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A new engine!

Started by CraigStern, June 05, 2016, 05:39:11 PM

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CraigStern

-- the game now displays an animated experience bar when characters practice at night to show them accumulating experience.

-- incorporated new nose and hair style assets into character portrait generation, plus a new hair color.

-- fixed a medley of small issues with character portrait generation that were bugging me.

-- fixed a gap in character dialogue.

-- fixed a bug where the game wouldn't save character rosters after exiting certain scenes.

CraigStern

-- the game now has your characters consume food at the end of each day; if you run out of food before everyone is fully fed, group morale takes a significant hit and your characters lose energy. (You'll get a narrative description of the discontent as well.)

-- the game now has a display that tracks your food levels and tells you how much food your units are currently consuming per day.

-- baking now produces food.

-- hunting now produces more food, but at the cost of energy.

-- the gardening nighttime activity is now in the game. It does nothing most of the time--but 1 out of every 8 times, it results in a harvest that creates a bunch of food!

CraigStern

-- the game now dynamically positions animated experience bars by the portrait of whichever character they apply to at nighttime.

-- nighttime activities that raise or lower health or energy now produce their own animated bars illustrating the effects as well.

CraigStern

-- character likes are now divided into 2 types: hobbies and miscellaneous. A hobby gives the character a distinct nighttime activity that they can either perform a) alone, or b) with another character to boost their relationship. Each character gets one hobby and one miscellaneous like each upon generation.

-- added new nighttime activities Bird Watching, Play Board Game, Play Word Game, Play Sports, Knit, and Carve Wood.

CraigStern

-- characters no longer counterattack in response to backstabs (both making backstabs more tactically useful and making counterattacks more useful as well, as counterattacks will no longer make the counterattacker vulnerable to multiple melee-range backstabs in the same turn).

-- units can now level-up during nighttime.

-- added support for the Escape hotkey in nighttime, where it now advances dialogue or closes the level-up screen when pressed (and if there's no dialogue or level-up screen, it advances you to the next narrated activity)

-- the nighttime activity Treat Wounds now hastens the recovery of all characters with a Wound Level greater than 1. It now cannot be chosen unless at least one other character has a Wound level greater than 1.

CraigStern

Yesterday and this morning were devoted to AI!

-- finally forced myself to sit down and code the AI routines for determining how a unit should move when there's no target currently in attack range. Such units now find a destination scored by its proximity to the target, by the target's value, and by the relative safety of the destination space.

-- did some more work toward creating custom AI profiles for different commanders in battle.

-- coded a "dumber" AI routine in the style of the original Telepath Tactics, where the game just randomizes unit order and finds the best move for the next character in order without ranking the value of its best move against those of any other character in that army. (To be used on the lower difficulty settings.)

CraigStern

-- the cursor now changes to an hourglass when entering an AI-controlled player's turn, and returns to an arrow when that player's turn ends.

CraigStern

--the AI will now have a unit grab the item sack on their space if they've moved onto a space with an item sack.

CraigStern

-- there is now a half-second delay when moving the mouse to the edge of the screen before camera panning kicks in. (This ensures that the camera doesn't move around from incidental, unintended mouse movement.)

CraigStern

#279
-- there is now a New Turn pop-up that shows up onscreen to let you know when it's a new player's turn.

-- there is now a Victory pop-up that shows up onscreen at the end of a battle to let you know which player has won the battle.

--for units with low health, the AI now calculates a "bonus" based on each destination's proximity to allied healers when scoring long-range moves. The more badly injured the unit is (and the more that that particular AI cares about healing injured units), the more heavily it will weigh each potential destination's healer proximity.

-- after shuffling a unit's skill progression order during the generation process, the last skill in the character's progression is now removed. This will cause each character of a given class to be more distinct, and will leave more room for characters of the same class to teach each other skills if they grow close over the course of the game.

CraigStern

-- the game now checks victory conditions (Defeat Army / Kill-All Victory) and loss conditions (Protect Char / losing all of one's units) whenever characters die in combat and at the start of each new turn. If one of these conditions is found to have been triggered, it then displays the victory screen (or a defeat screen).

-- clicking the Victory Box now takes you directly to nighttime.

-- when units are defeated in combat, they now take a hit to their morale. (The damage to the unit's morale is equal to 2, plus 1 for every two Wound Levels they've taken, to a maximum decrement of 6.)

-- implemented the Delay Maneuvers condition in battle.

CraigStern

-- player characters can now level-up during the enemy turn; the game will pause while you review the changes, and the enemy turn will resume thereafter.

-- the game now gracefully handles characters leveling up after they deliver a match-winning blow; any level-ups happen first, and only afterwards does the victory box appear.

-- you can now add an [E] to the end of an item name within a <Unit> tag in a map to have the game spawn that character with that item already equipped.

-- tweaked Engineer character generation so that all Engineers start level 1 already knowing either Build Wood Bridge or Build Barricade.

-- fixed a bug that was causing unique portraits to not display for characters loaded from a saved game.

-- fixed a bug in how the level-up screen displayed stats that both received a proficiency boost and increased by normal means.

-- fixed a bug in which generated characters that came with generated equipment would start off auto-equipped with them even if they lacked the necessary masteries.

-- fixed a formatting issue where the last line of each stat tooltip was sometimes getting cut off, depending on display settings.

-- annoyingly, I had to redo all of the male frost spriggat rest and walk sprite animations for some reason.

CraigStern

#282
-- posted a Kickstarter update summarizing many of the development milestones I hit over the past year: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1426761469/telepath-tactics-a-strategy-rpg/posts/1781158

-- added a defensive facing algorithm to the AI; AI-controlled characters now turn their backs (if they can still rotate) to protect themselves against backstabs at the end of their turn.

-- fixed a thing in character generation such that characters of classes without physical attack skills will no longer be generated with a Strength growth above 0.

CraigStern

Spent the past week or so getting the site (and these forums) back in proper working order after my host screwed everything up while migrating to a new server--but with that done, it's back to developing! Gave artist feedback on some new work-in-progress 3D terrain today.

CraigStern

-- characters now support a "current mood," with duration (number of days they'll be in the mood) and power (a number reflecting how strong a subsequent mood has to be to override it). This will be used to mark characters with a sort of "temporary personality trait" that affects their behavior.

-- wrote narration for the "Disappear" activity, to be used by characters who are in mourning.