Together in Battle has launched into early access!
Greetings, tactics fans! After many years of work, the follow-up game to Telepath Tactics is now available to play on Steam early access!
Together in Battle is a procedural team management strategy RPG that follows the events of Telepath Tactics. Here's the premise:
You’ve come to the island kingdom of Dese with a mission: enter the gladiatorial games, find loyal fighters, and train. But things grow complicated when a sinister conspiracy threatens to throw Dese itself into chaos. Fight deep, turn-based tactical battles; manage resources; navigate random events; watch your characters grow together via a brand-new, emergent social sim system. Your characters, the relationships they form, and the trials you face together will be different every time you play!
You can expect the same killer combat mechanics as you saw in Telepath Tactics Liberated, but with more resource management; new in-depth morale, mood, and character relationship systems; random events with multiple possible outcomes; and a blend of bite-sized proc gen arena battles and hand-designed side quest and plot fights.
Because it's in early access, Together in Battle is cheaper now than it will be upon final release. You can currently pick it up for $14.99, with an additional 10% discount for launch week.
Why not give it a try? I'm dying to hear your feedback! 😉
Yours in tactics,
Craig
How does Telepath Tactics relate to Telepath Tactics Liberated?
Hello there! I see you've found your way to the Steam store page for Telepath Tactics.
My name's Craig--I developed this game about a decade ago, and I'm here to tell you that I ended up remaking it from the ground up and releasing it as Telepath Tactics Liberated a few months ago.
Is Telepath Tactics a good game? Sure! But Telepath Tactics Liberated is better. TTL tells the same story as TT, offers the same characters, and features the same battles, only it's in a much nicer engine with significant balance improvements, new content, and a ton of extra quality-of-life features (I run down a lot of the changes here).
So why even keep the original game up on Steam? Mostly for the sake of preservation. It has some differences from TTL, and I want players who are truly curious to be able to investigate those for themselves.
For most people, though--for anyone who just wants to play a fun SRPG in its best, most polished state--I strongly recommend buying TTL instead of the original game. You can find Telepath Tactics Liberated here.
As you probably know, Telepath Tactics Liberated is a ground-up remake of Telepath Tactics in a brand-new engine. Featuring an overhauled UI, 3D terrain, HDR lighting and effects, a way better camera system, improved AI, rebalanced characters, multiple new battles, dozens of new prestige classes, branching promotions, new skills, new items, and a massive upgrade in terms of modability. No longer will you be limited to the lowly standalone map editor: instead, you'll have access to an entire integrated campaign creation suite with the ability to upload campaigns directly to Steam Workshop!
Some folks have been asking if there would be a discount on TTL for owners of the original Telepath Tactics, and I'm happy to announce that I've done one better. If you bought the original Telepath Tactics at any point prior to Telepath Tactics Liberated's launch, then congratulations: you now own Telepath Tactics Liberated too, at no additional charge. No joke! It's in your Steam library right now. Consider this my way of saying "thank you" for supporting an upstart indie developer with a dream. 🙂
Well friends, that's all I've got for you. If you liked Telepath Tactics, then you'll love Telepath Tactics Liberated--and if you haven't played Telepath Tactics yet, you have a much nicer version of that same game waiting for you in your Steam library. Have fun, and make sure to check out the campaign creation suite!
Yours in tactics,
Craig
Announcing Telepath Tactics Liberated!
Greetings, tactics fans! I'm excited to announce that the Telepath Tactics remake is now playable from beginning to end, and it has a name: Telepath Tactics Liberated. (You see, not only do you do some liberating in the course of the game's plot, but the game itself has been successfully liberated from its old engine. Wordplay!)
I remain hard at work testing and fixing bugs. My plan was to release in February 2022, but February turns out to be crowded with media events and launches for other games. Rather than rush to hit a January release, I've decided to give myself plenty of time to make launch as smooth and bug-free as possible. Thus: Telepath Tactics Liberated will drop in mid-March 2022!
What's new?
There aren't many new features to speak of since our last update, as I've been very focused on bug testing and polish. However, I have compiled this handy list of all the stuff that's different in Telepath Tactics Liberated vis-a-vis the original game, in case you need a reminder!
New hand-designed maps!
New dialogue (including multiple victory barks for each character)!
New difficulty modes!
Rebalanced characters so everyone is useful!
More than 40 new skills to learn!
More than two dozen new classes!
Branching class promotions!
Special, hard-to-get items that let you promote characters early!
3D terrain! (Elevation effects no longer distort the map; characters visibly sink into water or lava and disappear into chasms.)
New items and equipment!
10 new status effect types!
Smarter AI! (You will now get shoved off of cliffs if you're not careful!)
Support for saving mid-battle!
A vastly improved user interface, including a dedicated shop interface and a dedicated promotion interface!
A vastly improved camera system!
Attack range is displayed when you click enemies, not just move range!
Support for auto-move-and-attack!
Improved backstab mechanics!
The ability to shove characters into each other for damage!
New music by composer Ryan Richko!
Beautiful hand-painted portraits with varying facial expressions!
Gorgeous HDR bloom lighting, attack effects, and particle effects!
A more visually dynamic presentation with idle animations, animated water and lava, animated smoke, vegetation that moves in the wind, etc.
Support for multiple different screen resolutions, including 4K!
Proc gen reinforcement characters who can join you under certain conditions!
A full-fledged campaign editing suite, not just a map and dialogue editor!
An improved and expanded scripting system for modding your own game logic!
Note that there are changes that alter the experience somewhat--new mechanics, balance changes, and way less of a focus on local multiplayer--so I've decided to leave the original Telepath Tactics up as its own game for folks who want access to the original experience.
The Telepath Tactics remake is coming...
Hello, tactics fans! I'm pleased to report continued progress on the remake.
Let's start with brass tacks: as of today, all of the game's battles have been remade with proper 3D terrain! In addition, I've converted the campaign's one and only mandatory proc gen battle--Out of Food--to a hand-designed map for more deliberate pacing and balance.
I'm now going back through and updating the scripting on the game's dozens and dozens of cut scenes as well testing each battle to ensure that it remains fun and playable with the game's updated scripting system and improved AI. As of this moment, 47 out of the campaign's 79 scenes are now complete and confirmed to be working as intended in-engine.
There are loads of little changes and improvements happening as a part of this process. Better AI; some all-new equipment; improved scripting; new dialogue to account for unusual interactions with the player; smoother and more intuitive controls for exploration mode; even proc gen reinforcement characters if the player has too few people left alive at a key point in the campaign...
Bridges are now built at the builder's own elevation, and the new 3D terrain has been a really nice improvement as far as making it *way* easier to see elevation differences (and to see what's going on when someone gets knocked off a cliff). You can see some of this at play in gameplay footage I recorded the other day:
[previewyoutube="or6pJ7tk8l0;leftthumb"]
Georgi Minkov has now completed all of the new, beautiful painterly proc gen and generic character portraits and is hard at work on painting portraits for the campaign's unique characters! (You can see a couple of them in-game in the video above.)
In short: things are still on track! A few more months, and this sucker should be ready to release. Thanks as always for your patience; I'm excited to get this out into the world!
--Craig
The Telepath Tactics remake is well underway!
Hello, tactics fans! Since our last update, I've been working hard on the new engine. As of this past week, all of the game's basic systems are now complete! Engine improvements include:
new procedural animations help everything feel more vibrant and alive. Characters breathe while standing idle; foliage now sways in the breeze; water and lava visibly slosh to and fro.
the rendering pipeline underlying it all has been upgraded to something more modern, with bloom lighting and full-screen anti-aliasing. Thanks to the bloom lighting, lava, sparks, fire, and other combat visual effects now visibly glow, and post-process color grading now makes everything pop more. There are glow effects in certain character portraits, too! There's a new trailer up on the Together in Battle page where you can see this all in action. :)
speaking of character portraits: I've hired the incredible painter Georgi Minkov to redo them all in a beautiful painterly style while retaining all the new, alternate facial expressions. Trust me, you're gonna love it. He's starting with the proc gen portraits, then moving on to the "generic unit" portraits, and then we're tackling the portraits for unique handmade characters.
the UI is prettier now, too: I had Franklin Chan (whom you might remember from True Messiah) paint some lovely new windows and cursors. I also added in more animated elements: new turn and combat victory/defeat screens now feature banners that sway to and fro in the breeze.
more combat interface improvements! Most notably, left-clicking an enemy now shows the spaces it can reach with its attacks in addition to its move range:
further AI improvements! The game now supports differing AI profiles with different ways of prioritizing moves, and these can be assigned on an army-by-army basis. Enemies will now take opportunities to shove your characters off of cliffs.
better proc gen battles! Gone is the old method of slapping together premade chunks into a level. Instead, the game now crafts levels from scratch algorithmically based on customizable parameters.
better campaign editor tools. The proc gen battle generation I mentioned? Yeah, it's in the map editor too! If you want some help fleshing out your campaign, you can let the map editor think up a level for you and then take it from there with your own edits and additions!
the game now supports custom voice-over dialogue. Wanna try voice-acting Emma--or an original character for your own campaign? It's supported!
cut scenes have a lot more polish as well, with changing facial expressions and proper walk bobbing and sound effects during portrait movement.
the game is now up to 153 skills! (To put this in perspective, I think Telepath Tactics originally shipped with a little over 110?) New skills include the new trap Caltrops, the area control skill Hold, the movement ability Juxtapose, and the first-strike ability Preemptive Stance.
new visual effects and sound effects for advanced skills!
bug fixes. My god, the BUG FIXES. I'm not playing around this time. Every bug must. Be. Squashed.
But wait, there's more! I haven't just been working on the engine: I've also been getting Telepath Tactics' cut scenes and battles working in the engine, one by one. I'm currently up to the "defend the camp" battle, which you can see me working on here in the game's spiffy new map editor:
I am shooting to have the remade version out no later than early 2022, but it's entirely possible I'll have it done earlier. I'll keep you posted!
Yours in tactics,
Craig
Try the new engine!
Hey there Telepath Tactics fans! Some of you have been understandably curious about my progress on the new engine--well, you will no doubt be pleased to hear that I've just released an alpha demo of Together in Battle for the Steam Game Festival, featuring that very engine! https://store.steampowered.com/app/1267210/Together_in_Battle/
A few things to note about the demo:
the demo is Windows-only for now, but I will eventually expand support to include other platforms in the full game.
the demo provides unfettered access to the entire campaign editor suite! While the demo is up, you can create whatever strategy RPG campaigns your heart desires (and offer feedback on any new features you want to see).
the full game offers different difficulty levels, but the demo here is set to be fairly hard so that you quickly get to see characters react to one another falling in battle. (Also, obviously, the demo is a lot shorter and less feature-filled than the full version of Together in Battle will be.)
I've mentioned this before, but just to reiterate--the updated version of Telepath Tactics uses this same engine, so all the functional and aesthetic improvements you see in the Together in Battle demo will carry over to the updated Telepath Tactics (which will be called, I dunno...Special Edition? Deluxe Edition? Edition Whose Mommy is Very Proud of It?)
Anyway, that's about it. Please give the demo a try and let me know what you think!
New engine progress!
Hello, tactics fans! It's been a while since I last posted here on Steam*, and this page seemed past due for an update.
Here's the short version: I've been working hard on the new engine for a few years now, and Telepath Tactics is now fully playable within said new engine right up to the first cut scene with Silithis Predat and Ambuur Sang.
Not only does the new engine fix the few remaining issues that I couldn't fix in the original release, it also adds in a ton of improvements and quality of life features! Here is a long but not exhaustive List of Things That Are Better In The New Engine:
no more inventory-swapping or progressive slowdown bugs.
you can now save the game mid-battle!
the camera is way better! It no longer gets zoomed out on large screens; it has smoothing on its movement; and you can now manually zoom the battle camera in and out.
SO MANY UI IMPROVEMENTS. There's now a visible space selector when you mouse around in battle to show you which space you're over; the game now uses icons for all stats and status effects, each of which you can mouse over for tooltip explanations of what they are; there is now a dedicated shop interface that allows easy browsing and selling off of unwanted items; the old, dizzying "zoom to whichever character is talking" behavior has been replaced with a little pulsing dialogue bubble icon to tell you who's talking; there are now dedicated screens for level-ups, promotions, and browsing through your army; and so much more!
more sophisticated AI!
better particle effects!
a proper lighting system!
different facial expressions supported for all character portraits!
victory barks!
nearly 40 new skills!
10 new status effect types!
new items and support for procedurally generated weapons and armor!
1 new basic class type!
class promotions can now branch! Every class in the new engine now has two unique promotion options, meaning that in addition to its 24 base classes, there are also 48 promoted classes for a whopping 72 character classes total!
real 3D terrain! Elevation effects no longer distort the map, and when characters are thrown into water or lava, they visibly sink into it instead of just kinda standing on top.
auto-move-and-attack! (You can shift-click an enemy to have your selected character choose an attack skill and move into attack range all on their own.)
the old map editor has been expanded into a full-bore campaign editing suite! You'll no longer have to edit XML by hand to create a new campaign--there are tools to handle all of it, including: an improved map editor with an army sub-editor, 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), and procedural terrain generation (letting you create a random map using a hand-picked combination of up to three different tilesets); an in-depth character creator with its own built-in portrait builder and the ability to simply roll up random characters for editing; a dedicated cut scene editor with sub-editors for building custom shops and character rosters; a dialogue tree and script editor with predictive text suggestions and in-engine explanations of reply types and script actions; a skill editor to let you create your own custom attacks; an item editor to let you create your own custom items and equipment; and more!
more powerful scripting support than ever before, with 194 supported script actions and counting!
a zillion more little quality-of-life improvements, improvements to mechanics, and awesome features that I'm simply not going to type out right now because this list is getting pretty long!
Anyway, that's the state of the new engine: there's still a lot of work left to do, but things are going extremely well. Thanks for reading! I'm excited to eventually release an improved version of Telepath Tactics for you to play. :)
Hey folks! It's been a while since the last update, so I figured I'd let you all know what's going on with Telepath Tactics.
As some of you know, there are a couple of bugs in Telepath Tactics that I was never able to fully correct despite months of sustained effort. No number of changes to the code seemed to fix these things; I eventually came to the conclusion that I must have run into limitations in the underlying engine.
At this point, the rational business decision would have probably been to go, "Oh well, I guess those bugs are just there to stay," then move on to another project. But that's not my style. Instead, I've been slowly but surely rebuilding the entire engine from scratch in a brand-new development environment.
The Telepath Tactics engine is complex (and also I have a day job), so this has been taking me a while--but this new version of the engine already has some significant improvements: better UI, 3D representation of the battlefield, camera smoothing and zooming, better performance, and some cool new capabilities that I'm not ready to talk about juuuust yet. ;)
When all is said and done, I hope to use it to put out a special, improved edition of Telepath Tactics. If you're eager for more details, you can follow along with my progress here on the Sinister Design forums.
Versions 1.050 and 1.051
Hey guys! I've pushed a couple of updates over the past two days. These change the following:
– fixed a bug in which the game would sometimes throw a null reference error if the first turn of a battle ended without any particles being rendered.
– reworked and reorganized particle rendering code to avoid any remaining situations where particles would stick around the battlefield.
– fixed a bug in which the game would throw an error upon starting a new game if the game did not detect an already-existing Documents > My Games > Telepath Tactics > Saved Games directory.
– added in extra dialogue in the fight outside the bandit fortress giving the player additional prior warning before the enemy lowers the drawbridge.
– added a chance of both Stunned and Burning status to the “Explode” attack from the destruction of Teresa’s charges.
– the game will now successfully load saved game files from slots which you haven’t yet created a game in. (If, for example, you download someone else’s saved game.)
– fixed a bug in which the game’s shadowling bosses would not spawn with flying.
– fixed a typo where the game treated the Flail item as increasing a character’s health by 250 points (and decreasing it a corresponding amount upon unequipping).
– fixed a typo where the game treated the Steam Crossbow item as increasing a character’s health by 320 points (and decreasing it a corresponding amount upon unequipping).
– increased the strength of the Steam Crossbow from 12 to 14.
– fixed scripting error in final battle which caused enemy reinforcements to cut off after turn 7.
– moved one of the spike traps in the final battle to keep newly spawned units from flying into it each time.
