Together in Battle Dev Log

[CraigStern]

- the game now previews non-collision knockback paths as well.

- Blinded characters can now only see 1 space through fog of war regardless of their Perception stat.

- fixed: fog of war would not auto-update after equipping (or unequipping) a torch in battle.

- fixed: fog of war would not auto-update after using SetStat to change a character's Perception or Coords in battle.

- new script action: AddBark. Dynamically adds a new combat bark to a character's stable of barks.

[CraigStern]

- new job type added to the jobs board: Card Tourney. Pay an entry fee to participate in a Psy Clash tournament against a series of proc gen opponents; win the tournament and take home a cash prize!

[CraigStern]

- new rare item: Mycelium Drops. Permanently increases a character's Psy by 1. Added them to the shops under the same circumstances as Salubrious Draughts and Protein Pellets.

- finished polishing up the Card Tourney job type.

- buffed the Shadowling card for Psy Clash; it how has health 3 when first played.

- cards in Psy Clash can now affect a minion's stats with more than one operation.

- fixed: the Cryokineticist minion in Psy Clash could send enemy power into the negatives, causing their attacks to heal him.

[CraigStern]

- Psy Clash cards can now drop as loot during battles!

- the runScripts attribute for items can now contain custom script parameters! Just like with the Run script action, add a comma, a parameter name, a second comma, and then a parameter value to pass a parameter to the script that gets run.

- increased the spawn rate of special weapons like rapiers in the shop.

- gave Lunge a range of 2 and a move-to-target behavior; increased Lunge's damage output from 1.5x strength to 1.75x strength.

- fixed: the dialogue input screen would accept a reply containing no text.

[CraigStern]

- began laying groundwork for a new item usability type: Gift.

- fixed: the deployment screen would show the option to switch to a second (empty) page of characters if the player's roster was exactly 18 units in size.

- fixed: the reserve supplies screen would show the option to switch to a second (empty) page of characters if the player's roster was exactly 18 units in size.

[CraigStern]

- created the cut scene prelude to the next investigation mission.

- started creating the actual battle.

- new destructible objects: Jug and Planter. Jug comes in two variants (empty and full of water), while Planter comes in four varieties (full of just dirt, or planted with arum lilies, ferns, or a palm tree).

- fixed: the map editor was inappropriately replacing special characters within army values when loading a saved battle map, causing custom strings and the like to be wiped.

[CraigStern]

- reduced the maximum health of thinner cave walls to 99 to make brute-force solutions to the optional objective in the Dissident's Den battle more feasible.

- made the dissident interrogation a little more flexible in how you can navigate the dialogue.

- new skill exclusive to the royal guard: Shield Bash. Low crushing damage with knockback 1 and a chance of stunning.

- new destructible objects: modular Rugs! Variants of the Rug object that seamlessly connect together to create rugs of arbitrary size and shape.

- new sound effect: Ceramic Breaking. Plays when destroying jugs and ceramic planters.

- buffed most of the highest-cost Psy Clash cards.

- got attack animations for Prince Ajit's battle sprite in-game.

- fixed: it was possible for the game to trigger the top AI move twice if scripted character movement occurred at the start of the enemy turn.

- fixed: one of the replies during the Prince Ajit interrogation linked to the wrong dialogue branch.

- fixed: the loadID for Grapple Pull contained a typo.

- right-clicking a destructible object present on the battlefield in the map editor now works like right-clicking open terrain, initiating a camera drag-pan.

[CraigStern]

- spent a lot of time balancing and polishing up the new intrigue mission.

- the level-up screen now has an animation for when characters learn new counterattacks.

- new tag supported: ForceGender. One parameter: gender. Forces the tagged instance of a premade generic unit with an 'Either' gender attribute to spawn with the gender specified.

- fixed: under circumstances where the AI was controlling more than 8 characters in the same army, if an AI-controlled character in that army died on its own turn (typically from an enemy counterattack), the AI would inappropriately skip the turn of the next character in order.

- fixed: units afflicted with the Frozen status effect could nonetheless regain energy on their turns.

- fixed: prior fixes had once again broken the game's ability to pick out the correct unit for displaying the talk symbol and producing unit babble in battle when multiple units shared its name (even when using a script ID in place of a name).

[CraigStern]

After a nice little holiday vacation (which my girlfriend insisted I not do any game dev work during 😅), I'm back!

I gave artist feedback on some new backgrounds. In addition:

- received, incorporated new cut scene background for card tournaments.

- did some final polishing and balancing of the new intrigue mission, wrote the end-of-battle dialogue (with variants depending on your success with in-battle objectives).

- fixed: Binoculars had stopped working due to a bug fix from a prior update.

- fixed: when cloning a unit in the campaign editor, the editor would add an attribute called "nodeCategory" to the cloned unit, thereby causing the engine to not be able to parse the XML file containing all of the custom campaign units and seeming to wipe out the units list.

- fixed: the area preference tag wasn't being applied to long-term moves that caused the character to stop within the named area on their way to a destination outside the area.

[CraigStern]

More artist feedback!

Changes for version 0.4.50:

- you can now rename characters! Hold a one-on-one with the character you want to rename and choose "We need to change your name" to have that conversation with them.

- massively decreased the amount of time the game spends reprocessing character dialogue upon renaming a unit.

- updated the fruit tree sprite so that it has a different silhouette from the regular tree, making it easier to spot (especially for colorblind players).

- created an alternate fruit tree sprite with orange-yellow fruits, made it the sprite for mango trees.

- new, small jug variant made.

- fixed: the game was not updating data for the trigger character or the secondary character in dialogue after updating their stats via a SetStat action.

- AI fix: the game would consider 0-move destinations for Swim, which could potentially lock the game into an endless loop of an AI unit using Swim and not actually moving anywhere with it.

[CraigStern]

- the Psy Clash deck viewer now lets you deactivate cards you don't want to use in your deck (and/or reactivate cards you previously deactivated).

- received, incorporated new desert and forest battle backgrounds.

- added a bunch of newer sound and image assets to the AssetNames.xml file for use in the campaign creator.

- fixed: the investigation progress tracker wasn't being set upon completing the witness protection battle, letting the player go back to the palace and replay it ad infinitum.

- fixed: the army overview button was missing from the Card Tourney scene.

[CraigStern]

- new script action supported: NextFrame. Automatically ends any dialogue that may be open and advances to the next frame of the current cut scene.

[CraigStern]

- added gamepad support to the deck viewer screen.

- added multiple-operations support to the SetStat script action. (For instance, you can now call SetStat/Alan Basilleaf,Health,+:10,*:2,c:50 all in one go.)

- fixed: characters were still returning from the Infirmary one day early because I "fixed" it last time via adding a second mathematical operation to SetStat when it did not yet support running multiple mathematical operations at once.

[CraigStern]

- received a new "dark alley" background, integrated it into the game.

- added several of the newer background assets to the AssetNames.xml file for use in the campaign creator.

[CraigStern]

- added a new difficulty setting between Challenging and Brutal: Challenging+. It's identical to Challenging, but cranks the enemy AI up to maximum difficulty.

- added gamepad support for the View Deck button and Deck Viewer screen.

- if Heavy status wears off while a flying character is dunked in water or lava, they no longer immediately return to flying movement--they must now swim to shore first.

- fixed: the team leader in the Monkey league Qualifier could start moving too early due to the AI detecting an item hidden in one of the bushes.

- fixed: in some circumstances, the animation for dropping a flyer into water or lava could play much too slowly.

- fixed: in some circumstances where a unit took a long time making a move on the battlefield destined to be interrupted by a trap, the game would start calculating the next move for that unit before the move was finished, without taking the trap's effects into account.

- fixed: missing-space typo due to localization implementation in the reserve supplies screen when asking the player if they want a character to automatically equip multiple new equippable items.

- fixed: the gamepad cursor logic could get confused when playing Psy Clash using the gamepad, resulting in the wrong card being deemed selected and leading to range errors.