Hey there, tactics fans! This month's update is a little on the short side because (drum roll, please)...I'm getting married this Saturday! Still, I've got some good stuff here that I hope you enjoy.
The two biggest additions are simply new investigation cutscenes:
- wrote a new interrogation scene with Malatose.
- wrote a new interrogation scene with Wailling.
Both of these scenes provide information important to the conspiracy investigation and set up new main plot missions that I'm planning for the next update. 😉
Miscellaneous features, improvements, and balance changes:
- generic unit portraits now shift skin and hair color to match their sprites!
- updated to a newer version of Unity.
- reduced frame drops that had started occurring during combat zoom-in and zoom-out.
- both proc gen characters and custom characters are now assigned a sad info response line when they are created. These responses are now used after particularly dark background dialogue in camp. (If the responding character comes from an older version of the game and therefore lacks a sad response variant, they'll just respond with a normal response line that generally won't acknowledge the seriousness of the disclosure.)
- wrote new nickname response lines for characters with the compulsive, empirical, imaginative, jokester, arrogant, serious, disciplined, sensitive, and vindictive personality traits! This means that a little more then one-third of all new characters will now have distinctive, personality-based responses to being nicknamed. (Characters from previous versions, by contrast, will all have responses picked from the same pool of half a dozen or so generic replies.)
- wrote a new talk narration for narcissistic characters.
- wrote new, self-loathing "fantasize" camp activity narrations for characters fantasizing about another character with whom they have a romance stat of 0 or lower.
- when characters are lined up to have dialogue with one another in camp, if the game detects that there is no valid dialogue they can have together, the game now tries to give them a narrated "small talk" activity instead of having them say "Actually, I have nothing to say."
- when premade generic units promote to classes that have new default weapon skills (e.g. the Blackguard with Throw Knife or Mantis Knight with Halberd), if they don't spawn with droppable weapons equipped, they now gain those new default skills as natural skills.
- generic Marauders and Berserkers now have Throw Axe as default weapon skills.
- improved the descriptions on certain personality traits for purposes of the character creator.
A quick note about the new response lines: if you have a custom character you made in a previous version whom you'd like to receive those new response lines, just open the character in the custom character creator and re-save them; the game should assign them new dialogue lines (including the new response types)!
Numerous bug fixes!
Thanks to me not adding any big new features this month, I was able to spend a good bit of time focused on knocking out a lot of bugs with highly specific reproduction conditions (plus a few that cropped up due to recent changes in the code):
fixed: the game had begun triggering visual and audio cues for characters dropping into chasms when merely moving onto bridges above (or, in the case of flying units, flying onto) chasm tiles.
fixed: the code which made the traveling merchant event more commonplace had a typo, essentially adding a nonexistent event into the event hopper and making the game skip to the next day whenever it came up.
fixed: it was possible for the game to select a heatwave event upon returning to camp in the evening, which would throw an error and cause the game to skip the evening's events.
fixed: if you recruited the enemy kineticist during the Monkey League Qualifier, they retained a script ID tag that could cause the game to inappropriately make them deliver lines intended for enemies during subsequent battles.
fixed: regular, non-dialogue camp activities intended to alter characters' familiarity, friendship, and romance were misformatted and so were not actually altering these values.
fixed: certain response lines incorporating the speaker's non-verbal tic were getting the entire line replaced with just the tic narration.
fixed: certain response lines incorporating the speaker's specific laugh were getting the entire line replaced with just the laugh description.
fixed: if a character got the random "romantic crush" event in camp, then lost their romantic feelings for their crush before they could fantasize about them (e.g. via the crush turning them down for a date or saying something unkind to them), the game would fail to find any valid "fantasize" narration in camp when the fantasizing character came up during free rein, thereby freezing the game.
fixed: if a character asked another character out on a date, the game could leave a forced "fantasize" camp activity tag on the character despite removing the associated camp activity from their "free rein" activity list.
fixed: the Trailing Malatose event could be triggered repeatedly.
fixed: the game was triggering an event where the player receives a letter from Manbir about Malatose much too early.
fixed: if they hadn't been triggered beforehand, Ishita Svaamee's buyout offer events would remain in the random event hopper even after the championship battle.
fixed: a bunch of potential character interests were missing from the "ally gift" event.
fixed: when generating a unique named knife for the "family weapon" event, the game would assign the wrong image name, causing the weapon to display no image in inventory screens.
fixed: a change in the last update broke the NPC attribute special character in dialogue, causing NPC pronouns in proc gen character dialogue (particularly background lines concerning family members) to simply not appear.
fixed: many day logs for investigatory visits to the palace were being cut off.
fixed: custom variables and other special characters within map objectives were not being processed during auto-displaying of objectives at the start of a battle.
fixed: default lines and attributes from the game's placeholder CharAttributes.xml file could be loaded alongside campaign-specific lines and attributes even when they shared the same ID.
fixed: as of the last Unity version update, objects assigned to a player army (e.g. the statue in Defend the Idol) were using a material containing the wrong render order, leading to these objects always displaying behind characters even when they should have displayed in front.
fixed: in rare circumstances, the game could still fail to display the counterattack sprite when showing reasons why a character wants a piece of equipment.
fixed: when playing in gamepad mode, the gamepad cursors were misaligned to buttons in the new turn box and the actions bar.
fixed: when loading a previously created custom character in the custom character creator, the game was not loading tooltip data for the personality and physical trait pickers.
fixed: tooltips for personality and physical attributes could appear below the portrait pickers in the character creation screen.And finally, we have a few improvements for campaign makers:
if the game detects a plural in the Relationship parameter for an -NPC:x- attribute special character in dialogue (e.g. when the NPC relationship is "mom and dad" or "aunt and uncle"), and the Attribute Type is a special character pronoun, the game will now supply the appropriate they/them plural pronoun.
fixed: the campaign creation suite was not loading campaign-specific custom character classes upon loading up a campaign for editing.
fixed: a null error was preventing the cutscene editor from working properly.That's all for this update! As I mentioned last month, all the big-ticket features are in-game at this point, so from here until release, it's just churning out content and polishing things up.
I'm going to take a little time to enjoy the whole "getting married" thing, but I'll be back to working on Together in Battle soon enough! I'm looking to get two new main-plot missions done for next month's update--and if there's time, maybe another non-main-plot event or two. Until next time!
Yours in tactics,
Craig
