Hello, tactics fans! With February behind us, it’s time to recap everything we got done on Telepath Tactics during the month. As always, we’ll start with all the pretty new art!

• More portraits from David Hammond!

• Lorne Whiting has completed the first set of NPC sprites! This first set consists of human villagers:

• I’ve finally decided to try my hand at pixel animation. With two hours of effort, I was able to produce a decent little “power up” effect for use with character buff abilities (shown on the right). While I was at it, I also created a couple of new item graphic variations for use in the campaign.

• Most attacks that need visual effects have now had them added in-game, and are just looking really really nice.

• The Bandit class now has walk animations in all four directions.

• I wanted to have more original character and effect animations done this month, but our main animator, the eminently talented Tyvon Thomas, took some time off to release his own game: Joylancer. (You can check that out here if you’re curious.) We should be back on track and have the Bandit attack animations done this coming month.

• We managed to finish up all of the attack animations for the game’s nearly two-dozen alternate gender sprites! Thanks to the tireless efforts of Lan Giniewski, 19 of the game’s 22 character classes now have complete sets of fully animated sprites in both male and female variations.

• The biggest undertaking this month has been continuing my mission from last month, cleaning up the game’s interface and replacing placeholder assets with polished work. We’re still not quite done, but we’ve made some excellent progress on that front. You can see a smattering of new interface assets below:

• Along those same lines, we now have new attack icons complete! There are 106 of these in total. Here are a few of them for your perusal–for fun, see if you can guess which attack each icon represents!

• Because we now have all gender variant sprites and portraits, I was able to code support for randomized gender into the game. Character gender is now randomized in multiplayer, so you’ll likely end up with a different combination of men and women under your command each time.

• I’ve created the introduction to the game, consisting of the first five scenes and battles of the main campaign; I’m quite pleased with how that has turned out so far.

• I’ve continued creating new characters and dialog for further scenes in the game. (Perhaps my favorite new character is the cocky pyrokineticist Rebecca Flare–I’ll avoid spoiling anything by saying more about that, though!)

• I’ve expanded the lissit language, as detailed in this post.

• I filled the female spriggat name database with over 100 unique names; for some reason, it seems I never got around to finishing that one earlier on in development. Oh well!

• You can now easily select characters behind trees and walls! The difficulty of selecting characters behind trees has been a consistent complaint for many months, so I’m relieved to have figured out an easy, elegant solution to address it. Whenever you left-click an object, the game now acts as if you had clicked the space behind it for purposes of character selection. Simple as that.

• Telepath Tactics now supports battle objectives! You can easily take a peek at them by hitting Shift + O.

• There’s a new individualized lighting attribute that ignores the level’s global illumination and lights the character or object independently. (You can see that at work in the campfire object shown on the right.)

• The game now has smoother auditory transitions; it keeps music playing continuously without interruption when it transitions from one scene to another that both use the same music. A small change, but it makes those sorts of scene transitions feel a hell of a lot better.

• New dialog script actions! I know, I know, I’m supposed to be done with these, but I found myself needing a couple more of them while creating scenes in the main campaign. Besides, there are only two of ’em: RemoveGlow and IfOnCoordsRun.

• Oh, and wait for…wait for iiiiiit…I fixed a load of bugs! (Did you think that wasn’t going to be in this month’s update? Ha ha! Silly reader.)

All right, that’s all for this month! In the coming month, I’m aiming to have all of the NPC sprites finished; get the bandit attack animations done; replace the graphics for those little pop-up windows with info on characters, attacks, etc.; and have the first hour of the main campaign completed. Can we do it? There’s only one way to find out. Stay tuned for our next monthly update!