Greetings, strategy RPG fans! Another month, another update containing improvements to the engine from my ongoing development of Together in Battle.
Let's talk about this month's improvements. First up, we have a few AI buffs and fixes!
- improved the AI's ability to intelligently target skills with buffs and debuffs to Strength and Psy.
- the game no longer values Move Bonus (i.e. the status effect granted by Sprint or Steam Engine) positively for characters who are Immobilized or tagged as Immobile.
- fixed: when the game calculated a move onto a trap as the best move, the AI would sometimes have the unit stand totally still even as they suffered the trap's effects.
- fixed: with particularly long character movement ending in a trap, the AI could outpace itself and queue up an attack before the game was ready to launch it.
Next, we have new and improved visual effects and other miscellaneous improvements to the main campaign! These include:
- I adapted the Pierce visual effect to create a dedicated visual effect for when a unit triggers a spike trap.
- the game's handling of AddCondition/Global Lighting during battle is now much better; it now transitions to the new global lighting over a few seconds instead of immediately applying the new lighting setup.
- when changing between weather types using the same particle (e.g. Rain to Heavy Rain or Snow to Blizzard) there is no longer a delay before the change takes effect.
- fixed visual issue with snow and ash particles being stretched horizontally; they now render as intended.
- increased minimum impact damage in combat from 5 to 6.
- added a fallback for those rare occasions where the actions bar fails to reappear after a round of combat: clicking to select a character who can still move or act now forces the actions bar to show back up.
- fixed: one-shot sound effects (most notably the battle victory fanfare) were abruptly cutting off upon transitioning to a new scene. The game now gracefully fades them out instead.
- fixed: when multiple dialogue trees were queued up at once, the game was not triggering them in succession due to a mistake in the dialogue formatting process assigning all dialogue the same convID.
- fixed: the game would not allow characters to push or pull item sacks off of other destructible objects due to item sacks always being treated as last for attack priority on a space. When an item sack is on top of another object that is not pushable or pullable, knockback now affects the position of the item sack instead of the object it's resting on.
- fixed: the DamageUnitAt script action had slightly different damage ordering priority rules than a regular attack.
- fixed: Crush Res. was not being applied to mitigate impact damage from units being smashed into each other (or objects, or the edges of the map).
- fixed: Falling Res. was not being applied to mitigate Falling damage, which resulted in item sacks inappropriately taking damage when falling from heights.
- fixed: a file with crucial scripts for in-game traps and space-swapping skills had accidentally been overwritten, causing the above-mentioned skills to stop working for a few days.
- fixed: if a character's Speed was chosen to increase upon level-up it would increase by 5, not 1.
- fixed a typo in a victory bark variant for proc gen characters with the "disciplined" personality trait.
- fixed: characters had begun saying their heal barks 100% of the time instead of the normal 25%.
- fixed: the game had begun to throw null errors upon right-clicking destructible objects.
- the game now keeps track of how many seconds it's been running across all play sessions.
- laid some groundwork for future, non-Steam versions of the game.
And finally, we have improvements for campaign makers:
- new sound effect: Card Shuffle.
- new weather types supported: PetalsRed and PetalsGold. These shower the scene in flower petals (red or yellowish orange).
- new weather types supported: LeavesGreen and LeavesBrown. Causes 3D leaves (green or brown) to gradually flutter down from the top of the screen. Battle-only for now.
- Fireflies weather type is now finally supported in battle, not just cut scenes! Causes fireflies to appear, flit about the battlefield seemingly at random, and disappear a few seconds later.
- new 2D particle effects supported: FlowerBurstRed and FlowerBurstGold.
- when characters hit promotion level via the LevelUp and LevelUpArmy script actions, the game will now quietly auto-promote them to an advanced class consistent with their base class (if one exists).
- if it doesn't find a loadID match first, the SpawnUnit script action now checks characters from prior scenes by name.
- fixed an inconsistency with the way that IfValGoTo and IfValRun treated custom integer values that had not yet been set. Both now treat custom values that have not been set as equal to 0. (Previously, only IfValRun did this).
- fixed: the cut scene editor would remember the last cut scene you loaded and load its data when creating a new cut scene, resulting in the previous cut scene's narration, background, and other data showing up by default.
- fixed: upon going to the campaign editor and then returning to the title screen without the title music changing, the music would abruptly stop.
And that's about all, folks!
What's next?
I ran some calculations earlier: it's been 8 years, 4 months, and 30 days since I first released the original Telepath Tactics. One full remake and a year and a half of free patches and content updates, and I do believe it's time to call this a wrap!
As such, this is going to be the last regular monthly update. This won't prevent me from pushing fixes if there are any nasty new bugs discovered, of course--but barring that, it's time for me to move on. I have Together in Battle to finish, I want to look into releasing Telepath Tactics Liberated on other platforms, and I have other Secret Project Ideas rattling around the ole noggin.
Thanks for your continued support over all this time--it means the world to me. I do hope you'll join me as I continue this grand adventure! The next game in the series, Together in Battle, is already a blast and something I'm immensely proud of. I hope to see you there. 😉
Tactically yours,
Craig