Telepath Tactics Liberated News

The main campaign in Telepath Tactics Liberated can now be played in randomizer mode!

Randomizer mode mixes things up by removing the cast of characters you know and love, and swapping in a selection of procedurally generated characters with classes chosen at random. This allows you to replay the main campaign with totally different units at your disposal--you'll get a fresh experience and a different challenge every time!

You'll also find new tools to customize your characters in randomizer mode. New limited-use items let chosen characters place traps and timed charges; special books teach characters skills they wouldn't ordinarily know; and Emma can be trained into a new class of your choice a few battles into the campaign!

I've also added a couple of new achievements in for beating randomizer mode: Roller of Dice and Master of Randomness. Are you up to the challenge?

To unlock randomizer mode, simply beat the main campaign on any difficulty. The next time you go to start a new game, select The Randomizer of Emma Strider from the list of campaigns and randomizer mode will commence! (If you've already beaten the game and received the Liberator achievement, the game will automatically detect it and unlock randomizer mode for you.)

[h2]Patch version 1.0.35[/h2]

This update brings the game up to version 1.0.35--and while randomizer mode is most definitely the crown jewel of this update, there are numerous other improvements joining the game alongside it! Among them:

-- the New Turn box no longer disappears upon clicking just anywhere onscreen; instead, there is now a dedicated Start Turn button that must be clicked to dismiss the box and commence the turn. This should help avoid players accidentally clicking past the opportunity to save at the start of each turn in battle.

-- the main battle menu is now accessible during deployment.

-- when the character screen is open in battle, scrolling the mouse wheel now cycles through the character screens for others in the same army.

-- when either the unit inventory browser or the character screen is open within the reserve supplies screen, scrolling the mouse wheel now cycles through other characters who have access to the reserve supplies.

-- the game now automatically sorts character inventory when opening the character screen, or when opening the unit inventory browser in the reserve supplies screen.

-- fixed: the reserve supplies screen's auto-equip feature would stop after auto-equipping one item given to the character.

-- you can now Store items from within the character screen while in the reserve supplies interface.

-- the character screen now displays "(X/12)" above the inventory, where X is how many of the character's inventory slots are being used.

-- tooltips for equipment now display the slot they equip to whether the item is currently equipped or not.

-- adjusted the proc gen cavalier skill progression: Charge is now guaranteed to be learned much earlier, and cavaliers learn either Hold or Sprint instead of always learning Hold and learning either Sprint or Great Shield Mastery.

-- boosted base Dodge by 5 for proc gen assassins.

-- when a proc gen character is first generated or levels up, the game now checks to see if they have any skills with an energy cost exceeding their maximum energy. If so, the game now automatically awards that character energy sufficient to bring their maximum energy up to the cost of that skill.

-- enemy units can no longer spawn on top of spaces containing player-created objects, such as traps and barricades.

-- fixed: the "Ability" animation for cavaliers was improperly compressed, preventing palette swapping of the sprite.

-- fixed: although the game checked for duplicate first names in characters generated through the recruitment interface, it did not do so with one-off proc gen characters produced through the GenerateUnique script action.

-- fixed: multiple timed charges simultaneously detonating from burning damage within Explode range of one another would produce a null error.

-- fixed: if apples were dropped onto a space already containing an item sack with apples in it during Out of Food Battle, the game would count the number of apples dropped incorrectly.

-- 1.0.35a: characters chosen for deployment are now automatically shuffled to the front of the army roster for easier access going forward.

-- 1.0.35a: removed the "Start Turn" button from the turn box at the start of AI turns.

-- fixed in 1.0.35a: Unity was offsetting the raycast boundaries of the buttons on the new turn box for reasons I have yet to understand.

-- fixed in 1.0.35a: after panning the camera with the WASD/arrow keys, the camera would slow to a stop approximately 3 times slower in the vertical axis than in the horizontal axis.

-- 1.0.35b: removed physical traits for proc gen characters that had no impact on the systems used in TTL.

-- fixed in 1.0.35b: when testing multiple consecutive scenes of a player-created campaign, the game would start to save over ordinary player save files.

-- fixed in 1.0.35b: the game's internal list of sound loops contained misnamed versions of the two "crickets" loops.

-- fixed in 1.0.35c: various procedurally generated characters appearing partway through the randomizer campaign were being prematurely auto-recruited to roster 0.

-- fixed in 1.0.35d: in randomizer mode, Silithis Predat was still having her skills wiped in the Training scene, but they weren't returning afterwards.

-- fixed in 1.0.35d: in randomizer mode, Silithis Predat could be generated without Grandmace mastery (necessary to use her personal weapon, Fangiss Ka).

-- fixed in 1.0.35d: draining a character's Energy below 0 had ceased to roll over into health damage.

-- fixed in 1.0.35e: the game would not spawn characters directly onto the battlefield by script ID who were marked for saving, but who were neither currently present on the battlefield nor actually saved yet. This caused Annel's proc gen replacement not to spawn in the randomizer version of Battle with Ebon Raban.

-- fixed in 1.0.35e: the game would lock up upon trying to move a character not found on the map via the MoveUnit or MoveUnitBy script actions.

-- fixed in 1.0.35e: proc gen cavaliers could be generated with a blank entry in their skill progression.

[h2]Wanted: your review![/h2]

Are you enjoying the game? We need your review! Writing a Steam review is one of the best things you can do to help get the word out about TTL. The more folks review the game, the more Steam's algorithm will show the game to new players; the more players that see the game, the more players will buy the game; and the more players that buy the game, the more resources I'll have to keep adding in awesome new art, features, and content.

That's all I've got for you today. Next week, we've got player campaign showcase #4; I hope you're excited for it!


Yours in tactics,

Craig

Hey there, tactics fans! I've got another update for you. The next big content push is nearly done; I'm just taking care of some housekeeping before I kick it out the door. :)

New in this patch:

-- for performance reasons, the game now automatically turns off the path-clearing algorithm for the AI if a map's combined width and height are greater than 48. (This helps enormously in speeding up enemy turns for big maps like Battle with Ebon Raban).

-- tweaked the AI so that it will always disregard scenery-clearing moves which do less than 1/5th the object's total health in damage.

-- reduced the sample rate on unit idle animations to 15 FPS to better match the other character animations.

-- made Longbow Mastery a much earlier get in the proc gen bowman skill progression.

-- added documentation for SaveChar to the Guide.

-- fixed a small typo in Crypt Diving.

-- fixed: in some circumstances, the AI would move a unit after the unit's turn had ended.

-- fixed: title screen music would begin playing at full volume regardless of music volume settings.

-- fixed: the AddPortrait action was only looking for characters actively on the battlefield when used in battle.

-- fixed: the game would ignore script IDs used as reference name parameters in the ChangeExpression and PortraitParticles script actions.

--extended the click-and-draggable area for the dialogue editor downward to accommodate mouse navigation of much larger dialogue trees.


Thanks for sticking with the game; I'm excited to show you the new content I've been working on!


Tactically yours,

Craig

Tally-ho, tacticians! Today marks the third in our series of videos highlighting excellent custom campaigns from members of the Telepath Tactics Liberated community.

This time around, we look at Shimmersea: Chapter 1 from Banjax. Shimmersea is perhaps the most traditional SRPG campaign we've looked at so far: there's royals fleeing the fall of their kingdom, a loyal cavalier looking after them, shadowy conspirators behind it all...if you've been hankering for a traditional Fire Emblem-style story, this should be right up your alley! But of course, we've also got a good slathering of TTL elements like telekinetic powers, special skills, backstabbing, and environmental hazards on hand to spice it all up. 😉

Here is roughly 50 minutes of the campaign with my commentary:

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Hot on the heels of version 1.0.32, it's...another patch! I received reports of rather significant bugs after the last patch dropped, so I decided to tackle them quickly and get fixes out the door (along with a new feature or two).

New in this version:

-- spaced out the introduction of enemy mentalists in Coria Bridge Battle a bit more to account for how much more dangerous they are in TTL.

-- the engine now supports forcing proc gen characters of a certain class to learn certain skills within a specified level range.

-- proc gen assassins now always learn Leap somewhere between levels 2 and 6. (Leap is just too important to the Assassin class to make them go without beyond this level range.)

-- fixed: in some rare situations, AI analysis of self-move attacks could cause the game to throw a null error.

-- fixed: in some instances, the new AI algorithm for assessing self-move skills would incorrectly identify movement paths as blocked.

-- fixed: the cut scene editor was failing to save custom menus created in the editor.

-- fixed: unequipping equipment that grants Speed (such as Runner's Cleats) did not decrement the character's max movement. This allowed the player to unequip and re-equip the item over and over again to increase maximum movement without limit.

-- fixed: when multiple instances of the status effect Alert were applied to the same target, their stat buffs were cumulative, but the game would only remove one of those buffs upon the status effect's conclusion, effectively rendering the others permanent.

-- fixed: it was possible for custom skills used on oneself to elicit a "Backstabbed!" pop-up if the skill's backstab multiplier was set to greater than 1.

-- fixed: it was possible for custom Shield skills with a positive power value to elicit a "Backstabbed!" pop-up on the target if the skill's backstab multiplier was set to greater than 1.

-- added a black background to the title screen art to account for players who somehow manage to force the game to run in unsupported, non-widescreen aspect ratios.


With this, the game is in good shape bugs-wise--enough so that I feel comfortable switching back out of bug-fixing mode and powering out the Big Content Update I've been working on. Keep an eye peeled! And don't forget: this weekend, the next player campaign showcase drops. I hope you're excited for it!


--Craig

Hey there, tactics fans! I've got another slew of bug fixes for you while I chip away at more technically challenging stuff:

-- adjusted the placement of portraits within deployment tiles slightly.

-- fixed: clicking a deployment tile multiple times with a shadowling or golem portrait inside would cause the portrait to continually shift to the left.

-- fixed: the AI did not recognize bridge tiles as dry land for purposes of plotting routes to escape water or lava with drowning characters.

-- fixed: turns out, the game was still preserving save slot 100 as the last-used save slot when testing campaigns in the editor. I really did stop that behavior this time!

-- fixed: the AI's self-move obstacle detection algorithm wasn't accounting for skills that move the attacker along with the target (e.g. Stick-and-Drag).

-- fixed: if the AI accidentally chose an invalid self-move skill, the game would throw a range error and freeze.

-- if the AI accidentally chooses an invalid self-move skill, the game now immediately discards the move and proceeds with the next-best move in the hopper.

-- fixed: the game was improperly saving and loading the "removes status effects" property of consumable items, leading to certain consumables losing their ability to remove status effects. (Note: in the quite-unlikely event that you have any saved games from pre-1.0.32 involving items that alter the properties of equipment, this will break those. Sorry about that.)

And finally, a few QOL improvements for folks making their own campaigns:

-- patched up some holes in the in-game documentation for status effects; added instructions to the Guide for changing status effect chance, power, and/or duration from their default values.

-- added in an Example Object into PremadeUnits.xml in newly created custom campaigns.

That's it for today. I hope you're excited for this month's player campaign showcase--I certainly know that I am!


--Craig