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Together in Battle Dev Log

Started by CraigStern, February 06, 2020, 05:37:30 PM

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CraigStern

-- when characters die, the mourning mood of their surviving friends and lovers is now linked to the decedent.

-- when a character dies, lesser friends and new lovers who aren't close enough to go into mourning will now become depressed for a shorter period.

-- moods acquired via camp activities can be now linked to an activity partner.

-- the Teach Law and Teach History camp activities can now go badly with a second character if that character is arrogant, empirical, or narcissistic; the characters can get into an argument about whether the lecturing character is correct, thereby hurting their friendship and romance scores.

-- if you click a skill and then shift-click an enemy, the game will specifically assess moves using the selected skill for auto-move-and-attack (as opposed to considering all available skills, as it previously did).

-- the report screen now has its "writing out" speed tied to whatever the setting is for dialogue animation speed.

-- the report screen now plays a sound loop reminiscent of a quill on parchment while its contents are being typed out.

-- added Attacker Army parameter to the OnCharDeath, OnCharAttacked, and PostCharAttacked dialogue triggers. All now have the following parameters: (1) Army Number, (2) Character Name, (3) Character Class, (4) Attacker Army, (5) Attacker Name, and (6) Excluded Attacker Names (each delimited with a colon).

-- new sound loop added to the game for general use: Writing.

-- fixed: beep speech had stopped working with combat barks.

-- fixed: in rare circumstances, an attack with knockback could conclude without associated falling damage being processed, resulting in the attack's damage and/or experience gain abruptly happening during the next character's attack.

-- fixed a parsing error when deserializing unit tags.

CraigStern

#181
-- the game now places down "hold tiles" to visually indicate which spaces are currently subject to a use of the Hold skill.

-- holds now immediately vanish when the originating characters moves (or is moved by someone else!)

-- nerfed Hold somewhat; it now costs 6 energy rather than 2, and it only produces a hold on 3 sides of the user instead of 4. (The space behind the character, specifically, is no longer held.)

-- the game now shows stat symbols rather than text when an ability directly affects a stat other than Health or Energy.

-- fixed: the game was parsing "blank" skill status effects incorrectly, leading to phantom status effects.

-- fixed: characters hit with a skill with knockbackTiming set after its impactTiming (e.g. Charge) would check for a counterattack before the knockback began, resulting in characters who were being knocked out of counterattack range nonetheless counterattacking during the knockback.

-- fixed: characters could remain "selected" within the game's logic when dying during a combat exchange that they initiated, and would reappear within the Actions Bar afterwards even though they were gone.

-- fixed: holds were not behaving properly on characters who started moving from a held space.

-- fixed: 0-range skills faced in an arbitrary direction rather than the direction the user faced in. (This effect was noticeable only with asymmetrical AOE reticle patterns.)

-- fixed some tooltip titles that were truncating incorrectly in the campaign editor.

CraigStern

Gave artist feedback. Meanwhile:

-- received the final, mastered musical track Maharaja from Ryan; incorporated it into the game.

-- new sound effect added to the game: Store Bell. Little bells of the sort that often hang on the doors at the entrances to shops and jingle when someone enters or exits. Now plays when you go to the shop or the recruitment office in Kalkerapur.

-- new sound effect added to the game: FootstepsFading_Outdoors. Footsteps fading off into the distance. Now plays when you go to the arena in Kalkerapur.

-- new sound effect added to the game: Steamthopter. The sound of a steamthopter powering up its rotors. Now plays when you use the Hover skill.

-- edited some of the intro narration to make it smoother.

-- fixed: the game was not playing impact sound effects or spawning impact particles for destructible objects with a passability type of "Flying" that had been pushed, pulled, or thrown via a character skill.

-- fixed: the Crowd loop was not looping smoothly due to silence at the start and end left over from its tenure as an mp3.

-- fixed: it was possible for characters chosen to get both Strength and Psy growths to end up without one or the other due to really high growths being chosen for the other stats, resulting in a null error when the game checked for one of these stat growths expecting it to be there.

CraigStern

-- created a new trap type: Caltrops. These damage the target and inflict Slowed status.

-- new Engineer skill: Place Caltrops. (This replaces Build Wood Bridge as a starting skill for proc gen Engineers, as Build Wood Bridge is too situational and advanced to serve as a good introductory skill for players new to the Engineer.)

-- decreased the delay before tutorials show up when you first enter the shop and recruitment screens.

-- removed compression for the cancel and confirm buttons, as artifacts were appearing when these buttons were displayed at large sizes.

-- increased the volume of the intro narration voice-over.

-- programmatically intervened to prevent repeat consonants at the intersection of the beginning and end parts of combinatorial last names.

-- fixed: you could attack your own spiked barricades without being damaged.

-- fixed: it was possible to throw objects onto other objects with a passability of "Flying."

CraigStern

-- created unique sprites for the Caltrops object and for the Place Caltrops skill button.

-- quadrupled the rate of overnight energy recovery for all characters in the Telepath Tourney campaign.

-- gave Pessimistic characters a chance to interrupt their negative thought train during the Naysay camp activity, producing no morale loss (but some lost energy).

-- rewrote the code for procedurally generating equipment, making it miles more efficient and easier to read.

-- transferred the effects of weapon/armor materials from hard code into XML, making it dramatically easier to create new weapon-material combos (and also opening up dramatically more of the equipment generation process to modding).

-- adjusted the effects of materials on proc gen weapons and armor to make the materials used more significant.

-- fixed: when tripping a pressure trigger via unit movement, if the triggered script didn't stun or freeze the enemy, the AI would just carry on with that unit's move as if the unit had successfully reached its intended destination (sometimes attacking a unit it never actually reached!)

-- fixed: burning damage had ceased playing the accompanying sound effect.

-- fixed: Frozen objects (e.g. Spiked Barricades) would not counterattack.

CraigStern

#185
-- save slots now display the scene name in dark red if a battle, dark blue otherwise.

-- save slots now support a custom string displaying some relevant information from whichever campaign they belong to.

-- save slots for the Telepath Tourney campaign now displays the player's team name.

-- new action: ChangeSaveString. One parameter: the name of a custom string variable. This causes the game to get the current value of a chosen string variable whenever the game is saved--the value saved under that variable will be displayed in the current save slot as an identifier for the state of the game whenever you go to the Load Game screen.

-- wrote some new greeting response lines (particularly for introvert characters, who had none!)

-- fixed visual effects alignment for Gravity Spike and Gravity Well.

-- added Clarified to the list of status effects that destructible objects cannot be affected with.

-- flagged the Introduction as non-saveable.

-- fixed: the game would display redundant status effect pop-ups if the unit took damage from multiple sources in a single exchange.

-- finally fixed that dumb bug from upgrading to the URP where shadows from 3D objects and terrain no longer appeared in battle.

-- fixed: skill tooltips in the character screen and level-up screen were out-of-date, as were the skill tooltips in the various skill selection submenus within the campaign creation suite.

-- fixed: save slots in various parts of the game UI were out-of-date.

CraigStern

#186
Did a podcast interview with Game Wisdom about Together in Battle and about SRPG design generally. :)

Captured a bunch of game footage for an updated game trailer.

-- fixed: the game would give you a pop-up warning when directing an Enthralled character to attack a unit one of its normal allies.

-- fixed: the AI wasn't considering certain newer status effects when weighting various moves.

CraigStern

Finished the new trailer! :D Also:

-- wrote some new plot dialogue.

-- when playing a sound effect, the game now checks to see if that same sound effect was just triggered a tenth of a second ago or less; if it was, rather than playing a second instance of the sound a fraction of a second later (and producing a grating "reverb" effect), the game simply boosts the volume of the original sound effect by 20%.

-- toned down the glow effects on lava somewhat to make surrounding units easier to see.

-- painted a "lone drop of sweat" particle to use with the new painted portraits in cut scenes.

-- fixed: light bulb icons were visible on lava tiles.

-- fixed: I'd accidentally broken single-space collision movement and backstab pop-ups with earlier fixes.

-- fixed: a typo in one of the branches of side quest dialogue.

CraigStern

-- adjusted the Feedback build-up sound effect and Feedback sound effect timing to better match the visual effect.

-- adjusted battle pop-up text size to help keep damage pop-ups legible when multiple adjacent characters are struck in battle.

-- adjusted health, energy, experience, and morale bar widths to help keep things legible when multiple adjacent characters have things going on with these in battle.

-- adjusted Ash weather particle settings.

-- fixed a formatting issue in Materials.xml.

CraigStern

Switched back to working on Telepath Tactics for a bit!

-- got unique character sprites for Emma and Sabrina Strider into the game! :)

-- assigned babble voice data to the game's whole cast.

-- dialogue babble now pauses during scripted unit movement in battle cut scenes.

-- the game now assumes that dialogue babble is no longer present when the speaker changes and it can't find a matching character, preventing unwanted babble sounds during tutorials and such.

-- updated early cut scenes with babble voices.

-- tweaked Emma's portrait data to make her face more anatomical.

-- broke all the palette-swapping code off into its own class for easier editing and management.

CraigStern

-- new tag: TargetPreference. This allows you to make individual characters value other individual units on the battlefield more or less as potential targets. Two parameters: (1) target name or script ID, and (2) float operation to perform on the target's base value for move calculation purposes with the tagged character.

-- placed a TargetPreference tag on Lakshmi in the Caravan Battle to ensure she doesn't wander off the reservation and get herself surrounded in the first few turns.

-- put together new sound effect: Crowd Cheering.

-- Crowd Cheering now plays upon victory in arena battles in Together in Battle.

-- fixed: campfire smoke wasn't emitting.

CraigStern

-- made drag-panning around the battlefield way snappier and more responsive!

-- when you click enemies, it now shows you spaces they can reach with their longest-range and shortest-range attacks in addition to those within their movement range.

-- put the firelight "flicker" effect for self-lit objects into the game. :)

-- fixed: the game was sometimes making character babble overlap.

CraigStern

Gave artist feedback. On the coding front:

-- the game now fully supports Use triggers! :D

-- the mouse cursor now changes to a sword whenever you mouse over attack tiles.

-- the mouse cursor now changes to a sword when mousing over an enemy while a skill is selected.

-- if you left-click a character while a skill is selected, instead of showing the clicked character's move range the game will now behave as though you'd shift-clicked that character, moving your current selected character into range and queueing up the selected skill for use on the target.

-- the game now distinguishes between left-clicking an enemy and clicking an ally from another army. With enemies, it only takes offensive skills into account when displaying spaces the unit can attack outside of move range; with allies, it accounts for healing abilities, buffs, and other non-attack skills.

-- new tag: LevelTo. Behaves like LevelUp, but instead of silently gaining a set number of levels, the unit will gain however many levels they need to reach a designated level. (If they are already at or beyond that level, they will not level up.)

-- the game now supports dynamic changing of sprites not just for characters, but also for objects (as well as changing models for 3D objects).

-- fixed knockback timing on skill Pull.

-- fixed: the SpawnUnit script action would always produce a brand-new copy of a character when used! The action now first checks to see if the character already exists from prior use--and if so, it simply loads that character instead of producing a clone of them.

-- fixed: the map editor was not saving per-unit trigger data when saving a map.

-- fixed an edge case where an AI-controlled unit wandering into a trap that stunned or froze them could produce a range error.

CraigStern

Received hurt pose sprites donated by Sean Hayden (Rad Codex)! Gave artist feedback to Franklin Chan. On the coding front:

-- the AI now accounts for the potential to deal falling damage and inflict falling-related status effects when scoring potential moves. (Which is to say: it'll now take opportunities to shove your characters off of cliffs.)

-- did a bunch of work on making the game support doors.

-- new tag: Locked. Causes a door to start off locked when the map loads.

-- script actions Lock and Unlock have been added to the game. As their names imply, these lock and unlock a specified door. Two parameters--Y coordinate and X coordinate--as well an optional third parameter, Object Name.

-- the game now consolidates damage pop-ups for skills that deal damage from multiple sources simultaneously (e.g. with a BonusDmg tag, or by dealing falling damage in addition to regular attack damage).

-- the game now consolidates pop-up announcements for those times when a character gets hit with multiple doses of the same status effect. (E.g. instead of getting two "Stunned!" pop-ups in a row, you'll now get "Stunned X2!")

-- fixed: the move analyzer wasn't accounting for allied armies when analyzing movable spaces.

CraigStern

-- doors are now fully supported in the game! :)

-- fixed: character sprites could sometimes clip through tall cliffs behind them, or through the ground when attacking downward.