All right! Time for another monthly update on Telepath Tactics. Let’s get right to it:

• New character portraits! Fun fact: as of today, Telepath Tactics now has 77 distinct character portraits, with dozens more to come! This set is pretty much exclusively just villains:

• We’ve created a new character class, the Bandit! Bandits wield axes, and will serve as early game enemies in the main campaign. Here are the male and female Bandit in their rest poses:

• Alternate gender sprites now all have Rest and Walk animations! Giving them attack animations will come next.

• We’re continuing work on special effects for attacks in the game. Mind Blast and Mental Effect effects are now completed, as well as Elemental Blast effects. Here are some gifs of the elemental blasts–light, shadow, cold and heat:

• Work is continuing on the main campaign. The game now has more than two dozen unique characters (allies, enemies and NPCs) written up, with plenty of more to come, as well as about a half dozen scenes introducing characters, establishing the plot, and setting up battles. I’m now working on building the first hour or so of the main campaign based on those scripts; I’m aiming to have that finished and playable by the end of the month.

• We’re prettying up the user interface, replacing the placeholder art from earlier in the game’s development with lovely work by actual artists. On the right, you can see the band-spanking-new Actions Menu, plus a few of the game’s new button icons!

• As part of my ongoing effort to polish the heck out of the game, I’ve recoded the combat animations system to remove that annoying little lag between the moment an attack animation seems to hit and the moment the game actually shakes the screen, pops up damage numbers, and animates the health bar. It makes everything feel much tighter.

• We’ve recorded some live instruments for the game soundtrack; the soundtrack itself is mostly finished now. You can hear part of a Telepath Tactics battle track, “For Honor,” in the video above!)

• Lots of bug fixes. (Because when isn’t that an item in these updates?)

As I mentioned in the last update, most of my efforts are now going into creating story / characters / missions for the campaign (most of the details of which I’m omitting from these posts, as they’d be pretty spoiler-ific). Don’t let the relatively small size of this post fool you, though–we’re making headway, and things are proceeding smoothly!

Nearly a year after the Kickstarter, funds are running low, but they’ll be sufficient to get us through to the end of development. It’s possible that I’ll have to spend some money out of pocket to wrap up the final few assets, but that’s nothing I hadn’t planned for. We’re still on track to release in 2014, and our prospects for making it onto Steam when we do are looking good: we’re in the top 50 on Steam Greenlight! (Which reminds me–please come upvote the game if you haven’t yet.)

That’s all for now. Until next month!