Telepath Tactics April Update

Craig Stern has published a new monthly update for his upcoming turn-based tactical RPG Telepath Tactics, in which he showcases some of the latest progress on the title, including new animations and graphical assets. Here’s a snippet:

• Attack reticles now calculate and display an attack’s chance to hit right below its eventual damage. Due to the deterministic nature of the game, this will usually be 100%, but it’ll give you a clear indication when that dips below 100% due to things like Dodge, blindness, or attacking while standing on ice.
• New script actions: AddTag, RemoveTag and AddTagToArmy allow you to dynamically change characters’ tags over the course of a battle (thus allowing you to script changes in AI behavior, among other things). FlipPortrait, too: this tells the game to flip the direction of a character’s portrait so it looks like they’ve turned around.
• Added one last character attribute to the game: charY. This one tells the game where to vertically position characters and objects within the space. I had previously had this function hard-coded into the game, but it was starting to get laborious carving out exceptions, and would not have given modders the necessary flexibility to do total graphical conversions, so I took the time to make this a user-editable attribute.
• New attacks! Consistent with my giving photokineticists Blinding Cloak last month, I’ve now given skiakineticists Fury (raises a character’s Strength), cryokineticists Douse (ends Burning status and raises Heat resistance), and pyrokineticists Melt (ends Frozen status and raises Cold resistance).
• I’ve updated prior battles and cut scenes. Among other things, I finished the battle at Adelbrae, and have updated another battle with a pressure trigger that damages characters who wander into a campfire. (This required fixing a bug that found its way into the code which was preventing pressure triggers from working properly.)
• I have now added a new battle into the game where you defend a caravan from attack, with two NPC characters you can talk to and potentially recruit into your army (assuming you make it to them before the enemy overwhelms them).