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...)
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:
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:
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!
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:
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!
