Greetings, tactics fans! Today marks the release of version 0.3.0 of Together in Battle, featuring a variety of improvements to Psy Clash, the weather system, and a big content milestone: the arena championship fight is now in-game, with branching cut scenes after.

I won't spoil anything here, but I'm proud of how the championship fight weaves together a tactical challenge with narrative reactivity (the "consequences" bit of "choices and consequences," for any RPG design nerds reading this). Based upon certain choices you made earlier in the game, things in the fight may be different for you!

Anyway, enough of that--here is the list of changes for this month. We'll start with the championship battle:

• created the championship arena battle, complete with conditions that change based on player choices from earlier in the game and--in some cases--optional in-battle dialogue.

• we've got a truly kickass new battle track from Ryan Richko appearing in the championship fight: "Contest of Blood"!

• added new branches to pre-championship dialogue with Ishita Svaamee.

• created a short cut scene intro leading into the arena championship battle.

• created branching cut scenes following the arena championship battle that react to the outcome of the battle (and to certain of your decisions leading up to it).

A second area of focus for this month's update was improving the Psy Clash mini-game, most notably by tweaking balance and buffing the AI a bit:

• Psy Clash AI improvement: when choosing a minion to target with cards (or to directly damage with bowmen or crossbowmen), the AI will now assess the targets available and choose based on an assessment of which minion would be best to target based on the minion's power and how effective the card would be on it. (Previously, the AI would just choose a target randomly.)

• Psy Clash AI improvement: opponents will no longer play Fury on minions who cannot attack.

• buffed a few Psy Clash cards: Smuggler now has 1 power instead of 0, Iron Jaw Trap now costs 0 energy instead of 1, and Focus now gives +1 card draw in addition to +1 energy.

• new sound effect: Card Shuffle. Now plays during Psy Clash when a player's deck is shuffled.

• fixed: in Psy Clash, the game could sometimes choose an empty lane that a minion had moved from when attempting to update that minion's changed health or power, resulting in the minion's health and power display not changing after combat.

In addition to the championship battle, cut scenes, and Psy Clash improvements, we have changes to other parts of the game as well! These include:

• painted a new UI background for the central buttons at the top of the recruitment interface, making them easier to see against certain scene backgrounds:

• toned down the level scaling for team leaders within arena leagues so you aren't regularly facing promoted enemies in the earlier leagues.

• reduced per-battle winnings for league arena fights (especially the later leagues) to help keep resource management a meaningful concern.

• AI improvement: the game no longer values the Move Bonus status effect positively for characters who are Immobilized or tagged as Immobile.

• AI improvement: the game is now much better at choosing targets for skills that apply buffs or debuffs to Strength and Psy.

• new weather types supported: PetalsRed and PetalsGold. These shower the scene in a soft rain of 3D flower petals (red or yellowish orange).

• new weather types supported: LeavesGreen and LeavesBrown. Causes 3D leaves (green or brown) to gradually flutter down from the top of the screen. (Battle-only for now.)

• now supported in battles: the Fireflies weather type! Causes fireflies to randomly appear, flit about the battlefield unpredictably, and disappear a few seconds later.

• added falling leaves to the Treasure Thicket map.

• added fireflies to the Thief Attack map:

• new 2D particle effects supported: FlowerBurstRed and FlowerBurstGold, producing a burst of red or yellowish-orange flower petals.

• new visual effect for spike traps added to the game.

• when characters hit promotion level via the LevelUp and LevelUpArmy script actions, the game will now quietly auto-promote them to an advanced class consistent with their base class (if one exists).

• received three new unique character portraits and integrated them into the game.

• added new dialogue options and possible event outcomes to the Card Swindler random event.

• increased minimum impact damage in combat from 5 to 6.

• when changing between weather conditions in a battle using the same particle type (e.g. Rain to Heavy Rain or Snow to Blizzard), there is no longer a delay before the change takes effect.

• added a system for queuing up a specific evening event in camp based upon events occurring earlier in the day.

• if it doesn't find a loadID match first, the SpawnUnit script action now checks characters from prior scenes by name.

• the game now keeps track of how many seconds it's been running across all play sessions.

And of course, we have bug fixes:

• fixed some scripting in dialogue with Ishita Svaamee.

• fixed: when multiple dialogue trees were queued up at once, the game was not triggering them in succession due to a mistake in the dialogue formatting process assigning all dialogue the same internal convID.

• fixed: the game would sometimes trigger traps for AI units where it calculated a move onto the trap as the best move even as it refused to actually move the character, resulting in the unit mysteriously suffering the trap's effects even as it stood totally still.

• fixed: league 4 battles were all being generated with snow-based names.

• fixed: with particularly long character movement ending in a trap, the AI could outpace itself and queue up an attack before the game was ready to launch it.

• fixed: the game would not allow characters to push or pull item sacks off of other destructible objects due to item sacks always being treated as last for attack priority on a space. When an item sack is on top of another object that is not pushable or pullable, knockback now affects the position of the item sack instead of the object it's resting on.

• fixed: the DamageUnitAt script action had slightly different damage ordering priority rules than a regular attack.

• fixed: Crush Res. was not being applied to mitigate impact damage from units being smashed into each other (or objects, or the edges of the map).

• fixed: Falling Res. was not being applied to mitigate Falling damage, which resulted in item sacks inappropriately taking damage when falling from heights.

• fixed a visual issue with snow and ash particles being stretched horizontally and looking "squished."

• fixed a typo in a victory bark variant for characters with the "disciplined" personality trait.

• fixed: auto-promotion via LevelUp was causing every character to auto-promote if within a campaign whose Classes.xml file didn't use the reqLvl attribute.

• when auto-promoting generic proc gen units, the game could throw a null error trying to update their non-existent character dialogue.

• fixed: if a character's Speed was chosen to increase upon level-up it would increase by 5, not 1.

• fixed: the cut scene editor would remember the last cut scene you loaded and load its data when creating a new cut scene, resulting in the previous cut scene's narration, background, and other data showing up by default.

• fixed: species-based sprite overrides didn't work for classes with only a single species-based sprite override.

• fixed: weather effects were not displaying with the same density in the map editor as in battle due to different emitter shape settings.

• fixed: upon going to the campaign editor and then returning to the title screen without the title music changing, the music would abruptly stop.

• added a fallback for those rare occasions where the actions bar fails to reappear after a round of combat: clicking to select a character who can still move or act now forces the actions bar to show back up.

• fixed an inconsistency with the way that IfValGoTo and IfValRun treated custom integer values that had not yet been set. Both now treat custom values that have not been set as equal to 0. (Previously, only IfValRun did this).

• fixed: a file with crucial scripts for in-game traps and space-swapping skills had accidentally been overwritten, causing traps and space-swapping skills to no longer work correctly for a few days.

• fixed: forgot to revert a change made for testing which was causing characters to say heal barks 100% of the time instead of 25% of the time.

• fixed: forgot to revert a change made for testing which was causing the game to throw null errors upon right-clicking destructible objects.

In addition to the above, I spent time these past few weeks laying groundwork for alternate versions of the game (which I'll avoid further details about for now, but stay tuned...)

That's all for this month. For next month, I'll be focusing on advancing the palace intrigue plot line (including at least one or two new hand-crafted battles), plus new random events. Until then!

Tactically yours,

Craig