Greetings, tactics fans! Did you think I was done making improvements to Together in Battle? I hope not, 'cause I wasn't! I'm still out here, running myself ragged to get requested new features into the game.
Let's start with the first big improvement: easy sharing of custom characters!
custom characters can now be exported as text, allowing easy sharing between players! No more having to email your CustomCharacters.xml file--just click the Export button and voila:
by that same token, characters can now be imported from text as well. It's as easy as this!
Big improvement #2: custom portrait assets are now supported!
as you might have noticed in that last gif, character portraits can now make use of custom clothing, eyes, noses, hair, accessories, and more. The only limit is your imagination! Here, for instance, is a noseless abomination inspired by the recent FFT announcement:
here's how it works: create custom portrait assets and save them in an appropriate subfolder of Documents > My Games > Together in Battle > Mods > _Common > Portraits. Next, provide information that the game can use to tell what type of asset it is (an eye? a nose? a hat?); the image's name and location; the types of character portraits it's compatible with; its size and positioning; and voila! Just like that, the game's character creation tools will automatically detect your new assets and allow you to use them in portraits with a single click! 🙂
using this new feature, modders can create--and you can download--new hair, eyes, mouths, noses, accessories, etc. for every single custom character portrait in the game.
the game will dynamically load custom portrait asset data from every single XML file containing the term "PortraitData" that it can find in Documents > My Games > Together in Battle > Mods > _Common > Portraits, so you can easily collect custom portrait assets from multiple sources and the game will be able to recognize them all.
This feature was slow and painful to implement due to Past Craig hard-coding dang near every single thing to do with the character portraits, but the Bonus Good News is that now that it's been reworked, new portrait assets should be a lot smoother for Future Craig to integrate into the game going forward! You can expect that in a future update. 😉
We've got smaller miscellaneous improvements as well:
when a character dies, all of the items in their inventory (except for personal items) are now automatically transferred to the reserve supplies.
gasul are now sturdier to make them better serve their hybrid role as front-liner. The gasul class's base health has been increased by 5; they now get an extra Strength or Health stat proficiency in their early skill progression; and protector and prophet bonus health has been increased by 5 and 6, respectively.
added an alternative way to uncover the Wailling quest line, making it much easier for players to find!
updated some of the dialogue in the initial thief attack battle to make it clear that the reinforcements in the south will move and attack as soon as they spawn.
wrote new, distinct defeat reaction lines for arrogant, blunt, friendly, loyal, narcissistic, religious, and vindictive characters, giving a bit more individuality to characters reacting to their friends and lovers falling in battle.
added class descriptions for bespoke enemy and NPC classes to the character screen:
updated the Bowmaster's extended class description, which had become outdated and decidedly unhelpful.
clarified the tooltip descriptions for Kinetic Gust, Kinetic Pull, and Grapple Pull.
more enemies now appear in the first random bandit battle if it occurs once the player has gotten midway through Duomensis. This should make it less of a dull pushover if it triggers later in the game.
AI improvement in version 1.0.25c: when the AI handicap level is set to less than 3, if there are a large number of enemies on the battlefield, the AI will now order the turns of all units making long-term moves by ascending distance to the enemy, lessening the likelihood of "traffic jams."
new in version 1.0.25c: reinforcements in the blacksmith rescue mission will now pause while there are 19 or more enemies already on the map.
Next, we've got bug fixes:
fixed: the Pyro Hail sound effect was too loud by about 6 decibels.
fixed: impact damage against the edge of the map was still using the old formula, resulting in inappropriately high damage amounts compared to collisions with other characters or terrain.
fixed: the enemy in the recruitment duel event was being leveled twice--once during the event dialogue, then again at the start of the subsequent battle. This meant that if the player inspected the character prior to accepting the duel, they would see them as significantly lower level than they actually ended up being in the duel.
fixed: using Levitate Other on a character submerged in water or lava would change their move type to Flying but would not actually lift them out of the liquid, making them impossible to move.
fixed: it was possible to learn about the summer palace without having the relevant variable set to let the player actually recall it during the evidence-recounting scene.
fixed: if the altar puzzle wasn't solved but a character had the Strangely Cut Gem in their inventory, the Strangely Cut Gem would get permanently stuck in that character's inventory. (Under these circumstances, the game now pulls it into the reserve supplies so it can be sold.)
fixed: non-hot-tempered characters could be generated with the hot-tempered defeat reaction line.
fixed: shadowlings (who do not have legs) could get a cavosphere camp activity narration that described them as dashing and kicking.
fixed: a character's class name could get cut off in the character screen mouseover tooltip if it was too long.
fixed some inconsistent spelling of Dayaan's name during the earliest stages of the investigation plotline.
fixed: changing a golem from one type to another (stone to bronze, or vice versa) in the custom character creator would mess up the portrait's stored body data for that character.
fixed: golem portraits in the custom character creator could cover up some of the buttons used to change portrait elements.
fixed: the page selector buttons for the clothing selection subwindow in the custom character creator weren't working.
fixed in version 1.0.25b: tooltips for units with a bespoke class description (like thieves, villagers, or royal guardsmen) were getting their data offset incorrectly due to a overlap with the delimiter for new bespoke class descriptions.
fixed in version 1.0.25b: the background layer of character hair for older proc gen human and spirit portraits had ceased loading.
fixed in version 1.0.25b: the game was assigning older proc gen spriggat portraits an incorrect "useBody" parameter, leading to these portraits simply not showing up as of version 1.0.25.
fixed in version 1.0.25b: newly recruited characters could be assigned a prior relationship with a golem or spirit.
fixed in version 1.0.25b: changes to the game's sprite palette-swapping logic to support player-created palettes had broken palette-swapping for minions in Psy Clash.
fixed in version 1.0.25b: the male swordsman's Double Strike animation's compression settings had somehow changed, causing the game to display the animation with a blur and no palette swapping.
fixed in version 1.0.25c: when generating a battlefield, the game could position enemies such that AOE from one of their skills could partially overlap a character's deployment spot.
fixed in version 1.0.25c: when calculating a character's move bonus for purposes of setting up battlefields, the game was only accounting for the default 40% move bonus effect and not greater move bonus effects produced by skills like Engine Boost.
fixed in version 1.0.25c: in rare cases, the AI could execute buffing skills targeting the space that an allied unit had just vacated.
fixed in version 1.0.25c: the Hair 2 selector was no longer cycling through shadowling horns in the custom character creator.
fixed in version 1.0.25c: a mask could sometimes inappropriately load for certain assets on certain portrait layers (e.g. shadowling horns).
fixed in version 1.0.25d: selecting the last eye for lissit and golems in the custom character creator would throw a range error.
fixed in version 1.0.25d: custom lissit portraits were not loading external, custom assets properly.
fixed in version 1.0.25e: older proc gen character portraits weren't loading correctly if the save file loaded began with a cut scene where those portraits would be visible (i.e. not the calendar screen).
And last but not least, as if custom portrait assets wasn't enough, we have even more goodies for custom campaign makers!
added hats, glasses, and masks to the accessories window in the custom character creator in the campaign creation suite, putting it on par with the portrait maker for custom characters on the title screen.
when the game starts up, if it doesn't find a Portraits subfolder in Mods > _Common, it now creates it and saves a copy of a file called CustomPortraitAssetsExplainer.xml with a detailed explanation and examples for how to format PortraitData.xml files to accompany custom portrait assets.
new script action: StoreItem. This will find the named item for a specific character (or among all characters in a specified army or roster) and store it in a specified roster's reserve supplies.
added a new optional parameter to the StripItemsFromUnit action: include personal items. (If not set to true, personal items will remain with the unit even as all other items are stripped.)
when creating a bespoke class in a character not present in Classes.xml, you can now add a short tooltip description to it by adding a vertical bar and then writing out the description in the unit's charClass attribute in PremadeUnits.xml. This description will show up when the player mouses over a character's class in the character screen.
new in version 1.0.25d: the mask and hat accessory layers now support a new portrait data attribute called forceMaskType. If a custom asset for one of these accessory types has forceMaskType="Body", the game will use hair, skin, and eye-color hue values for any associated mask (instead of army color hue values).
new in version 1.0.25d: you can now supply the number of a specific roster for the Character Name parameter in InvToList to get the items in a specific roster's reserve supplies as a list.
new in version 1.0.25d: item descriptions (and most tooltips in general) now support special characters.
fixed in version 1.0.25d: at a few spots in the code, the game was decapitalizing only the first letter of a string instead of the entire string, causing certain inventory-related script actions to affect the reserve supplies if they were accessed as "reserve supplies" or "Reserve supplies", but not "Reserve Supplies".
More progress on reviews!
We're now sitting at 83 store page reviews, which is awesome--however, we still need a lot more if we're going to hit our goal of 500 reviews.
For those who don't know, 500 reviews is a major milestone that Steam's algorithm uses when deciding whether to show a game to more people. If you've been playing Together in Battle and enjoying yourself, please leave a review letting everyone know what you think. It really does help out a lot! 😉
New coverage: "One of the finest TRPGs that I've ever played"
Since our last update, Together in Battle has been the subject of another review, this time by RPG Youtuber Adam the Fanatic! I can't embed it here, but I can quote it:
“One of the finest TRPGs that I've ever played: art and music is great, the storytelling is excellent, and the gameplay is nothing short of brilliant....9.7 out of 10.”
The full video is linked below--check it out!
Conclusion
With the new character importing/exporting and custom portrait asset features in place, I'll be finishing up our new game mode, getting together new portrait assets, and just generally ensuring that the next update is as big and juicy as possible.
Until then, I will continue to read all of your comments here on the Steam forums, on Discord, and throughout the internet with an eye to improving the game as much as possible. Until next time!
Tactically yours,
Craig