A new engine!

[CraigStern]

-- wrote another couple of like dialogue variations.

-- fixed a handful of small issues relating to character dialogue.

And with that done, I spent my remaining time writing up a game pitch to a publisher. (We'll see if I can find someone to market this sucker for me and get it ported to consoles!)

[CraigStern]

Submitted in my first publisher pitch! Meanwhile, on the development front:

-- received new "knife throw" animations for the assassin class, integrated them into the game. (I'd been wanting these animations for years now!)

-- implemented the rest and walk sprite animations for all the NPC villager sprite sets.

-- implemented the rest sprite animations for the adult male and female child slave sprite sets.

-- improved the golem walk sound loop.

[CraigStern]

-- implemented the walk sprite animations for the adult male and female child slave sprite sets.

-- implemented the rest and walk sprite animations for the lissit matriarch sprite set, the lissit child sprite set, and for the senator sprite set.

-- received, imported new portraits: chital, shadowling child, and spriggat child. Created portrait data for them and integrated them into the game.

-- entered in data for a fair number of alternate promoted classes.

[CraigStern]

-- created most of the remaining alternative promoted classes. The game now has 44 promoted classes in addition to its regular stable of 24 base classes!

-- new tag: ModAfterAttack. Takes two tag parameters: skill name and after attack type (End Turn, Use Once, Can Move, or Unlimited. For example:

Code Select Expand

ModAfterAttack,Sword,Can Move

This tag will make it so the unit who possesses it can move after using the Sword skill instead of having their turn immediately end.

-- fixed: it was possible for the game to get into a loop with re-checking and re-running repeatable OnReachingArea dialogue after ending said dialogue.

[CraigStern]

--finished creating all of the game's 48 promoted classes! The game now has 72 character classes.

-- new tag: ModSkillSFX. Takes two tag parameters: skill name and status effect name. For example, this tag will make it so the tagged unit will have a chance to inflict the Burning status effect whenever they use the Claw skill:

Code Select Expand

ModSkillSFX,Claw,Burning

-- started working on the "Choose a Promotion Class" screen.

-- light attacks can now cause both Blinded and Distracted.

-- Dazzle now has a chance to cause the Slowed status effect.

-- fixed: for reasons surpassing human understanding, sometimes the status effect displayer would skip over the first status effect when a character was afflicted with multiple status effects.

[CraigStern]

-- did a bunch more work on the character promotion interface; got it mostly working!

-- foxed: the CullListByList script action would cause the game to throw a range error in certain circumstances.

[CraigStern]

-- got the promotion interface working!

-- fixed: pre-promoted recruits showed up with the wrong character level displayed.

-- fixed: skill text in the recruitment interface wasn't wrapping onto the next line.

[CraigStern]

Began writing up my end-of-year summary of all the progress I've made on the game.

-- coded a boolean toggle to put the game into "Telepath Tactics mode" so that it loads the correct title screen, music, and default main campaign. This will allow me to more easily develop both the new game and the TT special edition simultaneously, with each sharing new features and bug fixes.

-- created class variants for the Vengeance of Emma Strider campaign (which generally features greater unit speed to suit its larger maps).

[CraigStern]

-- skills now have a new attribute: stopsCounters. If set to true, the skill will stuff any potential enemy counterattack when used. This replaces the dumb hard-coded thing where giving a skill the Distracted status effect would always necessarily mean it couldn't be counterattacked.

-- in addition to Feint and Throw Voice, all Light element attacks no longer permit counterattacks, nor do Mind Control or Possess.

-- created a check-box in the skill editor to let you change the stopsCounters attribute for a skill.

[CraigStern]

-- received, created portrait data for the last of the "child" portraits: the Lissit Child.

-- implemented the script action RemoveTagFromArmy. It works exactly like RemoveTag, but it affects an entire army (or, if used in a cut scene, an entire roster). Two or more parameters: (1) army/roster number, and (2+) the tag to remove.

-- fixed: the game wouldn't pan to the current army if you used the script action call MoveCam,,

[CraigStern]

-- new script action: ZoomCam. Lets you set the camera zoom level during cut scene stuff happening in battle. One parameter: zoom-out level (and integer between 0 and 4).

-- fixed: skills that don't have a specified camera shake magnitude or duration no longer produce camera shake.

-- fixed: a timing issue that was sometimes causing counterattacks to not go off on slower computers.

[CraigStern]

-- changed over the skill visual effects to use the new, easier PowerSprite method so I don't have to manually add each one (complete with boolean triggers) to a bloated, pointless animation controller by hand.

-- added the TowardTargets and TowardCenter visual skill effect behaviors into the game, allowing skill-based projectiles to move as they animate.

-- added in projectile visual effects for the bow, crossbow, and elemental blast skills.

-- added in "summoning" visual effects for the elemental blast skills.

-- created new scripting behaviors to allow the daisy-chaining together of skill animations, since the old frame-based method of TT doesn't work with Unity's animation system (which is non-frame-based). The new method: instead of selecting a frame on which to spawn a visual effect, you can now tell it to spawn immediately upon the death of another visual effect.

[CraigStern]

Posted a Kickstarter update summarizing this year's progress on the new Telepath engine: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1426761469/telepath-tactics-a-strategy-rpg/posts/2717821

I'll be making an alpha demo of the updated Telepath Tactics available to Kickstarter backers in the coming weeks. :)

In the meantime:

-- the game now checks sound effect and visual effect timings by reference to the in-game timer rather than via a frame countdown, in concert with the way Unity's animation timing system works.

-- went through nearly all of the game's ~150 skills and updated them with estimated decimal values for the visual and sound effects timings based upon Unity's animation timings for the implemented character sprite animations. Attack sound and visual effects now match up quite closely with the timing of their associated character animations!

-- added in visual effects for all the spriggat breath skills, as well as for feedback and grapple chain.

-- added in projectile visual effects for the throwing axe skill.

-- began going through and manually replacing the integer values from the old frame-based impactFrame attribute with appropriate decimal values in an impactTiming attribute for each skill, timing them in accordance with the character animations and visual effects for each skill.

-- fixed: the game was dropping camera shake magnitude and duration data for skills when converting them to individualized attack data.

[Sythion]

I forgot all about the Kickstarter, nice to hear backers aren't being left behind! With this, Hype has risen to 10/10 levels yay!

[CraigStern]

Yay! Hype for everybody! :D

Okay, new stuff:

-- got spawn offsets for visual effects working in the engine! This allows visual effects to not spawn right in the middle of a character's space (which ends up legitimately looking weird for certain effects, like the elemental blast skills).

-- recalculated the offsets for all skills that have them using decimal values relative to a full space away (rather than in integers reflecting absolute number of pixels, as they were in the original Telepath Tactics).

-- new script actions: SpawnVisualEffect and SpawnVisualEffectAt. Each spawns a visual effect animation--the first relative to a character on the battlefield, and the second relative to coordinates on the battlefield. Parameters: visual effect name, character name (or y coordinate and x coordinate as two parameters). Optional parameters: Front-Back Offset (decimal -- optional), Left-Right Offset (decimal -- optional), Move to Y coordinate (optional), and Move to X coordinate (optional).