Another month, another update! What’s new?

• Work is underway on the game’s promotion classes. All but four of them are outlined now, and we’re making progress on drafting their sprites. You can see drafts of the promoted cavalier and bandit below:

• We have new rest sprite variations for certain unique characters:

• We’ve made a bit more progress on animating the Bandit’s remaining attacks. Here’s Whirlwind:

• New mini-campaign created as a special gift for my Kickstarter backers and early access backers: Guard Llama!

• As part of my work on Guard Llama, I sprited and animated a playable llama, complete with several unique attacks. (No, really.)

• I created some new tile variants: a “hole” tile to stick beneath wells and such, as well as a couple of dungeon-water transition tiles so dungeons can have nice-looking pools and water channels in them.

• AI improvements! The AI now accounts for an attack’s chance to hit when deciding which skill to use and whom to attack with it. It also now accounts for ranged damage falloff and elevation bonuses/penalties when choosing where to shoot from. The AI now takes into account tags modifying attack damage as well (see below). AI characters that can do nothing useful will now pass their turns to their allies in case a better move opens up later in the turn. Finally, I significantly improved the algorithm that tells enemy units which direction to rotate after moving in order to keep themselves from getting backstabbed.

• Improvements to procedural level generation! You can now specify a range of levels for enemies to spawn at (e.g. 3-4 if you want the player to face level 3 enemies and level 4 enemies). Even better, generated level chunks now have lighting, dialog, scripts, and battle conditions, all of which are seamlessly incorporated into the generated level. (Script actions and dialog triggers with coordinate parameters, for instance, are auto-magically adjusted by the game based on where the host room is placed within the level.)

• The game now supports multiple types of procedurally generated dungeons. Each dungeon type gets its own subfolder with the room chunks that it can contain.

• New status effect, Disarm; if successful, it causes the targeted character to drop whatever item he or she has equipped to the Weapon Hand slot.

• New item graphics; there are now three visually distinct bows.

• Items can now modify a character’s accuracy.

• Items can now add tags to characters when equipped, and those same tags will be removed when the item is unequipped.

• New tags: ModDmgForClass, ModDmgForMoveType, ModDmgForRace, and ModDmgForTag each modify attack damage against certain targets. RangeBonus increases or decreases a character’s maximum range with ranged attacks. IgnoreArmy tells an AI-controlled character to ignore characters from the designated army; the character will not attack characters from that army.

• New attacks for promoted characters: Disarm, Poison Bolt, Build Wood Bridge 2, Build Wood Barricade 2.

• Long bows are now a thing! Long Bows don’t support the regular Bow and Split Shot attacks; they only support Arched Shot, but they deal more damage, have a bit more range, and boost the attacker’s base accuracy with Arched Shot from 60% to 80%. In essence, this means that you can now equip your bowmen for either mid-range harassment or longer-range artillery roles, depending on the type of bow you give them.

• Playable characters in the main campaign now all have death monologues.

• The game now displays character class and level in the deployment screen and in the common inventory when mousing over a character.

• New dialog trigger type: OnOpeningDoor. Unsurprisingly, this triggers dialog and/or scripts when a door at particular coordinates is opened.

• You can now use -Any- as a parameter in lieu of a character name with OnTalk dialog triggers (for those occasions where it doesn’t matter which character initiates the conversation).

• New cut scenes in the main campaign.

• Balance changes: increased the maximum range of the Crossbow attack from 3 to 4 to increase its usefulness vis-a-vis Bow; reduced the energy cost of Bonebreaker and Cripple (now each 3 Energy) relative to Stunner (4 Energy) to make them more useful.

• In exploration mode, the game now shows a different set of skills. Instead of just indiscriminately showing all zero-damage attacks, it now shows skills that have knockback, or which are either Move or Create element skills.

• New music! All of the game’s music is now written with the sole exception of the final boss music.

• Updated the manual with a lot of missing documentation.

• Fixed a lot of bugs, including a variety of particularly aggravating bugs that were afflicting common inventory management during deployment before battles.

That’s all, folks. Work continues apace. Until next time!