Telepath Tactics Liberated News

We've got one really significant new feature for 1.0.19 and a smattering of bug fixes; let's start with the feature:

-- you can now reduce visual quality in the game settings menu to boost performance! There are five supported levels of graphical fidelity reflecting steady gradations of quality as you step through: High, Medium, Med-Low, Low, and Potato.

• High: sub-pixel morphological anti-aliasing, full texture resolution, and post-processing effects on.
  
• Medium: quick and dirty anti-aliasing, full texture resolution, and post-processing effects on.
  
• Med-Low: quick and dirty anti-aliasing, half texture resolution, and post-processing effects on.
  
• Low: no anti-aliasing, half texture resolution, and post-processing effects off.
  
• Potato: no anti-aliasing, 1/4 texture resolution, and post-processing effects off.
  

The game defaults to "High," which reflects the visuals in all versions prior to 1.0.19. Needless to say, the game looks much worse on the lowest settings, but hopefully these options should help folks experiencing performance issues on their machines.

-- cleaned up the golden "gleam" texture used on the title screen logo animation.

-- fixed: the shop interface could bug out if asked to load reserve supplies for a roster without any reserve supplies saved.

-- fixed: it was possible for the game to throw a null error when generating hobbies for the proc gen characters who join you after the caravan battle.

-- fixed: game AI would treat enemy counterattacks as dangerous when weighing moves with skills that prevent enemies from counterattacking.

-- fixed: it was possible for a character's on-death skill to become null, leading to a null error when the AI tried to evaluate it.

-- updated gamepad support for cut scene menus to account for multiple pages of buttons.

-- updated gamepad support for new settings on the settings screen.

-- fixed: hitting the cancel button on a gamepad during dialogue or when interacting with the new turn box would lock up the game.

More fixes and small improvements:

-- the game AI now takes control of characters that it afflicts with Enthralled status.

-- the game no longer considers spaces with impassably large elevation differences as valid alternative spawn points for non-flying reinforcements when their original spawn point is blocked. (Among other things, Fera won't spawn on top of the fortress walls any longer.)

-- fixed: when using Swim, the game would place skill target tiles onto any adjacent bridge or land tile even if the elevation difference was too great.

-- fixed: in some circumstances, the shop interface would fail to load the player's reserve supplies, which could result in the reserve supplies simply being wiped.

-- added a field to the character creator allowing players to assign an on-death attack to characters (e.g. Explode, Big Shield, etc.)

-- added error-checking to counterattacks, masteries, and proficiencies within the skill progression field of the character creator.

-- fixed: the page buttons for picking test rosters within the cut scene and map editors had lost their reference to the functions that actually flipped the pages.

-- fixed: the cut scene editor was throwing a null error when previewing shops due to the shop script trying to reference gamepad navigation logic that doesn't exist within the campaign editor.

-- fixed: using ShakeScreen in cut scenes would cause the game to throw a null error.

-- made the "redded out" coloration within the character screen consistent with the coloration used everywhere else in-engine.

-- optimization: removed an unnecessarily duplicative step in deserializing the reserve supplies when loading game data for a cut scene.

-- fixed: portraits had lost reference to their 2D particle spawners, causing the PortraitParticles action not to work.

Some small fixes and improvements:

-- the game now displays a "Saving game..." notification when auto-saving during transitions between scenes.

-- fixed: unit move speed level 2 (but not the others) had ceased to be applied to AI-controlled characters.

-- fixed: in-game shops were still showing salaries and food in the info bar.

-- fixed: the animation type for point lights was not being saved properly by the map editor.

-- fixed: you couldn't add stock to a shop in the shop editor without first creating the shop.

-- fixed: the page buttons in the shop stock item sub-window had lost their reference to the functions that actually flipped the pages.

-- increased the chance of Feint causing Distracted from 75% to 100% and changed its after-attack behavior from Unlimited to Use Once, turning it from an annoying RNG gamble you had to "roll" over and over into a one-and-done tool.

-- added documentation for 2D particle presets to the Guide.

In today's patch, it's 99% bug fixes and a couple of nice little quality of life updates:

-- fixed: on rare occasions, the game's internal AI timer could get ahead of the "end combat sequence" timer, resulting in the AI not being informed that a non-turn-ending attack had been completed, which would lead the AI to treat the attacker as not having used an attack yet, in turn leading to one or more extra attacks. (The fix was pushed earlier today as a hotfix, version 1.0.15a.)

-- before the start of the player's turn, the game now performs a check to ensure that no essential characters are going to immediately die from burning, poison, drowning, etc.--if they are, the game will not let the player save the game.

-- the skill editor now changes the appearance of some of its input fields for Create skills to make it easier for users.

-- the skill editor now has a Units submenu you can browse to pick the character or object created by your Create skills.

-- fixed: upon loading a generic character in the character creator, the game would try to procedurally generate a unique portrait for the character.

-- fixed: upon loading a character with an empty inventory in the character creator, the game would mistakenly detect the nothingness in the character's inventory as an item.

-- fixed: the game was treating items without a valid template as equippable.

-- fixed: the skill editor was not correctly saving sound and visual effects.

-- fixed: after creating a new campaign in the campaign editor, the description would not "stick" in the UI until the campaign was reloaded.

-- 1.0.16a: turns out, the infinite AI turn bug was caused by an entirely different culprit: a change I had made to the AI in 1.0.15 that made the AI aware of the danger from attacking explosives in melee range. The new AI procedure for evaluating targets for on-death skills (e.g. the Explode skill of Charges) was accidentally overwriting the after-attack behavior for whatever skill the character doing the evaluating was considering attacking with; after the AI character attacked, the game wouldn't find the correct behavior attached to the attack, leading to that character's turn never being set to end.

-- 1.0.16b: fixed a situation in which the RemoveSpawn action would produce a null error when used in battle, freezing the game.

Hello, tactics fans! It's been 3 weeks since the release of Telepath Tactics Liberated; since that time, I've been busy updating the game with requested features, balance tweaks, and bug fixes. As of today, I've pushed 15 updates to the game.

[h2]Quality of Life Features Added So Far[/h2]

I'd like to take a moment to look back at all the QoL features I've added since launch based on player feedback:

• browsing and downloading of custom campaigns from Steam Workshop from in-game;
  
• a custom difficulty setting for the main campaign letting you customize weapon durability, death rules, AI level, experience scaling, shop prices, and more;
  
• immediate visual feedback on who can use equipment when mousing over weapons and armor in the reserve supplies screen;
  
• faster camera zoom and support for a greater level of zoom-out;
  
• optional screen-edge panning;
  
• support for VSync;
  
• auto-restart upon suffering defeat in single player;
  
• faster character movement on speed settings 3 and 4;
  
• a "turns passed" timer visible in the battle settings menu;
  
• more battles with elements that scale directly with the chosen difficulty; and
  
• support for promoted units in the character creator
  

As a solo developer, it was not easy to add this much stuff to the game in such a short period, let alone while also marketing and handling bug fixes--but it feels worthwhile to me to make the game as good as humanly possible. And there's more...

[h2]Player-Versus-Player[/h2]

Speaking of browsing and downloading of custom campaigns from Steam Workshop, a brand new game mode is now available for free: PVP mode! Grab a friend (or find one using Steam Remote Play) and play through the main campaign's battles head-to-head.

This version of the campaign strips out all of the tutorials for a more focused experience. Either player can save the game, and there's no need to restart and play through the battle again if you lose: the campaign will simply display Player 2 as the winner and progress to the next scene, keeping things moving forward!

[h2]Monthly Campaign Contests[/h2]

Going forward, I want to encourage players to create their own campaigns. As such, I am going to choose a player-created campaign to highlight every month going forward, starting in May! Check out this video for tips on getting started making a campaign of your very own. I'm available to answer any questions you might have--just post 'em on the forums.

[h2]Version 1.0.15 Changelog[/h2]

While we're at it, why don't we look at changes to the game's code in version 1.0.15?

-- halved the rate of enemy reinforcements in Battle with Tarion to make the fight less of a slog.

-- boosted Energy gain for promoted cavaliers.

-- scaled the difficulty up a bit for Five Guardians and the bandit fortress outer wall battle on Veteran and Tactician difficulties.

-- the AI now takes into account the presence of "on death" attacks when scoring attack targets, discouraging it from attacking explosive charges from within Explode range.

-- fixed an error in the counterattack damage calculation used by the AI to score potential attacks against opponent who can counterattack.

-- new AI handicap level 9: the AI does not account for damage it will take from counterattacks or from "on death" attacks.

-- fixed: changes to the way the game values destructible objects as attack targets led to the AI never considering Camp a viable target. This has now been fixed by massively increasing the multiplier in Camp's TargetValue tag to counteract those changes.

-- fixed: in rare circumstances, the game could end up with multiple "wait and execute next move" coroutines running at once, producing weird and unexpected enemy behaviors.

-- updated the Guide descriptions of Accuracy and the Res. stats to mention that these affect the likelihood of status effects taking hold.

-- the AI now grants a target value bonus to its own units that will die without intervention due to poison or burning, prioritizing them for healing. (This is turned off on AI handicap level 4 or higher.)

-- fixed: if an AI-controlled character had a skill without a valid, recognized after-attack type, it would cause a fatal "key not found" exception in the AI's algorithms.

-- fixed: the game's method for choosing skin, eye, and hair palettes for portraits of procedurally generated unique spriggats did not correctly account for promoted spriggat classes.

-- fixed: it was possible to use Books of Power in shop cut scenes, wasting the item.

-- new cut scene-only condition: Item Use. If set to false, items cannot be used in this cut scene.

-- fixed: the script action granting Meridian art supplies in Merchant 2 was using outdated syntax, causing the supplies not to be auto-equipped upon receipt.

..and that about does it!

[h2]Thank You[/h2]

I'd just like to say, thanks for coming with me on this journey. If you're enjoying the game, please don't forget to leave a review; and while you're at it, why not (politely) request that your favorite Youtuber or streamer check TTL out? That sort of thing helps out more than you might think!


Yours in tactics,

Craig