Together in Battle Dev Log

[CraigStern]

Dropbox produced conflicted versions of certain game files on my desktop last night, necessitating a few hours of confusion followed by deletion, renaming, and reconnection of assets to get everything working again. That SNAFU aside:

-- fixed: bridges in proc gen maps weren't being spawned with unique IDs, producing weird bugs when mousing over (or otherwise interacting with) them.

[CraigStern]

-- calendar now has a two-phase click reaction; if you click during the day-change animation now, it skips to showing the calendar instead of ending the scene entirely. If you click while the calendar is showing, however, it progresses to the next scene as normal.

-- tweaked the speed values of attack projectiles to make them feel more impactful.

-- added a new projectile to the game for the Spear attack. (It's a spear.)

-- fixed: the game was not accurately gauging distance to target for projectile VFX, leading to wildly disparate projectile travel speeds depending on facing direction. (Most notably, up-facing attacks traveled noticeably slower than in every other direction.)

-- fixed an error in the logic for the rewritten Kill-All Victory condition.

-- fixed: character babble could be unintentionally cut off via the Wait script action.

[CraigStern]

Gave Georgi a bunch of portrait feedback! Also:

-- the game now plays a "nope" sound if you try to change a character's equipment after their turn has ended.

-- fixed: null error in the character creator caused by the switch to the new proc gen dialogue system.

-- fixed: range error in the character creator when browsing pages of accessories for portraits.

[CraigStern]

-- responses to character dialogue are now regenerated after each use to decrease repetition.

-- fixed: second-character pronouns (heshe2, himer2, etc.) weren't getting processed properly.

-- fixed: the game was using the wrong approach type for characters whose familiarity rating put them past the greeting dialogue stage.

-- fixed: items weren't responding to mouse clicks due to a bug I accidentally introduced earlier today.

-- fixed: the first proc gen battle didn't have a nextBattle parameter.

-- fixed: the bandit side quest battle was locking up due the accidental addition of a second OnLoaded dialogue.

-- fixed a typo in one of the Awkward character lines.

-- fixed: the character creator was throwing a null error when confirming character dialogue entries due to changes in character dialogue generation elsewhere in the code.

-- fixed: the character creator had stopped generating generic characters successfully due to changes elsewhere in the code.

-- fixed: a typo in the CharAttributes XML file was causing weird errors.

[CraigStern]

-- the game now has generic placeholder lines for when it can't find character dialogue it needs. (Before, the game would just effectively freeze when this happened.)

-- fixed: a variety of circumstances where the game could run into null errors when trying to format dialogue for characters missing certain parameters (like tic and laugh lines).

[CraigStern]

Back to focusing on the Telepath Tactics remake!

-- spent hours working on the free-roaming bandit fortress section. However, it's clear that that sequence is going to require a lot of work on various aspects of the engine, so I'm skipping over it for the moment to get more scenes working using the core stuff that's already in-engine.

-- got the bandit fortress outer wall battle working.

-- fixed: it was possible for dialogue without a specified Conv ID to retrigger itself mid-dialogue by performing script actions that theoretically trigger new dialogue (such as opening a door), thereby trapping the game in a loop.

-- fixed: the game was tying triggered instances of dialogue to the parent dialogue data, which could result in errors trying to access the dialogue after removing it from the triggered dialogue queue.

[CraigStern]

-- got the five short cut scenes that follow the bandit fortress outer wall battle working!

[CraigStern]

Created a spreadsheet with every scene in Telepath Tactics to chart my progress getting them all working in the new engine.

-- reformatted the remaining shop cut scenes from Telepath Tactics to work in the new engine.

-- wrote some new attack barks and variations for personality traits that had fewer than others.

By my count, I've now got 39 scenes out of 79 total scenes working in the Telepath Tactics main campaign.

[CraigStern]

Recreated the Five Guardians battle in the Telepath Tactics main campaign.

[CraigStern]

Gave Georgi a ton of portrait feedback over the past few days!

-- Burning no longer stacks; applying additional Burning status to a Burning target will now merely extend the duration of existing Burning.

-- fixed: camp activities would display a "blank" portrait for some narration that didn't have a particular character attached.

-- fixed: the fix to dialogue retriggering itself midway through resulted in the game not recognizing that conversations had ended at all in some circumstances.

-- fixed: the game would not remove the grass patch objective reticle in the Qualifier if you skipped certain steps in the tutorial due to certain script actions referencing the wrong coordinates.

[CraigStern]

-- made bushes, trees, and other living plants more resistant to Pierce damage.

-- fixed: the shop tutorial had certain elements misaligned.

[CraigStern]

Geez, this month has just been terrible for productivity--so much time has been eaten up by having to watch videos to meet my requirement for 30.0 hours of CLE credits! Still, I'm making little bits of progress; mainly a lot of artist feedback. (Good grief are there ever a lot of portrait assets to remake.)

[CraigStern]

I've received the last of the proc gen portrait art from Georgi! While he works on the generic unit and unique character portraits, I'm going through and replacing the old assets with the new ones.

-- heads can be positioned and scaled along the x and y axes just like other portrait elements now!

-- got the new portrait assets for proc gen golem characters in-game and working.

[CraigStern]

-- began the process of incorporating the new proc gen human portrait assets into the game.

-- added dents and scratches to generated golem portraits.

[CraigStern]

-- got male and female human portrait assets in-game and with updated positioning data.