Together in Battle News

Greetings, tactics fans--it's time for another update! I've spent this past month writing new battles and events, plus making a variety of improvements.

The biggest change this month is that you can now fight the Tiger League Qualifier, play through Tiger League itself, and make it all the way to the arena championship! So let's start with changes to the arena:

- added the Tiger League Qualifier battle into the game.

- created Tiger League itself.

- the arena plotline is now playable all the way through to right before the championship match!

- enemy levels in arena fights now scale up 17% slower than before.

- expanded the pool of possible enemy team names in the arena.


My second area of focus this past month was adding new events to the game, of which I managed a little more than half a dozen. Here are all the changes on that front:

- created a third chital event as well as a recurring fourth chital event. Without spoiling too much, it is now possible to actually tame the chital.

- created a new evening event: Treasure Hunt.

- created a new late-night event: Nightmare.

- created a new late-night event: Late Night Idea.

- new event: Ishita Svaamee makes a second visit to the player's camp (unlocked by progressing through the arena leagues).

- created a new, special event that occurs the morning of the championship fight.

- when a character receives a letter from a sibling, cousin, mother, or father, the game now remembers this--it then becomes possible to get an event where that character gets visited by the family member who wrote to them.

- created an initial Sibling Visit event, with variants based on the kind of relationship the characters have (and potentially, the player's choices).



- characters created via the GenerateUniqueFromNPC action who are related to the originating character by blood now determine their own relevant NPCs and biographical details based on the originating character, ensuring that their backgrounds are consistent. Both they and the originating character start with a mutual 20 familiarity, ensuring they won't engage in any basic "getting to know you" dialogue in camp.

- added a new argument type that can occur with sensitive characters.

- added weapon repair kits to the item sale random event.

- fixed some scripting errors in a couple of events.


And what would an update be without miscellaneous improvements and fixes? The biggest of these is an improvement to the calendar screen--you can now flip back and forth between months once you've progressed past Unimensis.

Here's the full list of miscellaneous changes:

- the calendar screen has been improved! There are now buttons to flip back to previous months and review the events that occurred. The name of the displayed month is now always visible at the top of the calendar screen.

- wrote new, alternate dialogue for recruitment attempts during the Monkey League Qualifier battle when initiated by golems or spirits.

- wrote new dismissal response monologue variants for characters with the Arrogant personality trait.

- dismissing a character no longer reduces morale for other characters who have a negative friendship value with the dismissed unit.

- new camp activity: Fury, possible when a character is angry at someone else in camp.

- there is now a 1-in-3 chance that a high-level engineer will learn Place Snare Trap. (The other 2 possibilities remain either +1 range to Place Caltrops or gaining a Wrench counterattack.)

- buffed the Architect and Demolitionist promoted classes for the Engineer. They now each get improved versions of certain skills which let them keep using other skills afterwards (for the Architect, Build Wooden Barricade and Build Spiked Barricade; for the Demolitionist, Place Charges).

- hand-made battles featuring enemy reinforcements now scale based on how many days have passed in the game.

- generic Blackguards and promoted cavaliers without equipped weapons are now generated with natural access to Throw Knife and Halberd, respectively.

- added new music track to the game: Drawing Blades.

- integrated a new version of the Festival of the Ascendant Lights track into the game featuring a traditional Indian vocalist.

- Dacoit Cutters and Dacoit Slashers now gain a melee counterattack upon reaching level 5.

- being defeated in any of the battles where thieves or bandits try to rob the player now results in the player losing half their aura.

- sentinels, pikemen, and swordmasters are now more likely to be generated with more armor and/or shields.

- when proc gen maps are created with multiple hazard terrain types, the game will now select a hazard terrain type at random from those listed.

- when Damage or Drain is affected by a SetStat action in a cut scene, the game now automatically looks for the character's portrait and--if it finds it--animates the character's health/energy bar.

- when the GiveExp action is used in a cut scene, the game now automatically looks for the character's portrait and--if it finds it--animates the character's experience bar.

- characters now lose the ability to use books of power upon promoting, preventing the player from wasting them.

- AI improvement: the AI now distinguishes between Levitating characters and characters who have an ordinary, permanent move type of Flying for purposes of determining which spaces are safe to move to. (Without this, the AI would sometimes move Levitating characters over lava or chasms only for them to drop in at the start of the next turn.)

- when removing a character from the active roster by reference to their name or loadID, the game now automatically checks for duplicates and removes those as well if found. (For reasons not yet discovered, duplicates can sneak onto the roster; before this fix, they could cause characters to stick around even after being removed from the roster.)

- fixed: the last-used windowed/fullscreen setting was not being saved as part of game settings.

- campfire objects now lay flat.

- fixed: smoke from non-flat-lying objects (such as braziers and stoves) was no longer emitting at the correct angle.

- fixed: characters who were ordered to do something via a one-on-one could nonetheless be dragged into another character's partnered activity, precluding them from doing the thing they were ordered to do.

- fixed: I accidentally left the chance of small talk set to 100% after testing, thereby preventing most post-greeting character dialogue from spawning.

- increased the chance of a talk event producing small talk to 25% from 10%.

- fixed: a change to the AI in the last patch resulted in the AI freezing when, in large battles (>8 characters in the enemy army), the first character to move wandered into a trap or other pressure trigger.

- fixed: automatic inventory generation for generic proc gen enemies placed via the map editor was not working.

- fixed: the game was missing data for straight street edge tiles where the street was elevated above surrounding terrain.

- fixed: the game wasn't replacing script IDs with the names of unique characters in script actions within battle when the relevant characters were not already saved from a previous scene.

- fixed: the tooltip for the "view calendar" button in town had a typo.

- fixed: a LoadConv call to dialogue that either does not exist or which had been removed due to being already used and non-repeatable would lock up the game. The game now simply ends the current dialogue when this happens.

- fixed chital portrait scaling.

- fixed a scripting error that was preventing characters from getting speech bubbles and babble during chital events.

- fixed: in some circumstances, the game would remove script actions queued after a Wait action in dialogue initiated via a LoadConv action.

- fixed: it was still possible to accidentally skip nighttime camp events by clicking the background at the exact wrong moment.

- fixed: the game would spawn characters with zero (or negative!) health during the thief attack battle as if they were able to fight.

- fixed: the game wasn't compensating for promoted generic characters in a weapon-dependent class generated without an equipped weapon by boosting strength or granting their default weapon skill.

- fixed: when a character without a specific counterattack gained 1 or greater Counter Limit, the game could select a skill which did no damage but did impose a status effect (e.g. Throw Voice) as the character's counterattack.

-fixed: if you hired out everyone on your team and then returned to the docks for a second time in the same day, the game would effectively lock up.

- fixed: custom difficulty dialogue still referred to manual saving as "save scum mode."

- fixed for 0.2.10a: the game was spawning Heroes in recruitment.

- fixed for 0.2.10b: the variable tracking the day of the championship bout was not being set at the start of the game, causing the day-of-championship event to trigger on day 0 when starting a new game.

- fixed for 0.2.10c: losing a league match in Snow Leopard or Tiger Leagues could result in the game getting stuck in the Arena scene.

- fixed for 0.2.10c: repair kits (or any other item that alters the properties of character equipment) would be permanently stripped of their ability to alter other items upon transitioning scenes if kept in the reserve supplies.

- fixed for 0.2.10c: classes with multiple species-based sprite overrides were not registering sprite overrides for all species, resulting in shadowling psy users appearing with human sprites.

- fixed for 0.2.10d: a scripting error in the letter event could result in the game throwing a range error.

- fixed for 0.2.10d: the sidestab and backstab bonuses from gap-seeking weapons were only being applied to base weapon skills, not to advanced skills for that weapon.

- fixed for 0.2.10d: the AI could reapply Immobilized status to characters subject to a Hold multiple times when calculating moves.

- for 0.2.10e: fixed a freeze during AI damage calculations.


And finally, we have improvements for campaign creators:

- new script action: ConsumeFood. Automatically reduces current food by the current roster of characters's collective appetite without initiating camp activities. (Food will not go below zero, nor will a hunger event be automatically triggered.)

- added a new optional boolean parameter to the LevelUpArmy script action: Affect Reinforcements. If set to true, the level-up effect will be applied prospectively to characters of the chosen army who haven't spawned yet.

- the LevelUp script action now works in cut scenes.

- new stat supported in GetValByStat: True Level. Returns the character's current level combined with any hidden, pre-promotion levels.

- added documentation for read-only stats True Level, Health Left, and Energy Left to the in-game reference.

- finished implementing the GenerateUniqueFromNPC action in cut scenes.

- new class attribute: defaultWeaponSkills. This is used to tell the game that it should grant a Strength bonus and one or more natural weapon skills to generic units of that class if they are created without an equipped weapon in their inventory.


Phew! That about covers it for this month. Next month, I'll be shooting to finish up the arena championship plot line; add a new variant or two to arena matches; create yet more random events; and paint some new nose variants for human portraits.

Until next time!

--Craig

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

Greetings, tactics fans! I'm back with another update to Together in Battle. Today's update includes the ability to download custom campaigns, some requested AI improvements, new spriggat abilities, new inter-character arguments, and more!

Let's start with the AI. I'm usually loathe to touch the game's AI, as the systems involved are quite complicated and risky to mess around with--however, the AI's difficulty navigating fire on Gharial League maps was annoying enough that I decided to just dive in and make changes. After many hours of AI hell, I emerged victorious with a number of fixes and improvements!

- the AI now actively avoids wandering through non-player-created fire and traps when making "long range" moves (i.e. moves that won't bring it into range to immediately use a skill on anyone). This won't prevent you from baiting nearby enemies into preexisting fire and traps, but enemies should no longer randomly wander into fire or traps when they're nowhere near you.

- reduced the weighting that the AI gives to ally-buffing moves by 80%, meaning that the AI should now pretty much always favor direct attacks against characters within move-and-attack range when given the choice.

- fixed: in situations where the AI evaluated potential knockback moves that would collide the target against a damaging object (e.g. a spiked barricade) or character with a counterattack, the game would actually queue up the object or character's counterattack as though the knockback move had already been chosen and executed. This resulted in phantom counterattacks sometimes going off seemingly at random during the enemy turn.

- fixed: in some circumstances, AI-controlled characters who walked into fire would not continue their turns afterwards.

- fixed: the AI was not evaluating energy-draining skills correctly. It was checking the energy drain against total health instead of total energy for purposes of gauging efficacy, and did not account for overflow damage from energy-draining skills dropping the target's energy below zero.

- fixed: the AI was treating energy-draining skills as though they would be effective against inanimate objects (which they are not).

- fixed: the AI wasn't accounting for the dodge bonus granted by tall grass when weighing different attack options.


Those are the AI improvements, but wait--there's more! We also have new features, skills, event variations, and more. Let's start with the big marquee feature--browsing player-made campaigns!

- in-game browsing and downloading of player-made campaigns is now working! Click the blue flag button in the New Game menu to browse campaigns that other players have uploaded.

- new advanced spriggat skills: Fire Breath 3, Frost Breath 3, Dark Breath 3, and Light Breath 3. These all deal damage in a cone pattern that covers nine spaces.

- spriggats now learn their third-tier breath attack if they promote to greater spriggats, or else learn the multi-target hit-and-run melee skill Claws if they promote to an elemental claw class.

- doubled the psy buff for promoting to a greater spriggat and doubled the strength buff for promoting to an elemental claw. This should make these classes stronger and help to further differentiate their roles.

- reduced the amount that Strength contributes to a spriggat's base salary by about 33%.

- increased the floor (i.e. lowest allowable value) for starting energy on spirits and the major psy classes to 12. (This should prevent the game from generating psy healers, kineticists, and other primary psy users with 5 maximum energy.)

- increased the energy cost of Light Bomb from 18 to 20.

- increased the energy cost of Fury and Stimulate from 5 to 6 and reduced the duration of Strengthened and Lucid from 4 rounds to 3.

- in the shop, reduced the spawn chance of Runner's Cleats to 4% and Binoculars to 8%.

- fixed: the PICKFROMLIST{} special character would never pick the last entry in the list. This was causing the game to ignore the second "generic" argument in the argument event, all but ensuring that only one argument ("unwanted advice") was ever chosen unless the game happened to randomly draw two participants with clashing personality traits.



- re-scripted the camp "argument" event so the game will always choose characters with clashing personality traits to participate if available. (This will cause unique arguments tailored to each character's personality to show up much, much more often.) Moreover, personality-conflict arguments between two characters in the argument event will now always trump other arguments.

- wrote two new personality-conflict argument variants for religious and empirical characters, bringing the total number of unique arguments that can be chosen for this event up from 12 to 14.

- when a camp activity affects more than one social stat (familiarity, friendship, or romance) at once, the game now staggers the pop-ups a bit to make everything easier to see.

- fixed: level-ups and promotions produced by items used via a character screen from within reserve supplies menu would not "stick."

- fixed a range error produced when enemies applied a status effect under fog of war and were then revealed (manifesting primarily as fog tiles no longer being removed).

- fixed: cosmetic bridge connections spawning below ground level on solid terrain could override the space's ordinary elevation with a lower one.

- fixed: the game wasn't accounting for the dodge bonus granted by tall grass when displaying attack accuracy upon mousing over an attack tile.

- fixed: it was possible to stall until after the Festival of the Ascendant Lights to trigger the surprise camp visitation plot event.

- fixed: players with OSes set to countries that habitually use a comma to denote a decimal point would have their machine parse certain numbers incorrectly (which I suspect was responsible for messing up the timing of certain actions in combat for European players).

- fixed: the mentalist headband portrait accessory was misaligned on one of the male human head variants.

- fixed: the game's "check ahead for conversation-ending script actions within called scripts" functionality was not interacting correctly with conditional Run-type actions (e.g. IfValRun, IfStringRun, etc.)


And as usual, we have some goodies for people using the campaign creation suite:



- I created and uploaded a short example campaign to Steam Workshop demonstrating how to make use of the Together in Battle engine's most unique features (like recruitment, the calendar, and camp interactions). Open it up in the campaign creator to see how these things are done!

- new script action: PairToList. Winnows down an existing list of characters to two who meet distinct, specified sets of attribute requirements, then send their names to a new list.

- scripting improvement: you can now specify the name of a list for purposes of LASTINLIST[] special character using a custom string variable.

- scripting improvement: you can now use a custom integer value within an ID[] special character.

- fixed: the CombineLists script action did not work properly when combining more than two lists at once.

That's all for now--I have more things planned for the next update. Until next time!


Tactically yours,

Craig

Hey folks! Real life stuff interfered quite a bit with this past week, but I did still manage to add a much-requested feature: you can now create runs with custom difficulty!

Here are the changes:

- added custom difficulty to the difficulty selection! You can now create a new run with customizable AI difficulty, death rules, item prices, food prices, salary bases, training costs, and starting aura, as well as the option to turn off weapon durability.

- boosted training costs by 10% for brutal difficulty (applies to new runs only).

- broke up the arena manager's dialogue in the Qualifier Scheduling scene upon losing the Monkey League Qualifier into two branches, making it easier to see that the qualifier won't be rescheduled until the player goes back and wins another non-league match.

- updated in-game documentation to more clearly explain what each level of the AIHandicap script action does.

- fixed a typo in the tooltip for Relaxed difficulty on the difficulty selection screen.

- fixed an error in the way the game checked for level-specific skills in the progression which could cause a freeze upon promoting certain classes (such as bowmen).

- fixed a typo in the animated calendar for days 21, 22, and 23 of each month.

- fixed: cross-fading music during promotions was not behaving as intended, leaving two tracks playing simultaneously.

- fixed: cross-fading music was causing the new track to play too quietly.

- fixed: faded-out music could unexpectedly start playing again during scene transitions.

- fixed: the game was reconnecting and spawning a brand-new instance of the Steamworks manager class every time the player returned to the title screen.


As mentioned, this is a shorter one, but I hope you enjoy the new custom difficulty options. There's more to come!


Tactically yours,

Craig

Happy Monday, tactics fans! I've been continuing to work very hard on Together in Battle, adding more content, improving balance, and fixing bugs. This update came together a bit slower than I wanted due to real-life stuff (and also because I took the time to push three rounds of hotfixes to the last update)--but now that it's here, I'm pleased as punch to tell you everything new!

First and most significantly, the next main plot event is now in the game! I won't say anything here about what it is, but it occurs on the day after the Festival of the Ascendant Lights. (If you have a playthrough where a match is already scheduled for that day, just be aware that you won't be able to trigger the event--but the game will avoid scheduling fights on that day for subsequent playthroughs.)

In addition to this, there's a new Axefighter skill and new items can appear in the shop. I also made a few more balance tweaks and fixed a whole bunch of bugs. Without further ado, here are all the changes:

- throwing a character onto a space occupied by an object with "flying" passability now produces a context-dependent effect: if the character is an ally, they are thrown on top of the object as normal; but if the character is not an ally, they will now be thrown into the object instead for collision damage (and--if the object is spiked--additional piercing spike damage).

- new skill: Grappler Stance. Places a hold on one adjacent space, keeping enemies from moving away from (or through) it. This skill is learned by axefighters.

- skills which creates Holds can now be targeted on spaces occupied by other characters.

- helms can now get modifiers as part of the procedural generation process! Modifiers currently supported include Stylish (+1 morale), Beautiful (+2 morale), Gorgeous (+4 morale), Visored (immunity to Blinded status), and Calming (+1 energy regen).

- item quality in the shop now automatically increases upon getting into Snow Leopard League and upon successfully completing the Nihal's Bandits side quest.

- new accessory worn on the head: Bifocals. +10% Accuracy, can be equipped by anyone.

- added bifocals and torches to the shop's pool of "miscellaneous" items; reduced the odds of runner's cleats showing up in stock to 5%.

- toned down the photokineticist's Dazzle skill: it now applies Blinded only once with a base 100% chance (removing the additional 50% chance to apply it a second time) with a 50% chance to apply Distracted once (instead of one to three times).

- changed the way the game handles thieves in arena fights: instead of allying them with the enemy team, thieves now have ignore tags for both armies and a target value of 0. This should keep the enemy team from seeing healing or buffing thieves as a good move.

- pay for hiring out now scales more slowly with strength and caps out at 75 aura per character instead of 90.

- characters now only give a friendly fire reaction when allied skills with the element "Falling" (e.g. Kinetic Gust, Shove, Throw) deal more than 5 damage to them.

- rewrote religious attack, deployment, and victory barks to bring them more in line with the particular doctrines of each given character's religion.

- the info bar in the top-left of the screen now auto-updates food consumption and payroll info as soon as you dismiss a character.

- updated the trainer's dialogue a bit to explain that characters undergoing paradigm training will keep their old skills and masteries, but will learn new ones exclusively in their new class going forwards.

- boosted the amplitude of the song "Conspiracy" to better match the amplitude levels on other tracks.

- fixed: Golem and Spirits could be selected for the Sick Parent event in camp, which would result in the game freezing when it came time for them to talk about their parents (since spirits and golems do not have parents).

- fixed: when an enemy applied a status effect under fog of war, the game would not load the associated status effect icon for the targeted character at all. This would then cause a range error when the affected character came into view and the game tried to display the nonexistent (but expected) status effect icon, in turn causing a cascade of other issues like fog of wars tiles no longer being removed.

- fixed: ranged attackers could sometimes counterattack after being shoved into water or lava.

- fixed: surrendering in the Monkey League Qualifier would not send the player back to the qualifier scheduling scene as intended.

- fixed: characters ending a battle while swimming would have their movement type appear as swimming during deployment for the next battle.

- fixed: the cavalier and mantis knight sprite animations for Mega Charge were wrapping up about 4 frames too early.

- fixed: the special Day 1 daytime text in Kalkerapur ("The tournament begins tomorrow and you need a team. Time to go recruit some fighters!") was no longer appearing.

- fixed: the arena manager was not saying the day of the month that league matches were scheduled for due to a formatting error.

- fixed: characters could sometimes ignore orders given during one-on-ones due to leftover ForceNextCampActivity tags from previous one-on-ones or random events.

- fixed: the RemoveTag script action was not splitting up tag parameters, leading to situations where it was failing to remove specified tags (most notably, ForceNextCampActivity tags).

- fixed: you could mess up the ordering of nighttime camp events if you happened to click the background during the 1/100th of a second delay before character dialogue appeared onscreen.

- fixed: skills, masteries, and other things learned at specific levels (such as Book of Power mastery or the Assassin's Leap skill) would get reintroduced into a character's skill progression upon promotion, leading to that character learning a duplicate of that thing upon reaching level 2 of their promoted class.

- fixed: the upper UI buttons in recruitment had become unusable when a character was selected during recruitment.

- fixed: even if slain before turn 5, the Monkey League Qualifier team leader would still issue a taunt.

- fixed: losing fights or winning league qualifiers would modify golem morale.

- fixed: characters' steps taken would be reset to 0 upon promoting mid-turn in battle.

- fixed: if the skills bar was set to a character's second page of skills and they were thrown into water or lava, the game would still display their second (now blank) page of skills upon selecting them, making it impossible to command them to swim.

- fixed: the game was not recognizing player-placed Caltrops as traps for purposes of warning the player about moving their own units into them.

- fixed: when fire was spawned in front of elevated terrain, its smoke particles would aggressively clip through the terrain.

- fixed a formatting error in the character dialogue responding to a player's decision not to reclass a character in camp.

- fixed: the logger was not saving the version number in log files.

- fixed: status effect immunity popup text was misformatted.


For the campaign creation suite, we have a few improvements:

- the map editor now supports loading and saving a discrete defeatScene attribute for battles, allowing you to easily set a next scene dependent on the player's defeat without using conditions.

- new script action: SetDefeatScene. Sets the defeatScene attribute to a different scene for the current battle.

- new script action: AddStock. Programmatically adds stock to an existing shop in the scene. Lasts until the scene ends.

- new tag supported: Immunity. Grants status effect immunity to the tagged unit.

- new tag supported: AreaPreference. Alters the AI's calculated value for moves in which the tagged character ends their move in the named Area. You can use to nudge particular AI characters toward choosing moves that place them in specific areas of the battlefield; or alternatively, to dissuade them from pursuing moves in certain areas.

- new usable skill icon: Grappler Stance.

- new usable item icon: Bifocals.

- fixed: the character creator could roll up generic units with morale above zero (i.e. neutral).


And finally, we have some progress on gamepad support. (Gamepads aren't officially supported in-game as of yet, but hey--progress is progress):

- rather than duplicating the left trigger's zoom function, the right trigger is now mapped as an automatic "End Turn" button.

- the game now automatically repositions the gamepad cursor when auto-panning the camera during in-battle dialogue.

- fixed: gamepad controls were not functioning properly in the shop tutorial.

- fixed: the gamepad would sometimes be locked out of movement during deployment due to an internal failure to clear dialogue triggered at the start of turn 0.


[h2]Reviews![/h2]

TIB is already garnering some great reactions from content creators less than a month out from its early-access launch, including this one-two punch of positive launch review and even-more-positive follow-up vid from delightful SRPG channel 89 Games:

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

There have been some very nice reviews from players as well--today I'll highlight this one, which I really loved:



If you haven't done so yet and you're enjoying the game, please consider leaving a review of your own. Positive player reviews like this make a world of difference (as do gentle nudges to your favorite content creators to check out the game, *wink* *wink*).

Anyway, that's all I have for this update, but there is much more to come. Thanks for your support--I'll see you in the next one! 😉


Tactically yours,

Craig