Telepath Tactics - Engine Progress Report

A new update for Telepath Tactics details the progress being made on the new engine.

More progress on the new engine!

Posted by Craig Stern (Creator)

Hey all! It's been a little over a year since our last update on the new Telepath Tactics engine, and I'm still plugging away. Despite taking some time to release a new board game, I've made a ton of progress--so much so that it would be impossible to set it all out here in its entirety*. 

That said, here's another little summary for you:

• First and most importantly, mid-battle saving is now in-engine and working as advertised!
• We've got proper 3D terrain integrated into the game now! (One nice thing about the new 3D terrain: characters who get shoved into water or lava now visibly sink into it instead of just, like...standing on top it).

Did I mention that there's a new Sand tileset?

• Push/pull-type skills are now more powerful. Falling damage now occurs even when dropping a single tile of elevation, and enemies can be slammed into each other to deal significant damage to them both!
• Created new skills for classes that didn't have many, as well as alternate high-level skills for the core psy fighter classes to offer them differing tactical roles at high levels. There are now more than 150 different skills in the game!
• A proper lighting system, instead of that janky 2D approximation we had before.

• We now have a dedicated shop interface! Shops are highly customizable, with the ability to flexibly generate stocks of available items with a high degree of precision over both pricing and content. Oh, and they support selling off unwanted items. 

•  Procedural item generation is a thing! The engine now supports generating equipment with differing base materials, at differing levels of quality, and with special characteristics (sturdy weapons have increased durability; blazing weapons have reduced durability but a chance to set enemies on fire; armor-piercing weapons ignore 50% of the enemy's resistance; and so on).
• The engine now has a calendar system that tracks the progression of time, allows events to occur based on the number of days passed and/or the current day of the week, and so on.

• Dovetailing with the calendar system, the engine now has systems for managing food and character salaries. (I won't be using these particular systems in the TT rerelease, but I have plans for them in a future title using this same engine--stay tuned!)
• There is now a working campaign editing suite! As of now, the suite contains a map editor with fully functional autotiling (meaning that you can simply paint terrain types onto the battlefield, and the game will do the work of figuring out which specific tiles to use based on the stuff surrounding them); an in-depth character creator with its own built-in portrait builder; a dedicated cut scene editor with sub-editors for building custom shops and unit rosters; and a dialogue and script editor with predictive text suggestions and in-engine explanations of the more arcane engine-related features (like reply types and script actions). Still on deck: item and skill editors!

Creating a portrait for a new shadowling in the Character Editor

Picking out a new background in the Cut Scene Editor

• Wayyyyyy more cut scene backgrounds. Telepath Tactics had 6; so far, the new engine has 38 with more on the way!
• The scripting system is more powerful and flexible than ever before! A vastly expanded selection of special characters allow direct access to all manner of in-game data that you can slot directly into script actions, reply actions, and dialogue. As of now, 104 distinct script actions have been fully implemented. 
•  Procedural character generation is a thing! Proc gen characters have their own unique generated names, portraits, backgrounds, traits, stat growths, skill progressions, personalities, hobbies, and personalized dialogue. They can interact with one another, form relationships and memories, and directly impact each other's morale. There's a lot more to say about this, but I'll leave it there for now. :)

Hopefully that gives you an idea of what I've been up to! True Messiah stuff ate up more time than I was hoping, but I'm hoping to have an official announcement sometime in the coming months. Until then!

Yours in tactics,

Craig

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 *If you really want the complete blow-by-blow, go ahead and click to read this thread!