Good afternoon,
Today, we're happy to announce the release of Happy Bastard’s combat playtest v2!
While this version has the same gameplay content as in v1, we have added several layers of gameplay polish, new features, improvements, bug fixes and quality of life elements.
Here are the major new additions:
· Speech bubbles: The bastards are now alive and talking! They will sometimes say what’s on their mind, both in reaction to what’s happening on the battlefield and to request something from the player. This goes beyond just flavour as it anchors a couple of the features below.
· Battle Whims: Occasionally, a bastard is going to request something from the player. This is essentially a secondary objective for that combat, but that comes directly from the character and their situation. If you manage to satisfy the demand, they’ll be quite happy, otherwise … they might take it badly.
· Composure: First, we changed the name “Morale” to “Composure”, and we replaced all the old gameplay effects of that system with new ones. You can read the details in the tooltip in-game, but mostly we introduced Composure Break and In the Flow. For the first one, whenever something negative occurs to a character or to a teammate, there is a risk that someone suffers a Composure Break. The worse the situation, the higher the chance and the worse the effect. And you can bet your bastards are going to open their big mouths about it. On the other end of the spectrum, In the Flow is a bonus to many combat stats that gets bigger the higher the Composure.
· Player logs: We added a player log so that you can go back and see what happened in combat. We also added a tooltip that shows detailed combat calculations, both on the player log entries and on the preview panels while targeting *(you need to press “Alt” to reveal the tooltip there)*
· Undo system: We already had undo for movement. We now have undo for everything else except main actions, and they work in the same way, i.e. the opportunity to undo disappears as soon as you do anything else. This ensures that you live and die by your tactics, and not because of a clicking mistake.
· Line of Sight: Character size is now supported by the LoS system, so if you can see it, you can shoot it! Quite practical to attack those big enemies.
We also did a whole lot of small gameplay improvements and bug fixes.
Instead of listing them all, here’s a selection of some of the changes that you requested and that we implemented:
· Crits on DoTs now increase damage instead of duration
· Molotov Cocktail can now be thrown at objects (i.e. barrels) and will cause DoT damage at the start of the next round
· Disengage can now send the target to *any* tile, even if doing so causes damage
· Buffs with multiple effects now resolve as one effect, which is much faster
· Sound settings are now saved
Visually, we did a whole pass of visual polish on ability and status effect icons, as well as on portraits. It looks less placeholder now, even though there is still a lot of work left on visuals.
One such thing that’s high on our priority list but that is not included in the v2 is the change of visual style for the characters, to a slightly more mature/badass body shape. More news on this in early 2026.
So that’s it! The new version of the combat playtest is now live, we’d love to hear what you think of these changes over in the discussion boards or in our Discord
Still haven’t signed up for the playtest? Join our Discord to get your key and play now!
Thank you for all your support! The future looks Happy.