Greetings, tactics fans! I've got one final(?) update for you all with some extremely cool new quality-of-life features, optimizations, and general polish courtesy of the continued development of Together in Battle.
First up, we have new quality-of-life features and miscellaneous improvements:
- a much-requested feature is now in-game: show danger zones! 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:
(When in gamepad mode, you can do this by pressing the Y button on any space empty of units.)
- updated the "enemy range" tutorial in the caravan battle with instructions on how to show danger zones.
- you can now hold down the Alt key to see every character's health bar onscreen at once!
- 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, restart the entire battle, or go to the title screen.
- added a dark outline around danger tiles so they remain visible over lava.
- main menu buttons on the title screen now have tooltips.
- cleaned up photokineticist walk animations a bit.
- cleaned up assassin walk animations a bit.
- shaved about 1.1 GB off the game's file size.
- updated the game to a somewhat more recent version of Unity.
- AI improvement: the game can now string together additional moves after Use Once skills, causing higher-level enemies (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.
- for randomizer playthroughs, replaced the convex shield in Fera's room with a more universally helpful set of leather armor--and replaced the knife in the basement rubble with a convex shield.
- for randomizer playthroughs, reduced the mental resistance of the bandit fortress basement guard by 20 to help prevent softlock situations in case Emma has been reclassed to a psy user.
- added in version 1.0.60e: added a tag to Sarn Kamina causing her to greatly prefer staying in the middle island during the Rescuing Sarn Kamina battle.
- added in version 1.0.60e: when playing with gamepad, if you select a healing skill, the game now goes out of its way to position the selector on a tile containing an ally who's actually been damaged.
Beyond that, we also have bug fixes:
- fixed: Burning status was not being extinguished 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 there.
- fixed: characters could use self-move skills like Charge while immobilized.
- 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 freeze.
- 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: 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 in gamepad mode, the tutorial wasn't pulling focus for the gamepad cursor.
- 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.
- fixed: proc gen characters with dialogue referencing their god would say "ERROR" instead of the name of their deity.
- AI fix: when scoring potential moves, the game was double-counting impact damage against a target when the target was shoved into another character even if the character they were being shoved into was an ally of the attacker, not a second enemy.
- 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 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: when explosive charges detonated on their own due to Burning status and thereby destroyed bridge tiles with characters on top of them, those characters would not fall fully into whatever hazards lay beneath.
- fixed incorrect palette highlight coloration for pants in the photokineticist sprite.
- fixed: the player could get assigned the wrong roster during the caravan battle prelude scene in a randomizer playthrough, resulting in them having no characters on the battlefield and thereby getting stuck in a "defeat" loop.
- fixed: during randomizer campaign playthroughs, Silithis's companions were appearing as part of the wrong army during the cutscene where she reaches Adelbrae.
- fixed: the bridge-building kit item was missing from the randomizer campaign.
- fixed: if randomizer mode unlocked while controlling the game in gamepad mode, the unlock message popup wouldn't gain gamepad focus.
- fixed in version 1.0.60a: the game was dropping frames during combat zoom-in and zoom-out.
- fixed in version 1.0.60a: gamepad cursors were misaligned to certain UI elements in the new turn box and the actions bar.
- fixed in version 1.0.60a: 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 in version 1.0.60a: the TIB character creator (which is not supported in TTL and does nothing in the game) could be selected from the main menu of the title screen using gamepad even though no button for it was visible.
- fixed in version 1.0.60b: proc gen character dialogue using -TIC2- or -LAUGH2- special characters would have the entire line replaced with the character's tic or laugh narration.
- fixed in version 1.0.60c: attacking a target tagged with Pursue would cause the game to remove Passive tags from the target as intended, but not Immobile or Inactive tags; the game would remove Immobile and Inactive tags from the attacker instead.
- fixed in version 1.0.60c: when engaging the game's auto-move-and-attack behaviors, if the target wasn't in move-and-attack range of the top-scoring skill, the game simply wouldn't move the character or select a skill. Now, post-fix, if this happens the game goes through the selected character's other skills in descending order of effectiveness until it finds one that can reach the target, then auto-move-and-attacks with that skill.
- fixed in version 1.0.60c: due to a failure to call the Close() method on the XMLTextReader object used to download news updates on the title screen, the game would hang when returning to the title screen from a loaded game--and, upon returning a second time, appear to freeze entirely.
- fixed in version 1.0.60f: the settings menu was cut off by the top and bottom of the screen for players with super-widescreen monitors, preventing them from switching to a properly supported 16:9 resolution in-game.
- fixed in version 1.0.60f: the fourth row of items in the reserve supplies screen was covered by the character inventory sub-window.
- fixed in version 1.0.60g: the game was only loading class or species data when entering a cutscene or generating a proc gen unit, not when instantiating a battle, leading to situations where characters couldn't promote despite meeting the requirements if the player hadn't been in a cutscene yet after loading up their save.
- fixed in version 1.0.60h: the Transfer script action would add a character to the destination roster even if they no longer existed in the roster they were to be transferred from, causing characters who fell to permadeath during the bandit fortress escape maps to appear on the main roster anyway.
- fixed in version 1.0.60i: when in randomizer mode, the game could sometimes recruit a second Emma Strider during the bandit fortress escape.
- fixed in version 1.0.60i: the game could sometimes throw a range error during exploration.
And finally, some additions and improvements for custom 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 new destructible object: lavender flower bush.
- 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.
- expanded the Map Settings screen in the map editor; added a fifth objectives field.
- 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 in version 1.0.60a: a null error had crept into the cutscene editor and was preventing it from working properly.
- fixed in version 1.0.60b: the campaign creation suite was not loading campaign-specific custom character classes upon loading up a campaign for editing.
- fixed in version 1.0.60d: shops in the cutscene editor had broken, throwing a null error when displayed.
- fixed in version 1.0.60h: the -ATKX- and -ATKY- special characters had started each returning 0 when using skill scripts regardless of where the attack was centered.
And that's all, folks!
The Future
I'm making progress pushing toward version 1.0 on Together in Battle, looking into a possible secret console port, and entering the first stages of concepting out the even more super-secret game that comes after TIB.
What I'm saying: as one dude with a day job, I'm really taking on kind of a lot. Too much, really. So I think this will probably be the final TTL update...for real this time. At least for a while. (We'll see if I can stop myself from going back and further improving things. 😅)
Anyway, I just want to take a moment here and personally, sincerely thank every last one of you who've been here supporting me over the years. Without you, this game wouldn't have been possible, let alone the (IMO) even better games to come!
Want to keep tabs on Sinister Design developments going forward? Well, I have good news: we've got a website, a Discord, and forums for that! I hope I'll see you there. The adventure is far from over. 😉
Yours in tactics,
Craig