnecessary damage when engaging with you.
  • click-and-drag camera panning is working!
  • fog of war is working!
  • exploration mode is working!
  • weather effects in cut scenes are now supported!
  • anti-save-scumming RNG is now working!
  • auto-move-and-attack is now working! (Shift-click an enemy within range of the current character, and your character will select an attack skill and move into attack range all on their own for you.)
  • you can now manually zoom the battle camera in and out!
  • granular move speed settings are in-game! (Characters can now be set to move at 1x to 4x speed in battle.)
  • there's now an army overview screen that puts you one click away from viewing each of your characters in detail:
c300f4b8c0a33c9266d17ddaa1977039_original.png

Inspect your army at a glance!
  • the game now sports a mood system that allows characters to take on lasting emotional states in response to in-game events.
  • character class promotions now occur in a dedicated interface that lets you preview the available options. Oh, and speaking of which: promotions can now branch! Every class in the game now has two unique promotion options. This means that in addition to the game's 24 base classes, there are now 48 promoted classes for a whopping 72 character classes total!
  • replaced the old, dizzying "zoom to whichever character is talking" behavior from OG Telepath Tactics with a little pulsing dialogue bubble icon to tell you who's talking:
427810868495283f168e3e3898a24de1_original.png

Who even *is* Silas? Now we know!
  • there are now a whopping 55 cut scene backgrounds!
  • accuracy above 100% now has an actual purpose: it makes status effects more likely to take hold.
  • new status effects: Regenerating, Clouded, and Clarity!
  • loads of new tags allow the same skill to behave differently for different characters (or for the same character, when equipped with weapons sporting different properties).
  • in-game text has been enhanced, with support for bold, italics, underlining, strikethrough, dozens of in-game symbols, and different font colors.
  • the campaign editing suite now has a help button and a guided introduction to get you started building your first campaign!
  • created an item editor, skill editor, and global dialogue/script editor in the campaign editing suite!
faf6dfd858d55a9cd1c1811c95e813f1_original.png

The skill editor in action!
  • all editors now support tabbing between text fields.
  • all editors now have predictive text for (and where appropriate, in-editor explanations of) scene names, music tracks, script actions, conditions, elements, status effects, and so on, as well as sub-menus for browsing visual and audio assets:
08193700c7c07827f0de330e474ba808_original.png

Browsing to find music for a cut scene
  • the game now allows custom visual and audio assets to come bundled with campaigns.
  • the map editor now has undo functionality, add/delete row/column functionality, and complete auto-tiling logic!
  • there is now an armies editor within the map editor, allowing you to set armies up easily without having to mess around with a bunch of text-based conditions.
  • the map editor now also supports procedural terrain generation, allowing you to create a random map using a hand-picked combination of up to three different tilesets, with the ability to tune elevation and environmental hazard settings.
  • you can now preview music within the map and cut scene editors.
  • the cut scene editor now lets you reorder frames within a cut scene!
  • the campaign editor now lets you test your campaign directly from certain points using the new Test Mode!
  • loads of great new scripting functionality! There are now script actions to let you create and manipulate lists of characters or their properties based on various criteria (including their relationship levels with and romantic compatibility with other characters); actions to alter the course of cut scenes; and even a "for loop" action to run other script actions with a self-incrementing integer variable.
  • skills can now run scripts when used, giving modders an insane amount of flexibility in terms of what they can make skills do.
  • character classes are now moddable! These now hook directly into both the game's procedural character generation functionality and its class promotion systems. Even better, when characters switch classes, the game now automatically adjusts the character's stats and growths to fit their new role--but they remember their old skills and masteries, allowing them to effectively multi-class.
  • new supported custom variable type: Area. Areas let you define rectangular portions of the battlefield, then use them to check character coordinates for scripts and dialogue.
  • infinite loop detection!
I could go on, but your eyes have probably glazed over by now.

With all that focus on polish, you're probably wondering when you're going to see video of this thing in action! Well, friends, I'm going to do you one better. Soon--in the coming weeks--I'll be releasing a private demo just for KS backers so you can see how things are coming together (and offer me feedback, if you have any).

Until then!
 

Craig Stern

Sinister Design
Developer
Joined
Feb 15, 2009
Messages
398
Location
Chicago
If you're someone who gave up on trying to mod the original Telepath Tactics, I especially want your thoughts on the new campaign editor! (Not you specifically, mindx2, but anyone.) How easy do you find it to make a campaign with the new tools? What sort of things would you like to see to make it all more accessible? Etc.
 

Infinitron

I post news
Staff Member
Joined
Jan 28, 2011
Messages
97,236
Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
https://steamcommunity.com/games/357940/announcements/detail/3094511057675335416

The Telepath Tactics remake is well underway!

Hello, tactics fans! Since our last update, I've been working hard on the new engine. As of this past week, all of the game's basic systems are now complete! Engine improvements include:
  • new procedural animations help everything feel more vibrant and alive. Characters breathe while standing idle; foliage now sways in the breeze; water and lava visibly slosh to and fro.

  • the rendering pipeline underlying it all has been upgraded to something more modern, with bloom lighting and full-screen anti-aliasing. Thanks to the bloom lighting, lava, sparks, fire, and other combat visual effects now visibly glow, and post-process color grading now makes everything pop more. There are glow effects in certain character portraits, too! There's a new trailer up on the Together in Battle page where you can see this all in action. :)

  • speaking of character portraits: I've hired the incredible painter Georgi Minkov to redo them all in a beautiful painterly style while retaining all the new, alternate facial expressions. Trust me, you're gonna love it. He's starting with the proc gen portraits, then moving on to the "generic unit" portraits, and then we're tackling the portraits for unique handmade characters.

    e85b1fcbdecd6e582930cda1c32b1665063671b1.png


  • the UI is prettier now, too: I had Franklin Chan (whom you might remember from True Messiah) paint some lovely new windows and cursors. I also added in more animated elements: new turn and combat victory/defeat screens now feature banners that sway to and fro in the breeze.

  • more combat interface improvements! Most notably, left-clicking an enemy now shows the spaces it can reach with its attacks in addition to its move range:

    ExmGCpJXEAcgLXE


  • further AI improvements! The game now supports differing AI profiles with different ways of prioritizing moves, and these can be assigned on an army-by-army basis. Enemies will now take opportunities to shove your characters off of cliffs.

  • better proc gen battles! Gone is the old method of slapping together premade chunks into a level. Instead, the game now crafts levels from scratch algorithmically based on customizable parameters.

  • better campaign editor tools. The proc gen battle generation I mentioned? Yeah, it's in the map editor too! If you want some help fleshing out your campaign, you can let the map editor think up a level for you and then take it from there with your own edits and additions!

  • the game now supports custom voice-over dialogue. Wanna try voice-acting Emma--or an original character for your own campaign? It's supported!

  • cut scenes have a lot more polish as well, with changing facial expressions and proper walk bobbing and sound effects during portrait movement.

  • the game is now up to 153 skills! (To put this in perspective, I think Telepath Tactics originally shipped with a little over 110?) New skills include the new trap Caltrops, the area control skill Hold, the movement ability Juxtapose, and the first-strike ability Preemptive Stance.

  • new visual effects and sound effects for advanced skills!

  • you can now smash enemies into each other! (It's super fun.) This is shown on the Together in Battle page too. :)

  • bug fixes. My god, theBUG FIXES. I'm not playing around this time. Every bug must. Be. Squashed.


But wait, there's more! I haven't just been working on the engine: I've also been getting Telepath Tactics' cut scenes and battles working in the engine, one by one. I'm currently up to the "defend the camp" battle, which you can see me working on here in the game's spiffy new map editor:

7bfd64b9cc02c7d30e16151b3bf31e8414cd3c9b.png


I am shooting to have the remade version out no later than early 2022, but it's entirely possible I'll have it done earlier. I'll keep you posted!


Yours in tactics,

Craig
 

vazha

Arcane
Joined
Aug 24, 2013
Messages
2,063
Incline with visuals, and it's mostly down to Codex' entirely justified criticism. Now if we could successfully convince him to hire a competent writer (preferably someone who can present a sample of their writing) our noble task would be completed.
 

Fluent

Arcane
Patron
The Real Fanboy
Joined
Apr 8, 2021
Messages
830
the remake sounds phenomenal, craig. day one purchase for me. thanks for your hard work in making it.
 

Mustawd

Guest
Craig Stern how moddable will the new version be? I recall the old version allowing you to create your own campaigns
 

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