Developer's Log

[CraigStern]

--fixed a bug wherein the game had stopped displaying text overlays for the appropriate amount of time whenever AI characters used items

[CraigStern]

--the Coria Bridge battle is now completable! There's also a little scripted event where an enemy engineer lays explosive charges on the bridge, which her allies then detonate to take a chunk out of the battlefield. Or at least, there's supposed to be--it's not working quite right just yet. I'll try to get it working tomorrow night.

--new script action: IfPathClearRun. This checks to see if a particular character has a clear movement path to a particular space; if so, the game runs a script. This action has four parameters: Character Name, Y coordinate, X coordinate, and Script Name. If the named character has a path to the battlefield coordinates you specified, the named script is run.

--fixed a bug where the game would freeze if you tried to move a character to a space using the MoveChar action and the character could not actually move there

--fixed a bug where if you accidentally clicked on weather particles while trying to click-and-drag the battlefield, the battlefield would not be dragged

[CraigStern]

--finished the Coria Bridge Battle. This one was a little tougher to balance than I first thought, scripting that part where the engineer lays the explosive charges was way harder than I thought it would be. Well, no matter--it's done!

--wrote a cut scene introduction to the apple-picking forest battle.

--the game now handles the character sprite loading process more efficiently; hopefully this should reduce memory leakage and lead to better performance over long play sessions.

--the game no longer makes water splash particles when objects or characters spawn on a bridge atop water or lava.

[CraigStern]

--balanced the apple-gathering battle to make it a bit easier (gave the player 8 characters to work with instead of 7; each tree gives 4 apples instead of 3, and you have to collect 11 apples instead of 9)

--balanced the "five guardians" battle to make it slightly easier (removed the bandages from all the enemies but Vitalia Spring)

--new cut scene following the apple battle and providing context for the second visit with Goniff Bastid

--new dialog in the second scene with Goniff Bastid providing context for the "five guardians" fight

--blocked out the geometry and some basic features of the port city of Coria. There is going to be a really epic battle here, folks.

[CraigStern]

--made more progress on Coria

--fixed a bug where campaign roster changes made in cut scenes would not stick if you quit and reloaded the game before beating the next battle

[CraigStern]

--created some concave water-grass and water-dirt transition tiles; I'd been badly wanting these, but they weren't in the default Grass tileset. (The dirt ones are shown below.)

--created a 3-minute gameplay video showing off the Hills of Coria battle

[CraigStern]

--drafted the battle with Ebon Raban in the streets of Coria! (That's 6 battles drafted; I'll aim to draft two more in the next two days. 8 new battles with attendant character dialog and cut scenes in a month is pretty respectable, right? I'd say that's at least comparable to 10 battles with no new cut scenes or dialog.)

--new dialog with Meridian when meeting Goniff Bastid for the second time; she receives Art Materials that improve her perception, psy defense, and psy power by 1, and her accuracy by 10%.

--you can now use -ANY- for the second parameter in an OnCharDeath or OnCharAttacked trigger. In combination with a specific character named in the fourth parameter, this'll let you trigger dialog based solely on the attacker rather than on the character attacked. (I'm taking advantage of this to have Ebon Raban issue a little quip when he first attacks someone.)

--you can now use ID[] tags with any of the character name parameters in OnCharDeath or OnCharAttacked triggers.

[CraigStern]

--new item: wing armor. Makes spriggats less vulnerable to piercing weapons--and thus, more viable as front-line fighters.

[CraigStern]

--game now automatically detects characters who must be protected and auto-deploys them at the start of deployment mode, even if the character is really far back in your roster

[CraigStern]

--created a draft of a new battle: the fight against Umber Gnawbone in the basement of the Coria Dogs headquarters!

--created two new recruitable characters: Naila Hashmal and Oliver Spenks.

[CraigStern]

--animated the cast animation for the male and female Photokurios (promoted Photokineticist)

[CraigStern]

--created an initial draft of a stealth battle with the lissit where they must infiltrate a camp and assassinate someone under cover of night

--created new unique weapon: Fangiss Ka, Silithis's mace!

--the Promoted tag is now taken into account for purposes of character level requirements for equipping items

[CraigStern]

--added some character dialog to the new Gulch battle

--new character tag: Trigger. This lets you associate a trigger with a destructible object right in ObjClasses.xml. I'll be using this for traps, since they'll always be triggering the same scripts from PersistentDialog.xml no matter what scene they appear in.

[CraigStern]

--new attack: Place Snare Trap. Lets you place a snare trap on the battlefield. Here's a video!

--fixed a bug where computer-controlled enemies would simply continue their turn after wandering right onto a trap that froze or stunned them

--fixed a bug where you could get yourself killed in the training battle with Silithis by attacking Sabrina

--fixed a bug where the game would overwrite Trigger tags with null triggers when spawning characters via Create attacks

--fixed an issue where some of the game's items still used "Lizardman" as race and class requirements even though I'd long since renamed the race and class to "Lissit"

--fixed a bug in which equipping a new item to an occupied slot would result in the game popping up text displaying both the stat changes from unequipping the old item and the stat changes from equipping the new item simultaneously


Updated the game's installers online!

[CraigStern]

--new cut scene background: tent interior!