Together in Battle Dev Log

[CraigStern]

-- updated formatting for the character death monologues in The Vengeance of Emma Strider campaign.

-- added facial expressions to the character death monologues in The Vengeance of Emma Strider campaign.

-- levers now always play a sound effect and produce smoke particles when triggered regardless of what other scripts are attached to them.

-- floor buttons now always play a sound effect and produce smoke particles when triggered regardless of what other scripts are attached to them.

-- new dialogue trigger: OnDoor. Trigger dialogue when a character interacts opens, closes, or unlocks a door. Parameters: Door Y coordinate; Door X coordinate; Door Name (or -ANY-); Door State (or -ANY-); Character Name (or -ANY-); and Army Number. All parameters are optional. Door State can be Open, Closed, or Locked.

-- raised the volume on the lava splash sound effect.

-- added an audio browser menu to the dialogue editor that now appears automatically when adding a PlayMusic, PlayLoop, or PlaySound action.

[CraigStern]

Made a fun little April Fool's video. :D

-- new script action: Wait. Causes the game to wait a certain amount of time before it resumes executing script actions. One parameter: time (in seconds). Can be left blank, in which case the game will wait 1 second by default.

-- script action Open has been added to the game. This fully opens a specified door (rather than merely unlocking it). Two parameters--Y coordinate and X coordinate--as well an optional third parameter, Object Name.

-- new tag: Open. Causes a door to start off open when the map loads.

[CraigStern]

Gave Georgi artist feedback on character portraits. (Proc gen stone and bronze golem portraits are just about complete now!)

-- added a "duplicate scene" function to the campaign editor.

-- added tooltips to the delete and duplicate buttons within each entry in the campaign editor.

[CraigStern]

-- added a "duplicate character" function to the campaign editor.

[CraigStern]

-- fixed a bunch of little issues with how doors behave visually when opened/closed.

-- implemented open-close behaviors for the game's gate objects.

-- created alternate facing Wood Door objects, allowing for structures with double doors.

-- the "which direction should I face" AI algorithm is now dramatically more efficient where there are lots of enemies for whom the character is not within move-and-attack range, and a bit more efficient in all other circumstances.

[CraigStern]

-- fixed an AI issue in the Battle with Gunther.

-- got the Igor and Fera cut scene working, as well as Gunther and Emma. Added portrait expressions and animations to both cut scenes.

-- fixed: characters were no longer appearing partially submerged when on a water or lava tile.

[CraigStern]

Had an exchange with Unity technical support about a weird glitch in the Replace Color shader node that's causing problems with character portraits. In the meantime:

-- got a new cut scene background from Franklin Chan: the Dese Palace Balcony, along with three variants. Added it to the game.

-- got the giant campground chat dialogue tree working in Telepath Tactics. Added in character facial expressions and animations to match the old dialogue.

-- began recreating the Defend the Camp battle from Telepath Tactics.

-- dialogue trees now support a theoretically unlimited number of replies! You can cycle through "pages" of replies (with up to 5 showing at a time) using arrow buttons that now appear when the option is available.

[CraigStern]

-- did some necessary rebalancing on the Defend the Camp battle.

-- new script action: FaceArmyToward. This is exactly the same as FaceUnitToward, but it affects an entire army rather than a single character. Same parameters except for the first, which takes an army number in lieu of a character name.

-- new optional parameter in the ShowReserveSupplies script action: character name. This tells the game that only a single character on the roster is currently able to access the reserve supplies due to their position on the battlefield. (This parameter does nothing in cut scenes.)

-- tripled the number of frames in the looping Pyro Hail fireball animation, smoothing it out substantially.

-- quadrupled the number of frames in the Power Up visual effect animation, rendering it silky smooth; boosted its glow value and improved its alignment.

-- fixed the scripting and dialogue in the Defend the Camp battle in the Telepath Tactics campaign.

-- fixed: using an object with a Use trigger but without a "Used" sprite variant would produce a null error.

-- fixed: changing an object sprite to something that didn't exist just in general would produce a null error.

[CraigStern]

-- I realized that the game logic hadn't been updated to reflect the new, army-dependent nature of the Kill-All Victory condition; overhauled a big chunk of it to support that.

-- realized that I was using move turn as a shorthand for the army number of the current player; a big mistake that would inevitably produce bugs when armies got eliminated in battles with more than two armies and the battle didn't immediately end. Spent a bunch of time rewriting code to address this issue.

-- new special character: -PLAYERARMY-, as distinct from -PLAYERTURN- (which is the equivalent of move turn).

-- fixed: the "writing" sound loop stopped playing when advancing to subsequent pages of a report.

-- fixed: certain scene data wasn't always being made accessible to the action runner depending on the context.

[CraigStern]

-- finished getting the Defend the Camp battle working in the Vengeance of Emma Strider campaign.

-- got the cut scene Silithis Gets to Adelbrae working in the Vengeance of Emma Strider campaign.

-- got the cut scene Emma and Sabrina 1 working in the Vengeance of Emma Strider campaign.

-- got the cut scene Bandit Fortress Outer Wall working in the Vengeance of Emma Strider campaign.

-- fixed: the AI would add the "grab sack bonus" to moves that made no sense, occasionally producing bizarre short-term moves in situations where a character had no good short-term moves but did have a loose item sack nearby.

-- fixed: in circumstances where an AI-controlled character died of a status effect resulting in a player character level-up, the game could fail to restart the AI decision-making process upon the level-up screen closing.

-- fixed: when a character had dialogue in battle, moved, and then a different character became speaker via the ShowTalking action, the moving character would inappropriately display their speech bubble along with the actual speaker.

[CraigStern]

Got my first dose of covid vaccine over the weekend, so I'm recovering and not working as hard for a few days. Still, got this done:

-- proc gen characters now have a bark they'll say when hit by friendly fire in battle.

-- the game now detects when "a" is used as the article before a word starting with a vowel, then corrects it.

-- fixed: dialogue in the cut scene editor was throwing a null error when attempting to start or stop dialogue babble.

-- fixed: the dialogue editor was throwing a range error when attempting to delete a newly loaded dialogue or script.

[installdisc]

-- proc gen characters now have a bark they'll say when hit by friendly fire in battle.

The ff could be switched on/off?
The multiplayer will have an option to disable the random object drops?
Will be there any secret spider cave :)?

Thank you for the updates and looking forward to hearing from you and for the game as well!!

[CraigStern]

Ha ha, thank you! :D

The ff could be switched on/off?
The multiplayer will have an option to disable the random object drops?
Will be there any secret spider cave :)?

Friendly fire is always on; there's no switching it off. However, there's no random friendly-fire in the game--if a character hits another character, it's because you deliberately chose to have their attack hit an area containing a friendly character!

I'm not sure yet how I'm implementing multiplayer--in contrast to how I developed the Telepath Tactics the first time around, that's gonna be the last thing I tackle here.

It wouldn't be a secret if I talked about it here, now would it? ;)

[CraigStern]

-- new script action: WaitForPostDialogue. Pauses the execution of all subsequent script actions until the dialogue menu is closed (as via EndConv).

-- renamed the WaitForDialogueEnd action to WaitForDialogue to avoid confusion with WaitForPostDialogue.

-- combat barks with associated morale or other effects now delay displaying those effects using WaitForPostDialogue.

-- camp dialogue now waits an additional second to display pop-ups and such after the text finishes animating.

-- friendly fire reactions now occur for skills that inflict negative status effects, not just damage.

-- fixed: capitalization-insensitive text-matching processes in the game weren't working under certain circumstances.

[installdisc]

Thank you for the answer. Can not wait for this game!! and the remake!!