KickStarter Telepath Tactics Liberated - deterministic tactical RPG inspired by Fire Emblem

[Craig Stern]

ICYMI, Telepath Tactics is currently 35% off on Steam! http://store.steampowered.com/app/357940/

Determinism, tactical flexibility, and a stiff mental challenge can now be yours for under $10 until Monday the 28th.

 

[Anthedon]

ICYMI, Telepath Tactics is currently 35% off on Steam! http://store.steampowered.com/app/357940/

Determinism, tactical flexibility, and a stiff mental challenge can now be yours for under $10 until Monday the 28th.

Any new hints towards if/when mid-battle saving will be implemented?

And yeah, if you like tactical RPGs, get this. The deterministic mechanics are great when you just have played Blackguards or any other game where a few bad rolls can lose you an entire battle. Not going to happen here.

 

[Bonerbill]

I really want to try this game, since I miss the whole Fire Emblem style gameplay after moving exclusively to PC (thracia 776 is still one of my favorite games of all time). However, the art style and the interface is just putting me off for some reason. Yeah, fire emblem was typical weeaboo anime looking garbage, but it was good looking anime garbage.

Oh well, I may get it when it's slightly cheaper.

 

[roshan]

ICYMI, Telepath Tactics is currently 35% off on Steam! http://store.steampowered.com/app/357940/

Determinism, tactical flexibility, and a stiff mental challenge can now be yours for under $10 until Monday the 28th.

Holy shit this game is good. If the incline doesn't end I may never get back to work.

 

[roshan]

I really want to try this game, since I miss the whole Fire Emblem style gameplay after moving exclusively to PC (thracia 776 is still one of my favorite games of all time). However, the art style and the interface is just putting me off for some reason. Yeah, fire emblem was typical weeaboo anime looking garbage, but it was good looking anime garbage.

Oh well, I may get it when it's slightly cheaper.

The art style looks poor in the screenshots, but is actually pretty decent in game. Overall, it's actually quite an engrossing experience. The sprites and animations for the attacks are really great, the deterministic combat system is superb and instantly addictive, the music is excellent (seriously, I'm impressed), and the writing is fantastic. I haven't found myself laughing out loud at game text in a long time. I never thought I would enjoy or play games with simplistic graphical styles like Antharion or Telepath Tactics, but these RPGs simply have so much to offer.

 

[Craig Stern]

Any new hints towards if/when mid-battle saving will be implemented?

Nothing new to report just yet on that front! To be honest, I'm a little leery about trying to add it in at this point, since any new features I've added lately have seemed to end up creating something like 5 updates' worth of bugs for me to track down and fix. (Which would be fine, except that it means everyone's game is broken until I get everything working properly, and I have limited time in which to find and fix everything due to the whole having-a-day-job thing.)

TL;DR: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

[Zetor]

Yeah, absolutely more people need to play this game. Bugs are bugs, but good SRPG design is hard to find nowadays.

I really want to try this game, since I miss the whole Fire Emblem style gameplay after moving exclusively to PC (thracia 776 is still one of my favorite games of all time). However, the art style and the interface is just putting me off for some reason. Yeah, fire emblem was typical weeaboo anime looking garbage, but it was good looking anime garbage.

Oh well, I may get it when it's slightly cheaper.

This is one of those games where still shots of zoomed-out combat scenes don't really do the art justice... they make the game look like RPG Maker shovelware, when the quality is very much above that (well okay, I'm not a fan of the title screen, and Zimmer's MSPaint beard is kinda amusing).

In my LP I've decided to use animated gifs to spice things up a bit, because they tend to be a bit more evocative than screenshots:

 

[Abu Antar]

I will buy it before the sale ends. I did find the demo to be decent when I played it a long time ago, so I will probably support the incline.

 

[Jocund]

I'm curious, I haven't seen much about this game, but I've skimmed a few let's play videos after seeing this.

1) Is the class system like Final Fantasy Tactics (i.e., "generic" soldiers that can end up as anything) or like Vandal Hearts (this unit is a "soldier" and can upgrade into different soldier classes later, this unit is an "archer" and can upgrade to sniper or flying spearman)? It looks like the latter to me, except without the upgraded classes?

2) It looks like the game goes: Battle -> Dialogue/Shopping menu -> Battle -> Dialogue/Shopping menu, with some in-battle talking. Did I just see a particular set of battles, or this the flow for the entire game (without say, a world map or anything outside battle/shopping)? If so, are all of the battles pre-set? Not to say that would be bad.

 

[ScubaV]

I loved the Shining Force games growing up, so I was pretty excited for this. I bought it during the Steam summer sale, got about 4 missions in and then just bounced off it. I didn't like how there was no town exploration between missions, which forced you to behave really oddly if you wanted to get the chests in battle. Combine this with the lack of mid-battle saves and long enemy turns when there are lots of units it becomes really frustrating.

I quit during whichever mission has you rescue the imprisoned person. I played it straight up, but lost a unit or two and reloaded. Then, realizing that there seemed to be no exploration phase, I decided to try to open the chest on the island on the far right. I tried that twice, unsuccessfully, and never touched the game after that. It was extremely annoying to spend a ton of time carefully killing guys and minimizing damage, crossing the map, and waiting for gobs and gobs of enemies to slowly take their turn, then have to start all over from scratch if my strategy didn't work out.

Despite my criticism, it seems like a good game and I will probably try it again at some point. But, if there's no mid-battle save I'll probably have to resort to extremely safe play and ignore most/all chests. I don't want to spend hours replaying the same battle in order to experiment or try something risky.

 

[jagged-jimmy]

I played the demo recently and it looks totally like my cup of tea. Don't care about exploration, it looks like a game where you play a single mission a day to get an awesome turn-based combat fix. (or more if you're really hungry)

But i imagine with all the coming massive battles i would really like to have a mid-battle save feature.

Spoiler

or 50% - you choose.

 

[MRY]

Craig Stern So I have what may be a frivolous question. From having read many of your posts here and some of your blog posts, it seems pretty clear that the TT's design was very much a labor of love / building the game you've always wanted to play. In hindsight, do you wish you'd done things differently -- such as including Shining-Force-style town exploration, having a more traditional fantasy plot instead of peasants vs. corporations (probably a gross simplification!), lowering the stakes of battles, etc.? Obviously, there's no saying whether any of that would have affected the game's commercial success / mass appeal, but it's something that as a hobbyist developer I'm curious about myself. (For my current personal project, I've very much taken a vanity approach to it, so if someone told me I could double the game's reach by simplifying the language, I would say something polite and pay no attention.)

 

[Craig Stern]

Craig SternIn hindsight, do you wish you'd done things differently -- such as including Shining-Force-style town exploration, having a more traditional fantasy plot instead of peasants vs. corporations (probably a gross simplification!), lowering the stakes of battles, etc.?

There are some things I wish I'd done differently, but they're not any of the things you listed there! I rather like the low stakes, character-driven plot of TT--I think it makes for a refreshing contrast to all of the you-personally-must-save-the-world-because-reasons plots that are so ubiquitous in RPGs. I also like the high stakes behind your decisions in battle, though I actually did compromise on that point and include an optional casual mode. More exploration would've been nice, but I really didn't have the resources to pull that off well on top of everything else I was doing. (Note that there actually is one explorable area in the game, and people pretty much universally think it's one of the low points of the game.) Personally, I friggin' love SF's explorable towns, but my priority was crafting the battles and the cast of characters (which, I might mention, are both way way more complex and interesting than SF's were).

Nah--the main thing I wish I'd done differently wasn't a design decision, it was a business decision: I wish I'd held off release for another couple of months, taken another sabbatical from my day job, and just sat at home playing through the full campaign over and over, fixing every single bug I could find. I grossly underestimated how many bugs were left in the game before release, and that ended up causing me a lot of unnecessary problems.

 

[Craig Stern]

1) Is the class system like Final Fantasy Tactics (i.e., "generic" soldiers that can end up as anything) or like Vandal Hearts (this unit is a "soldier" and can upgrade into different soldier classes later, this unit is an "archer" and can upgrade to sniper or flying spearman)? It looks like the latter to me, except without the upgraded classes?

2) It looks like the game goes: Battle -> Dialogue/Shopping menu -> Battle -> Dialogue/Shopping menu, with some in-battle talking. Did I just see a particular set of battles, or this the flow for the entire game (without say, a world map or anything outside battle/shopping)? If so, are all of the battles pre-set? Not to say that would be bad.

1) More like Vandal Hearts, although really the closest analog is Shining Force--characters auto-promote to a set prestige class upon reaching level 20. (Unfortunately, due to budget limitations, creating alternative prestige classes would have been cost-prohibitive for me.)

2) That's the flow for most of the game; some battles are either secret or optional, but the overall structure of the game is story-driven and linear. It lets me keep things tight, both story-wise and in terms of balancing the fights to be both challenging and doable.

 

[Zetor]

I'm curious, I haven't seen much about this game, but I've skimmed a few let's play videos after seeing this.

1) Is the class system like Final Fantasy Tactics (i.e., "generic" soldiers that can end up as anything) or like Vandal Hearts (this unit is a "soldier" and can upgrade into different soldier classes later, this unit is an "archer" and can upgrade to sniper or flying spearman)? It looks like the latter to me, except without the upgraded classes?

2) It looks like the game goes: Battle -> Dialogue/Shopping menu -> Battle -> Dialogue/Shopping menu, with some in-battle talking. Did I just see a particular set of battles, or this the flow for the entire game (without say, a world map or anything outside battle/shopping)? If so, are all of the battles pre-set? Not to say that would be bad.

For 1): the class system is actually something like Fire Emblem -- each unit can upgrade to a fixed elite class. Hero becomes Champion, Cavalier becomes Mantis Knight, etc. AFAIK each upgrade has some sort of mechanical boost for the unit, and there are very few items that are only usable by an elite class, like the halberd. For the most part, though, level isn't as critical, and my low-level units weren't a complete liability in the endgame (unlike Fire Emblem, where deploying an underdeveloped light mage was a death sentence even if he only engaged enemies his spells were supposed to be especially strong against).

For 2): There is no world map and the flow is set -- however, there are some optional battles with semi-random maps, and there are some battles that you only encounter if you saved a particular friendly NPC in an encounter.


e: goddammit Craig Stern :p

 

[MRY]

I haven't played TT (and alas, it seems very unlikely that I'll ever be able to), but as a kid, I really enjoyed the characters in Shining Force. It's true that they didn't have much dialogue or introspection, but they were so delightfully diverse and drawn with broad strokes. I remember fondly the whole "traitors die by fire" bit (I think from Shining Force 2?), Joghurt the Yogurt, the wolf guy . . . . I'm not sure how I'd take it if I were playing for the first time now, but through the lens of nostalgia, I think I might actually prefer the iconic, even cartoonish character design of the 16-bit jRPG era to the nuanced, angst-ridden, and long-winded characters of the 32-bit era. (For that reason, I'm in the tiny minority who thinks that Vandal Hearts has a better story than Final Fantasy Tactics. It may be a minority of 1!)

Re: bugs -- Yeah. Primordia had the same story. We really didn't crush them all for about two years after release. :/

 

[ColCol]

Lack of md-battle
save has pretty much stopped my play-through.

 

[Craig Stern]

I've been issuing lots of patches lately, and we're now up to version 1.049! Here are the changelogs since version 1.044, if you wanna read 'em:

1.049
1.048
1.047
1.045

 

[Reinhardt]

In my LP I've decided to use animated gifs to spice things up a bit, because they tend to be a bit more evocative than screenshots:

Thanks. It's really looks much better.

 

[vonAchdorf]

I think the sprites are great, especially the animations which cost Craig lots of money from what I remember. The dialogue busts are so so, but you get used to them.

 

[MRY]

I think the sprites are great, especially the animations which cost Craig lots of money from what I remember. The dialogue busts are so so, but you get used to them.

Craig Stern Any chance of getting idling animations? Or is that cost prohibitive? I wonder if even the old jRPG staple of having them walk in place would add something.

 

[Mustawd]

Craig Stern I wonder if even the old jRPG staple of having them walk in place would add something.

Please no...

EDIT: Do you have an example where this looks good?

 

[MRY]

Please no...

EDIT: Do you have an example where this looks good?

Well, I haven't played a jRPG strategy game since I was a kid, so I have no idea whether it looked good or bad. It's just that the gifs posted look strangely static to me, and my recollection is that jRPGs had the units walk in place to avoid the problem. Probably wouldn't work with this size sprite, though.

 

[Mustawd]

Also, to be fair, the camera moves with the active character, as does your eye. So the static characters are not really an issue IMO.

 

[Ninjerk]

In TO and FFT, the idle animations made haste, stop, and slow identifiable at a glance.