Greetings, tactics fans! Another month means another update. I've got some extremely cool things cooking behind the scenes, but this month's update is mostly focused on moving along the palace intrigue plot (alongside new quality-of-life features, optimizations, and general polish).
Without further ado, let's talk about the biggest new thing in the game:
- Created the next few palace intrigue scenes, introducing a new suspect and some new wrinkles. I could say more about it, but I think it's best encountered fresh. 😉
Next, we have some long-awaited interface improvements:
- during battle, you can now hit the 'Q' key to have the game auto-display every tile that can be reached and/or attacked by at least one enemy! (You can activate this in gamepad mode by pressing the Y button on a space empty of any units.)
- during battle, you can now hold down the alt key to see every character's health bar onscreen at once:
- added a dark outline around danger tiles so they remain visible over lava tiles:
- when defeated in battle, a button to call up the main menu now appears in the bottom-right of the screen so you can double-check objectives, go to the title screen, or--if playing with manual saves--restart the entire battle (as opposed to restarting from the last save).
Third, we have some optimizations to the game:
- optimized the evening event-choosing process to avoid stack overflow issues that could result from excessive attempts to pick an event.
- reduced the size of the game's installation footprint by lowering the resolution of cutscene backgrounds.
- updated the project to a somewhat more recent version of Unity.
We have miscellaneous other improvements as well, including some AI improvements:
- AI improvement: the game can now string together multiple additional moves after Use Once skills (such as Sprint and Feint), causing higher level units (and swordsmen in particular) to take much more effective turns.
- AI improvement: the game now takes into account whether a target is frozen, blinded, or immobilized when deciding whether to mind control them.
- increased the rate of enemy level scaling a bit for the merchant side quest battles.
- added team size and average level warnings to the Investigate daytime action.
- increased the witness's durability a little bit for the witness protection battle.
- cleaned up photokineticist walk animations a bit.
- cleaned up assassin walk animations a bit.
- the auto-objectives screen no longer appears until after any turn 0 dialogue occurring after the dismissal of the turn box.
We have numerous bug fixes:
- fixed: characters could use self-move skills like Charge while immobilized.
- fixed: on maps with more deployment slots than allowable deployed characters, players could bypass maximum deployment restrictions merely by deploying every one of their available characters.
- fixed: switching to gamepad controls mid-game (as opposed to doing so on the title screen) would not disable the mouse.
- fixed: when auto-showing the shop tutorial, the tutorial wasn't pulling focus for the gamepad cursor.
- fixed: upon clicking a skill, then opening the character screen and unequipping the item which grants the use of that skill, the skill's red attack tiles would remain present and clickable on the battlefield.
- fixed: targeting an ally with a skill that does no damage and causes a negative status effect to which they are immune (e.g. targeting a non-flying ally with Gravity Spike) would provoke a friendly-fire reaction despite having no effect.
- fixed: when changing a custom string for the name of an army during a battle, the game would not update the army's name in the new turn window (an issue appearing most noticeably during some of the league qualifier bouts).
- fixed: due to a scripting error, a flag allowing the player to follow Malatose one week following her second interrogation was never set.
- fixed: if a character did not have a stat listed among their growths and they gained a trait altering growth for that stat, the game would ignore the growth boost entirely instead of adding that stat to the unit's growths for modification.
- fixed: the character generator was not interpreting traits with multi-operation growth effects and base stat effects correctly, causing the Sharp-Eyed trait not to work as intended.
- fixed: physical traits imbued by a character's past life skills would not exclude the opposite trait from being selected during character creation (potentially leading to characters with, e.g., both muscular and skinny traits at once).
- fixed: when selecting Restart Battle, the actions bar would reappear while fading out the scene.
- fixed: if a text overlay was onscreen when selecting Restart Battle, it would reappear while fading out the scene.
- fixed: when using Charge against a target, ending the charge on caltrops, and killing the target, the target wouldn't get knocked back and the combat sequence wouldn't conclude, causing the game to lock up.
- AI fix: when scoring moves, the game was double-counting impact damage against a target when the target was shoved into another character even when the character they were being shoved into was an ally of the attacker, not a second enemy.
- fixed: Burning status was not being ended by a character being submerged in water.
- fixed: destroying a cosmetic bridge tile embedded in land via an explosive could result in a surviving unit standing on that space being "dropped" upward into the air and remaining suspended there.
- fixed: you could lock up the game by blocking a character from moving at all during scripted movement.
- fixed: a character spawning onto the battlefield on top of a trap would not trigger the trap.
- fixed: if a character started its turn on a pressure trigger space, the game would ignore pressure triggers on the first adjacent space the character moved to.
- fixed: when killing an enemy by shoving an ally into them, if the enemy had a counterattack available, the enemy could sometimes counterattack the character who was shoved into them even though they had taken lethal damage.
- fixed: if a map had BeforeTurn dialogue marked as repeatable, the auto-objectives screen could cause it to re-trigger after the objectives faded, trapping the player in a loop.
- fixed: text overlays could appear beneath the auto-objectives screen.
- fixed: the space selector was inappropriately snapping to bridges and other objects that lay flat when mousing above them, as though they were characters with height.
- fixed incorrect palette highlight coloration for pants in the photokineticist sprite.
- fixed: the Mantis Rider card art was not loading correctly in Psy Clash.
- fixed: the description text for laboring was out of date, stating that laboring takes only 30% of a character's remaining energy rather than the 50% it now takes.
- fixed: a handful of random event day logs could be truncated due to a formatting mistake.
- fixed: the day log summary for characters getting wounded was missing a period.
- fixed a couple of typos: one in the Festival of the Ascendant Lights narration, one in Malatose's dialogue during her first interrogation.
- fixed: there were missing spaces in certain variants of the cavosphere activity narration.
And lastly, we have a few improvements for campaign creators!
- added support for terrain tiles with built-in status effects!
- added two new cutscene backgrounds to the game: Dese Palace Garden and Dese Palace Study.
- added the Overheat, Lava Burn, and Crowd Booing Muffled sound effects to the assets list for use in the campaign creator.
- added the Cut, Place Caltrops 2, Place Brazier, Levitate Other, and Shockwave skill button graphics to the assets list for use in the campaign creator.
Next month's update is going to have some big-ticket items that folks have been asking for--things I spent time working to get in with this month's update, but which I couldn't quite squeeze through in time. Stay tuned--I know you're really going to like them! 😉
Yours in tactics,
Craig