Greetings, tactics fans! I'm back with more improvements to Together in Battle!
New Game Plus is now in the game!
When you get the good ending, at the conclusion of the game's end credits, you are now given the option to create a New Game Plus playthrough: "Custom Character Run."
Selecting Custom Character Run will prompt you to select a save slot; a new playthrough will then begin in the chosen save slot with two major differences from a normal playthrough:
characters of every species (not just humans, lissit, and spriggats) will be available for recruitment at the Recruiter starting on day 1.
custom characters will fill as many recruitment spots as are available, and with a 100% show rate.
You can use this to easily do full playthroughs with teams consisting entirely of custom characters!
We have more in the way of custom portrait asset support:
I created a layered template that players looking to paint their own custom portrait assets can use to easily match the scale, style, and default coloration of the game's own assets! Download it in your preferred format here:
.KRA [ ]
.PSD [ [url="https://sinisterdesign.net/Downloads/Together%20in%20Battle/Portrait%20Asset%20Maker.psd"]https://sinisterdesign.net/Downloads/Together%20in%20Battle/Portrait%20Asset%20Maker.psd ]
head layer graphics can now be customized for all species portraits, allowing modders to completely overhaul the style of proc gen character portraits from top to bottom! (To this end, heads now support img, folder, and override attributes in PortraitData, allowing people to override the game's default portrait head images with whatever their hearts desire.)
custom portrait assets can now appear in randomly generated character portraits, not just portraits for custom characters.
custom portrait assets can now be flagged on an individual basis so that they are used only for custom characters, and will not be chosen by the game when randomly creating portraits for proc gen characters.
We have miscellaneous improvements as well:
AI improvement: enemies now won't use self-buffing skills that either a) end their turn or b) apply Move Bonus unless one or more enemies are within a single turn's move-and-attack range of them. This should keep enemies from constantly using skills like Sprint and Defiant Stance when enemies are all the way across the map (i.e. when they're not very likely to be useful).
if a second custom character shows up in recruitment, there is now a 10% of a third one appearing; and if that one shows up, a 5% chance of a fourth. (This change is not retroactive to existing playthroughs.)
wrote new background lines for former chefs, farmers, and lawyers, plus a unique background dialogue for former farmers.
wrote a new defeat response line for Disciplined characters.
increased the Strength of Krodh a bit.
increased the Crush Resistance of Royal Mail to 60.
if the player voluntarily reduces their deck to less than the tournament minimum of 12 cards prior to entering a card tournament, the game will now allow them a chance to edit their deck to correct the issue instead of summarily ejecting them (provided that they have enough inactive cards on hand to render their deck tournament legal).
if the player voluntarily reduces their deck to less than the tournament minimum of 12 cards during the "last chance to edit your deck" phase of a card tournament, the game will now catch that.
gave the arena manager a more tailored response if the player picks "How exciting!" prior to the penultimate match in Gharial or Snow Leopard Leagues.
for v. 1.0.35d: if the player gets locked into the bad ending after winning the arena championship, the game now automatically draws to a close after 4 days rather than 7.
for v. 1.0.35d: BPD intervention rewards no longer queue up once a player is locked in to the bad ending.
for v. 1.0.35d: added "Chaos Breaker" to the list of weapon names Dhatuu Dil would give a variant response to when engraving.
We have bug fixes:
fixed: lights could flicker excessively if too many Fire objects were near the edge of the arena shining on the battle background. (Unfortunately, due to Unity engine limitations, the fix for this necessitated removing flickering lights from Fire objects entirely.)
fixed: under some circumstances, the game was not considering pure knockback skills (i.e. most of a kineticist's arsenal) as offensive skills, potentially leading to enemy kineticists potentially being placed too close to the player's deployment spaces in proc gen fights.
fixed: if a unique custom character in the enemy army died, the game could throw a fatal error attempting to access the personality traits of generic allies when determining if they took a morale hit.
fixed: getting counterattacked by a destructible object (such as a spiked barricade or ice spikes) would cause that object to become "rotated" in the game's logic, permitting it to then be backstabbed from the opposite side.
fixed: the game was not displaying customized golem or spirit lines at the start of the summer palace escape map.
fixed: if a character's first name was just the letter 'A' and their last name began with a vowel, the game's text processing routine would display their first name as 'An' instead of 'A' when they spoke in dialogue.
fixed: there was a typo in one of the Miscellaneous Like dialogue variants for pessimistic characters.
fixed: there was a typo in one of the Make Weapon camp activity narrations.
fixed: the game was not serializing the individual pages of a readable book item correctly under specific circumstances.
fixed: there remained a small palette error affecting Psy Clash minions.
fixed in v. 1.0.35a: when calculating collision damage between two different characters with different levels of Crush resistance, the game was applying resistances incorrectly.
fixed in v. 1.0.35a: the mid-battle "save game" button had gotten disconnected from the method it calls in this update.
fixed in v. 1.0.35b: a change to a log call contained in the last hotfix could sometimes cause a null error and make the game lock up.
fixed in v. 1.0.35b: custom spirits were displaying more hair options for their portraits than actually exist in the game.
fixed in v. 1.0.35c: changes from hotfix 1.0.35a caused overshoot damage scaling to only apply to one of the two colliding characters during inter-character collisions.
fixed in v. 1.0.35c: using an equipment-altering item in battle would reset the user's steps taken and remove stat changes from active status effects.
fixed in v. 1.0.35c: using an equipment-altering item in battle would not refresh the character screen.
fixed in v. 1.0.35c: 14 different types of cumulative combat stats (like total attacks using backstab, total attacks from elevation, etc.) used for certain achievements were not being recorded.
fixed in v. 1.0.35d: the town crier plot event could occur twice in the same day.
fixed in v. 1.0.35d: for reasons I still do not understand, under extremely rare circumstances, the game could sometimes fail to covert a "-1" to an integer when reconstituting a unit's memories, producing a format error and locking up the game.
fixed in v. 1.0.35d: typos in the scripting for the revenge quest event chain were preventing the chain from progressing through to the final event.
fixed in v. 1.0.35d: a missing delimiter in Tiger League battles could, on rare occasions, cause the enemy team leader to appear as an invalid class.
fixed in v. 1.0.35d: a second copy of the recruiter's portrait showed up upon visiting recruitment once locked into the first bad ending.
fixed in v. 1.0.35d: a scripting error was causing the For All In-tents achievement to be granted when losing tents in a thief attack rather than when not losing tents.
fixed in v. 1.0.35d: the game was not selecting the team leader's pronouns correctly in introductory dialogue for Powerbot 5000.
fixed in v. 1.0.35d: the game was referencing the wrong character for pronoun selection in one of the variants for "inspirational leader" dialogue.
fixed in v. 1.0.35d: a letter in Manbir Raksha's glossary entry was incorrectly capitalized.
And finally, we have improvements for custom campaign creators:
new Psy Clash cards can now be created (and existing ones can be edited) as part of a custom campaign! To do so, edit the CardSets.xml file that now appears when creating a custom campaign.
new script action: ClearCalendar. Wipes all events off the in-game calendar.
new script action: ClearCustomVariables. Wipes all custom variables; the names of any variables supplied as parameters will be exceptions.
new script action: ClearLoadedChars. Wipes the game's memory of all characters previously saved.
new script action: ClearReserveSupplies. Wipes all reserve supplies of any items.
you can now supply -1 as the roster number for ClearRoster to clear every roster.
the Custom Char % parameter of ShowRecruits now sets the % chance of getting a single custom character to show up. For a chance of more than one custom character appearing, you can now add additional Custom Char % parameters to the end, one for each additional possible custom character.
the game now permits using a custom string for a scene's nextbattle property.
Review progress!
We've made it to 96 store page reviews, representing continued progress toward our goal of 500 reviews! 🎊
I want to personally thank all of the people who've left nice reviews for the game so far--it really does help out. The more we have, the more likely Steam's algorithm is to show the game to new people. If you've been enjoying Together in Battle and haven't left a review yet, please make sure to write one! 🙂
What's next?
New portrait assets remain in progress. I've largely been painting these new assets myself due to the game's portrait artist going unresponsive; however, progress has been slow due to me also handling all of the...everything else.
Well, no longer: I will be focusing on painting the new assets and getting them all out at once for a dedicated free update in July! Make sure to comment here on the Steam forums, on Discord, and elsewhere with all of your requests for new clothing, accessories, masks, hats, etc. and I'll do my best to get them in!
Okay, folks: that's all I've got for now. Until next time...
Tactically yours,
Craig