Together in Battle Dev Log

[CraigStern]

- new arena battle condition that can appear starting in Gharial League: Attack the Idol. The player must destroy the enemy team's idol to win, with a strict time limit in place.

- the arena battle condition where fans request the player avoid using a skill now increases to forbid two skills when in Snow Leopard League or Tiger League.

- split out the multiplier for protecting targets from the self-interested defense weight in AI profiles.

- new AI profile: Protective. The army will heavily prioritize protecting units subject to a Protect Char condition over all other considerations.

- changed the ChangeArmyAI script action so that the first parameter now asks for army number instead of army name.

- fixed: the level of thieves spawning in the arena during Snow Leopard League remained unchanged from Gharial League.

[CraigStern]

- received, incorporated new "palace front" background into the game. (It now appears instead of the temple exterior background during scenes in front of the summer palace.)

- new arena battle condition that can appear starting in Gharial League: Inspirational Leader. The opposing team has a very strong unique named character as their team leader--as long as this character is on the field, the enemy team will have maximum morale (with its attendant energy recovery, damage, and accuracy boosts) and your own team's morale will be reduced by 3.

- adjusted default values to make proximity to targets needing protection more consequential in the AI's move-scoring algorithm.

- fixed: the new "maintain proximity to units that must be protected" AI weighting was not being applied to long-range AI moves (i.e. those where the character did not have a skill target immediately in range).

- fixed: destructible objects belonging to army 99 were being disregarded as targets by the AI even if an army was assigned to protect them.

- fixed a scripting error that would have frozen the game if a character undertook the Cook camp activity without a second character available to react to the food.

- fixed a scripting error that prevented individualized character morale penalties from occurring in reaction to a character's dismissal from the team.

[CraigStern]

Spruced up some old code to make an in-person convention demo for Chicago Indie Game Showcase tomorrow. :)

- wrote a new late-night random event that can occur depending on whether the player has recruited a spirit.

- the "weather" condition type for battles in Tiger League can now also produce snowstorms or fiery ash, not just rain.

- fixed: you could only set a single custom parameter in IfListHasRun actions unless the Check For Absence parameter was set to true.

- fixed: characters could start conversations with spirits beyond just the initial greeting.

- new script actions: IfTilesetGoTo and IfTilesetRun. Battle only. Checks if the map has a certain tileset, then runs the script if it does.

- camp activity narrations now support species and gender requirements for the second participating character.

- new mood types: Afraid, Angry, AnnoyedAt, and HappyAbout.

- created in-game documentation of the game's different mood types, now available in the Guide in the campaign creation suite.

[CraigStern]

Showed Together in Battle at CIGs yesterday--it's been a while since I did an in-person show, but it was super fun connecting with enthusiastic SRPG fans! Today, I created a Telepath RPG franchise page on Steam.

- increased the Perception stat for lit braziers created by engineers; they now reveal fog of war 3 tiles out instead of 2.

- fixed: you could right-click a character and open their character screen in the middle of an AI army's turn.

- fixed: there was no day log created for winning (or losing) the initial qualifier match--or the two hand-designed tutorial fights that follow it.

- fixed: a few pixels on the face of the female crossbowman sprite's downward-facing rest pose were not palette swapping.

[CraigStern]

- reduced the delay on showing each objective when auto-displaying objectives at the start of a battle significantly.

- the game no longer shows auto-displays objectives during the Qualifier tutorial map.

- new condition: Show Objectives. One boolean parameter. If set to false, the game won't auto-display the objectives for this map.

- fixed: when engaging the game's auto-move-and-attack behaviors, if the target wasn't in move-and-attack range of the top-scoring skill, the game simply wouldn't move the character or select a skill. Now, post-fix, if this happens the game goes through the selected character's other skills in descending order of effectiveness until it finds one that can reach the target, then auto-move-and-attacks with that skill.

- fixed: text set via the AddObjective script action was not being processed for special characters.

- fixed: AddSpeakerPortrait wouldn't work in branch 0 of dialogue if the speaker name was set to -FNAME- and the triggering character was assigned in branch 0's own script actions.

[CraigStern]

- the jobs board is no longer selectable from the main menu in town until Day 4 of the campaign. (This is to prevent new players from rushing off on caravan guard or cavern exploration jobs and getting absolutely wrecked before they've even finished the tutorials.)

- fixed: there was no sound assigned to play when clicking the reserve supplies button in the deployment screen.

- fixed: in the infirmary, if a character could be treated and released that same day, the narration would read "0 day" instead of "0 days" for the duration of their stay.

- fixed the spelling of the character name Soumil in the character name bank.

[CraigStern]

- received new cutscene background for the summer palace kitchen, incorporated it into the game.

- when starting a new game in a slot that already contains a saved game, the game now specifies which slot you are about to overwrite in the warning message.

- when saving mid-battle in a slot that already contains a saved game, the game now specifies which slot you are about to overwrite in the warning message.

- key words in the tutorials are now bolded to help emphasize the topic being discussed.

- fixed: if a character poisoned an enemy or set them on fire and the status effect caused the enemy to die during the AI's turn--and the death both gave the attacker a level-up and triggered their victory bark--then the AI turn would resume immediately upon closing the level-up screen even though the victory bark had not yet been dismissed.

- fixed: some status effect tooltips were using the additive effect value where the text implied it was a percentage (e.g. a tooltip for Weakened showing -2% to Strength when the effect was, in fact, -2 Strength). Numerous status effect descriptions now show both the relative percentage and the flat value of the effect. (Note: this fix will cause a few minor aspects of saved status effects to break, but nothing too serious.)

- fixed: non-human characters with the Serious personality trait could get a greeting line variant in which they distinguished between their full name and their first name despite the fact that non-human characters do not have names beyond their first names.