Version 0.2.09: repair kits, broken weapons, and further AI refinement!
Greetings, tactics fans! Real life has once again been interfering more than I'd like (the curse of being a solo dev with a day job), but I still managed to make time to add in more requested features, improve existing ones, and fix some bugs. It's a shorter update this week, but hopefully you enjoy it:
- the game now supports an alternative set of weapon breakage rules: when a weapon breaks, instead of completely disappearing and leaving the equipped character with no usable attack skills, the weapon reforms into a "broken" version of itself. This allows the character to still use weapon-dependent attacks, but the broken weapon will have no stat bonuses, tags, or scripts; no resale value; and a -4 Strength penalty.
- weapon breakage rules now differ between difficulties: Brutal retains the old "broken weapons vanish" rule, but lower difficulties adopt the new "broken weapons reform as a weakened version of themselves" rule. (Note that the new "reform broken weapons" rule is now the default; you will have to start a new Brutal run to get the old rule to apply.)
- weapon breakage rules are now settable as part of custom difficulty.
- new item: Repair Kit. A consumable item that restores 20 uses to the user's current equipped weapon, up to the weapon's ordinary maximum number of uses. (But beware: it does not work on broken weapons!)
- the shop now has a 60% chance of carrying a single repair kit on any given visit, while the traveling merchant has a 100% chance of carrying 2 or 3 of them.
- made a difficulty-scaling pass on all of the game's side quest battles. They now all scale in difficulty based on time passed so as to present an appropriate challenge if they happen later in the run.
- it took refactoring of some code, but I further improved the AI's anti-trap checks. Enemies now avoid wandering into fire in a wider variety of situations.
- the AI now inherently values any move that results in a character moving off of a damage-dealing space, even if the move provides no other benefit. (The game already did this for characters submerged in water or lava, but for obvious reasons, the "swim to safety" behavior doesn't work with fire.) This should address the phenomenon of passive enemies on a fire tile without an enemy in range simply ending their turn instead of moving to safety.
- reworded "save scumming" to "manual saving" during the introduction scene. (Apparently there were players who interpreted the phrase as some kind of personal insult, which was definitely not the intention!)
- fixed: clicking on an Immobilized character would not show the character's attack range.
- fixed: a typo in the classes file was causing the game to skip promotions (among other possible issues).
- fixed: Shield skills that didn't affect health or impart a status effect (e.g. Static Shield) wouldn't grant experience unless the target was missing health.
- fixed: the OnTurn and BeforeTurn dialogue triggers had stopped being repeatable.
- fixed for 0.2.09a: a change to the AI in the last patch resulted in the AI triggering a null error when trying to swim out of water.
- fixed for 0.2.09a: if you reclassed a lissit to any of the main psy-user classes, it would change their character sprite to a human's and mess up their character portrait.
And specifically for campaign creators:
- new script action: WeaponBreakageRules. Changes the rules governing weapon breakage game-wide. If Rule Type is set to Destroy, broken weapons will disappear; if Rule Type is set to Reform, broken weapons will remain but will lose all stat benefits, status effects, tags, etc., will have a sell value of 0, and will impose Strength -4, but will allow the character to keep using weapon-dependent skills.
As mentioned, this is a smaller update, but hopefully you appreciate the changes! This should be the last major systems-focused update I make for a while; going forward, I'll be shifting to updates focused on adding new events, side quests, and main plot scenes and battles. I'm also going to shift from weekly to monthly updates so I can take the time to thoroughly write, design, balance, and test all those new events, cut scenes, and battles.
Until next time!
Craig
- the game now supports an alternative set of weapon breakage rules: when a weapon breaks, instead of completely disappearing and leaving the equipped character with no usable attack skills, the weapon reforms into a "broken" version of itself. This allows the character to still use weapon-dependent attacks, but the broken weapon will have no stat bonuses, tags, or scripts; no resale value; and a -4 Strength penalty.
- weapon breakage rules now differ between difficulties: Brutal retains the old "broken weapons vanish" rule, but lower difficulties adopt the new "broken weapons reform as a weakened version of themselves" rule. (Note that the new "reform broken weapons" rule is now the default; you will have to start a new Brutal run to get the old rule to apply.)
- weapon breakage rules are now settable as part of custom difficulty.
- new item: Repair Kit. A consumable item that restores 20 uses to the user's current equipped weapon, up to the weapon's ordinary maximum number of uses. (But beware: it does not work on broken weapons!)
- the shop now has a 60% chance of carrying a single repair kit on any given visit, while the traveling merchant has a 100% chance of carrying 2 or 3 of them.
- made a difficulty-scaling pass on all of the game's side quest battles. They now all scale in difficulty based on time passed so as to present an appropriate challenge if they happen later in the run.
- it took refactoring of some code, but I further improved the AI's anti-trap checks. Enemies now avoid wandering into fire in a wider variety of situations.
- the AI now inherently values any move that results in a character moving off of a damage-dealing space, even if the move provides no other benefit. (The game already did this for characters submerged in water or lava, but for obvious reasons, the "swim to safety" behavior doesn't work with fire.) This should address the phenomenon of passive enemies on a fire tile without an enemy in range simply ending their turn instead of moving to safety.
- reworded "save scumming" to "manual saving" during the introduction scene. (Apparently there were players who interpreted the phrase as some kind of personal insult, which was definitely not the intention!)
- fixed: clicking on an Immobilized character would not show the character's attack range.
- fixed: a typo in the classes file was causing the game to skip promotions (among other possible issues).
- fixed: Shield skills that didn't affect health or impart a status effect (e.g. Static Shield) wouldn't grant experience unless the target was missing health.
- fixed: the OnTurn and BeforeTurn dialogue triggers had stopped being repeatable.
- fixed for 0.2.09a: a change to the AI in the last patch resulted in the AI triggering a null error when trying to swim out of water.
- fixed for 0.2.09a: if you reclassed a lissit to any of the main psy-user classes, it would change their character sprite to a human's and mess up their character portrait.
And specifically for campaign creators:
- new script action: WeaponBreakageRules. Changes the rules governing weapon breakage game-wide. If Rule Type is set to Destroy, broken weapons will disappear; if Rule Type is set to Reform, broken weapons will remain but will lose all stat benefits, status effects, tags, etc., will have a sell value of 0, and will impose Strength -4, but will allow the character to keep using weapon-dependent skills.
As mentioned, this is a smaller update, but hopefully you appreciate the changes! This should be the last major systems-focused update I make for a while; going forward, I'll be shifting to updates focused on adding new events, side quests, and main plot scenes and battles. I'm also going to shift from weekly to monthly updates so I can take the time to thoroughly write, design, balance, and test all those new events, cut scenes, and battles.
Until next time!
Craig