News:

Welcome to the new Sinister Design forums!

Main Menu

Recent posts

#51
Together in Battle / Re: Together in Battle Dev Log
Last post by CraigStern - May 14, 2025, 09:02:45 AM
- the undo stack now properly supports Move skills which swap the locations of two units (such as Twirl, Quick Twirl, and Trade); undoing these now resets both units to their original spots simultaneously.

- as a convenience, the shop now accounts for units temporarily absent from the group when showing what equipment your characters can use, who wants what, and why.

- special weapon availability in the shop now expands upon hitting Gharial League.

- Anatomical Treatises may now show up in the shop on rare occasions.

- day logs tracking wins and losses in the arena now distinguish between league matches and pick-up matches.

- cleaned up some mistakes in the hue-shifting mask for the Dese messenger portrait.

- fixed another long-standing UI annoyance where using a hotkey to undo a move would cause all of the revised move tiles to spawn in blank even if one of them spawned in directly beneath the current location of the mouse cursor, forcing the player to move the mouse off the tile to see the full move sequence displayed.

- fixed: Twirling a non-flying enemy into a chasm was not queueing up the requisite fatal falling damage.

- fixed: deployed units were set to face toward the central coordinates of a map, meaning that if a player deployed a character onto the very centermost tile of the map, at the start of battle, the game would temporarily assign them a facing direction of "None" and replace their sprite with a placeholder sprite until they moved. Freshly deployed characters now try to face toward the closest enemy on the map instead.

- fixed: if you dismissed a character with a truly excessively long custom name, the name could spill over onto the second line of the confirmation window and obscure the warning about how they'll be gone permanently.

- fixed: when generating special relationship labels for characters created from an existing character's NPC pool, if the characters were related, their relationship labels were getting inappropriately swapped.

- fixed: when generating special relationship labels for characters created from an existing character's NPC pool, the special relationship label on the newly created unit re: the original character was not getting capitalized.

- fixed: one of the dialogue branches during the final confrontation was missing a portrait.

- fixed: when the game detected EndConvImmediately in branch 0 of dialogue and there wasn't a speaker or any dialogue text in that branch, it would recognize the dialogue as purely a vessel to run script actions and wouldn't display the dialogue menu even if the branch was changed to one where there is a speaker or dialogue text.

- fixed: the info bar could block certain tooltips in the army overview screen.

- fixed: certain, newer dialogue-processing variables were not being cloned when cloning dialogue-processing data.
#52
Together in Battle / Re: Together in Battle Dev Log
Last post by CraigStern - May 13, 2025, 07:29:33 AM
For the second post-launch patch:

- normal arena battles no longer end immediately when the last opponent falls; the game now checks for victory at the end of each turn.

- increased the Drake's Health boost from +18 to +23, reduced Energy gain from +2 to +1.

- the Prophet now gets +5 Strength instead of +4; the Protector now gets +8 Psy instead of +4.

- removed most of the trash-tier and "practice" weapons from random item drops. New rare item: Void Cloak. Essentially a Shadow Cloak, but dramatically more effective.

- species that canonically float (e.g. shadowlings, spirits) now have an attribute that, when a portrait is displayed for a character of that species, causes the game to automatically make the portrait glide when it moves.

- fixed: paper scraps with riddle lines on them were not being removed from character inventories upon exiting a cavern, and were stuck indefinitely eating up inventory space.

- fixed: randomly dropped leather boots and plated boots were showing up without a valid item image.

- fixed: even if the player somehow managed to win the game without ever meeting Ishita Svaamee, the game would show them her slide during the ending sequence anyway.

- fixed a long-standing UI annoyance where using a hotkey to select an attack would cause all of the red attack tiles to spawn in blank even if one of them spawned in directly beneath the current location of the mouse cursor, forcing the player to move the mouse off the tile and back onto it to see the hit reticle and damage prediction text.

- fixed: the Together in Battle demo was inappropriately connecting to Telepath Tactics Liberated's Steam workshop instead of Together in Battle's.

- fixed: spirits and golems could be chosen for the "slur" portion of the BPD Recruitment event.

- when used in battle, the RemoveItem script action now supports using "Army X" nomenclature for the character name parameter to stripped the named item from every character in the specified army.

- new condition: Combat Victory Check. By default, this is set to true, meaning that the game will check for victory after every combat exchange where a combatant dies. If it is set to false, the game will not check to see if victory conditions have been satisfied until the end of each turn (giving the player time to do any last-minute grabbing of fallen item sacks).


For future updates:

- barudit now learn Net Mastery as part of their early skill progression.

- wrote a seventh riddle for caverns.
#53
Together in Battle / Re: Together in Battle Dev Log
Last post by CraigStern - May 12, 2025, 06:53:56 AM
- added Cancel buttons at every stage of the custom difficulty wizard to let the player opt out instead of finishing selecting all the options.

- increased the energy cost of Cut from 1 to 2 and the damage from 50% of Strength to 30% of Strength.

- began writing a new, distinct response type reacting to character hobby lines.

- the Tab key now replicates the "next character" function of the mouse wheel in character screens and the reserve supplies window.

- wrote a new rainstorm narration for Disciplined characters.

- wrote another variant for Teach Response dialogue.

- fixed a typo in one of the sad info response lines.

- fixed: due to a scripting mistake, guessing the wrong answer to a riddle during cavern exploration would cause the game to reveal the answer.

- added documentation for the -HOBBYVERB- special character.

- new special characters: -CHAR2HOBBY-, -CHAR2HOBBYTXT-, -CHAR2HOBBYVERB-, -CHAR2LIKE-, and -CHAR2LIKETXT-, allowing a reacting character to reference their own likes in proc gen dialogue.

- fixed: a couple of null errors could occur when triggering a chain of exploding satchel charges.

- fixed: a cavalier could charge directly onto a tile with elevation 2 greater than the second-to-last tile, so long as the charge started on a tile no less than 1 elevation below the ending tile.

- fixed: a cavalier could charge and hit a tile with elevation 2 greater than the second-to-last tile, so long as the charge started on a tile no less than 1 elevation below the ending tile.

- fixed: narration about a character running out into the rain during the rainstorm event could continue to show the inside of the tent.

- fixed: narration about a wounded character during the rainstorm event could continue to show rain particle effects if the preceding character was a golem or someone otherwise outdoors.

- fixed: golems and spirits could be inappropriately chosen for certain two-character camp activities.

- fixed: the game never set the default move type for unique generated characters created via the GenerateUnique script action, causing these units to have their move type permanently set to "Swimming" when attempting to reset the unit's current move type upon emerging from water.

- fixed: backgrounds that normally provide an additional physical trait were not doing so for custom characters.

- fixed: when playing with gamepad and creating a new custom character, canceling out of the new character screen did not return gamepad focus to the custom character browser.

- fixed: when creating a custom difficulty, the game would override your choice of time limit with 140 days.

- fixed a small typo in Rohit's dialogue when he gives the player a deck during the Festival of the Ascendant Lights.
#54
Together in Battle / Re: Suggestion: undeployed cha...
Last post by laurawoods - May 12, 2025, 03:10:51 AM
Which specific daytime activities do you think would be most beneficial or interesting for undeployed characters to participate in, and how might they impact gameplay balance?
#55
Together in Battle / Re: Together in Battle Dev Log
Last post by CraigStern - May 11, 2025, 08:26:39 AM
For the second post-launch patch:

- reconfigured the barudit's late skill progression to ensure they more consistently get a greater variety of skills.

- barudit now learn either Nimble Stance or Defiant Stance instead of Preemptive Stance or Defiant Stance.

- new skill: Quick Shove. Shove, but it costs 2 energy and doesn't end the turn. Barudit and Prophets now learn this.
#56
Together in Battle / Re: Together in Battle Dev Log
Last post by CraigStern - May 10, 2025, 10:11:47 AM
- fixed: when playing with gamepad, the recruitment menu was off by 1 when disabling character portraits upon recruitment.

- fixed some graphical errors with hair layering for generic male kineticist, generic female cryokineticist, generic female psy healer, and generic assassin portraits.

- fixed a graphical error with the masking for generic female photokineticists.

- fixed: Secret line 17 could be generated in a variant too long for the dialogue box.

- fixed: unintended species could be generated with Secret line 03.
#57
Together in Battle / Re: Together in Battle Dev Log
Last post by CraigStern - May 09, 2025, 08:29:53 AM
- improved the quality of item sacks thrown by fans in the crowd as the player advances up the leagues.

- gave the Barudit class an additional early proficiency in Health or Dodge.

- Blackguards now gain +8 bonus Health instead of +5.

- Wyrms now gain +6 bonus Strength instead of +5.

- increased the Prophet's Dodge boost from +25 to +30.

- Protectors are now guaranteed to learn Far Shield.

- when using script actions to spawn units within a randomized range of spaces, the game will now check ahead to ensure that environmental hazard tiles are not chosen for the spawn spot, and will pick the closest safe space to the one randomly chosen.

- AI improvement: the game now considers Disarmed, Slowed, and Sick status effects less valuable when scoring moves.

- AI improvement: the game now factors in space damage on all AI levels, not just the highest one.

- fixed: golems and spirits could react to an ally cooking dinner.

- fixed: in some circumstances in caravan defense missions, it was possible for caravan guards to spawn already submerged in water.

- fixed: camp activities for novelists and toymakers had a formatting error in their camp activities that caused the game to throw an error when holding a one-on-one with them in camp.

- AI fix: the AI valued actions applying Disarmed status to targets who were already disarmed.

- AI fix: the AI was not recognizing chasm tiles as potentially damaging units who moved over them (even while temporarily levitating).
#58
Telepath Tactics Liberated (2022) / Re: Feras Room Bug
Last post by CraigStern - May 08, 2025, 09:51:02 AM
The map does take up inventory space; I wouldn't call it an oversight so much as a design decision.
#59
Together in Battle / Re: Together in Battle Dev Log
Last post by CraigStern - May 08, 2025, 09:49:42 AM
- item tooltips for weapons now list the uses left out of the weapon's maximum.

- fixed: due to a scripting change, it had become possible to hire out guards or explorers more than once in a day.

- fixed: item tooltips could say "1 uses left."

- fixed: unique portraits with poseable mouths but no support for skin or hair hue-shifting could get their mouths "stained" in their Actions Bar portrait in battle if the last proc gen unit to be selected before them was a spriggat.
#60
Telepath Tactics Liberated (2022) / Re: Feras Room Bug
Last post by joshuaking - May 08, 2025, 02:15:02 AM
Is the inventory limit supposed to prevent Emma from picking up key items like the map, or is that an oversight?