Telepath Tactics - January Development Update

Craig twittered there was some news on the development of Telepath Tactics, which is still scheduled to be released this year.

• New character portraits! Fun fact: as of today, Telepath Tactics now has 77 distinct character portraits, with dozens more to come!

• We’ve created a new character class, the Bandit! Bandits wield axes, and will serve as early game enemies in the main campaign.

• Alternate gender sprites now all have Rest and Walk animations! Giving them attack animations will come next.

• We’re continuing work on special effects for attacks in the game. Mind Blast and Mental Effect effects are now completed, as well as Elemental Blast effects.

• Work is continuing on the main campaign. The game now has more than two dozen unique characters (allies, enemies and NPCs) written up, with plenty of more to come, as well as about a half dozen scenes introducing characters, establishing the plot, and setting up battles. I’m now working on building the first hour or so of the main campaign based on those scripts; I’m aiming to have that finished and playable by the end of the month.

• We’re prettying up the user interface, replacing the placeholder art from earlier in the game’s development with lovely work by actual artists. On the right, you can see the band-spanking-new Actions Menu, plus a few of the game’s new button icons!

• As part of my ongoing effort to polish the heck out of the game, I’ve recoded the combat animations system to remove that annoying little lag between the moment an attack animation seems to hit and the moment the game actually shakes the screen, pops up damage numbers, and animates the health bar. It makes everything feel much tighter.

• We’ve recorded some live instruments for the game soundtrack; the soundtrack itself is mostly finished now. You can hear part of a Telepath Tactics battle track, “For Honor,” in the video above!)

• Lots of bug fixes. (Because when isn’t that an item in these updates?)

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Additional details including images can be found in his blog, which also talks about his funds being low. For those who haven't yet, you can still contribute here by participating in the alpha program for Telepath: Tactics.

More information.

I'm glad I backed this game. While it isn't going to be a very visually appealing game by modern standards (Frankly, there are SNES games that look better), the amount of complexity it sounds like there will be in the battles is just awesome… Could end up being the best 10 bucks I ever spent.