Telepath Tactics Liberated News

Greetings, tactics fans! As you may have noticed, Valve recently designated Telepath Tactics Liberated "playable" on Steam Deck. With that designation comes new fans eager to play the game on Steam Deck--and with them, reports of issues unique to that platform.

As you know, I developed TTL for Windows: I never received a developer Steam Deck from Valve, and I didn't have the opportunity to test the game on Steam Deck before Valve marked it playable. However, I'm nothing if not motivated to make fans happy! So I went ahead and bought a Steam Deck with my own money to test the game out and fix issues.

This latest patch primarily addresses display and control-related problems that were holding the game back on Steam Deck. (Special shout-out to user janichbumbelby for offering detailed feedback on this!) Here are the specific changes I've made so far:

-- the game now auto-switches to gamepad controls upon starting up if it detects that it's running on Steam OS.

-- new feature: when in battle in gamepad control mode, the game now treats mouse wheel movement as an impetus to focus on the actions bar and scroll through the action-bar buttons. You can configure the Steam Deck's track pad to register clockwise and counterclockwise circles as mouse wheel input for this purpose.

-- fixed: the cursor indicator was appearing in the wrong spots on certain menus (primarily on the title screen and save game screen) when the game was running in resolutions other than 1920 x 1080. In the Steam Deck's native 16:10 resolution of 1280 x 800, these menus were all but unnavigable. Now they work as intended in all resolutions.

-- save slots once again highlight when they're moused over, and now engage in this same highlighting behavior when the gamepad cursor is moved over them to further eliminate any visual ambiguity.

-- fixed: the right joystick was mapped to the wrong axes for Steam Deck (and XBox 360) gamepad controls, preventing proper independent panning of the battle camera.

-- fixed: the text overlay box had incorrect scaling settings for 16:10 resolutions.

-- fixed: the gamepad control graphic was incorrectly scaled for 16:10 resolutions.

-- fixed: the gamepad controls screen was showing incorrect info for the shoulder buttons. The left shoulder button is bound to Next Unit, while the right shoulder button is bound to Auto-Skill On Target (i.e. if you press it when a character is selected, your selected character will attempt to use an appropriate skill on whatever unit the selector is presently overlapping, independently moving into range if they can and they need to).

-- extended the "snap the selector to an attack tile containing a valid target" gamepad behavior so that if no characters are in skill range, the game will instead default to snapping the selector to a space containing a destructible object.

-- when using a gamepad and ending a character's move, if there are no attack targets in range and the character is on top of an item sack, the game will now auto-focus the cursor on the Grab button in the actions bar for more convenient sack-grabbing.

-- fixed: when in battle using gamepad controls, the game was overriding give tiles with move tiles after selecting the Give option on an item in the character screen, making it impossible to successfully give another character items during battle.

-- fixed: when ending a battle scene in gamepad mode, the selector would pop back up on the battlefield as the scene faded out.

-- new in 1.0.42a: when using a gamepad and ending a character's move, if there is an adjacent unit the character can talk to, the game will auto-focus the cursor on the Talk button in the Actions Bar.

-- fixed in 1.0.42a: the shop tutorial text overlay didn't fully fit onscreen in 16:10 display resolutions.

-- refactored the menu-switching code in the gamepad navigator class as of 1.0.42a to fix issues with tooltips not appearing on the element selected when first opening a menu. (I am pleased to report that this worked.)

-- fixed in 1.0.42a: when using a gamepad, the cursor arrow would continue to be visible in the bottom-right of the screen after ending the player's turn.

-- fixed in 1.0.42a: when using gamepad controls, the auto-equip confirmation window in the reserve supplies screen wasn't gaining focus upon spawning.

-- fixed in 1.0.42a: when using gamepad controls, exiting the shop was still shunting focus to the dialogue window rather than the exit confirmation window.

-- fixed in 1.0.42a: when navigating a dialogue tree, the gamepad logic would not consider replies above the last-chosen reply to gain focus when the number of available replies shrank upon reaching a new dialogue branch, making it so that you could inappropriately invoke the last-chosen reply from the previous branch by simply hitting "A."

-- fixed in 1.0.42b: using the gamepad "character screen" button (Y) in the reserve supplies screen only showed the character screen for whomever was first in the character roster.

-- fixed in 1.0.42b: gamepad L3 and R3 inputs did not undo or rotate, respectively, if focus was in the actions bar.

-- fixed in 1.0.42b: when in gamepad mode, menus in cut scenes were double-counting presses of the cancel button (B).


And here's a regular bug fix unrelated to Steam Deck:

-- upon destroying an object with fly-only passability resting on stairs suspended over a hazard tile, the game would drop the stairs into the hazard as though they had been resting atop the object. This is now fixed.


That's all we've got for now, folks. Thanks as always for supporting the game; it means a lot to me!


Tactically yours,

Craig

Greetings, tactics fans! I've got another update for you with a long-awaited graphical improvement and some bug fixes.

Our most visible change this update involves, quite literally, tables. Due to the way Unity's perspective camera handles 2D sprites, sprites near the edges of the area visible onscreen tend to skew outwards. This looks pretty normal for characters and objects that are relatively tall and narrow (like trees), but not so much for longer, squatter objects--like tables. As you can see, when those skew outwards, it looks like they're positioned counter to camera perspective:



You may recall that in the last minor update, I improved how "flat" sprites like traps are displayed. Tables aren't strictly flat, however--they have more dimensionality, and so required a different approach. Well, I finally took some time, got good (enough) at Blender, and figured out how to actually texture and export 3D models and get them working in-game!

This meant modeling a 3D version of the basic table, adapting the existing 2D pixel art for tables to create textures for every table variant in the game (basic, with food, with beer, with dice, with books, with map, with papers...), and importing them into the game. It sounds simple when I type it out, but this was days of work! And here's the result:



Pretty neat, eh? Now that I've now definitively fixed the issue of table sprites skewing near the edges of the screen, I can use this technique to address other such issues going forward (as well as to create brand-new 3D objects!) It's a small thing, but I'm quite happy about it.

But wait, there's more--let's run through some other improvements I've made to the game with this update:

-- a recent change in the code designed to prevent Together in Battle from connecting to Steam as though it were Telepath Tactics Liberated apparently broke achievements for Telepath Tactics Liberated. This is now fixed.

-- the mouse cursor is now fully locked, disabled, and rendered invisible when loading or starting a new game with gamepad controls enabled. This way, you can't accidentally mess with the cursor by bumping your mouse when in gamepad mode.

-- fixed: when in gamepad mode, the game was displaying a selection arrow over the new turn box at the start of AI-controlled turns, then leaving the cursor arrow onscreen after the new turn box faded from view.

-- fixed an exploit involving skills with an after-attack effect of "Can Move" (such as Lance or Bow) granted by a weapon with a remaining durability of 1. When using such a skill with a 1-durability weapon, it would break the weapon, after which the character could equip another weapon granting that same skill to use the skill a second time in the same turn.

-- fixed: the character creator was auto-marking weapons as equipped even if a different weapon was manually marked as equipped via "[E]" notation in the inventory field.

-- fixed: in cut scenes in gamepad mode, the Options button would sometimes inappropriately gain focus and open the options menu when selecting something else onscreen.

-- added in some code so the game can now detect if it's being run on Steam Deck. (This doesn't do anything just yet, but it will allow me to diagnose and fix issues with the the game when it's running on Steam Deck going forward.)

That's all we've got this time, folks. Thanks again for all your support!


Tactically yours,

Craig

Hey folks! We've got a relatively small patch this time around focused on fixing some graphical jank, fixing a few bugs, and adding in some improvements for our intrepid campaign creators! Here are the changes:

-- improved the way that certain destructible objects are displayed, particularly those which shouldn't cast a shadow (e.g. wildflowers, reeds, and spike traps) and those which are supposed to lay relatively flat (e.g. floor buttons, rubble, snare traps, iron jaw traps, and caltrops).

-- added two new attributes to units: hasShadow and laysFlat.

-- new destructible object added to the game: Rug.

-- tweaked the save slot formatting to better accommodate long scene names.

-- improved procedural terrain generation in both the map editor and proc gen battles generally.

-- the game now saves proc gen battle battle names at the start of combat, meaning that the save slot won't display "RANDOM" prior to mid-battle saving anymore.

-- adjusted the numerical calculation for status effect icons in the character screen to more accurately match up with the rounds remaining.

-- fixed: undoing a flyer's move off of a fly-only object would result in them being reset to the wrong elevation.

-- added a new skill to the game: Twirl. Switches positions with an adjacent target character. Costs no energy and ends the turn when used.

-- added a new optional parameter to RemoveFromList: stop after. This allows you to easily remove only the first X entries in a list that match a string.

-- fixed: using CombineLists when the first list was not already set would cause an error. (Now when this happens, the game auto-creates an empty list to serve as the first list.)

-- fixed: using CombineLists when the second+ list was not set would cause the game to not create the destination list at all. (Now when this happens, the game simply clones the first list to the destination.)

Hey folks! Here's another update for you with some highly requested quality-of-life features, bug fixes, balance changes to encourage greater use of knockback mechanics, some additional resources for folks making their own campaigns, and lots of little bits of polish. Here are the changes:

-- status effect icons in the character screen now display a number representing the effect's remaining duration, so you no longer have to guess how much longer a status effect will last!

-- the "shift-click to auto-move and attack" behavior can now be accomplished by simply double-clicking an enemy while you have a character selected.

-- tweaked some of the AI's move-valuing formulas to further cut down on instances where the game thinks it's a good idea to have characters attack bits of scenery.

-- fixed: the Coria cut scene (which plays immediately after the Coria Bridge battle) was missing a Recover condition, causing Emma and friends to arrive in Coria without their wounds healed or energy restored. (If Emma or Sabrina arrived with very low health and the player then unequipped a shield from them in the shop, this could result in the character's health going below 1 and the game treating them as dead for deployment purposes.)

-- added 1 space of knockback to Trueshaft and slightly lowered base damage.

-- bumped up the knockback on Kinetic Gale to 3; created a new kineticist skill called Kinetic Wind with knockback 2 to replace it for proc gen kineticist characters.

-- added a new stone golem skill: Hurl. It's basically Throw, but it goes 4 spaces and deals twice as much damage.

-- adjusted the proc gen stone golem skill progression so they start with Shove at level 1 and gain Toss or Throw in the early levels following.

-- changed the Avalanche prestige class for stone golems; instead of getting Charge, they now get to use Toss without ending the turn and get 50% off the energy cost of Throw.

-- added a new weapon trait to the pool for the highest tier of proc gen weapons: "Colossal." Colossal weapons add +1 to knockback on all skills which depend upon the weapon.

-- adjusted proc gen spriggat portrait scale to more accurately reflect their true size.

-- fixed: the tooltips for the item buttons for individual character inventories within the Reserve Supplies screen were formatted slightly differently than the tooltips for item buttons everywhere else in the game, causing them to not display the third line of text for longer item descriptions.

-- added a specific sound effect that plays when small plants are destroyed.

-- added a specific sound effect that plays when objects made of stone are destroyed.

-- added a specific sound effect that plays when trees and objects made of wood are destroyed.

-- fixed: the game wasn't saving or loading unit-specific particle effect settings. (This wasn't a problem before, as they weren't being used for anything--but now they're used to determine which destructible objects should make the above sound upon being destroyed.)

-- fixed: bonus damage from colliding with a damaging object (e.g. Spiked Barricades) was not being applied when the character had been knocked back multiple spaces due to the game checking the wrong space for purposes of "counterattack" range.

-- massively increased the speed of the "fade out" animation for menus, making it much harder to notice proc gen character portrait elements going transparent during the fade.

-- fixed: the game was creating cosmetic connectors on land tiles for bridges being built at elevations above the land.

-- fixed: the game would delete the player's saved game after losing a battle in ironman mode even if the battle lost had a "defeat scene" specified.

-- fixed: levitating characters moving onto a fly-only object, then moving off of it after Levitate wore off would sink into the ground. Flying characters now display above fly-only objects when they move onto the same space as them, the same as non-flying characters.

And here are the things added for the benefit of modders:

-- a huge variety of improvements to procedural map generation, most significantly to the placement of enemy units. Proc gen maps now spawn enemies in groups based on how many turns away from the player they are. Proc gen maps feature a new "aggressiveness" parameter that alters (a) how large each enemy group is, and (b) how many of them it will mark as Passive to start off the fight.

-- new sound effects usable: Crowd Booing, Plant Destroyed, Stone Breaking, and Wood Breaking.

-- added an "associated feeling" parameter to the NPCsToList action, allowing the game to narrow NPCs by whether a character associates happiness, sadness, or anger with them.

-- added an "associated feeling" parameter to the -NPC:X- special character, allowing the game to narrow NPCs by whether a character associates happiness, sadness, or anger with them.


As always, thanks for supporting the game! Your support means the world to me. :)


Tactically yours,

Craig

Imagine Telepath Tactics Liberated with team management, random events, emergent relationship-building, and tighter fights. That's Together in Battle, the SRPG roguelite coming to Steam early access next year! This trailer should give you the general gist of it:

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

As part of Steam Next Fest, I've put a meaty demo online for you to play for free. It'll only be up until next week, though, so make sure to check it out while it's online--and don't forget to wish list Together in Battle! 😉


Tactically yours,

Craig