Greetings, tactics fans! It's been a few months since our last update, but the wait is over!
As a certain SRPG juggernaut with an odd (one might say unbeWeaveable) amount of overlap* with TIB bears down on us, the time seems right to drop some goodies for those of us presently without the means to acquire a Switch 2.
Together in Battle may not have Functionally Infinite Gacha Money behind it, but it does still have some things that Fortune's Weave does not: deeply customizable shareable characters, a dynamic social sim layer, elevation mechanics, multiplayer, roguelike mode, a campaign editor, and now...
...three (3) new lissit classes!
Yes, you read that correctly! I heard some folks out there were hankering for more lissit class options, and so I spent weeks designing and hiring artists to expand things some more for our scaly friends. The result: a new whip-wielding class, the Wachikit, along with two promoted variants!
"Wachik" is a lissit word. Believed to have originated as an onomatopoeia for the sound a whip makes, the wachik is a traditional lissit hunting whip--and "wachikit," the term for those who have devoted themselves to mastering the wachik.
As the first proper lissit ranged class, Wachikit are unique in that they deal slashing--not piercing--damage, and they attack at a very specific range: exactly 3 tiles away from their targets. In exchange for this range limitation, Wachikit gain access to a wide array of cool and distinctive abilities: they can scale trees and cliffs, drag enemies at range, disarm enemies, entangle targets, rip flyers out of the air, and--of course--whip characters or objects and use them as anchors to swing and leap across obstacles without ending the turn!
Accompanying the new Wachikit base class are two new classes for promoted Wachikit: the Lasher and the Winged Serpent. The Lasher gains raw attack power and access to the free-action attack Quick Lash, while the Winged Serpent gains dodge and unlimited use of Whip-and-Leap to fly across the battlefield with an absurd level of mobility.
Here are the related change logs (I've omitted the logs describing all of the wachikit skills, by the way--I think it'll be more fun for you to discover those yourself!):
new classes added to the game: Wachikit, Lasher, and Winged Serpent.
new weapon type added to the game: Whips! Whips grant the skill Whip, of course, but also have a unique property: they automatically add a chance to impose Distracted status on the target when using Whip or any of its dependent skills. (Whip cracks are really loud, y'all.) In exchange for their long range and distracting effect, whips deal a bit less damage than most other weapons.
whips are procedurally generated the same as all other weapon types and now appear in stores along with the rest of the weapon types.
added 9 brand-new skills to the game, all of them exclusive to the wachikit class.
Wachikit can now appear as enemies in the arena starting in Monkey League, while Lashers and Winged Serpents can appear in the later leagues.
As a fun bonus, I've created a new downloadable custom character for folks to play with: Wipetiss Chikak! She's fast, she's strong, she's loyal, and she's fully decked out with unique, malaprop-laden custom dialogue. Head over here and copy her code, then import her into the game and have fun! 😉
Cross-class advancements are now a thing!
I've long felt that there were a few multi-class combos in Together in Battle that just didn't have enough synergy to be really worth pursuing. To address this, I've added a new engine feature: reclassing can now trigger "cross-class" skills based on which other classes the character has learned in the past!
When triggered, a cross-class advancement gets quietly added to the character's skill progression. This opens the door to certain suboptimal class combos suddenly gaining unique utility. The first beneficiaries of this system are a subset of fighter/caster hybrids:
characters who switch between a non-engineer, non-assassin physical damage class and one of the elemental psy fighter classes (i.e. pyrokineticist, cryokineticist, photokineticist, and skiakineticist) now gain a cross-class skill that lets them imbue their weapons with elemental bonus damage. This takes what was once a net negative (improvements to Psy seldom benefited weapon-based attacks, making these builds weaker than doing nothing at all) and turns it into a positive (that same Psy can now be channeled into armor-bypassing bonus damage for turns at a time). In short: you can now create the mechanical equivalent of mage knights in TIB!
new status effects: Heat Weapon, Cold Weapon, Light Weapon, and Shadow Weapon. These buff the target so that weapon-based attacks deal bonus damage equal to 2/3rds the user's Psy with the corresponding element. (Subsequent uses of these status effects extend the duration but do not stack in power.)
created four new skills that self-buff with the corresponding status effect: Heat Weapon, Cold Weapon, Light Weapon, and Shadow Weapon. Each has an energy cost of 5 and grants the user the status effect for 3 rounds.
I didn't stop there, though; Engineers got some love, too:
characters who switch between the engineer class and one of the elemental psy fighter classes (i.e. pyrokineticist, cryokineticist, photokineticist, and skiakineticist) now imbue their Caltrops with added elemental effects, causing Burning, Frozen, Blinded, or Softened status in addition to their baseline effects!
the game now supports tags to modify the status effects inflicted by traps a character creates.
Now, I don't know if an all-lissit team backed up by a Cryokineticist-Architect would be optimal--but I do know that it would be damned fun to see in action.
That's all for this round of cross-path advancements, but I'd love to push this further. Have any fun ideas for cross-path advancements tied to particular class combinations? A big boost to throwing axe strength and range for Axefighter-Kineticists, say; or a Steam Geyser attack for Pyrokineticist-Cryokineticists? I want to hear your craziest ideas! Come share them on the Discord or shout them out in the comments below! 🙂
We have speed improvements!
For those of us not blessed with the patience or free time to luxuriate in this game's hard-won bounty of fluid animations, I've sped things up a bit!
the game's "menu popping up" animation has been sped up by about 33%.
the delay before you can select a new character after attacking has been reduced by roughly 3/10ths of a second (which might not sound like much, but it makes a surprising amount of difference!)
new experimental feature: a Skill Animation Speed setting is now live and in-game! This causes combat animations to play up to twice as fast while still maintaining the correct timing for accompanying sound effects, visual effects, knockback, and attack impact. (I've tested it and it works, but because there are so many different timing-dependent effects that can occur with skills in TIB, I'm labeling this one experimental in case something slipped through the cracks. If you run into an issue, please capture a log file and report the thing!)
optimized the pathfinding code to help speed up AI calculations during non-player turns.
added in version 1.1.20c: further reduced unnecessary delay at the conclusion of an attack sequence.
added in version 1.1.20c: the maximum skill animation speed setting was increased from 8 to 9.
added in version 1.1.20c: Skill Animation Speed now affects the speed of character movement from skill knockback as well.
added in version 1.1.20f: Skill Animation Speed now affects the speed of character movement from Move skills (like Leap) as well.
With these changes, TIB feels genuinely feel snappier and more responsive now--and that's a win in my book. Thanks to the players who kept bothering me about this!
We also have miscellaneous improvements not encompassed by the above!
a new unique character background dialogue has been added to the game: adventurer parent.
a new proc gen character dialogue attribute is now supported: addTag. As soon as the character delivers the relevant line of dialogue, they become tagged with the specified tag. This can (and if I get the time, will) be used in the future to tie random events to particular dialogue that proc gen characters might deliver in camp.
when playing with mouse and keyboard, a short tutorial now appears when you first visit the reserve supplies screen pointing out that you can drag-and-drop items onto characters and auto-equip new equipment. Multiple times, I've heard from players who don't attempt to use drag-and-drop in inventory management and just sort of assume it's not supported. The game now makes sure you know about it up front!
whenever you download a custom campaign from Steam Workshop, if the game can't immediately move the downloaded campaign to its destination in the Custom Campaigns folder, the game now marks the folder that it was downloaded to and attempts to move it to the intended destination every time you open the game or close the Download Campaigns window from then on. (Once it succeeds, it removes it from the list.) This should hopefully address problems relating to Windows refusing to move and rename the downloaded folder at the moment the download finishes.
as an added precaution against rare situations where the AI could potentially end up out of sync with the rest of the game and select a move originating from a space not occupied by the current AI-controlled character, the game now proactively strips out all moves originating from spaces other than the destination the very moment an AI-controlled character begins moving.
the game now dynamically adjusts camera panning boundaries based on the current camera zoom level, relaxing the borders when zoomed in and pulling them in as you zoom out.
added in version 1.1.20f: Fireclaws, Frozenclaws, Shadowclaws, and Brightclaws now gain +1 counterattack upon promotion.
added in version 1.1.20f: buffed the Library card in Psy Clash: it now has 6 health instead of 5.
added in version 1.1.20f: buffed the Iron Jaw Trap card in Psy Clash. When triggered, the card's owner now draws an extra card in addition to its other effects.
We have bug fixes, too (because of course we do)!
BIG FIX: I finally fixed a visual glitch that had been annoying me for years! Have you ever seen a moving character sometimes jitter backward for just a moment, seemingly at random? Not anymore, you won't! 😁
fixed: when custom characters were recruited at or past Monkey League, the game was inappropriately resetting their stats to level 1 when reapplying equipped item bonuses.
fixed: on the calendar screen, it was possible to accidentally open the day log by clicking the wrong spot before the day advancing animation had completed.
fixed: when reclassing a character at the trainer, the character would immediately learn every single skill of the new class normally learned at or below their current level.
fixed: the lissit-exclusive Swift trait was increasing character base Speed, but their actual movement range was not updating to match until they emerged from water or lava.
fixed: when using a one-space parabolic movement skill to land on fly-only objects like trees, boulders, or barrels, the game would fail to place the mover on top of them, and the mover would then sink partway into the ground when walking off those objects. (Note: up until I added Clamber, there were no one-space parabolic Move skills in the game, though players could potentially add them in custom campaigns.)
fixed: tags were not being saved correctly when serialized as part of a character's ordinary skill progression (as opposed to when they were granted immediately upon promotion).
fixed: recognition lines for Blunt, Narcissistic, and Paranoid characters were missing the attributes necessary to ensure characters correctly chose the positive or negative variant based on their actual relationship with the other character in the exchange.
fixed: the custom character creator was not appropriately saving minimum and maximum friendship values necessary to let the game distinguish between positive and negative recognition lines for custom characters (among other things).
fixed: one of the Imaginative miscellaneous like lines interacted awkwardly with the explanations for why a character liked certain things.
fixed: static health bars remained onscreen even when opening the character screen (or other UI windows) in battle.
fixed: a trigger to call the code which clears unit tooltips upon mousing over the actions bar in battle had become broken.
fixed: when using Shift + Enter in the custom dialogue window of the custom character creation interface, the game would input an invalid character that prevented the character from being saved successfully upon exiting.
fixed: there was a weird little visual artifact over the left shoulder, right at the neckline, of gasul portraits using head variant 1.
fixed: the page change buttons in the deployment menu were using outdated arrow button graphics.
fixed: the page change buttons in the army overview screen were using outdated arrow button graphics.
fixed in version 1.1.20a: an oversight in the post-version 1.1 player-directed move pathing logic meant that the game was no longer warning players before they walked into their own traps.
fixed in version 1.1.20a: static health bars could remain onscreen above warning windows that appeared during combat.
fixed in version 1.1.20a: unit tooltips could overlay the weapon selector button if the button was moused over with a unit behind it.
fixed in version 1.1.20b: bridges could become impassable at times due to changes to the code made while optimizing.
fixed in version 1.1.20b: creating objects on top of bridges was no longer working due to changes to the code made while optimizing.
fixed in version 1.1.20b: regardless of the skill animation speed setting, the delay while waiting for attacks to resolve was not lessened if the game checked for an enemy counterattack.
fixed in version 1.1.20c: skill animation speed was not being applied to knockback or creation delays, meaning that if the speed was set high enough, the game could try to conclude the attack before the knockback or creation delay completed, leading to a range error.
fixed in version 1.1.20c: there was one more coroutine in charge of timing the end of combat exchanges that wasn't being affected by the skill animation speed setting, leading to an unintended "hang" at the end of a sped-up attack.
fixed in version 1.1.20c: when Skill Animation Speed was cranked up, the delay before self-moving in a self-move attack was not being scaled correctly (causing, e.g., self-movement not to begin soon enough with skills like Charge).
fixed in version 1.1.20c: when Skill Animation Speed was cranked up, if a Create attack took too long to complete relative to the game's calculated time to complete the attack, the game could softlock.
fixed in version 1.1.20c: under certain circumstances, if the AI took more than 2 seconds total to calculate a character's move, the game could softlock.
fixed in version 1.1.20c: pop-ups occurring during enemy moves had begun to appear on the space where they started their movement.
fixed in version 1.1.20c: stat proficiency bonuses were being displayed twice in the level-up screen.
fixed in version 1.1.20c: after opening the Report an Issue screen in battle, keyboard shortcuts would stop working.
fixed in version 1.1.20c: the game was missing a "hook" to update the Characters Resigned stat (necessary to get the "It's not you, it's me" achievement).
fixed in version 1.1.20c: the "Jack of all trades" achievement still required promoting to 51 different promoted classes instead of the full 53 promoted classes now in-game with the wachikit class.
fixed in version 1.1.20d: changes to the code from the pop-ups fix from version 1.1.20c was causing null errors under certain circumstances.
fixed in version 1.1.20d: the Skill Animation Speed setting was not selectable in the settings menu with gamepad.
fixed in version 1.1.20e: when Skill Animation Speed was cranked up, it was sometimes possible for a null error to be thrown when an AI-controlled unit died at the start of the computer's turn (e.g. from drowning or burning or the like).
fixed in version 1.1.20f: the deployment screen would sometimes inappropriately display a character in the current roster twice.
fixed in version 1.1.20f: the little "hop" animation non-flying characters used when traversing up a level in elevation was not scaled to match lateral movement speed on Unit Move Speed settings above 1, leading to a weird visual glitch where the unit would fly up into the air, then suddenly snap back down to the ground mid-hop.
fixed in version 1.1.20f: psy healers, mentalists, and kineticists were inappropriately getting cross-path weapon buffing skills when cryo/pyro/skia/photokineticists reclassed into those classes, whereas crossbowmen were not getting cross-path weapon buffing skills when cryo/pyro/skia/photokineticists reclassed into that class.
And last but not least, we have improvements for custom campaign makers!
maps now support border tiles! This is just what it sounds like: a purely cosmetic "border" of tiles that cannot be interacted with. Just as with battle backgrounds, these help give the illusion of the world continuing on past the edges of the battlefield--but unlike painted battle backgrounds, this does so in a way that isn't dependent on continually commissioning new paintings to match each particular battlefield. Border tiles can hold destructible objects and characters just like any tiles, but things placed on border tiles cannot be selected, moved, attacked, or inspected. The AI will ignore them. Border tiles are treated just like the edge of the map for all purposes, up to and including knockback. Border tiles are visually darkened to signify to the player that they are non-interactable. Border tiles can now be set whenever you create a new map in the map editor. Additionally, a new button has been added to the Alter Map Size submenu: Adjust Borders. This allows you to change a map's number of non-playable border tiles after its initial creation.
there's a brand-new behavior tag intended for enemies in free movement exploration mode: Chase! A character tagged with Chase, if within a certain minimum distance of the specified unit, will pop up a little exclamation point to show they've spotted them. (Regardless of distance, Chase-tagged characters won't notice the chase target if the target is behind them.) After a short pause, a chasee who's noticed their target will move directly to the space the target was on when they were spotted. This behavior ignores ordinary limits on movement logic that ordinarily prohibit deliberately moving onto the same space, allowing the chaser to actually collide with the chasee. Upon collision, the game will run a specified script (which you can set to damage the player, initiate a battle, or do pretty much anything you like). If the target is not collided with and is no longer within chasing distance after the chaser moves, the chaser will pop up a little question mark to signal that they've lost the trail, and will then default back to whatever other movement logic they might have (or, if they have none, they will revert to standing still) until such time as the target comes back into chasing distance.
The Chase tag has three parameters: Distance, Character Name, and Script Name(s). To run multiple scripts on collision with the chaser, delimit each script name with a vertical bar (|).
new pop-up images to signal that a character has initiated a chase and lost the trail, respectively: _Exclamation and _Question.
new sound effects used in the above situations: Spotted and Lost.
new tag: PostChaseDelay. This sets the length of the delay after a character with the Chase behavior either (1) catches the target or (2) loses sight of the target before the chaser will start counting down its movement timer again. (By default, this value is 2.0 seconds.) One parameter: Seconds (decimal at or above 0).
new tag: ModTriggerSFX. Modifies specified objects so that, upon being triggered, those objects apply the named status effect to the triggering character. One parameter: status effect.
new tag: ModCreationTriggerSFX. Modifies the tagged character so that when they create a specified type of object, the object automatically gets a ModTriggerSFX tag applied to it. Two parameters: object name and status effect type.
the engine now supports WithTarget-type self-move skills with definable, built-in delay periods before the self-movement begins. (This was already supported on ToTarget self-move attacks such as Charge.)
the engine now supports LeapToTarget-type self-move skills (just like ToTarget self-move attacks such as Charge or Lunge, except that the user now moves parabolically instead of in a straight line along the terrain.)
new skill button graphics added to the game: Heat Weapon, Cold Weapon, Light Weapon, Shadow Weapon, Whip, Whip-and-Pull, Whip-and-Pull 2, Whip-and-Leap, Entangle, Disarming Lash, Drag to Earth, and Quick Lash.
new sound effects added to the game: Whip Crack Alt, Leather Creak, and Leather Creak Short.
new Wachikit portrait art added to the game.
new Wachikit and Lasher spritesets added to the game.
fixed: for skills with negative knockback and WithTarget self-movement (e.g. Pull or Stick-and-Drag) that target at range (not someone adjacent), the game was only displaying the UI tile previewing movement for the attacker, not for the target.
fixed: the map editor's Alter Map Size submenu was no longer aligned to the button that opens it.
fixed in version 1.1.20a: the darkening effect on border tiles did not appear over water, lava, or chasm tiles.
fixed in version 1.1.20a: an unassigned reference exception in the map editor was occurring due to ongoing work on new, top secret, yet-to-be-implemented functionality...
As for that next game I mentioned...
Remember how I said that I knew what my next game would be? Well, guess what? I'm now roughly 50 single-spaced pages deep on the design doc, two-thirds of them devoted to sketching out the story and a further 1/5th devoted to further fleshing out the cast. I'm working with artists, I've hooked in the composer, and pre-production is moving along!
I'm still not going to tell you what the game actually is, of course--but I will say that you can expect to hear a good deal more about it sometime next year! I suspect you'll be pleased. 😉
Until next time, friends!
Tactically yours,
Craig
* a gladiatorial arena SRPG with a calendar system, multiple plotlines, scheduled qualifier matches, unscheduled pickup matches, a jobs board, and--of all things--a 3-range shadow-teleporting ability that can be followed up by other attacks!
