Developer's Log

[CraigStern]

Phew. I think I might've been pushing myself too hard over the past couple of weeks! I seem to have gotten sick. I'm going to dial back the pace a bit as I continue working to improve the game.

--created a Telepath Tactics demo for Power of Play, which I will be attending this weekend as a selection.

[CraigStern]

--fixed a bug in which characters who take fatal damage from being shoved into a trap would remain on the battlefield with 0 (or negative) health.

--added a Defeat Army condition to the battle with Gunther Lathe, the battle in The Teeth, and the battle with Leon Hart so the battle will end upon defeating the main enemy army even if you beat the thieves to the chests and left them alive to wander the battlefield.

[CraigStern]

--fixed a bug in the save game code where dead characters weren't getting clipped out of the current character roster until after the roster had already been saved.

--cleaned up the roster-saving code to ensure that it wasn't getting inappropriately entangled with the army roster array used in the main game (which could have resulted in character deaths getting saved--or recruitments getting saved--even if the player restarted the battle before completing it). I suspect that one or both of these may have been responsible for the issues with characters getting duplicated or removed from the player's army roster inappropriately.

[CraigStern]

--there's now a grab bar that lets you drag the deployment window around. This lets you move it out of your way on those rare occasions where your army spawns at the top of the map.

[CraigStern]

--fixed a bug where, if the player selected a campaign other than The Vengeance of Emma Strider, then loaded a save slot featuring a different campaign, then quit and returned to the Campaign menu and hit the New Campaign button, the game would start the campaign they'd most recently loaded instead of the campaign that remained selected on the drop-down menu.

[CraigStern]

--fixed a bug where the game would freeze if the last enemy on the map to die, died from burning.

--fixed a bug where you could undo scripted character movement in cut scenes by pressing Z afterwards.

[CraigStern]

--added an extra check to the function that adds characters to army rosters to prevent the adding of duplicates

[CraigStern]

--addressed exploit where the player could use the same "Unlimited" ability over and over in the same turn to grind experience. Abilities now only grant experience no more than once per turn, no matter how often they are used.

[CraigStern]

--added what used to be the Instant walk speed (i.e. skipping super-fast between spaces without doing the walk animation) back into the game as a fourth character movement speed option, "Turbo." Instant remains as it is now: instantaneous.

--suspecting that lingering bitmap data loaders might be the culprit behind slowdown on larger battles, I put in some code to systematically clear them out of memory the second character sprite sheets load. Testing it out, I noticed an immediate, palpable boost in the game's speed. I think this might have been the cause of our slowdown--I'm going to test it out some more this evening, and if it turns out that this fixed the slowdown, I'll be pushing the version 1.03 update ASAP. :)

[CraigStern]

Tried my hand at some code to make the game camera zoom in during attacks! Unfortunately, as with pretty much all of my attempts at improving the game's camera code, it failed spectacularly. Best to leave well enough alone, I guess.

[CraigStern]

--repeated the process of clearing loaders out of memory for the game's bevy of bitmap data attack effect animations.

--fixed a few chasm tiles on the Mines Entrance map that had the incorrect elevation.

--fixed the description of Kinetic Wave.

--fixed a bug where a character could use an item, the player could undo, and the item's benefits would be erased while the item did not get its use back. Using an item now simply prevents the player from undoing back to before the item was used.

--bumped up the base damage on Poison Bolt.

--added a second chance to inflict Stunned status to Charge.

--fixed bug with unequipping items in the reserve supplies screen.

[CraigStern]

Version 1.03 is out! :D

[CraigStern]

--added flails to late-game stores.

--pulling the lever on the ground-floor Coria Dogs battle now spawns a chest with a special treasure inside. ;)

--expanded the range for psy user buff abilities from 1 to 0-2.

[CraigStern]

--newly spawned reinforcements can no longer attack on the same turn they spawn (though they can still move).

[CraigStern]

Posted an article giving press folks extra reasons to pay attention to Telepath Tactics.