Greetings, tactics fans! February may be the shortest month, but as you'll soon observe, I've been incredibly busy racking up a ton of welcome changes to Telepath Tactics Liberated. This month sees lots of small graphical improvements; a [i]lot[/i] of fixes and improvements relating to the UI (with a special focus on gamepad support); new AI capabilities; miscellaneous bug fixes; an improved Disarmed status effect; and lots of new tools for campaign creators. Let's get into all the changes! First up, we have graphical improvements, equipment usage by the AI, and more: -- adjusted the height of the Pyro, Cryo, Shadow, and Light Blast explosion animations to properly align with their projectiles. -- fixed a graphical glitch involving the left- and right-facing visual effect animations for Light Breath and Light Breath 2. -- cleaned up the graphic for the 2D particle "Sparkle." -- finally fixed that annoying bug where stray 2D particles could end up "stuck" at the top-left corner of the battlefield. [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/41649779/5584f2841ff992631233a161fdc89cbfe4c541e5.gif[/img] -- improved the look of the game's rain particles in battle. -- fixed: it was sometimes possible to see the "corners" of the weather particle emitter box in battle under certain conditions. -- improved the shop tutorial; it is now nicer-looking, spread across two pages, and provides more relevant information. -- the game now remembers if you've completed the shop tutorial and won't show it automatically on subsequent playthroughs. -- fixed: things which caused a character to be instantly placed on a specific space in battle (e.g. undoing) could sometimes mess up that character's z-sorting. -- the AI will now equip weapons, armor, and other items if its characters (a) have something equippable in their inventories and (b) they have the relevant equipment slot unused. -- successfully switched the cut scene backgrounds over to an asset bundle streaming system. This sort of thing is supposed to reduce build times, and can theoretically help with memory management on more resource-limited systems. -- improved background image compression; converted the background asset bundle to use chunk compression. -- fixed: the Escape button would not act as a click on the report screen in cut scenes. -- fixed: in the character screen in battle, you could start the process of giving an item to an adjacent character by selecting Give for an item, then immediately reopen the character screen, use or drop the item, and finally return to the battlefield and click the red give tile to give a pristine copy of that item to an ally. There are a [i]lot[/i] of gamepad improvements and fixes: -- created sprites for the A, B, X, and Y gamepad buttons; integrated them into the engine as text sprites. -- updated the game's various tutorials to now use gamepad button glyphs and instruct the player on gamepad-specific controls if it detects the player is using a gamepad (or playing on Steamdeck). -- the game now uses "Press (A)" instead of "Click" for continue prompts in the dialogue menu and cut scene narration box when the player is using a gamepad. -- fixed: the gamepad cursor was misaligned for the screenshake adjustment buttons in the settings menu while on the title screen or in battle. -- fixed: the gamepad cursor had become misaligned for character screen elements while in cut scenes. -- fixed: after using the start button to open the main menu in cut scenes, the game incorrectly treated game settings as the current menu for purposes of gamepad navigation. -- fixed: the gamepad cursor could navigate to the "switch page" buttons in the reserve supplies screen even when they were invisible. -- fixed undesirable gamepad cursor behavior when switching between dialogue branches with multiple replies and those without multiple replies within dialogue trees. -- added gamepad controls for the options menu and settings screen in cut scenes. -- added gamepad support to the info bar. -- fixed: in cut scenes, gamepad focus would not be restored to custom menus when backing out of other gamepad menus. -- made the options button selectable with the gamepad when in a custom menu. -- fixed: the game treated invisible custom menu elements as selectable with the gamepad cursor. -- fixed: gamepad controls for the report screen did not function properly in cut scenes. -- fixed: upon returning to the title screen from a game, remaining on the screen in a submenu for the length of the intro movie while using gamepad controls would result in the game inappropriately pulling gamepad focus onto the main menu. And finally, we have more goodies for campaign creators, including an overhaul of the Disarmed status effect: -- the NewBackground script action now allows you to load backgrounds in battle! They will appear behind the battlefield. -- new background added: Arena_Interior. -- prettied up heart portrait particles. -- the Run reply type now supports passing multiple parameters. -- new script action: LevelUpArmy. Works like LevelUp, but it affects an entire army at once instead of just one character. -- the skill editor now has a checkbox that can be used to toggle whether a skill is considered a weapon skill by the game for purposes of the Disarmed status effect. -- the game can now distinguish between weapon-based skills and non-weapon-based skills, and will now prevent characters from counterattacking with weapon-based skills while subject to the Disarmed status effect even if they don't have a weapon explicitly in their inventory. -- created a Disarmed icon; the game now displays the Disarmed status effect for the rest of the turn when an enemy is disarmed. -- changed the Disarm skill's element from Mental to Slash, increased the base chance of success to 100%, changed the cost to 4 and made it end the turn. -- new skill: Disarming Strike. Deals basic sword damage with a 60% chance to disarm the target; can be used once per turn and doesn't end the turn, but it costs 6 energy. -- the spirit's Possess skill now causes the user to become Hidden until their next turn. -- fixed: the game would strip Hidden status from attackers at the conclusion of an attack even if the skill they attacked with was the thing that gave them Hidden status to begin with. -- fixed: the -ATTACKER- special character was inappropriately referencing the attack target instead of the attacker when used in skill scripts. -- in skill scripts, the skill target is now treated as the triggering character and the user of the skill is now the secondary character. -- new special character: -ROSTERNUM-. Gets changed to whatever the number of the current roster is. -- fixed: head 12 in lissit portraits was missing data for mouth 8. -- improved documentation of the LoadConv reply type. -- fixed some outdated info in the in-game documentation relating to generate unit-type actions, specifically with respect to the first salary parameter. -- fixed: a Wait action queued up after a WaitForDialogue action would cause the wait timer to run concurrently with the wait-for-dialogue condition; and if the wait timer counted down to zero before the dialogue finished animating, the game would proceed with executing actions anyway! The game now waits for dialogue to conclude if a WaitForDialogue action was executed before commencing the countdown for a subsequent wait timer. -- fixed: SkillProgToList would not always generate the list in ascending numerical order of the level the skills are learned. -- fixed: the game was not recognizing when a dialogue branch was marked for input text within PersistentDialogue.xml. -- new script action: GenerateItemName. Causes the game to randomly generate a (hopefully) cool-sounding name for a unique weapon, then sets custom string _UniqueItemName with the name generated. -- greatly improved documentation for the CreateUniqueItem script action. -- fixed: a typo in the logic for CreateUniqueItem was causing it to disregard mandatory tags. -- new script actions: ShowCalendarButton and HideCalendarButton, which can be used to toggle visibility on a button the player can use to examine the in-game calendar during cut scenes. -- you can now scroll through characters in the character screen while within the army overview screen using the mouse wheel (or, if in gamepad mode, the shoulder buttons). -- fixed: the reverse match method in CullListByList was not working properly. Annnnd that's about all for now when it comes to TTL! I've been working extremely hard getting Together in Battle ready for its April 25th launch, as it has to be ready to go out to reviewers next month. It's been a real whirlwind of rounding up things that I've been putting off completing and then getting them good and done. I really think you all are going to love [url=https://store.steampowered.com/app/1267210/Together_in_Battle/]Together in Battle[/url]; it has nearly everything that makes Telepath Tactics Liberated special, plus a much more open structure with a lot of latitude for player choice and (gasp) actual role-playing. This time, we've got loads of character customization via the in-game trainer, and tons of replayability via the...well, everything. You see a lot of "strategy roguelikes" these days, but they're mostly just card games focused on short "runs." It's rare to get one that leans into providing a true long-form role-playing adventure, and pretty much unheard of to get one that's also a deep SRPG at its core. I think that makes TIB pretty special. Anyway, enough of my blabbering--I have a game to prepare! See you all in a month or two. 😉 Tactically yours, Craig