Together in Battle

Without further ado, let's talk about the biggest new thing in the game:

• Created the next few palace intrigue scenes, introducing a new suspect and some new wrinkles. I could say more about it, but I think it's best encountered fresh. 😉
  
  
  

Next, we have some long-awaited interface improvements:

• during battle, you can now hit the 'Q' key to have the game auto-display every tile that can be reached and/or attacked by at least one enemy! (You can activate this in gamepad mode by pressing the Y button on a space empty of any units.)
  
  
  
• during battle, you can now hold down the alt key to see every character's health bar onscreen at once:
  
  
  
• added a dark outline around danger tiles so they remain visible over lava tiles:
  
  
  
• when defeated in battle, a button to call up the main menu now appears in the bottom-right of the screen so you can double-check objectives, go to the title screen, or--if playing with manual saves--restart the entire battle (as opposed to restarting from the last save).
  

Third, we have some optimizations to the game:

• optimized the evening event-choosing process to avoid stack overflow issues that could result from excessive attempts to pick an event.
  
• reduced the size of the game's installation footprint by lowering the resolution of cutscene backgrounds.
  
• updated the project to a somewhat more recent version of Unity.
  

We have miscellaneous other improvements as well, including some AI improvements:

• AI improvement: the game can now string together multiple additional moves after Use Once skills (such as Sprint and Feint), causing higher level units (and swordsmen in particular) to take much more effective turns.
  
• AI improvement: the game now takes into account whether a target is frozen, blinded, or immobilized when deciding whether to mind control them.
  
• increased the rate of enemy level scaling a bit for the merchant side quest battles.
  
• added team size and average level warnings to the Investigate daytime action.
  
• increased the witness's durability a little bit for the witness protection battle.
  
• cleaned up photokineticist walk animations a bit.
  
• cleaned up assassin walk animations a bit.
  
• the auto-objectives screen no longer appears until after any turn 0 dialogue occurring after the dismissal of the turn box.
  

We have numerous bug fixes:

• fixed: characters could use self-move skills like Charge while immobilized.
  
• fixed: on maps with more deployment slots than allowable deployed characters, players could bypass maximum deployment restrictions merely by deploying every one of their available characters.
  
• fixed: switching to gamepad controls mid-game (as opposed to doing so on the title screen) would not disable the mouse.
  
• fixed: when auto-showing the shop tutorial, the tutorial wasn't pulling focus for the gamepad cursor.
  
• fixed: upon clicking a skill, then opening the character screen and unequipping the item which grants the use of that skill, the skill's red attack tiles would remain present and clickable on the battlefield.
  
• fixed: targeting an ally with a skill that does no damage and causes a negative status effect to which they are immune (e.g. targeting a non-flying ally with Gravity Spike) would provoke a friendly-fire reaction despite having no effect.
  
• fixed: when changing a custom string for the name of an army during a battle, the game would not update the army's name in the new turn window (an issue appearing most noticeably during some of the league qualifier bouts).
  
• fixed: due to a scripting error, a flag allowing the player to follow Malatose one week following her second interrogation was never set.
  
• fixed: if a character did not have a stat listed among their growths and they gained a trait altering growth for that stat, the game would ignore the growth boost entirely instead of adding that stat to the unit's growths for modification.
  
• fixed: the character generator was not interpreting traits with multi-operation growth effects and base stat effects correctly, causing the Sharp-Eyed trait not to work as intended.
  
• fixed: physical traits imbued by a character's past life skills would not exclude the opposite trait from being selected during character creation (potentially leading to characters with, e.g., both muscular and skinny traits at once).
  
• fixed: when selecting Restart Battle, the actions bar would reappear while fading out the scene.
  
• fixed: if a text overlay was onscreen when selecting Restart Battle, it would reappear while fading out the scene.
  
• fixed: when using Charge against a target, ending the charge on caltrops, and killing the target, the target wouldn't get knocked back and the combat sequence wouldn't conclude, causing the game to lock up.
  
• AI fix: when scoring moves, the game was double-counting impact damage against a target when the target was shoved into another character even when the character they were being shoved into was an ally of the attacker, not a second enemy.
  
• fixed: Burning status was not being ended by a character being submerged in water.
  
• fixed: destroying a cosmetic bridge tile embedded in land via an explosive could result in a surviving unit standing on that space being "dropped" upward into the air and remaining suspended there.
  
• fixed: you could lock up the game by blocking a character from moving at all during scripted movement.
  
• fixed: a character spawning onto the battlefield on top of a trap would not trigger the trap.
  
• fixed: if a character started its turn on a pressure trigger space, the game would ignore pressure triggers on the first adjacent space the character moved to.
  
• fixed: when killing an enemy by shoving an ally into them, if the enemy had a counterattack available, the enemy could sometimes counterattack the character who was shoved into them even though they had taken lethal damage.
  
• fixed: if a map had BeforeTurn dialogue marked as repeatable, the auto-objectives screen could cause it to re-trigger after the objectives faded, trapping the player in a loop.
  
• fixed: text overlays could appear beneath the auto-objectives screen.
  
• fixed: the space selector was inappropriately snapping to bridges and other objects that lay flat when mousing above them, as though they were characters with height.
  
• fixed incorrect palette highlight coloration for pants in the photokineticist sprite.
  
• fixed: the Mantis Rider card art was not loading correctly in Psy Clash.
  
• fixed: the description text for laboring was out of date, stating that laboring takes only 30% of a character's remaining energy rather than the 50% it now takes.
  
• fixed: a handful of random event day logs could be truncated due to a formatting mistake.
  
• fixed: the day log summary for characters getting wounded was missing a period.
  
• fixed a couple of typos: one in the Festival of the Ascendant Lights narration, one in Malatose's dialogue during her first interrogation.
  
• fixed: there were missing spaces in certain variants of the cavosphere activity narration.
  

And lastly, we have a few improvements for campaign creators!

• added support for terrain tiles with built-in status effects!
  
• added two new cutscene backgrounds to the game: Dese Palace Garden and Dese Palace Study.
  
  
  
• added the Overheat, Lava Burn, and Crowd Booing Muffled sound effects to the assets list for use in the campaign creator.
  
• added the Cut, Place Caltrops 2, Place Brazier, Levitate Other, and Shockwave skill button graphics to the assets list for use in the campaign creator.
  

...Day Logs!

• in the calendar screen, you can now review the logs of all tracked events and choices that happened on every day of your run!
  
  
  
  
• in last month's second, mini update, I started having the game track certain choices and events. That tracking has now expanded to cover more things like character recruitments, character deaths, characters recovering from being wounded, characters going off to train, the results of job board missions, and so on.
  

...a variety of other UI improvements!

• combat objectives now auto-display at the start of each battle! No longer will you have to infer your victory and loss conditions from dialogue (or manually open the objectives menu)--the game now simply gives this information to you automatically.
  
• in battle, the "I" key now serves as a hotkey to open the current selected character's inventory. (Of course, this just amounts to opening their character screen, since that is where the inventory resides--but this should still be an improvement for new players who haven't yet cottoned on to that fact.)
  
• move tiles, along with the step numbers and path arrows that appear within them, now have outlines to make them visible against snow and lava tiles!
  
  
  
  
• I was dissatisfied with the aesthetics of the New Turn box in battle, so I redesigned it with new, hand-animated painted banners. (I seldom have time to paint much new art myself these days, but I'm quite happy I did so here--I think they look a whole lot nicer than before! 🙂)
  
  
  

Next, we have improvements to gamepad support!

• dramatically improved gamepad navigation on the recruitment screen (which was pretty haphazard before).
  
• added gamepad support for the battle objectives screen.
  
• added gamepad support for the new day log UI in the calendar screen, as well as to the next month and previous month buttons.
  
• added shoulder button support to the character inventory pop-up window within the reserve supplies screen when playing with a gamepad; the shoulder buttons now automatically switch to the next/previous character in the roster.
  
• added shoulder button support to the shop screen when playing with a gamepad; the shoulder buttons now automatically switch to the next/previous item category.
  
• added shoulder button support to the calendar screen when playing with a gamepad; the shoulder buttons now automatically switch the currently displayed month.
  
• when switching item categories in the shop in gamepad mode, the game now jumps the selector over to the first item in the new category instead of leaving the cursor down among the category buttons.
  
• fixed: at some point, the UI arrows had ceased appearing on reply buttons during dialogue when playing with gamepad.
  
• fixed: gamepad support for the promotion screen was completely missing during non-combat scenes (such as camp).
  
• fixed: when playing with gamepad and using the reserve supplies screen during deployment in battle, the game would inappropriately shift gamepad cursor focus to the battlefield when hitting "B" to back out of an individual character inventory.
  
• fixed some more spots where gamepad support had broken in recruitment and in camp.
  
• fixed: the UI arrows had become misaligned with various elements of the interface in the recruitment screen when playing with gamepad.
  
• fixed: when playing with gamepad, physical traits were not inspectable in the recruitment UI.
  
• fixed: when playing with gamepad, the next page / previous page buttons in the recruitment interface remained selectable with gamepad even when disabled.
  
• fixed: when playing with gamepad, it was possible for the game to become "stuck" at the conclusion of evening camp activities.
  
• fixed: the game was displaying character health bars when mousing over a character under an attack tile, thereby blocking the player's view of the hit chance text.
  
• fixed: when playing with gamepad, visiting the jobs board would cause the gamepad cursor to jump up to the calendar button at the top of the screen.
  
• fixed: when playing with gamepad, the "B" button would not exit out of the calendar screen.
  
• fixed: when playing with gamepad, the UI arrows were no longer appearing in their intended spots on buttons within the reserve supplies screen during deployment in battle.
  
• fixed: character tooltips could remain onscreen when dialogue was triggered mid-battle (particularly when playing with gamepad).
  
• fixed: it was possible for character tooltips to pop up over the top of the promotion screen when a character promoted in battle when playing with the gamepad.
  

We have new content and miscellaneous improvements!

• wrote a new, two-part random evening event for depressive characters.
  
• a new unique arena event can occur in Tiger League: "Powerbot 5000."
  
• the ash weather condition during Gharial League now has an actual effect, spawning additional fire around the arena every two rounds.
  
• the snow weather condition during Snow Leopard League now has an actual effect, spawning a new battlefield object around the arena: ice patches! These positively wreck dodge and cold resistance for whatever unit stands on them, significantly reducing their accuracy as well. Worst of all, if a non-flying unit moves onto an ice patch, they will become Slowed until the next round.
  
• new random caravan battle condition: numerous enemies. The caravan is attacked by an unusually large force of bandits.
  
• when sending units to serve as caravan guards, the player is now much less likely to get a caravan defense battle without any complicating condition.
  
• at last, gasuls now gain a distinct spriteset upon promotion! (Note that the Bonebreaker/Cripple/Stunner animation is still in progress.)
  
• new swordsman skill: Cut. 1 energy, deals 50% of normal slash damage, doesn't end the turn (and therefore can be combined with other attacks, applying bonus damage from the user's weapon with every attack made).
  
• swordsmen now always learn either Shove 2 or Pull 2, always learn Defiant Stance or Preemptive Stance, and always learn either Lunge or Cut in the later part of their skill progressions.
  
• reduced the dodge gain upon promoting a barudit to Wyrm to make Drake stand out a bit more as an option.
  
• new skill: Shockwave. Deals Crush damage to every unit adjacent and immediately diagonal, with a chance of stunning.
  
• new visual effect: Shockwave.
  
• updated the objectives on all in-game battles for greater clarity; objectives that count as victory conditions are now clearly labeled as such.
  
• AI improvement: I capped the AI's space danger modifier at 3.0 for short-range moves to avoid situations where the AI chooses not to make optimal moves merely because the current unit is too low on health.
  
• received a new Palace Gardens cutscene background (necessary for the next main plot scene, but not yet integrated into the game).
  

We have a variety of bug fixes:

• fixed: Snow Leopard and Tiger Leagues were missing checks to ensure that the vengeful brother scenario couldn't recur multiple times in the same playthrough.
  
• fixed: the game could pick golems as team leaders in Tiger League, leading to situations where a golem was the team leader and the "brother in the stands" condition was picked, the combination of which would lock up the game as it tried and failed to generate a unique name for a male golem (which does not exist).
  
• fixed: the game was not paying the player the second half of their commission for successfully defending caravans.
  
• fixed: the player would be locked out from visiting the jobs board if no characters were available on the team, preventing the player from participating in card tournaments.
  
• fixed: status effects would hang around on units after a battle if the scene was switched without the battle formally ending in a victory or defeat.
  
• fixed: due to a scripting mistake, kidnapped characters with maximum health above 30 weren't having their current health reduced as intended at the start of Battle at the Northern Stepwell.
  
• fixed: the Caltrops 2 skill description didn't match its AOE pattern.
  
• fixed: non-flying, non-bridge units and objects created on chasm tiles would not immediately fall in.
  
• fixed: the AI was not creating a move tracker for enemies it enthralled during its turn; thus, if the AI enthralled a unit and that unit's best move was a non-turn-ending attack, the game could get caught in a loop.
  
• fixed: an off-by-one error in the game's experience staling tracker was effectively causing all skills to grant an additional, unintended 12.5% experience if they'd been previously used on a different target during the same fight.
  
• AI fix: the scoring bonus for self-healing moves when very low on health was being applied to moves attacking allies, which in some circumstances could lead the AI to regain health on near-death units by attacking allies with Feedback.
  
• AI fix: the scoring bonus for self-healing moves when very low on health was being applied even when the target was completely immune to Mental attacks, which in some circumstances could lead the AI to make some highly questionable targeting decisions when using Feedback.
  
• fixed: template enemies in proc gen battles without specified names (e.g. the dacoits in caravan defense battles) were not being leveled up to the correct levels, making job board missions much easier than intended.
  
• fixed: template enemies in proc gen battles without specified names (e.g. the dacoits in caravan defense battles) were having their names inappropriately changed to match their load IDs.
  
• fixed: it was possible for combat winnings to go into the negatives with enough stalling during an arena fight.
  
• fixed: the adult female Dese civilian's right-facing walk animation had gotten overwritten with an up-facing walk animation in the sprite sheet.
  
• fixed: one of the wall chunks in the recruitment duel fight had become rotated incorrectly.
  
• fixed: unpromoted swordsman sprites were using the wrong color for the brightest secondary highlights, resulting in the most highlighted portion of their helmet plumes appearing red even when their secondary army colors did not include red.
  
• fixed: promoted spearman sprites were using the wrong color for secondary highlights, resulting in the glossy bits of the top half of their tower shields appearing red even when their secondary army colors did not include red.
  
• fixed: promoted shadowling sprites were using the wrong color for secondary highlights, resulting in half of their mask appearing red even when their secondary army colors did not include red.
  
• fixed: both promoted and unpromoted cavalier sprites were using the wrong color for the brightest secondary highlights, resulting in the most highlighted portions of their flags and of the designs on their shields appearing red even when their secondary army colors did not include red.
  
• fixed: both promoted and unpromoted crossbowman sprites were using the wrong color for the brightest secondary highlights, resulting in the tops of the shoulders on their non-crossbow-holding arm appearing red even when their secondary army colors did not include red.
  

And finally, we have improvements for the campaign creation suite:

• the character creator now automatically marks all equippable items as equipped when you save a character with a built-in inventory.
  
• new object: Ice Patch! Ice patches reduce dodge by 75, accuracy by 25, and cold resistance by 50; non-flying characters who move onto them become Slowed (i.e. they immediately lose half their maximum movement and simply cannot dodge at all) for 1 round.
  
• new special character: -SPECIES-. Gets replaced with the species of the character who triggered the dialogue.
  
• new special character: -CHAR2SPECIES-. Gets replaced with the species of the secondary character in the dialogue.
  
• you can now set one of a unit's coordinates to a valid integer number and the other to -1 to have the game try to spawn them on a random space within a specific row or column of the battlefield.
  
• the SetWinAura script action now supports multiple operations in one call, delimited by commas.
  
• fixed: the "Sex" field for procedurally generating units in the map editor did not actually force the resulting unit to be of the specified gender if the unit was a generic.
  
• fixed: when generating a unique named character from a class not defined in Classes.xml using the GenerateUnique script action, if the unit's species was not specified, the game would pull a species of "ERROR," resulting in the character having no valid value for gender, which would in turn cause the game to be unable to generate a name and freeze.
  
• fixed: the FindClosestCharacter script action could cause the game to throw a null error if used with a list of characters to exclude that didn't actually exist.
  
• fixed: golems created in the character creator were not receiving the golem voice set for their babble sounds.
  
• fixed: the SetStringByStat script action was not accepting First Name or Last Name as valid string stats.
  

First, the improvements:

• the game now keeps an internal log of the activities, events, and battles that occur each day! You can't actually see this log yet, but that will be coming in a future update. 😉
  
• new skill: Place Caltrops 2! Range 1-2, tosses a row of caltrops onto the battlefield. Doesn't end the turn.
  
• Architects now learn Place Caltrops 2.
  
• the architect now gets +1 range on Build Wood Barricade 2.
  
• Megaliths now get +6 energy and learn Hold.
  
• Mantis Knights now gain the ability to continue acting after using the Halberd skill.
  
• when a Mantis Knight uses Lance, it now blocks access to Halberd for the rest of the turn (since Halberd is just an alternate version of Lance)--and vice versa.
  
• increased the maximum range on Create Fire and Create Ice from 2 to 3.
  
• changed Jump's after-attack behavior from Can Move to Use Once.
  
• rebalanced laboring to make it less effective as a substitute for fighting in the arena (particularly since there are multiple other options on the jobs board now). The energy cost to labor is now 50% instead of 30% and pay now scales more slowly with a character's base strength--past base strength 10, much more slowly.
  
• cave exploration now takes characters 2 days to participate in instead of 3.
  
• in Psy Clash, you can now pay 2 energy to draw another card once per turn!
  
• in Psy Clash, abilities can no longer bring an opponent below -1 energy. (Previously, the lower bound for player energy was -6.)
  
• in Psy Clash, the game now tells you how many cards your opponent has in their hand at any given time.
  
• added a copy of Gasul to the player's starting deck in Psy Clash.
  
• painted new human male hairstyle: balding.
  
• painted new human male hairstyle: long and curly.
  
• painted new human male hairstyle: neck-length and wavy.
  

Next, the bug fixes:

• fixed: on certain occasions, the game could throw a key-not-found error when silently promoting an enemy in the arena, causing the game to freeze.
  
• fixed: the deck viewer would throw a range error and refuse to open if the player had more than 40 cards.
  
• fixed: page-flipping buttons in the deck viewer hadn't been connected to the function that updates the cards.
  
• fixed: the promoted bronze golem's stomp animation wouldn't play on accompanying skills if they weren't facing downwards.
  
• fixed: the game would display novice battle primers instead of weapon repair kits during the item sale event if weapon repair kits were the items chosen to be on sale.
  
• fixed: a hotfix from the last week had caused the Babble script action to stop working on dialogue tree branches past 0.
  
• fixed: sometimes, Psy Clash AI opponents would take their turn before registering that they'd drawn a new card.
  
• fixed: there was no defeat scene set for the Save Grandpa, Strikebreaking, or Duel in the Streets event battles.
  
• fixed: dacoit pyrokineticists of level 5 or higher had an invalid skill because they were using the deprecated name "Melt" instead of Defrost.
  
• fixed: in Psy Clash, certain minions could block the minions behind them from being clicked.
  
• fixed: in Psy Clash, the Gasul's sprite did not display correctly.
  
• fixed a typo in Manbir Raksha's dialogue when reporting findings to him.
  

Finally, a new script action for the creation suite:

• new script action: AddDayLog. Creates a log entry memorializing an activity, event, or battle occurring that day. Three parameters: log entry category, log entry body, and (optional) number of days passed (in case you want the log entry to reflect an occurrence on a day other than the current one).
  

Let's start with the marquee new content:

• new random event with associated battle: Smuggler's Den!
  
• new random event: Catchphrase! (This one literally lets you write a new victory bark for one of your characters, which I think is pretty neat.)
  
  
  
• new investigation scene: the second interrogation of Malatose!
  
• wrote the event that occurs after the second Malatose interrogation as well as new palace narration.
  
• the game's second ending has now been added!
  

We've got balance changes!

• promotions now increase character health across the board, but especially so for the melee combat classes (including the spriggat "claw" classes).
  
• equippable shields now provide higher base health bonuses. (Note that this change is prospective only--shields you already possess from before this update will keep the same stats they had before.)
  
• spriggat base health (i.e. at level 1) has been bumped upward 3 points, and spriggats now always gain Health Proficiency somewhere between levels 7 and 12 as part of their skill progression.
  

But those changes are far from the only balance changes...

• reduced the influence that speed has on salary levels by 40%, rendering shadowlings and assassins more cost-competitive.
  
• boosted the base level of enemy arena teams in the latter three leagues (especially for Snow Leopard and Tiger leagues).
  
• arena team leader enemy level scaling increased from an additional 20% per match to an additional 25% per match once the player reaches Monkey League.
  
• once the player gets to Snow Leopard League, the shop now has a 75% chance of having 1-2 medicated bandages in stock per visit.
  
• increased the per-day rate of enemy level scaling in the Save Grandpa and Treasure Thicket event battles a bit to help keep the challenge level up later in a playthrough.
  
• boosted the effect of strength and psy on the maximum health of an engineer's barricades: the barricades now receive added max health equal to 133% of the creator's combined strength and psy. (Previously, it was only 100%.)
  
• the power of explosive charges now scales upward with the strength and psy of the engineer who places them, ensuring that they remain potent into the late game.
  
• increased the energy cost of Place Charges and Place Timed Charges to 8 and 10, respectively.
  
• proc gen cavaliers now either gain a lance counterattack or heavy armor mastery, not both. (They are still guaranteed to learn heavy armor mastery if they promote to a Mantis Knight, and still guaranteed a lance counterattack if they promote to Mant Lancer.)
  
• proc gen cavaliers now start with 20% lower base Energy.
  
• training energy for cavaliers now costs 8 times as much as it does for every other class.
  
• proc gen cavalier base salaries are now higher.
  
• spriggats no longer have a 1-in-3 chance of spriggats learning Mind Blast as their miscellaneous psy skill, and instead have a 1-in-3 chance of learning Kinetic Gust.
  
• whenever you register for a Psy Clash tournament, you now receive two random, complimentary Psy Clash cards before the tournament starts. You can use these in the tournament, and will keep them going forward regardless of whether you win the tournament.
  
• the Psy Clash card Leap now lets you draw another card after using it.
  
• changed the Pocket Sand skill's element from Poison to Light so that it can affect golems.
  
• further increased Ansh's health for the witness protection battle when playing on Relaxed difficulty.
  

We have visual and UI improvements!

• darkened the background strip behind camp activity narrations to make the text easier to read against lighter backgrounds.
  
  
  
  
• item sacks now visually drop into place when fans throw items onto the battlefield in the arena!
  
• when grabbing an item sack with equipment in it in battle, if the grabber can use the equipment and they have nothing equipped in that slot, the game will now prompt the player if they want to auto-equip the thing they grabbed.
  
• constrained the pop-up text animation in combat a bit more to make it easier to follow (and easier to tell which character it belongs to in the event of an AOE effect).
  
• character tooltips can now display a different fourth stat besides counterattacks when appearing in menus.
  
• character tooltips now display morale instead of counterattacks during selection for a one-on-one in camp.
  
  
  
  
• character tooltips now display strength instead of counterattacks during selection for laboring at the docks.
  
• while selecting a character in training, character tooltips now display each character's base strength, psy, and accuracy in lieu of counterattacks.
  
• while selecting characters for random events, character tooltips now show morale in lieu of counterattacks.
  

We have a wide variety of miscellaneous improvements!

• when loading up your save file from the demo campaign in the full game, the game now automatically converts it into a main campaign save file so you can continue where you left off in the demo!
  
• lit battlefield objects (such as braziers, candelabras, campfires, and lamps) now visibly poke holes within fog of war, letting you see enemies within their light radius! (Needless to say, the effect goes away if these objects are destroyed.)
  
  
  
  
• new Kineticist skill: Levitate Other. Levitate another character for one turn.
  
• new Engineer skill: Place Brazier. Creates a lit brazier on the battlefield that reveals fog of war in a 2-tile radius around it (and burns enemies who attack it in melee).
  
• increased the positive morale effect of rainstorms on the characters who like them.
  
• characters who clean together now gain friendship with one another.
  
• characters are now generated with a response line for when they receive a nickname from another character.
  
• characters' friendship now mutually increases when they respond to a nicknaming event.
  
• wrote some alternate dialogue for the second crush event for cases where the characters are mutually romantically interested.
  
• wrote a new campsite Talk variation for characters who have a crush on their talk partner.
  
• wrote new like/hobby dialogue for characters with the depressive personality trait.
  
• wrote new Talk narration for depressive and introverted characters.
  
• wrote new generic campsite Talk narration.
  
• wrote a new two-person sparring narration for Suave characters.
  
• wrote a new info response line for religious characters.
  
• flirtatious characters now only deliver flirty lines to characters with whom they are fundamentally romantically compatible (i.e. they only flirt with characters of a gender and species to which they are attracted, and no longer have any chance to flirt with characters they are related to).
  
• painted a 19th human female hairstyle.
  
  
  
  
• if you reach a day with a scheduled league match and you have no one left in your roster to fight, the game now detects it and queues up a scene where the arena manager chews you out.
  
• if the avenger remains after the conclusion of the revenge quest event chain, their background and secret dialogue now change to acknowledge what happened.
  
• added dialogue options to the initial meeting with Manbir Raksha where you can ask him for advice on how to conduct the interrogations.
  
• updated scripting in Battle in the Dissident's Den to activate Hari and his group if the player strays too close to the west door in his office.
  
• updated scripting in Battle at the Northern Stepwell in case the kidnappee is a golem or spirit and, simultaneously, a golem or spirit is the one to reach them.
  
• added some safeguards to ensure that a fall into a chasm will always be an insta-K.O. (Previously, the game would apply damage equivalent to falling 10 levels of elevation under the assumption that this would always be enough damage to K.O. a character).
  
• created new sound effect that plays when a character takes environmental damage from being in lava.
  
• added portrait animations to all of the advice events.
  
• the "asking for advice" events will no longer end with a character saying "never mind"--if that's about to happen, the game will now simply find a different event to run instead.
  
• shuffled around the timing of certain random events.
  
• wrote 44th and 45th loading screen tips.
  

We have a ton of bug fixes!

• fixed: the Sick status effect had started making skills cost 2,000% their normal energy cost instead of 200%.
  
• fixed: after introduction of the new, more efficient parabolic arc code, objects thrown via skills like Toss and Throw were no longer getting parabolic arcs (and consequently, could end up lodged inside the ground and invisible to the player).
  
• fixed: the game was not allowing Stone Golems to throw objects over other objects of the same category. (They would simply smash into them instead.)
  
• fixed: it was possible for inorganic destructible objects to get the Poisoned status despite having 100% Poison resistance if the skill conferring the status was not itself of the Poison element.
  
• AI fix: due to a quirk in how C# handles integer division, the AI was not applying any scoring penalty at all to attacks that would draw a non-lethal counterattack--even if the counterattack would leave the attacker with 1 health.
  
• AI fix: due to a quirk in how C# handles integer division, the AI was not applying a penalty to attacks against targets with non-lethal on-death attacks (such as explosive charges), meaning that enemies could still sometimes decide to attack--and detonate--explosive charges while in range of the blast.
  
• fixed: golems and spirits could acquire moods of types that made no sense for them (e.g. Starving or Sick).
  
• fixed: if movement speed was set to instant, doors that AI-controlled characters moved through would not be opened and scripts triggered mid-move via the MoveOver trigger would not be triggered.
  
• fixed: equipment-modifying items (such as repair kits and whetstones) were not usable in camp.
  
• fixed: the game was freezing whenever a player-controlled (non-AI) character used Defensive Stance.
  
• fixed: attempting to use an item in a character screen during deployment at the start of battle would fail without providing a pop-up message.
  
• fixed: the rear horn in a spriggat's portrait would appear incorrectly scaled, positioned, and colored if the prior displayed character portrait possessed a hair accessory.
  
• fixed: on certain occasions, item sacks on top of bridge tiles became non-interactable.
  
• fixed: due to a formatting error in the new, modifiable item attributes table, poisoned and blazing weapons were bugged and could freeze the game upon being equipped.
  
• fixed: with equipment that would replace a filled slot, the shop interface was still only showing a comparison of one stat maximum (rather than the intended 1-3), and could display a stat penalty as a reason for wanting the equipment.
  
• fixed: on-death attacks were being applied twice, resulting in double damage (and double application of status effects) from explosive charges.
  
• fixed: adding support for finding characters by load ID in a past update broke the Unlock Door skill, causing the game to think the character was attempting to unlock whichever proc gen character was first recruited because they happened to have a blank load ID.
  
• fixed: the game was still showing the actions bar and portrait when AI-controlled characters hidden in fog of war moved.
  
• fixed: the game could show incorrect actions bar information for AI-controlled characters who acted after an ally hidden by fog of war.
  
• fixed: characters using Light attacks and Staggering weapons could attack spiked barricades and fires without taking damage.
  
• fixed: if an AI-controlled character blinded a player-controlled character in a fog of war map, the game would suddenly treat the AI army as if it were player-controlled for purposes of updating the fog of war, thereby revealing most of the map.
  
• fixed: fog of war tiles would not update when unequipping a torch or other Perception-affecting item.
  
• fixed: the bathing event did not add a follow-up event where one character asks the other on a date to the hopper.
  
• fixed: in the witness protection battle, even if the kineticist on the stage was already dead, he would still give his "close the fist" dialogue.
  
• fixed: due to a scripting oversight, it was still possible to get the information from the documents in the dissident den raid even if they were destroyed.
  
• fixed: the AddStatus script action was no longer announcing the applied status effect.
  
• fixed: the Challenger and Brutalist achievements would only trigger if starting a playthrough on roguelike mode.
  
• fixed: when multiple scripts were attached to the same skill or item, the second script would have its first action run out of order.
  
• fixed: if OnVictory dialogue was spawned for the enemy army, using a WinBattle action or reply to change it to a player victory would not prevent the game from showing a "Defeated" pop-up regardless.
  
• fixed: the game would still show the dialogue menu in the very first branch of dialogue even if that branch contained a HideDialogueBox action.
  
• fixed: the "Black" cutscene background was not usable.
  
• fixed: the CastleSandstone tileset's transitions between other tilesets were not working.
  
• fixed: in games of Psy Clash, no sound was playing when minions switched lanes as part of their built-in abilities.
  
• fixed: Religious characters' greeting responses were inappropriately referencing the god of their dialogue partner rather than themselves.
  
• fixed: you could visit the trainer with 0 characters in your roster.
  
• fixed: the game would throw an error if the player reached the Festival of the Ascendant Lights with no characters in their roster.
  
• fixed: the game would get caught in a loop if the player received Manbir Raksha's summons after the festival with no characters in their roster.
  
• fixed: the game was skipping over the "alone in camp" narration on evenings where no one remained in the roster.
  
• fixed: the game could still display buttons in custom menus twice if they were preceded by hidden buttons.
  
• fixed: the game wasn't counting the Festival of the Ascendant Lights toward the days that characters were out training, working, vacationing, or in the infirmary, resulting in them all returning a day late.
  
• fixed: it was sometimes possible for characters involved in a Talk activity to have their own, independent activity later in the same evening.
  
• fixed: the camp activity generator's infinite loop break code was incrementing the iteration number in the wrong scope, and so was not working correctly.
  
• fixed: strings typed in by the player during dialogue could end up not displaying properly (or at all) if they used commas or quotation marks.
  
• fixed: the text sprite for Drowning Res. was missing (most noticeable in shop interface explanations for why certain characters want aquatic armor).
  
• fixed: with Vindictive and Vengeful equipment that would replace a filled slot, the shop interface was still failing to display the sprite for additional counterattacks granted by the equipment.
  
• fixed a typo in the dialogue when deciding whether to report to Prince Ajit after the witness protection battle.
  
• fixed a typo in the armorer interrogation.
  
• fixed a typo in the extended Architect class description.
  
• fixed a typo in one of the rest narrations for flirtatious characters.
  
• fixed: the description for Place Timed Charges contained the wrong after-attack behavior.
  
• fixed: the description of Feedback was ambiguous in relating the skill's self-healing effects.
  
• fixed: the romantic compatibility check function hadn't been updated since the game gained the ability to generate NPCs as full characters (meaning that blood relatives were not being automatically excluded from romantic compatibility).
  

And of course, we have additions and improvements for the campaign creation suite:

• new script action: AddCharDialogue. Adds a line of non-combat dialogue (i.e. one used during camp activities) to the character's repertoire. Parameters: Character Name,Dialogue Type,Dialogue String,Facial Expression (optional),Response Type (optional). Supports an arbitrary number of miscellaneous properties after Response Type as well--anything used in CharAttributes.xml will work (in the format mor1=1, hp2=-10, etc.)
  
• new script action: RemoveCharDialogue. Behaves much like RemoveBark, but is intended to remove non-combat lines of dialogue (i.e. those which are used during camp activities) instead of combat barks, and the "All" parameter will only affect those camp lines. Has one additional, optional parameter which, if set to true, will make the character "forget" having spoken dialogue of this sort before in camp.
  
• new special character supported: -GOD2-. Gets changed to the name of the deity worshipped by the secondary character in the conversation (if any), or to "no one" if they are atheist.
  
• new special character supported: -BIO2:X-. Gets changed to the appropriate bio detail of the secondary character in the conversation (if any), with 'X' being the bio detail type (region, hometown, hometownSize, raised by, siblings, worships, and religion).
  
• new sound effects: Crowd Booing Muffled and Lava Burn.
  
• new, optional third parameter for the OnTalk dialogue trigger: Enforce Positions. If set to true, this specifically requires the triggering character to be as described in the first trigger parameter (rather than letting the second talk partner take on the role of triggerer).
  
• new optional parameter added to SpawnUnit and the Generate-Unit-type script actions: Drop Unit. If set to true, causes the unit to drop onto their space from somewhere above the battlefield when they spawn, a la an item drop.
  
• added minimum parameter checks to about a half-dozen portrait-related script actions that were missing them.
  
• added minimum parameter checks to the game's unit-spawning, unit-generating, door manipulation, change dialogue character, and roster manipulation script actions.
  
• camp activity narrations can now be tagged with a reqsRomanticCompat attribute.
  
• fixed: the "Neutralized" status effect was missing from the localization file and causing the game to throw a null error when applied.
  
• added documentation for ShowDeckButton and HideDeckButton to the in-game reference.
  
• added missing in-game documentation for the Move Over unit trigger.
  
• added missing documentation for the pitch range parameter in the PlaySound script action.
  

What Changed Over This Year

• a flexible time points system for daytime actions;
  
• loads of balance improvements (including much more forgiving rules surrounding broken weapons, payroll shortfalls, and camp cleaning);
  
• two new arena leagues (Snow Leopard and Tiger Leagues), each with their own "biomes" and hand-made qualifier battles;
  
• the arena championship fight (with its own accompanying events);
  
• a variety of new arena battle conditions (such as 4-on-4 and Defend the Idol);
  
• twenty new random events (most with multiple outcomes and many with associated hand-designed battles);
  
• eight more "palace intrigue" main plot events, including five witness interrogations and three hand-designed plot battles;
  
• the first of the game's endings;
  
• numerous user interface improvements (such as pre-visualizing knockback effects and previewing the benefits of each piece of equipment for characters within the shop);
  
• countless improvements to the AI;
  
• two new difficulty levels, including a custom difficulty mode;
  
• full gamepad and SteamDeck support;
  
• a card-collecting mini-game (Psy Clash!) with a dedicated deck management screen;
  
• a jobs board with four types of jobs (manual labor, proc gen caravan guarding missions, proc gen cavern exploration missions, and proc gen card tournaments);
  
• an infirmary where you can send wounded characters to recover;
  
• a blacksmith where you can repair items;
  
• character renaming;
  
• weapon renaming;
  
• the ability to give characters bonuses or send them on vacation for a morale boost;
  
• a variety of new skills (including Create Fire, Create Ice, Quick Twirl, Kinetic Surge, Mega Charge, Shield Bash, Fire Breath 3, Frost Breath 3, Dark Breath 3, and Light Breath 3);
  
• a ton of new items, including weapon-modifying consumables, permanent stat boosters, and weapon repair kits;
  
• new equipment modifiers (such as Stylish, Beautiful, Gorgeous, Visored, and Calming);
  
• new environmental conditions, such as heat waves and rain storms that spawn puddles around the battlefield;
  
• new weather effects (such as fireflies, falling leaves, and flower petals);
  
• new skill visual effects (such as overheat and spike trap);
  
• new battlefield objects like ice spikes, exploding trees, puddles, trapped chests, rugs, jugs, and planters;
  
• additional character portrait variety;
  
• lots of additional character dialogue;
  
• additional narrated character camp activities;
  
• the ability to make characters' relatives appear in-game as full-fledged characters themselves;
  
• new character sprites;
  
• new battlefield backgrounds;
  
• new cut scene backgrounds;
  
• gorgeous new music (such as "Drawing Blades" and "Contest of Blood");
  
• tons of new features, functionality, and assets for the campaign creation suite;
  
• the ability to download and play other players' custom campaigns right in-game;
  
• approximately one zillion bug fixes; and
  
• more stuff I probably missed.

Update #20: Version 0.6.20!

More battle variety!

• new event: a second nighttime thief attack battle (much larger in scale than the first)!
  
• two new "inter-team sparring" events, each with an associated battle sporting a special (and unusual) victory condition!
  
• a new "revenge quest" event chain, plus a new associated battle!
  
  
  
  
• new arena fight condition: Skill Request. A fan requests that you use a specific skill (known by at least one of your deployed characters) during the battle; if you use that skill a certain number of times and go on to win the fight, you'll gain an extra reward! (This condition can appear beginning in Monkey League.)
  
• new arena fight condition: Skill Avoid Request. A fan requests that you avoid using a specific skill (known by at least one of your deployed characters) during the battle; if you do not use that skill at all and still go on to win the fight, you'll gain an extra reward! (This condition can appear beginning in Monkey League.)

We have a variety of other improvements as well!

• a much-requested feature is now in-game: when playing with manual saves, you can now create a mid-battle save right after deployment but before taking your first turn!
  
• you can now have the recruiter auto-generate a balanced starting team for you on Day 0! This lets players jump into the game quickly without having to make sense of the recruitment screen (especially helpful for new players who haven't experienced combat yet).
  
  
  
  
• improved recruitment UI behavior when mousing over other recruits with a different recruit selected: you can mouse over other recruits normally, but the selected recruit will pop back up upon mousing off of them for ease of comparison.
  
• AI improvement: the AI now does a much better job of appropriately balancing the value of reaching a preferred area versus the value of moving toward a character it would like to attack (but cannot yet reach).
  
• AI improvement: the AI now imposes an internal scoring penalty for any move that would take a character who is already inside their preferred area outside of said area.
  
• AI improvement: reduced the minimum calculated value of usage before enemies will use items, avoiding situations where enemies won't use bandages even though it's optimal to do so.
  
• AI improvement: AI-controlled units now value Defending status proportionally more as they become more injured, and more based on their ability to counterattack.
  
• wrote new tutorial text about fruit trees, explaining why AI-controlled enemies sometimes attack them. (Because they drop health-restoring fruit when destroyed.)
  
• reduced the odds of a late event occurring on any given night.
  
• further boosted the likelihood of characters who are already friends or romantically interested in one another choosing to interact with each other over other characters.
  
• added two new "life background" dialogue variants.
  
• character dialogue can now be made available (or excluded) for a character based on their family's socioeconomic class.
  
• new mood added to the game: Determined.
  
• particular proc gen character lines can now be assigned greater likelihood of selection.
  
• the game now accounts for characters temporarily off working, training, in the infirmary, or on vacation when spawning the number of tents in the thief attack battles.
  
• shifted the timing of the Brother Leader Revenge event chain; it can now no longer occur until Gharial League at the earliest.
  
• updated the "tent looted" conversation in the thief attack battles so the game shows you the info bar with the money being lost.
  
• updated the Strikebreaking event so the game shows you the info bar with the money being added if you complete the job.
  
• completing Jiti Sone's job now has a downside: spriggats will refuse to appear in recruitment, and any spriggats actively on the team when the job is done will suffer a huge morale hit.
  
• added portrait animations to the "ignore" options for the Ishita Svaamee events.
  
• added a portrait animation to the first traveling merchant event.
  
• the game can now process custom strings used as part of a scene's display name.
  
• laid the groundwork for the engine to support looking at specific aspects of the skills that characters are using as parameters for dialogue triggers.
  
• the Together in Battle Steam demo has been updated! (The demo was last updated in August 2023, so this was long overdue.)

A whole bunch of bug fixes!

• I pushed a small "hotfix" update at the start of the month, so part of my bug-fixing progress for April is chronicled there. As for the rest...
  
• fixed: bridges below the level of the terrain could cause the game to use the bridge's elevation instead of the ground's for purposes of calculating movement and elevation bonuses.
  
• fixed: bridges below the level of the terrain could cause the game to use the bridge's elevation instead of the ground's for purposes of calculating which spaces are moveable for a non-flying unit.
  
• fixed: under some circumstances where the AI had a character move and use a non-turn-ending skill, the AI could queue up further actions for the character where they moved and used a skill, but then fail to execute the "actually moving" part, resulting in the character attacking outside their normal range.
  
• fixed: if an army in a battle was completely neutral by way of being allied to every other army, the game would treat them as having vanquished all enemies and immediately end the battle with them as the victor.
  
• AI fix: the retreat AI algorithm was not accounting for area preference or patrol tags, causing characters with no usable skills to retreat without regard for the areas they were supposed to be moving towards.
  
• fixed: if any of an AI-controlled unit's skills could affect a target worth affecting, all of that unit's skills would be marked as worth using as part of short-range moves toward a preferred area, leading to the unit potentially inappropriately attacking scenery.
  
• fixed: changes to the code made it so generalized character death barks could again get queued in addition to specific OnCharDeath dialogue for the same character upon falling in battle.
  
• fixed: proc gen battle map names were not being saved in the "battle start" save files used when restarting a battle, resulting in the map's internal file name displaying instead.
  
• fixed: the "force species" attribute could be used to create proc gen characters of a species not compatible with the chosen class, resulting in issues like missing portraits and sprites.
  
• fixed: door-affecting script actions such as Lock could trigger OnDoor dialogue when used in OnLoaded dialogue.
  
• fixed: mousing over a unit and then immediately mousing over the deployment window thereafter without ever mousing off the unit could cause the unit's mouseover tooltip to become "stuck" onscreen for a time.
  
• fixed: it was possible for cavaliers to charge across a path with an elevation difference of 2 or greater, just so long as they effectively charged off of the cliff rather than up it.
  
• fixed: in some circumstances, the game could save (and reload) past instances of generic templated units in a way that would reintroduce tags placed onto those unit types in past battles.
  
• fixed: a misformatted script action parameter in the event where a character asks the player for money to gamble with resulted in the event proceeding even if the player lacked the minimum amount of money to gamble with.

Improvements to the campaign creation suite!

• the final two army palettes that were supported in the original Telepath Tactics (Orange and Pink) have now been added to the engine!
  
• new script action: AddNickname. Gives a character a new nickname to be used by a second character (or by every other character) in dialogue.
  
• new script action: HideDialogueBox. Allows you to manually hide the dialogue box during dialogue.
  
• new script action: ShowDialogueBox. Causes a hidden dialogue box to reappear.
  
• new script action: HideActionsMenu. Allows you to manually hide the actions bar during battle.
  
• new script action: ShowActionsMenu. Causes a hidden actions bar to reappear.
  
• new script action: StripItemsFromUnit. Removes all items from the named character's inventory and places them directly into a roster's reserve supplies.
  
• new script action: AddTriggerCharPortrait. Adds the portrait of whatever character triggered the dialogue, without regard to whether their name is used as speaker for the current branch. Has the same parameters as AddSpeakerPortrait.
  
• new dialogue trigger type: OnSkillUsed. Triggers dialogue when a given skill is used. To satisfy the trigger, the skill usage must be effective in some way (i.e. not just attacking an ally or healing an enemy). Parameters: skill name, user army, and user name.
  
• new tag: RemoveAll. This tells the game to remove all existing tags from the unit.
  
• new condition: Drop Items On Death. Lets you set a particular army to not drop items when a character in that army dies. Parameters: army number, drops items (boolean value--true by default).
  
• three new special string stats are supported for SetStringByStat: First Name, Last Name, and Nickname. (These are read-only, so don't try using them as a parameter with SetStat.)
  
• added last name as a supported attribute value for the SetStringByNPC script action.
  
• the LevelUpArmy script action now works in cut scenes.
  
• new option for the IfInArea script actions: you can now use an army in the Character Name parameter (e.g. "Army 0", Army 1", and so on) and the game will check for any character belonging to that specific army.
  
• TargetPreference tags now support the use of custom string variables for their target name parameter.
  
• changed the runScript attribute in CampActivities.xml to runScripts to make it consistent with the rest of the game.
  
• updated in-game documentation for the IfBioDetail-type script actions and the -BIO:X- special character with the default bio detail types.
  
• fixed: the Delete Row and Delete Column algorithms in the Map Editor were faulty, with their use potentially causing the game to lose track of where units should be until the map was reloaded.
  
• fixed: in the Map Editor, adding a new column to the very rightmost edge of a map would secretly cause the game to add a second column, invisibly offsetting mouseover coordinates and making the selector appear in the wrong spot when mousing over units.
  
• fixed: in-game documentation for the AddNPC script action was missing the tenth parameter, Blood Relative.
  
• fixed: in-game documentation for the SetStringByNPC script action was missing blood relative among the supported attribute values listed.
  
• fixed: getting a unit's load ID via the SetStringByStat script action would return an empty string for proc gen characters. (It now returns the unit's name, which can stand in for its load ID in virtually every use case.)
  
• fixed: bridges below the level of the terrain would cause the map editor to set the cursor elevation (and the elevation of further objects placed on the space) to the bridge's elevation instead of the ground's.

How can you help?

• fixed: the AI would get locked into an infinite loop when swimming with proc gen units generated with the Swimmer trait.
  
• fixed: the counterattacks icon did not display correctly when providing in-shop explanations for why characters wanted Vengeful weapons.
  
• fixed: a range error occurred when a stone golem threw a flying character.
  
• completely overhauled the way the game deals with parabolic movement to improve performance on slower systems (and to thereby avoid weird issues with assassin Leap arcs visibly lagging behind everything else).
  
• overhauled the game's dodge animations so that they, like the new parabola animations, are driven purely by code and math, and so perform much better on older machines.
  
• rewrote the way that the game times combat sequences to end after zooming out the combat camera so as to avoid issues arising from the slowdown in Unity animations on lower-end machines.
  
• cleaned up the timing on character "hop" animations when changing elevation.
  
• received a revised smile for the blacksmith portrait. (The original was just too awkward to use.)
  
• balance change: reduced the number of green allied caravan guards that spawn during caravan defense missions from 4 to 3.
  
• balance change: reduced the chance of a Whetstone appearing in the shop during a given visit from 33% to 10%.
  
• fixed for version 0.6.11a: due to recent changes in the AI code, the game would throw a null error if an enemy drowned to death at the start of the AI's turn.
  
• fixed for version 0.6.11b: it was possible for an AI-controlled character with a preferred area tag and no viable moves to remain on the "calculate a move" list forever despite having no viable moves, thereby preventing the computer from ever ending its turn.
  

Let's start with the biggest changes and additions this month:

• 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!)
  

We've got UI improvements and polish:

• 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.
  

Miscellaneous other additions and improvements:

• 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.
  
  

Bug fixes aplenty:

• 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.
  

New goodies for campaign creators:

• 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.
  

• new event: Clown For A Day.
  
• new event: A Nice Bath.
  
• new item: Anatomical Treatise. Permanently boosts the user's Accuracy stat by 5.
  
• new item: Spring Shoes. Grants Jump. Limited to 3 uses.
  
• new skill: Jump. Same as Leap, but has an after-attack behavior of Can Move instead of being unlimited. Conferred by Spring Shoes.
  
• new item: Pocket Sand. Grants Pocket Sand. Limited to 1 use.
  
• new skill: Pocket Sand. Has a 75% chance to cause Blinded for 2 rounds. Doesn't end the turn.
  

• further improved the shop explanation for why characters want equipment: when the reason a character wants something is stat-related, the game now lists as many as 3 stats the equipment will improve (not just 1), making it easier to compare the benefits from upgraded armor at a glance.
  
• camp activities can now affect the health of everyone present in camp.
  
• revised the doctor's Treat Wounds activity so that it serves a purpose when not playing on Challenging or Challenging+ difficulty. In addition to its existing effect of curing 1 wound level for wounded characters, it now also restores 15% of missing health for all non-wounded characters in camp.
  
• when a character first gets a crush on another character, their activity that evening will now always be to fantasize.
  
• refactored the code for determining nighttime character activities to avoid unwanted behaviors when multiple characters have activities that reference (but do not include) a second character.
  
• created ability, casting, hurt, and shove animations for Praetor Nero.
  
• created ability, axe, hurt, shield bash, and shove animations for Manbir Raksha.
  

• fixed: there were a few lines of code I had been using for testing that turned almost every character Sensitive (lines which I forgot to turn off afterwards).
  
• fixed: height was set incorrectly for the promoted shadowling cast animation.
  
• fixed: camp activities like Fantasize were still plucking the characters being thought about out of the activity order for free rein.
  
• fixed for 0.6.01a: it was possible for characters chosen for the events A Crush or A Nice Bath to become romantically interested in characters they were already had a crush on (or were romantically involved with).
  
• fixed for 0.6.01a: some of the scripting for Battle in the Dissident's Den was not working as intended.
  

• created new item graphic: Pouch.
  
• created new skill button graphic: Pocket Sand.
  
• created new sound effect: PoofCloud.
  
• new sound effect: Boing.
  
• created new item graphic: Book White.
  
• created new item graphic: Spring Shoes.
  
• new mood type: Embarrassed. Narrates that a character feels embarrassed.
  
• new mood type: EmbarrassedAbout. Narrates that a character feels embarrassed about their interaction with a specified second character.
  
• received sunset and nighttime variants of the new Riverbank cutscene background; added them into the game.
  
• updated AssetNames.xml to make the most recent batch of cutscene backgrounds selectable in the cut scene editor.
  
• new in 0.6.01a: IfGoneGoTo and IfGoneRun can now find objects by their load ID.
  
• fixed for 0.6.01a: the in-game documentation for SocialUnitsToList was missing the last parameter (amount).
  

The biggest changes this month:

• the game now has a virtual keyboard, allowing text input when playing with a gamepad! With this change, Together in Battle now fully supports gamepad--and along with it, SteamDeck. 🙂
  
  
  
  
• in the shop, when mousing over equipment, the game now immediately clues you in to the biggest reason why each character who wants that piece of equipment wants it. If the reason is an increase in a particular stat, the game will display the stat change the new equipment would produce:
  
  
  
  
• improved auto-move-and-attack behavior: when double-clicking or shift-clicking an enemy, the game now heavily favors skills for which the target is already in range. (If the character moves, it will generally be because there is no skill that's in range, or because there is a much more effective skill that requires the character to move.)
  
• caverns now have a second floor with free exploration that can be accessed by finding the stairs down! (Characters don't regain energy or recover from being Stunned while in free exploration mode, making the navigation a bit of a puzzle.) Cavern depths are generated with one of three different puzzle types, each of which leads to a big treasure if solved.
  
• the funeral scene is now complete, with new cutscene art to match!
  
• new random event sequence that begins in the arena, has multiple cut scenes, capped off with a dramatic hand-designed battle.
  
• new random event: Birthday Fan. This one can play out a variety of different ways depending on the personality of the character you select to participate in it.
  
• new skill: Create Fire. Creates Fire on an open space within 2 tiles of the character. Pyrokineticists now learn Create Fire later on in their skill progression.
  
  
  
  
• new skill: Create Ice. Creates Ice Spikes on an open space within 2 tiles of the character. Cryokineticists now learn Create Ice early on in their skill progression.
  
• new skill: Quick Twirl. Behaves just like Twirl, but the character can both move and use other skills afterward. Costs 2 energy. Characters generated with the dancer background are now set to learn Quick Twirl when they reach high levels.
  
• new item: Flower Garland. Worn on the neck; boosts morale by 1.
  

Miscellaneous improvements

• incorporated new sprites for Dese civilians into the game, replacing the placeholder sprites used in Save the Travelers.
  
  
  
  
• proc gen characters are now created with some natural variability in their portrait size--some larger and some smaller--with human women on average a bit smaller than human men.
  
• increased the consistency of physical trait effects on character stat growths.
  
• increased the maximum number of life skills and personality traits the game will track over the course of a playthrough to avoid duplicates from 12 to 18.
  
• when tracking life skills with alternate names (e.g. author/novelist, farmer/gardener, lawyer/judge, etc.), the game now accounts for all variants, not just the variant chosen, thus foreclosing the other variant from being chosen by another character.
  
• added a commonality attribute to various life skills so that ones with duplicative effects (like historians, professors, lawyers, and judges) are now collectively no more likely to be chosen than any other.
  
• wrote new background dialogue for pickpockets, burglars, and bounty hunters. (Previously, they shared the same background dialogue as gamblers.)
  
• it is now possible for a camp activity to involve a second character without that character physically showing up (or having their own activity used up).
  
• characters who have a crush on someone now gain a potential camp activity where they spend the evening fantasizing about their crush.
  
• artistic characters with a crush on another character can now sketch drawings of their crush at night.
  
• reduced the daily chance of a character with -10 morale resigning from 35% to 25%.
  
• updated the Mustebeast Tent event so you can now pick a bunkmate from among everyone else in the roster, not just a selection of 4 random characters.
  
• the engine now supports changing character clothing within unit portraits (as well as disrobing).
  
• new portrait added to the game: town crier.
  
• new portrait added to the game: Specter.
  
  
  
  
• UI improvement: for moves smashing an enemy up against the edge of the map, the collision damage preview now displays the collision just off the edge of the map instead of layering it under the ordinary damage reticle.
  
• UI improvement: removed the "you have already done this today" warning from the Jobs Board button in Kalkerapur, as it is now commonplace to get multiple job opportunities in a given day.
  
• you can now talk to Explorers while on a Cavern Exploration job.
  
• you can now talk to Caravan Guards while on a Caravan Guarding job.
  
• increased the difficulty of caravan guard battles slightly.
  
• made Ice Spikes a bit more dangerous and durable, and made Fire a bit easier to extinguish.
  
• if you choose to people watch during the Festival of the Ascendant Lights, Gurdeep now has a bit more dialogue and you will now have an opportunity to buy a Flower Garland for 5 aura.
  
• you can now ask Rohit for a more in-depth explanation of the Psy Clash rules during the Festival of the Ascendant Lights if you opt to play games.
  
• added some animated portraits to the narration before meeting Gurdeep during the Festival of the Ascendant Lights.
  
• added Black as a battle background for dark spaces (like caverns and such).
  
• new background art for camp activities involve a character discovering or going to a temple!
  
• new background art for the riverbank!
  
  
  
  
• new background art for the Dusht random event and the gambling camp activity!
  
  
  
  
• did a bit of code optimization for when the game checks for whether spaces are solid land.
  
• optimized the game's internal operate() function for increased performance.
  
• the game's procedural map generator can now generate bridges across large stretches of hazard tiles, not just one-tile gaps.
  
• the game's procedural map generator can now generate bridges across gaps between cliffs.
  
• characters and objects can now be forced to spawn within a specific range of distances from the player in proc gen maps.
  
• the game now properly supports stairs which appear to lead down below the map; there is a now a "StairsDown" variant of all existing stairs objects.
  
• improved proc gen map logic for placing stairs (they can now only be placed at elevation 1, and not adjacent to environmental hazards).
  
• status effect immunity messages now only pop up if the target is a character. (The player doesn't really need to hear about how boulders and trees are immune to, say, Blinded or Enthralled status.)
  
• removed the log and one of the bushes from Battle at the Overgrown Garden to make movement around the map less restrictive.
  
• wrote another variant for narration during rainstorms.
  
• added a couple of kitten name variants.
  
• added animations to the portraits of characters reacting to the player's choices during the Beggar event.
  
• improved the sound effect made by floor buttons when they are stepped upon.
  
• cleaned up the "Grab" sound effect a bit.
  
• added the number of the current save slot to generated log files.
  

Bug fixes

• fixed: characters returning from cavern exploration would inappropriately remain on the cavern exploration roster going forward, allowing them to participate in cavern exploration while also remaining available for everything else.
  
• fixed: clicking on a bridge or on stairs while moving in exploration mode would cause the selected character to move adjacent to (rather than onto) the clicked object.
  
• fixed: when ending dialogue in exploration mode, the game would select the next character in the army rather than re-selecting the last selected character.
  
• fixed: the land movement sprite had become misconfigured in movement tiles during Exploration Mode due to (what else) changes to the code made when adding localization support.
  
• fixed: shoving an object while in exploration mode could result in the game displaying that object as the current selected unit in the actions bar.
  
• fixed a null error that could occur when clicking to Use a triggerable object when in exploration mode.
  
• fixed: in the deck viewer, you could accidentally click on cards by clicking in the empty area below them.
  
• fixed: triggering an on-death attack for a destructible object (such as Explode) would not grant experience to the character who destroyed the object and triggered the attack.
  
• fixed: due to a typo, the game was unable to grab the item template for Fur-Lined Cloaks.
  
• fixed: the game was sometimes overwriting proc gen equipment materials values for Together in Battle with old placeholder values, resulting the game not loading material names correctly and therefore failing to generate the correct names for weapon and armor images.
  
• fixed: when shown in battle, the info bar was layering on top of UI elements that should have taken priority over it.
  
• fixed: AI-controlled characters would not open a closed door during their move onto the door's space if that space happened to be the last space in their move.
  
• fixed: flyers who were dunked into water or lava by virtue of being Heavy would, upon swimming to an adjacent tile of liquid terrain after Heavy status wore off, immediately resume flying. Such units must now swim back to land (or a bridge tile) to recover Flying movement.
  
• fixed: the AI could use Swim with characters suffering from Immobilized status when in water or lava.
  
• fixed: when switching months in the calendar, the game ceased to display the current day correctly.
  
• fixed: it was possible (albeit mathematically unlikely) for one or more of a character's NPCs to be generated sharing that character's same first name.
  
• fixed: the Poltergeist promotion for the Spirit effectively nerfed Juxtapose by changing it from an after-attack behavior of Use Once to Can Move.
  
• fixed: narrowing down a tag by its parameters for RemoveTag was only working in cut scenes, not battles.
  
• fixed: when talking to Caravan Guards in a caravan battle, the game referred to them as Explorers.
  
• fixed: on rare occasions, the proc gen map algorithm could generate more than one bridge tile on the same space.
  
• fixed a range error that could occur when generating spawn positions for destructible objects in proc gen maps.
  
• fixed: the gamepad navigator code could sometimes fail to enable navigation to some of the reply buttons in dialogue branches with multiple responses once the reply options finished fading in.
  
• fixed: using the StopMusic script action and then resuming the track that was playing prior to StopMusic with PlayMusic would not work, as the game would think that track was already playing.
  
• fixed: characters undergoing the second Lost Kitten event were not gaining the new Play with Kitten camp activity as intended due to a scripting error.
  
• fixed: character dialogue would animate, with accompanying babble sounds, even as a report covered the dialogue menu onscreen. In a branch with a ShowReport action, the game now initiates dialogue animation and babble sounds only after the report is closed.
  
• fixed: one of the "talk" camp activity variants for hot-tempered characters was not setting character facial expressions appropriately.
  
• fixed alignment on the floor button object.
  
• fixed: the Crickets and CricketsAlt loops were not looping cleanly.
  
• fixed: localization-related changes to the code over the past few months caused the game to stop displaying the name of the status effect in "[Status effect] wore off" pop-up messages.
  
• corrected an error in the description for Medicated Bandages.
  
• fixed: Create skills with particle effects did not produce their particle effects as intended.
  
• fixed a few awkwardly worded dialogue variants where characters talk about their life backgrounds.
  
• fixed: when shown in battle, particle effect velocity for the info bar was not scaled properly.
  
• fixed: one variant of one of the hot-tempered victory barks was ungrammatical.
  

Campaign creation suite improvements

• new tileset added to the map editor: Castle Sandstone! It's the same as the Castle tileset, but sandstone-colored (and thus more appropriate to sandy or arid environs).
  
• you can now edit the properties of different materials used in procedurally generating weapons and armor in a custom campaign! When creating a new custom campaign, the game now saves a copy of Materials.xml, which you can manually edit to alter the effects of different equipment being made of--for instance--Steel instead of Bronze, or Boiled Leather instead of Leather.
  
• new script action: KnockbackUnit. Pushes the unit in a specified direction for a specified number of spaces, as if they'd been shoved or subjected to a kinetic gust. Three parameters: unit name, direction, and number of spaces.
  
• new script action: ChangeClothing. This works like ChangeExpression, but instead of changing facial expression, it changes the body graphic being used in an existing character portrait. Supports all base classes usable by characters of that species. Optional third parameter: if set to true, this will permanently change the clothing used in the named character's portrait wherever it appears throughout the game.
  
• commissioned new clothing for human proc gen character portraits, settable with ChangeClothing: Villager, VillagerDese, VillagerDese2, Merchant, MerchantDese, RoyalGuard, Slave, and None.
  
• new script action: ReactToDeath. Causes all characters in the specified roster(s) to behave as though the named character died while in their roster. They will suffer a morale penalty based on the strength of their Friendship and Romance with the named unit, will gain a memory of the event, and may become depressed or go into mourning for a period of time. Two parameters: character name, roster number(s).
  
• new script action: SetStringByClosestCharacter. This grabs characters based on how close they are in a relationship sense. Sets a string variable equal to the name of the character in the specified army (if used in battle) or roster (if used in a cut scene) who scores as "closest" with the named character: 1 pt per Familiarity level, 15 pts per Friendship level, 20 pts per Romance level. Parameters: Variable Name, Army or Roster Number, Character Name, Exclude Characters In List (optional).
  
• when calling LoadConv, the new conversation now keeps the existing trigger character and secondary character of the prior dialogue or script by default for easier scripting.
  
• you can now leave the name parameter blank in the AddNPC script action, and so long as the NPC being added is a relative of some kind, the game will auto-generate a name for them (as well as procedurally filling in all the other parameters you left blank).
  
• new tag used to affect randomized battlefield placement: AvoidOwnArmy. This causes the game to weight placement of the tagged unit so that members of the unit's own army are treated as enemies, enforcing minimum distance rules.
  
• new tag used to affect randomized battlefield placement: AvoidArmyObjects. This causes the game to weight placement of the tagged unit so that destructible objects belonging to various armies are treated as characters, including them when calculating minimum distances.
  
• new sound effect: Button Click.
  
• new sound effect loop: Running Water.
  
• new combat visual effects: CryoCast and PyroCast (used in the new Create Ice and Create Fire skills and adapted from existing visual effects for Cryo Blast and Pyro Blast).
  
• new text sprite symbols: Backspace, Confirm, and Arrow White L.
  
• the map editor successfully loads and saves the "forced spawn distance from the player" attribute of army groups in proc gen maps.
  
• reorganized the army group fields in the Generate Map window of the map editor, added fields for specifying forced spawn distance from the player.
  
• within the Generate Map window of the map editor, shifted the player deployment options over to the leftmost column to make better use of space.
  
• created a 5th set of object fields in the Generate Map window of the map editor.
  
• the map editor will now let you select more than just 2 terrain tilesets, and more than just 1 hazard tileset. (It will still pick only 2 tilesets and 1 hazard set at a time when it generates an instance of the proc gen map, but those will be will pulled from every possible tileset you selected.)
  
• added "force spawn distance from player" fields for destructible objects to the Generate Map window of the map editor.
  
• the map editor successfully loads and saves the "forced spawn distance from the player" attribute of objects in proc gen maps.
  
• improved the game's detection of premade unit load IDs (as opposed to actual class names) for army group units in proc gen maps.
  
• added parameter count error-checking to a bunch more script actions.
  
• improved in-game documentation of AddCampActivity and LearnCampActivity to better distinguish them.
  
• the game now supports Species as an alternative to Race among string stats.
  
• fixed: using RemoveTag to strip a unit of its scriptID would remove the tag, but not the associated scriptID marker used to find it by the game.
  
• fixed: upon loading proc gen maps, the map editor would strip out colons from any premade unit load IDs within army groups.
  
• fixed: the map editor was not setting terrain check boxes correctly within the Generate Map window of the map editor to match the sets used by existing proc gen maps upon loading them.
  

So where are we now?

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