Today, I pushed the last of the free updates to Telepath Tactics Liberated. With that milestone reached, I figured it might be nice to take a step back, take a deep breath, and gaze upon the long journey I undertook to reach this point.
It was 2011, six years after Adobe bought Macromedia. I was closing in on finishing Telepath RPG: Servants of God–on the side, I began dabbling with a new tactics engine prototype using Actionscript 3.
It was December 2012, ten months after the release of TRPG:SoG. Kickstarter had just become incredibly popular for funding games; I ran a Kickstarter campaign of my own for Telepath Tactics. It was ill-fated, destined to fall short of the funding goal by some $7,000.
I learned lessons. I licked my wounds. I tried again four months later. The second Telepath Tactics Kickstarter ended successfully in April 2013 with more than $41,000 raised. It feels downright absurd to type these words: that was more than 11 years ago.
Funding secured, it took two more years to finish Telepath Tactics and get it out on Steam. At the time, I had no idea what would await me on the other side of launch: a torrent of bug reports prompting half a year of constant, free updates to the game pumped out at a fever pitch.
This was the first game I’d ever made with outside funding, and I felt intense pressure to get everything working flawlessly. The issue was compounded by my naive decision to launch the game in three different versions on my website (Windows, Mac, and Linux), plus versions for Steam and GOG. This meant that every single patch I pushed entailed rebuilding the game multiple times across two different computers, then pushing all five builds to various online destinations. It was painful.
After six months, I felt well and truly burned out; but to my great frustration, it still wasn’t quite enough. There were a couple of significant issues with the game that I just wasn’t able to fully fix. I refused to accept this. I felt that I had let people down, and I was unwilling to tolerate that.
Rather than giving up, I made the drastic–some might say stupid–decision to completely remake Telepath Tactics from scratch in a brand-new, 2.5D engine.
Rebuilding the game anew took me more than five years (to say nothing of thousands of dollars thrown at updated art). By the conclusion of the process, I had created something special: Telepath Tactics Liberated. I’ve been pushing free updates to TTL for more than two years now: 58 free updates in total, adding prettier terrain, new animations, new effects, gamepad support, Steamdeck support, a randomizer mode, UI polish, quality-of-life features, AI improvements, performance improvements, expanded capabilities for the game’s campaign creation suite, and hundreds of bug fixes.
Telepath Tactics Liberated brought a bevy of “firsts” with it. It was my first game to be playable with a gamepad; my first game in a 3D engine; my first game to have meaningful online functionality; and my first game to be playable on a portable system. It was also my first game to attract a publisher: over this past year, I signed up with Freedom Games (now indie.io) for the express purpose of helping squeeze out a few more sales.
In the end, I really have only one regret with Telepath Tactics, and that is the time frame involved. Telepath Tactics has been a part of my life in one form or another for more than a decade now–which is really just an affectionate way of saying that it took me much too long to finish the game to my satisfaction. And within that time, the world changed drastically.
When I first started creating Telepath Tactics, there were hardly any strategy RPGs on Steam and none in the Fire Emblem vein. Today, by comparison, you can’t walk five steps without tripping over an SRPG inspired by Fire Emblem (thanks in no small part to the English launch of SRPG Studio in 2018) or FF Tactics. It is very hard for an indie strategy RPG to stand out in a market like this, even if it happens to be an unusually good indie strategy RPG.
Popular tastes have changed, too. By the time Telepath Tactics Liberated came out in 2022, the SRPG-buying public had largely turned their backs on the politically savvy world-building and nuanced writing emblematic (pun intended) of the Tellius games in favor of goofy caricatures and dating sim mechanics. To a clear majority of the market, anime aesthetics and self-insert romantic wish fulfillment are simply a higher priority than any sort of focused tactical challenge. The “classic Fire Emblem, but low RNG and deeper” formula pioneered by Telepath Tactics was successful for its time–but by the time TTL arrived, that time had passed.
It is now time for me to move on, too. I still have so many other things I want to do: I want to reach version 1.0 on Together in Battle by spring 2025, and I’m now in the preliminary stages of concepting out a new, super-secret game to come after Together in Battle. There’s so much be done and so little time to do it.
Make no mistake, though: I am grateful for the opportunity to have made Telepath Tactics on PC, both vanilla and Liberated, and incredibly grateful to all the wonderful people who’ve supported me in making each. I cannot stress this enough: everyone who has supported me through the years has made my little game design career, such as it is, possible. I thank you all once again from the bottom of my heart.
Thanks to you, the future gleams bright with possibility. I am terribly excited to be putting my energy fully into the games that come next; our adventures together are far from over, friends.
Until next time,
Craig Stern
P.S. If you have thoughts, suggestions, or burning questions, you can usually find me on the forums or the Sinister Design Discord. I’d love to hear from you! 😉 (Also, while I’m nagging you: go buy or wishlist Together in Battle if you haven’t yet! It’s really good!)
