Together in Battle Dev Log

[CraigStern]

-- got the Battle with Gunther fully working in the Vengeance of Emma Strider campaign.

-- got Defending the Camp fully working in the Vengeance of Emma Strider campaign.

-- item buttons now create popups when the player tries to do something with them that isn't allowed, explaining why they can't do the thing. (For instance: if a character has already used an item or grabbed a sack that turn, attempting to use another consumable will produce pop-up text that says, "Already used or grabbed an item this turn!")

-- new popup text color supported: maroon. Essentially, it's red but at 45% lightness.

-- fixed: the "saved at time" text in save slots could overflow the bounds of the save slot on particularly long dates and times.

-- fixed a range error that could occur when undoing unit movement.

-- fixed up some remaining issues with the way destructible objects are visualized within the character screen.

[CraigStern]

-- the game now uses the correct sprite for both unpromoted and promoted shadowlings belonging to the various psy classes.

-- refactored the code that handles skill/mastery/proficiency acquisition at certain levels to make it more robust and less of a mess. (This meant rewriting a lot of code.)

-- massaged the experience formula. Big AOE skills no longer provide quite such massively disproportionate experience gains; skill cost now factors into experience gains only once regardless of the number of targets affected.

-- fixed: range-altering unit tags did not affect the range displayed in skill tooltips.

-- fixed the way negative damage values are displayed in targeting reticles.

-- fixed the way damage from shield skills are displayed in damage pop-ups.

-- fixed: the game was not calculating starting skills correctly for promoting characters, leading to them sometimes not receiving all of their intended bonuses right away.

-- fixed: right-clicking an unselected character and using an item would cause the game to highlight the new character without unhighlighting the previous selected character.

-- fixed: the game did not display experience out of 100 in mouseover tooltips for characters based on whether they were unique and human-controlled, but based on whether they were in army 0.

-- fixed a typo on one of the proc gen character expletives.

[CraigStern]

-- changed the Liberator advanced class for Emma and Sabrina; it now provides much lower stat bonuses, but gives +1 to maximum movement and turns Sword into a "Use Once" skill a la the rapier's Thrust.

-- finished up the promotion visual effects, timing the sprite change to match them and creating accompanying sound effects.

-- the game now tracks your total score for each battle you win.

-- the -SCORE- special character is now working. When used, the game displays the player's cumulative score across all battles won.

-- got the ending scene working in the Vengeance of Emma Strider campaign.

[CraigStern]

Gave composer feedback.

-- added Recurve Bows to the last two shops in the Vengeance of Emma Strider campaign.

-- got "scrolling text" cut scenes working in-engine.

-- got the end credits working in the Vengeance of Emma Strider campaign.

[CraigStern]

-- hand-designed a new version of Crypt Diving. It is now fully working in-game, which means that the Vengeance of Emma Strider campaign is now fully playable from start to finish!

-- enemy units now dynamically appear and disappear when making moves that take them out of (and into) fog of war.

-- fixed: the game would overwrite conditions added via the AddCondition action run in OnLoaded dialogue as it attempted to incorporate new variable values also set in OnLoaded dialogue.

-- fixed: characters covered by fog of war would freeze the game when trying to move.

[CraigStern]

-- added a fifth setting to text speed that makes it appear instantly without animating.

-- added Whisper sprites into the game.

-- fixed: max steps were not getting updated alongside changes to Speed via the SetStat action or class changes.

[CraigStern]

Gave Georgi artist feedback on a new batch of portraits.

-- made some improvements to the character promotion interface.

-- made it so Dazzle no longer ends the user's turn.

-- added Greater Dark Spriggat sprites into the game.

-- added Greater Frost Spriggat sprites into the game.

-- added corpses to the default list of premade destructible objects; made them movable.

-- fixed: Gunther would say dialogue when attacked over and over again in the Battle with Gunther in the Vengeance of Emma Strider campaign.

-- fixed: using LoadConv under certain circumstances would essentially freeze the game.

[CraigStern]

-- the game now tracks how many times a given skill is used on a given character over the course of a battle, as well as cumulative uses over the course of the game.

-- skills used on the same target over and over (or in the case of Create skills, used at all) now offer diminishing returns on experience: -12.5% with each successive use, meaning that the experience gained drops to 0 after 8 uses of the same skill on the same target. This helps prevent farming experience indefinitely by just repeating the same actions over and over.

-- increased the base experience for Create skills from 12 to 15 to help offset this effect for "creator"-type units.

-- standardized skill descriptions for skills with Unlimited, Use Once, and Can Move after-attack attributes.

-- fixed: characters got experience for using Shield skills on enemy characters.

-- fixed: the code to reset certain unit stats after battle was incorrectly written.

-- fixed a handful of scripting issues in the Rescuing Meridian battle.

-- fixed: slain caravan guards weren't getting palette-swapped in the Caravan Prelude scene.

-- fixed: the hotkey numbers on skill buttons in the Actions Bar blocked raycasts to the skill buttons underneath. (This means that if you moused over a hotkey number, the game would behave as though you'd moved the mouse cursor off of the skill button.)

-- fixed: auto-looting collected automatic items from loose item sacks into reserve supplies rather than triggering them. This meant that coins would appear in reserve supplies rather than being added to the player's money total.

-- fixed: the "close window" button for the Cut Scene editor's shop sub-editor's items window didn't have a function assigned.

-- fixed: the tooltip for the Door button in the Actions Menu had text overflowing the background.

[CraigStern]

-- added Cryokurios sprites into the game.

-- added Pyrokurios sprites into the game.

-- added Skiakurios sprites into the game.

-- added Puppetmaster sprites into the game.

[CraigStern]

Gave Georgi artist feedback on a new batch of portraits; spent some time creating a huge image with every unique character portrait in the game for reference (and marketing) purposes.

-- added Greater Golden Spriggat sprites into the game.

-- added Drake sprites into the game.

-- added Machinist sprites into the game.

-- updated the Engineerand Machinist's Wrench attack animation with a smear frame and an elongated wrench on the "hit" frame to make it feel more satisfying.

Only four more promoted class sprite sets left to integrate!

[CraigStern]

-- added Marauder sprites into the game.

-- added Sentinel sprites into the game.

-- added Specter sprites into the game.

-- added Titan sprites into the game. Annnnnnd that's the last of the promoted unit sprites!

-- updated Classes.xml so that promoted units now all use the correct sprites.

[CraigStern]

-- improved the AI's defensive facing algorithm.

-- when aggroing a group, the AI now reconsiders moves for characters in the AggroGroup it had previously skipped over due to a Passive tag.

-- fixed some of the scripting in the Rescuing Meridian battle.

[CraigStern]

Gave artist feedback.

-- fixed a bit more of the scripting in the Rescuing Meridian battle.

-- fixed: the formula for factoring in AI aggression when scoring attack damage was multiplying the target character's base value along with the damage factor.

[CraigStern]

-- fixed: when multiple dialogue trees were triggered from the same interaction and the first one contained the EndConvImmediately action, the game would fail to recognize that the second dialogue tree was still queued up to trigger.

-- fixed: the game would treat multiple instances of pop-up text spawned based on coordinates rather than being linked to a character as being themselves linked to a single, wholly non-existent character, resulting in them all appearing sequentially on the same space as the first pop-up.

[CraigStern]

-- made weapon degradation toggle-able using the new script action WeaponDurability. One parameter: true or false. If set to false, weapons will no longer lose uses or break when the player attacks with them.

-- added Talkable status to Sarn Kamina and Siripent in Rescuing Sarn Kamina, and to Doran Chamberlain in Battle with Archos. (The conversation with Naila remains deliberately hidden, however.)

-- fixed: the x axis on status effect sprites was flipped. (It took a while to notice this due to most status effect icons looking perfectly normal this way!)

-- fixed: under certain circumstances, Cavaliers could still charge at targets to which they had a blocked path.

-- fixed: the game was producing a prolonged pause between an attack's knockback and collision between the knocked-back target and whatever is behind it.

-- fixed: health bars and pop-up damage text were appearing at the point of collision when a character was shoved into someone or something rather than on the character's space. (This made it quite difficult to read what was happening when one character was shoved into another, as the pop-up text and health bars would overlap.)