Welcome to another monthly update on Telepath Tactics! Today, we’ll be summing up everything that happened in May. First and perhaps most importantly, I just submitted Telepath Tactics to Indiecade. Most of the past few weeks have been spent polishing the game and stamping out bugs in anticipation of that submission, but I’ve continued adding new content and features to the game as well.

The changes:

• There is now an exploration mode in the game! This turns off player turns and allows the player to move characters freely around the map. (This can be used to create freely explorable towns and puzzle areas.)

• There’s a new dialog trigger, OnTalk, which allows player-initiated conversations (via the “Talk” command) when two particular characters are adjacent. In battle, this works just like the Talk command in Fire Emblem; and in exploration mode, it works just like talking in your standard-issue jRPG or wRPG.

• We’ve got a bunch of great new art assets! Both the Castle and Town tilesets have been significantly expanded by Lorne Whiting, there are a lot of item graphics in progress by Julia Buge, and there are a bunch of great new attack animations from Tyvon Thomas:

• Also on the art front: I’m in the process of seeking out someone to do Fire Emblem-style character portraits to spice up dialog sequences and character info screens. I’m hoping to have that settled within the next couple of weeks.

• When a battle is won, the game now displays an animated victory splash that visibly tallies up the victor’s various battle stats onscreen (kills, damage dealt, etc.) and awards them a score.

• The user interface has been improved once again! The ugly system default right-click menu has finally been removed, its functions now moved to both the Actions Window and a new, proper in-battle menu with options to change Settings, Surrender, or Quit to the title screen. Right-clicking the battlefield now deselects the currently selected character.

• Game settings (animation speed, edge panning, sound and music volume, etc.) are now remembered between play sessions.

• The Actions Window now stays open when characters are not selected, making global functions like Next Character, Undo, Rally and End Turn accessible at all times.

• New action buttons supported: Next Character and Talk.

• New dialog script actions! NewScene lets you instantly jump to a specific scene in the game; IfValsGoTo lets you compare the values of two custom variables rather than merely comparing a custom variable to a fixed value.

• You can now change a character’s name or movement type using the SetStat dialog action.

• You can now have the game simulate die rolls using the new r (as in “random”) operator with SetVal.

• New condition! Kill-All Victory. If set to false, this will turn off the game’s built-in behavior of immediately granting victory to a player once it detects that the battlefield is absent of any of that player’s enemies. This allows for non-combat scenarios, as well as scenarios in which enemies may be absent from the battlefield for a portion of the battle. (Kill-All Victory is automatically set to false in Exploration Mode.)

• The game manual now thoroughly documents all areas of modding supported in Telepath Tactics.

• I’ve been making progress in mapping out the course of the main campaign, and have been writing dialog to be used in the actual scenes. Once the necessary assets are complete, I will start actually creating this campaign.

• I’ve fixed a lot of bugs.

That’s it for last month–stay tuned for June! And don’t forget: you can follow me on Twitter or subscribe to the Devlog for more frequent updates as I work.