Happy New Year! It’s time for another summary of our monthly progress.

• First: Telepath Tactics made it into the Top 100 on Steam Greenlight this month for the first time! We’ve been steadily getting pushed back, though, as bigger games with larger audiences have shown up and flooded the service with votes, so every upvote on Telepath Tactics counts right now. Your help is appreciated!

• We’ve been forging ahead with portraits for the game’s unique characters. I don’t want to give any spoilers, so I’ll just post an image with a bunch of faces on it and leave the rest your imagination:

• The Bronze Golem and Skiakineticist are now done–and with that, character animations for the game’s 22 default character types are now complete!

• We’ve now moved on to creating alternate gender sprites for 19 of the game’s character classes. Those are very nearly done, at which point we’ll finish up their animations as well. Here we can see some of the alternate gender sprites: the female cavalier, male spirit, and female lissit.

• We are hard at work on attack effects. As with everything else in the game, these are moddable and can be created and customized on a per-attack basis. Here’s the Mind Shield effect, and you can see the “hit” effects for physical attacks on display in this video:

• We’re working on some proper button graphics to finally replace the amateurish placeholder graphics we’ve been using. Perhaps most excitingly, this includes individualized icons for every attack in the game, so you won’t have to pick from a row of identical little buttons-with-daggers-on-them anymore!

• We’re getting close to having the game’s soundtrack finished! Tireless composer Ryan Richko has managed to scrabble together a collection of live musicians to give the already-pretty-damn-great music an extra shot of awesome.

• I’ve been continuing work on filling out the game’s story and cast of characters. (The storyline for the main campaign is largely character-driven, so these activities go hand-in-hand.) Knowing the characters, the circumstances under which they meet, and their goals and motivations is going to make it much easier to figure out the particular battle scenarios that they’ll encounter during the campaign.

With the game engine’s core features now done, I’m spending my time more-or-less exclusively on writing and level design. I don’t want to share too many details of these activities in the monthly round-ups, as (a) they contain loads of spoilers and (b) I want to leave myself room to rewrite and revise as I move forward.

It’s 2014 now; people have been pressing for a specific release date, and while I definitely still plan on a 2014 release, I just want to make clear that there is no way to know for certain when the game is going to be ready. In an ideal world, Telepath Tactics will be finished and released in autumn of this year. However, game dev is ever an unpredictable beast, and it could turn out to take longer. I’ll be updating you all right here on my progress every month, so there shouldn’t be any crazy surprises.

That’s all I’ve got for now. Until next time!