Together in Battle Dev Log

[CraigStern]

- new cutscene background added to the game: Blacksmith.

- updated Make Weapon camp activity narrations to make use of the Blacksmith background.

- added icons to the main daytime menu options in Kalkerapur.

- added icons to the main evening menu options in Camp, and to the main dialogue options during a one-on-one.

- reworked Engine Boost: it is now usable only once per turn, increasing maximum movement by 67% (i.e. by 2 for most golems) at the cost of 5 energy.

- puddles now spawn with water particles instead of smoke.

- reworded the bit in the introductory scene where the game asks if you want to enable manual saving so that people who think "roguelite" means "a game where you get a choice of 3 upgrades sometimes and also there's vertical progression" don't get confused.

- fixed: one of the character responses to being renamed slightly exceeded the available space for text.

- fixed: placing traps, bridges, and barricades had begun spawning spark particles after the last update.

- new special character added to the game: -ATKMOVETYPE-. Lets you check whether the current skill's move type is Normal, Parabolic, Teleport, ToTarget, WithTarget, or Special.

[CraigStern]

More artist feedback.

- began writing and scripting a blacksmith scene!

- extended the game's shop interface to support browsing and repairing weapons that have uses missing.

- new script action: ShowBlacksmith. This calls up the shop interface in "blacksmith mode", displaying weapons possessed by the group which are below their maximum uses left. Clicking a weapon in this mode causes it to be repaired in exchange for the repair cost (equal to the proportion of max uses to be repaired times the weapon's original sale price).

- new sound effect: Hammering.

- wrote a second "you have no characters" camp narration variant.

- changed the way Whetstones work: instead of providing +1 Strength for the rest of the battle, they permanently add +1 Strength to the user's current equipped weapon. They can now only be used once.

- whetstones are now rarer and more expensive.

- toned down the power scaling on Self-Repair: it now restores health equal to 1.5x Strength instead of 2.5x Strength.

- fixed: certain text sprites (such as Regenerating, Strength, or Talkable) had faint lines appear near the edges of the image due to trilinear filtering bleed from adjacent icons in the spritesheet.

- fixed: certain messages in the shop interface were missing localization support.

- fixed: the "no one is in camp" narration text was missing localization support.

[CraigStern]

Spent a ton of time trying to get an automatic online bug reporting feature working, but after about 6 hours of struggling with the decidedly unhelpful error reporting capabilities of PHP and MySQL, I am admitting defeat (at least for now) and implementing the following:

- the main menu now has a Report an Issue button; pressing it saves a log file and opens the Together in Battle "Bug Reports" forum on Steam.

- it is now possible for equipment-modifying items to add one or more tags to equipment.

- new weapon-modifying item: Counterweight. Permanently adds +5 accuracy to the user's current equipped weapon.

- new weapon-modifying item: Poison Sheath. Permanently adds tags to the user's current equipped weapon causing its skills to deal 1 bonus Poison damage and to have a chance of imparting Poisoned status.

- new weapon-modifying item: Reinforcing Spine. Permanently adds +5 maximum uses to the user's current equipped weapon.

[CraigStern]

- got in-game bug reporting up and working! Special thanks to Ross Przybylski for the PHP and SQL tips.

- added gamepad (and virtual keyboard) support to the Report an Issue screen.

- when using the virtual keyboard, the game now displays a flashing caret in the associated input text box as if the box were actually selected.

- fixed: gamepad focus on the virtual keyboard would get overriden by the underlying dialogue tree when input text was enabled in the very first branch of dialogue.

- fixed: the dialogue interface's virtual keyboard gamepad navigation was not working as intended when used in battles.

[CraigStern]

Together in Battle is now SteamDeck verified!

- new weapon-modifying item: Oil-Filled Sheath. Permanently adds tags to the user's current equipped weapon causing its skills to deal 1 bonus Heat damage and have a chance of imparting Burning status.

- new destructible object set added to the game: Sandstone castle walls.

- renamed the StairsLimestone destructible object set to StairsSandstone for the sake of consistency.

- cleaned up the shop interface a bit: the text that notes when you've bought or sold something can no longer overlap with the page-swapping buttons, and is now far less likely to end up truncated.

- fixed a few bugs that were preventing tag-granting item modifiers from working as intended.

- fixed: the map editor was spawning Blank game objects whenever new units were placed on the map.

[CraigStern]

- new skill button graphic: Clothing.

- the character creator now allows you to manually set the clothing used by character portraits.

- the character creator now allows you to manually set the scale for character portraits when they appear in dialogue (from 50% up to 125% of normal size).

- improved click detection for portrait accessory and clothing buttons in their respective character creator submenus.

- added support for Max Uses and Tag as Attributes to Alter in the item editor within the campaign creation suite.

- updated the item editor's built-in guides to include Max Uses and Tag (with added explanation on how to use the latter).

- fixed: with the introduction of differing portrait scales for proc gen characters, the character creator could start to progressively shrink the preview portrait when cycling through different features.

- fixed: deprecated palette code could sometimes cause null errors to pop up when adding certain accessories to portraits for certain characters in the character creator.

- fixed: the Jwalaa item graphic was misnamed in AssetNames, and was therefore not showing up in the item graphics browser.

- fixed: loading a saved game mid-scene, stairs could end up counting themselves for purposes of determining base elevation, thereby raising themselves up higher than the terrain calls for (and potentially making themselves untraversable).

[CraigStern]

- new sound effect added: Plant Rustle.

- tall grasses now make rustling noises when characters walk onto or through them.

- fixed: the character creator could list duplicates in the class selection window.

- fixed: height was set incorrectly for the promoted cavalier lance and charge animations.

- fixed a typo in the default CharAttributes file that would cause the character creator to throw a range error when trying to randomly generate character dialogue.

[CraigStern]

- improved the weather visual effects for rain.

- fixed: the Blizzard weather effect was no longer displaying properly.

[CraigStern]

- wrote new investigation scene: interrogation of the palace armorer.

- the combat camera now pans over to the attack even if combat zoom is turned off, reducing graphical issues resulting from visual effect layering.

- you can now check your calendar and army overview during league match and qualifier scheduling scenes.

- added portrait animations to the Shadowling Grandpa event.

- added auto-looting to the Save Grandpa battle.

- personality-specific rest narrations are now much more likely to be chosen when a character chooses to rest in the evening.

- fixed: the "force name" feature for characters in proc gen map army groups was not being applied to units drawn from PremadeUnits.xml, only to units procedurally generated from scratch, resulting in the Dacoit Leader not being named as such in Caravan Defense maps.

- fixed: camp music was not returning to normal after receiving Prince Ajit's letter.

- fixed wording on a few personality-specific rest narrations.

- fixed the wording on a bit of Prince Ajit's interrogation dialogue.

- fixed: the order of the Combat Zoom setting options was switched in the localization file, causing 'Attacks Only' to be interpreted as 'Off' and vice versa.

- fixed: you could click an enemy to show their moveable spaces under fog of war.

[CraigStern]

Gave artist feedback on some new portraits.

- the blacksmith now supports renaming weapons!

- it is now possible to alter a piece of equipment's name via an equipment-altering consumable using Name as the attribute to alter.

- added support for Name as an Attribute to Alter in the item editor within the campaign creation suite.

- updated the item editor's built-in guides to include Name.

- fixed: a character portrait added to the left edge of the screen and that same portrait walking to the left edge of the screen would end up in positions about 5 pixels off from each other, occasionally leading to awkward transitions in camp.

[CraigStern]

More artist feedback.

- dialogue branches now support an attribute called "show single replies." This forces the game to show a reply button on this dialogue branch even if only a single reply remains--useful for moments when the player says or does a particular thing.

- refined and improved the armorer interrogation scene.

- received finished portraits for the blacksmith and a second character whose identity I am not going to reveal here. :)

- received new clothing for female human portraits: RoyalDese.

- received new clothing for male human portraits: Blacksmith.

- integrated the new portraits into the game and created positioning data for them.

- the jobs board now supports cooldown periods of more than just than 1 day before taken jobs have a chance of appearing again. There is now a 2-day cooldown on the Caravan Guard job and a 5-day cooldown on Cavern Exploration.

- fixed: the logic to prevent the same job (other than laboring) from showing up multiple days in a row on the jobs board was faulty.

[CraigStern]

- added support for enabling "show single replies" in dialogue branches within the game's dialogue editor. The map and cut scene editors now load and save these attributes correctly.

- new tag type supported: Patrol. This works like AreaPreference, but acts upon a looping sequence of areas for the character to prefer. Once the character reaches the first area in the sequence, their preference shifts to the next one, and so on.

- added a new skin tone that can be used for character portraits: Ruddy Brown.

- added three new eye colors that can be used for character portraits: Aqua, Red, and Violet.

- the blacksmith will now comment on your choice if you name a weapon after a particularly famous one (especially if it appeared in a Fire Emblem game), or if the name contains something dirty.

- fixed: the AI could disregard a valid move onto an AreaPreference space if no valid skill targets existed within range of the destination.

- fixed a null error in the cut scene and map editors caused by the game expecting the online bug reporting component to be present.

- fixed: in some circumstances, adding a row to a map could produce a null error.

[CraigStern]

- you can now Find Blacksmith in the main menu for Kalkerapur after interrogating the armorer.

- wrote the introductory cutscene for the blacksmith rescue quest.

- buffed the Sentinel class: they now gain a 75% chance to block with Defensive Stance instead of the normal 50% chance.

- the Defending status effect can now stack in its power and is hard-coded to disappear when a unit gains a new turn or becomes Enthralled.

- characters can now gossip about other teams in the arena when they talk in the evening.

- reduced the likelihood that characters will talk about the weather when they talk at camp.

- fixed: sometimes, the tooltip for an item's Give button wouldn't show up upon mousing over it.

- fixed: the in-battle pop up text showing experience gain from using a battle primer would scale the displayed experience against the resulting level rather than the level at the time of use, frequently resulting in it announcing less experience than was actually gained.

- fixed: in some circumstances, displaying dialogue in the cut scene editor could cause a null error due to the game attempting to call the gamepad menu navigator component.

- fixed: the tag granting the Kinetokurios the ability to inflict Weakened status via Kinetic Constriction was misformatted.

[CraigStern]

- buffed the Specter promoted class a bit: they now get +5 power to Drain in addition to the range and cost improvements.

- added a variant mood called "Heat Sick" with its own distinct narration to make it clear when a character is feeling sick due to working during a heat wave.

- the game no longer counts it as friendly fire if a character attacks an ally while Enthralled.

- fixed: due to a scripting oversight, hiring out a character as a laborer during a heat wave could throw a range error and cause the game to lock up.

- fixed: if a character was moved via a Teleport-type skill (such as Shadowport or Juxtapose), the game would not check to see if it should drop them into water, lava, or a chasm upon reaching their new position.

- fixed: you could undo after using a Move skill that also moves a second character (like Trade or Juxtapose).

- fixed: if you beat Battle in the Northern Stepwell without ever having someone speak to the kidnapped character, they would never return to your roster.

[CraigStern]

- finished creating a rough draft of the Blacksmith Rescue battle.

- adjusted Battle in the Northern Stepwell so the rescuee's remaining health is never enough to survive more than 5 rounds of drowning.

- status effect tooltips now dynamically display the actual power of the status effect conferred for those occasions where a status effect power differs from its ordinary default value.

- repositioned status effect tooltips within the character screen so the mouse cursor doesn't obscure any of the text.

- fixed mouseover zones for status effect icons in the character screen.

- fixed: you could trigger the Team Leader's Brother arena event more than once per playthrough.