Post-launch update #2: more fixes, tweaks, and QOL!

Greetings, tactics fans! It's now been 8 days since we hit version 1.0; I've been dutifully collecting your bug reports and squishing them all (the bugs, not the reports) one by one. The result: we have a second patch!

First, let's talk UI improvements:

• as a convenience, the shop now accounts for units temporarily absent from the group when showing what equipment your characters can use, who wants what, and why. You no longer need to remember what equipment your absent characters use or cross-reference the army overview.
• fixed a long-standing UI annoyance where using a hotkey to select an attack would cause all of the red attack tiles to spawn in blank even if one of them spawned directly beneath the mouse cursor, forcing the player to move the mouse off the tile and back onto it to see the hit reticle and damage prediction text.
• fixed another, similar UI annoyance where using a hotkey to undo a move would cause most of the revised move tiles to spawn in blank even if one of them was directly beneath the current location of the mouse cursor, forcing the player to move the mouse off the tile to see the full move sequence to that space.
• for players who prefer to use keyboard shortcuts, the Tab key now replicates the "next character" function of the mouse wheel in character screens and the reserve supplies window.
• added Cancel buttons at every stage of the custom difficulty wizard at the start of the campaign. This lets the player opt out midway through instead of having to select every single option before canceling.
• day logs tracking wins and losses in the arena now distinguish between league matches and pick-up matches, making it easier to see your progress when reviewing the logs.
• fixed: the info bar could block tooltips labeling characters as wounded or absent in the army overview screen.
• fixed: if you dismissed a character with an excessively long custom name, the name could spill over onto the second line of the confirmation window and obscure the warning about how they'll be gone permanently once dismissed.

Second, a buff to the lissit!

Following the version 1.0 launch, I became aware of community consensus to the effect that high-level lissit were lacking the same variety of tools that other species' classes had available to them. After examining things, I agreed, and so I've given our scaly pals some more tools to keep them competitive with all the other species in the late game!

• reconfigured the barudit's late skill progression to ensure they more consistently get a greater variety of skills.(Previously, certain skills or masteries could be randomly skipped in favor of a bonus stat proficiency.)
• barudit now learn either Nimble Stance or Defiant Stance instead of Preemptive Stance or Defiant Stance, giving them some variance from the human melee classes (and increasing the chance of characters sharing different stances via inter-species friendships).
• new skill: Quick Shove. It's just like Shove, but it costs 2 energy and doesn't end the turn, allowing the unit to flexibly combo shoving with other moves. Barudit and Prophets now learn this skill.
• increased the Drake's Health boost from +18 to +23 and reduced its Energy gain from +2 to +1.
• given that gasul must split their stat-ups across numerous stats, the Protector now gets +8 Psy instead of +4 to help ensure that players always have a gasul promotion option that can heal competently in the endgame.
• the Prophet now gets +5 Strength instead of +4.
• you may notice that barudit now gain something called "Net Mastery." This doesn't do anything just yet, but rest assured--soon enough, it will... 😉

Next, let's look at a bunch of other miscellaneous improvements:

• in response to player suggestions, normal arena battles no longer end immediately when the last opponent falls! Instead, the game now checks for victory at the end of each turn, giving the player a chance to grab any item sack that might drop from the last opponent standing.
• the undo stack now properly supports Move skills which simultaneously swap the locations of two units (such as Twirl, Quick Twirl, and Trade); hitting Undo after using one now resets both units to their original spots simultaneously.
• special weapon availability in the shop now expands upon hitting Gharial League.
• Anatomical Treatises may now show up in the shop on rare occasions.
• removed most of the trash-tier and "practice" weapons from random item drops and chests, making them more worthwhile on average. (Moreover, given the breadth of experience-gain mechanics available in TIB, practice weapons just didn't seem all that necessary or helpful to keep in as random drops.)
• new rare item: Void Cloak. A dramatically more effective variant of the assassin's Shadow Cloak!
• nerfed Cut somewhat, increasing its energy cost from 1 to 2 and decreasing its damage from 50% of Strength to 30% of Strength.
• wrote a new rainstorm narration for Disciplined characters.
• wrote another variant for Teach Response dialogue.
• species that canonically float (e.g. shadowlings, spirits) now have an attribute that, when a portrait is displayed for a character of that species, causes the game to automatically make the portrait glide when it moves. This ensures that shadowling portraits always move appropriately when chosen for random events that can also occur for non-floating characters.
• for version 1.0.02a: added a note to the Blacksmith Rescue mission warning about using loud skills.
• for version 1.0.02a: added a message to the Blacksmith Rescue mission informing the player that they can control Dhatuu Dil directly after speaking to him.
• for version 1.0.02a: added a tutorial about using keys to unlock doors to the Blacksmith Rescue mission.
• for version 1.0.02a: during the Battle with the Steel Bandits, when the player is spotted, the boss now waits a turn before aggro-ing so they don't sprint out ahead of all the other units and get sniped.
• for version 1.0.02a: during heat waves in Snow Leopard League (and on maps covered with snow in Tiger League), characters now have twice as long to win in the arena before they get stricken with heat sickness.
• for version 1.0.02c: commas can now be typed in directly when writing custom character dialogue instead of using the double-semicolon workaround; the game now automatically reformats the dialogue behind the scenes so commas won't be treated as delimiters.

Next, we have a raft of bug fixes!

• fixed: a couple of null errors could occur when triggering a chain of explosions from multiple satchel charges.
• fixed: Twirling a non-flying enemy into a chasm was not queueing up the requisite fatal falling damage.
• fixed: due to a scripting mistake, guessing the wrong answer to a riddle during cavern exploration would cause the game to reveal the answer.
• fixed: paper scraps with riddle lines on them were not being removed from character inventories upon exiting a cavern, and were stuck indefinitely eating up inventory space.
• fixed: when playing with gamepad and creating a new custom character, canceling out of the new character screen did not return gamepad focus to the custom character browser.
• fixed: backgrounds that normally provide an additional physical trait were not doing so for custom characters.
• fixed: a cavalier could charge directly onto a tile with elevation 2 greater than the second-to-last tile, so long as the charge started on a tile no less than 1 elevation below the ending tile.
• fixed: a cavalier could charge and hit a tile with elevation 2 greater than the second-to-last tile, so long as the charge started on a tile no less than 1 elevation below the ending tile.
• fixed: the game never set the default move type for unique generated characters created via the GenerateUnique script action, causing these units to have their move type permanently set to "Swimming" when attempting to reset the unit's move type upon emerging from water. (This issue manifests most prominently in the main campaign with recruited spirits.)
• fixed: deployed units were set to face toward the central coordinates of a map, meaning that if a player deployed a character onto the very centermost tile of the map, at the start of battle, the game would temporarily assign them a facing direction of "None" and replace their sprite with a placeholder sprite until they moved. Freshly deployed characters now try to face toward the closest enemy on the map instead.
• fixed: randomly dropped leather boots and plated boots were showing up without a valid item image.
• fixed: narration about a character running out into the rain during the rainstorm event could continue to show the inside of the tent.
• fixed: narration about a wounded character during the rainstorm event could continue to show rain particle effects if the preceding character was a golem or someone otherwise outdoors.
• fixed: golems and spirits could be inappropriately chosen for certain two-character camp activities.
• fixed: when creating a custom difficulty, the game would override the player's choice of time limit, enforcing a 140-day limit regardless.
• fixed: certain, newer dialogue-processing variables were not being cloned when cloning dialogue-processing data.
• fixed: when generating special relationship labels for characters created from an existing character's NPC pool, if the characters were related, their relationship labels were getting inappropriately swapped.
• fixed: when generating special relationship labels for characters created from an existing character's NPC pool, the special relationship label on the newly created unit re: the original character was not getting capitalized.
• fixed a typo in one of the sad info response lines.
• fixed a small typo in Rohit's dialogue when he gives the player a deck during the Festival of the Ascendant Lights.
• fixed some mistakes in the hue-shifting mask for the Dese messenger portrait.
• fixed: one of the dialogue branches during the final confrontation was missing a portrait.
• fixed: spirits and golems could be chosen for the "slur" portion of the BPD Recruitment event.
• fixed: even if the player somehow managed to win the game without ever meeting Ishita Svaamee, the game would show one of her slides during the ending sequence anyway.
• fixed in version 1.0.02a: the game could run a second event upon returning to camp after the battle with the steel bandits.
• fixed in version 1.0.02a: the game wasn't returning to camp after the treasure thicket event, instead skipping to the calendar.
• fixed in version 1.0.02a: there was a flaw in how the game's pathfinding algorithm interacted with allied traps, causing movement paths through those traps to not appear and potentially producing a really nasty character positioning offset bug if the player deliberately chose to walk into an allied trap.
• fixed in version 1.0.02a: the game was using the wrong activity word for proc gen dialogue about ventriloquists.
• fixed in version 1.0.02a: when using a gamepad in the custom character creator, hitting the B button to exit the portrait accessories window would transfer gamepad cursor focus back to the main character creation screen as intended but would leave the accessories window open.
• fixed in version 1.0.02a: when playing with gamepad, under some circumstances when positioning the selector over a space and then selecting a skill from the actions bar which could not target the space the selector was left on, the game would fail to snap the selector to a valid attack tile space.
• fixed in version 1.0.02a: when playing with gamepad, in rare circumstances, it was possible for the gamepad cursor to shift focus to the battlefield rather than the victory screen as the battle ended.
• fixed in version 1.0.02a: when playing with gamepad, pressing the X ("Actions") button while in the middle of targeting an attack would switch the gamepad's focus to the actions bar even as the actions bar remained invisible, and would not clear the attack targeting UI or text overlay with the skill's name.
• fixed in version 1.0.02a: when playing with gamepad, "Click to Continue" text exhibited a small graphical glitch when animating during the camp and plot narrations.
• fixed in version 1.0.02b: the new battle start character-facing logic was causing a null error when starting a battle with no enemies on the field (such as Treasure Thicket).
• fixed in version 1.0.02c: if a character became wounded on the first floor of cavern exploration, a second copy of the next ally after them in the roster could spawn when entering the lower level.
• fixed in version 1.0.02c: when playing with gamepad, ending the turn via any sort of pop-up screen (such as the game asking if you want to end the turn early) would result in the victory screen losing gamepad focus, forcing the player to resort to mouse and keyboard controls to proceed.
• fixed in version 1.0.02c: any item with an asterisk in it (such as the book Quiet Mind: Focus Under Stress) would cause delimiter issues when saved in the player's reserve supplies, eventually leading to a game-breaking range error when loading a scene.
• fixed in version 1.0.02c: ambiguous wording in the description for Gust with Gusto.

And finally, we have improvements for campaign creators:

• new condition: Combat Victory Check. By default, this is set to true, meaning that the game will check for victory after every combat exchange where a combatant dies. If it is set to false, however, the game will not check to see if victory conditions have been satisfied until the end of each turn.
• when used in battle, the RemoveItem script action now supports using "Army X" nomenclature for the character name parameter; this will strip the named item from every character in the specified army, where X is the army number.
• added documentation for the -HOBBYVERB- special character.
• new special characters: -CHAR2HOBBY-, -CHAR2HOBBYTXT-, -CHAR2HOBBYVERB-, -CHAR2LIKE-, and -CHAR2LIKETXT-, allowing a reacting character to reference their own likes in proc gen dialogue.
• new Species attribute: portraitsGlide. If set to true, the portraits for characters of this species will always glide when they move.
• the game's undo function in battle now supports undoing Move-element skills with all types of after-attack behaviors, not just "Unlimited."
• fixed: the Together in Battle demo was inappropriately connecting to Telepath Tactics Liberated's Steam workshop instead of Together in Battle's.
• fixed: when the game detected EndConvImmediately in branch 0 of dialogue and there wasn't a speaker or any dialogue text in that branch, it would recognize the dialogue as purely a vessel to run script actions and wouldn't display the dialogue menu even if the branch was changed to one where there is a speaker or dialogue text.
• for version 1.0.02a: new script action, EquipmentToList. Creates a list of all equipment in the specified character's inventory; an optional parameter narrows it only to equipment which is currently equipped.
• fixed in version 1.0.02a: topic tooltips were being layered beneath the describer pane in the in-game reference for the campaign creation suite.
• fixed in version 1.0.02c: when using the campaign creator in 16:10 resolution, the menu bars for the map editor, cut scene editor, item editor, skill editor, and dialogue editor were not scaling as intended.

All right, that's about it for this one!

65 reviews! 🥳

A huge thank-you to all of you who've continued to leave nice reviews for Together in Battle! We're moving steadily toward our goal of 500 reviews. Reaching 500 reviews is a big deal for a game like this; it means that we'll have a shot at being not just "Very Positive," but "Overwhelmingly Positive"--though even if we just remain Very Positive, moving into the 500+ review tier will still help a ton with getting this game shown to more SRPG players on Steam.

If you're having fun, please don't hesitate to contribute your review. Every single one matters a lot more than you realize! 🙂

More coverage!

Building on the post-launch coverage from last week, we now have a very nice review from 89 Games; a fun promotional stream by FEtuber Dani Doyle (who I'm told is likely going to start a proper TIB video series); and continuing Let's Play series from Bumpy McSquigums, Special Caesar, and White Falcon! (I can think of at least three more channels with coverage in the works, too, but I'll save that for another day.)

Updates going forward

With nearly all of the post-launch bugs now addressed, I'm going to dial back the frequency of updates and focus on creating a bigger, content-focused update with a bunch of cool new stuff; new toys for making custom characters, new content, and--what was it mentioned last time?--ah, yes, a new game mode. 😉

Feel free to let me know what sort of things you'd like to see more of in the Steam forums, on Discord, and--if you're old school--on the regular old Sinister Design forums.

Until next time!

Tactically yours,

Craig