Version 0.6.10: Prison break mission, blacksmith, weapon mods, and more!

Greetings, tactics fans! After a minor surprise update one week into the month, I've spent the last three weeks working hard to pack in as many goodies as I could for this, the monthly update proper. (I won't recap the additions from the mini-update, but the gist is that I added in new events, skills, and items; you can find details on that here.)

As for this update I've just pushed, read on!

[h3]Let's start with the biggest changes and additions this month:[/h3]

new investigation scene: interrogation of the palace armorer!
new side investigation: find the blacksmith!
new prison rescue mission!
new daytime option: Blacksmith! If you can find him, the blacksmith will become available as a way to reliably repair your weapons. The blacksmith lets you rename your weapons, too! (He may even comment on your choice of names, depending on what you pick. 😉)
new battlefield object: puddles! Puddles visibly and audibly splash when characters walk through them, and drop dodge and cold resistance while slightly raising heat resistance for anyone standing in them. During battles with a rain weather effect, the game will now progressively spawn puddles randomly around the battlefield. (The harder it is raining, the more frequently puddles will appear.)
the game now has a bunch of new weapon-modifying items! These are consumables which permanently improve a weapon in one fashion or another. These include counterweights (permanent +5 accuracy), reinforcing spines (+5 to the weapon's maximum uses), poison sheaths (+1 poison damage and a chance to poison), and oil-filled sheaths (+1 heat damage and a chance to set an enemy on fire).
whetstones are now a weapon-modifying consumable: instead of providing a character +1 Strength for the rest of the battle, they permanently add +1 Strength to the user's current equipped weapon. To compensate for this buff, they can now only be used once and both rarer and more expensive than before.
the game now has built-in bug reporting! Simply press the Report an Issue button in the main menu during a battle or cut scene to open up a window where you can submit a report; the game will automatically generate a log and send it to me along with other relevant info so I can start tracking down the bug as soon as possible. (Special thanks to Ross Przybylski for his help troubleshooting the PHP back-end!)

[h3]We've got UI improvements and polish:[/h3]

added icons to the main daytime menu options in Kalkerapur.
added icons to the main evening menu options in Camp, and to the main dialogue options during a one-on-one.
reduced the height on the pop-up text animation to aid readability.
right-clicking rugs and other objects set to be treated as floor no longer opens the character screen.
you can now check your calendar and army overview during league match and qualifier scheduling scenes.
cleaned up the shop interface a bit: the text that notes when you've bought or sold something can no longer overlap with the page-swapping buttons, and is now far less likely to end up truncated.
when using the virtual keyboard, the game now displays a flashing caret in the associated input text box as if the box were actually selected.

[h3]Miscellaneous other additions and improvements:[/h3]

tall grasses now make rustling noises when characters walk onto or through them.
improved the weather visual effects for rain.
added a chance of Pocket Sand appearing for sale in the shop.
added a new skin tone that can appear in character portraits: Ruddy Brown.
added three new eye colors that can appear in character portraits: Aqua, Red, and Violet.
characters can now gossip about other teams in the arena when they talk in the evening.
reduced the likelihood that characters will talk about the weather when they talk at camp.
personality-specific rest narrations are now much more likely to be chosen when a character chooses to rest in the evening.
the jobs board now supports cooldown periods of more than just than 1 day before a taken job has a chance of appearing again. There is now a 2-day cooldown on the Caravan Guard job and a 5-day cooldown on Cavern Exploration.
added a brand-new visual effect for Overheat!
created a new sound effect for Overheat.
increased the power scaling on Overheat from 1.25 to 1.5 and gave it +50 default accuracy.
increased the power scaling on Drain from 1.5 to 1.75.
buffed the Specter promoted class a bit: they now get +5 power to Drain in addition to the range and cost improvements.
buffed the Sentinel class: they now gain a 75% chance to block with Defensive Stance instead of the normal 50% chance.
the Defending status effect can now stack in its power and is hard-coded to disappear when a unit gains a new turn or becomes Enthralled.
reworked Engine Boost: it is now usable only once per turn, increasing maximum movement by 67% (i.e. by 2 for most golems) at the cost of 5 energy.
toned down the power scaling on Self-Repair: it now restores health equal to 1.5x Strength instead of 2.5x Strength.
adjusted Battle in the Northern Stepwell so the rescuee's remaining health is never enough to survive more than 5 rounds of drowning.
added portrait animations to the Shadowling Grandpa event.
added auto-looting to the Save Grandpa battle.
the combat camera now pans over to attacks even if combat zoom is turned off, reducing graphical artifacts from visual effect layering.
new portraits for the blacksmith (and a second character whose identity I am not going to reveal here 😉.)
added a variant mood called "Heat Sick" with its own distinct narration to make it clear when a character is feeling sick due to working during a heat wave.
the game no longer counts it as friendly fire if a character attacks an ally while Enthralled.
dialogue branches now support an attribute called "show single replies." This forces the game to show reply buttons on this dialogue branch even if only a single reply remains--useful for moments when the player says or does one particular thing that someone will react to.
status effect tooltips now display the actual power of the status effect conferred, not just the default value for that status effect.
repositioned status effect tooltips within the character screen so the mouse cursor doesn't obscure any of the text.
wrote a little tutorial blurb about rain and puddles in Battle at the Dry Mounds.
updated Make Weapon camp activity narrations to make use of the new Blacksmith background.
wrote a second "you have no characters" camp narration variant.
reworded the bit in the introductory scene where the game asks if you want to enable manual saving so that people who think "roguelite" means "a game where you get a choice of 3 upgrades sometimes and also there's vertical progression" don't get confused.
refactored aspects of the game's movement code to make adding to (and changing things in) character movement much easier.
in version 0.6.10a: the game now warns you if you're about to embark on the Find the Blacksmith quest with a roster of less than 8 characters, or a roster with an average level below 17.
in version 0.6.10a: swapped the eye palette numbers for violet and red eyes.
in version 0.6.10a: characters will no longer be generated with creepy red eyes in recruitment; that option is now exclusive to the character creator in the campaign editor.

[h3]Bug fixes aplenty:[/h3]

fixed: loading a saved game mid-scene, stairs could end up counting themselves for purposes of determining base elevation, thereby raising themselves up higher than the terrain calls for (and potentially making themselves untraversable).
fixed: sometimes, the tooltip for an item's Give button wouldn't show up upon mousing over it.
fixed: under certain circumstances, dummy attack tiles shown upon mousing over an attack button could inappropriately vanish (or fail to appear at all).
fixed: if you beat Battle in the Northern Stepwell without ever having someone speak to the kidnapped character, they would never return to your roster.
fixed: you could trigger the Northern Stepwell event sequence more than once per playthrough.
fixed: hiring out a character as a laborer during a heat wave could throw a range error and cause the game to lock up.
fixed: a null error could occur in camp under very specific circumstances.
fixed: smashing an enemy up against the edge of the map could only ever deal a single tile's worth of collision damage even if using a skill with multiple tiles worth of extra knockback.
fixed: battle AI was not set to recalculate moves upon removing Inactive tags from a CPU-controlled units mid-turn.
fixed: battle AI could disregard a valid move onto an AreaPreference space if no valid skill targets existed within range of the destination.
fixed: due to an oversight when implementing the new move-tracking code, the computer could fail to clear its internal list of viable moves when an enemy's attack slew a character and triggered a death monologue, which in rare cases could result in the AI proceeding with the second-ranked move without recalculating based on the updated state of the battlefield.
fixed: if a new turn belongs to an army with no units remaining, the game would skip to the next turn without triggering any OnTurn or BeforeTurn dialogue set to trigger on that turn.
fixed: you could click an enemy to show their moveable spaces under fog of war.
fixed: if a character was moved via a Teleport-type skill (such as Shadowport or Juxtapose), the game would not check to see if it should drop them into water, lava, or a chasm upon reaching their new position.
fixed: the Blizzard weather effect was no longer displaying properly.
fixed: you could undo after using a Move skill that also moves a second character (like Trade or Juxtapose).
fixed: the tag granting the Kinetokurios the ability to inflict Weakened status via Kinetic Constriction was misformatted.
fixed mouseover zones for status effect icons in the character screen.
fixed: gamepad focus on the virtual keyboard would get overridden by the underlying dialogue tree when input text was enabled in the very first branch of dialogue.
fixed: the dialogue interface's virtual keyboard gamepad navigation was not working as intended when used in battles.
fixed: height was set incorrectly for the promoted cavalier lance and charge animations.
fixed a typo in the default CharAttributes file that would cause the character creator to throw a range error when trying to randomly generate character dialogue.
fixed: if a character had a camp activity and the character right after them in order fantasized about them, the first character's portrait would stick around inappropriately.
fixed: the logic to prevent the same job (other than laboring) from showing up multiple days in a row on the jobs board was faulty.
fixed: selecting Investigate when no more investigation scenes exist would kick the player straight to camp instead of returning them to the main menu in Kalkerapur.
fixed: Create skills would not function on spaces containing rugs or other objects with a true "treatAsFloor" attribute.
fixed: the "force name" feature for characters in proc gen map army groups was not being applied to units drawn from PremadeUnits.xml, only to units procedurally generated from scratch, resulting in the Dacoit Leader not being named as such in Caravan Defense maps.
fixed: camp music was not returning to normal after receiving Prince Ajit's letter.
fixed: the order of the Combat Zoom setting options was switched in the localization file, causing 'Attacks Only' to be interpreted as 'Off' and vice versa.
fixed: a character portrait added to the left edge of the screen and that same portrait walking to the left edge of the screen would end up in positions about 5 pixels off from each other, occasionally leading to awkward transitions in camp.
fixed: the game made the "weapon breaking" noise when non-weapon equipment (such as Pocket Sand, Snare Kit or a Satchel Charge) went to zero uses.
fixed: the in-battle pop up text showing experience gain from using a battle primer would scale the displayed experience against the resulting level rather than the level at the time of use, frequently resulting in it announcing less experience than was actually gained.
fixed: certain text sprites (such as Regenerating, Strength, or Talkable) had faint lines appear near the edges of the image due to trilinear filtering bleed from adjacent icons in the spritesheet.
fixed: certain messages in the shop interface were missing localization support.
fixed: the "no one is in camp" narration text was missing localization support.
fixed: one of the character responses to being renamed slightly exceeded the available space for text.
fixed: placing traps, bridges, and barricades had begun spawning spark particles after the last update.
fixed: the deployment window's starting text was being overwritten by default localization values.
fixed wording on a few personality-specific rest narrations.
fixed the wording on a bit of Prince Ajit's interrogation dialogue.
fixed in version 0.6.10a: losing the Blacksmith Rescue mission while playing on roguelike mode would be treated like an ironman loss and cause deletion of the save file.

[h3]New goodies for campaign creators:[/h3]

the character creator now allows you to manually set the clothing used by character portraits.
the character creator now allows you to manually set the scale for character portraits when they appear in dialogue (from 50% up to 125% of normal size).
improved click detection for portrait accessory and clothing buttons in their respective character creator submenus.
new AI tag type supported: Patrol. This works like AreaPreference, but acts upon a looping sequence of areas for the character to move toward. Once the character reaches the first area in the sequence, their preference shifts to the next one, and so on. Paired with a Passive tag, characters will simply walk through the sequence while ignoring enemies outside their move-and-attack range.
new script action: ShowBlacksmith. This calls up the shop interface in "blacksmith mode", displaying weapons possessed by the group which are below their maximum uses left. Clicking a weapon in this mode causes it to be repaired in exchange for the repair cost (equal to the proportion of max uses to be repaired times the weapon's original sale price).
new dialogue trigger supported: OnUnitAttacked. This works just like OnCharAttacked, except that the unit attacked does not have to be a character to trigger the dialogue. (Someone attacking a specified object, for instance, can trigger OnUnitAttacked dialogue.)
new script action: AddTagToGroup. This works just like AddTagToArmy, but instead of specifying an army number, you specify an AggroGroup number. Every unit in the specified AggroGroup will receive the new tag you provide.
new script action: RemoveTagFromGroup. This works just like RemoveTagFromArmy, but instead of specifying an army number, you specify an AggroGroup number. Every unit in the specified AggroGroup will lose whatever tag you provide.
added support for enabling "show single replies" in dialogue branches within the game's dialogue editor. The map and cut scene editors now load and save these attributes correctly.
new optional parameter in the Deployment battle condition: maximum characters. This allows additional deployment spots to be placed on the battlefield without increasing the maximum number of deployable characters for the battle.
new trigger type added to the game: Move Over. These behave like Pressure triggers, except that they don't interrupt unit movement or clear the undo stack upon triggering. As such, they are intended for small, non-mechanics-related effects (particle effects, audio cues, etc.) when walking over certain spaces.
new special character added to the game: -ATKMOVETYPE-. Lets you check whether the current skill's move type is Normal, Parabolic, Teleport, ToTarget, WithTarget, or Special.
new 3D particle effect supported: WaterSmall. A small splash for moving through shallow water (as opposed to the preexisting big splash used when falling into deep water).
new sound effect added to the game: Water Splash Light. A much lighter splash sound than the existing Water Splash.
new sound effect: Hammering.
new sound effect added: Plant Rustle.
new sound effect: Overheat.
new optional parameter added to the PlaySound script action: pitch range. Accepts a range of positive decimal values, where 1.0 is the sound's normal pitch, values below 1.0 deepen the pitch, and values above 1.0 raise the pitch. If the pitch range parameter is used, the game will randomly choose a pitch value from within the supplied range when playing the sound effect.
new cutscene background added to the game: Blacksmith.
new skill button graphic: Clothing.
added support for Max Uses, Name, and Tag as Attributes to Alter in the item editor within the campaign creation suite.
updated the item editor's built-in guides to include Max Uses and Tag (with added explanation on how to use the latter).
it is now possible to alter a piece of equipment's name via an equipment-altering consumable using Name as the attribute to alter.
received new clothing for female human portraits: RoyalDese.
received new clothing for male human portraits: Blacksmith.
updated the item editor's built-in guides to include Name.
new destructible object set added to the game: Sandstone castle walls.
renamed the StairsLimestone destructible object set to StairsSandstone for the sake of consistency.
fixed: in some circumstances, displaying dialogue in the cut scene editor could cause a null error due to the game attempting to call the gamepad menu navigator component.
fixed: in some circumstances, adding a row to a map could produce a null error.
fixed: the map editor was spawning Blank game objects whenever new units were placed on the map.
fixed: with the introduction of differing portrait scales for proc gen characters, the character creator could start to progressively shrink the preview portrait when cycling through different features.
fixed: deprecated palette code could sometimes cause null errors to pop up when adding certain accessories to portraits for certain characters in the character creator.
fixed: the Jwalaa item graphic was misnamed in AssetNames, and was therefore not showing up in the item graphics browser.
fixed: the character creator could list duplicates in the class selection window.
added in version 0.6.10a: new custom menu button gray-out/warning type: avgLvl. Calculates the average level of the characters in the current roster and grays out the button or pops up a warning if their average level falls outside the specified range.

And that about covers it for this update! As always, thanks for your support--making a game this complex as a solo developer is long, lonely, and difficult work, let alone doing it in my free time with no outside financing. Your support is what makes it possible for me to keep doing this.

If you're enjoying Together in Battle, I encourage you to leave a review; it matters a lot! What's more, I want to hear your feedback; come join us on the Sinister Design Discord and let me know what you're liking and what new things you'd like to see changed or added.

Until next month!

Tactically yours,

Craig