Somier the Kawa merchant

New Build:

Build 0.6.0 is up! It's probably our biggest content update yet in terms of new encounters. We're adding 4 story battles, 2 patrols, 1 cutscene, 1 optional event, an optional 3 battles tournament and a special arena with 7 patrols. We're adding our first battle with a "2 back-to-back fights" in this build as well. We're strongly considering adding a save prompt in between the 2 battles, but we haven't had time to test the system enough, so it's probably going to end up in next week's update. But you won't lose to that 2nd battle, so you don't need the added safety, right? :) In all honesty, the 2nd fight in that series of fight can be brutal, so that's another thing we'll be keeping an eye on.

The Arena

The arena is a decent spot for leveling new characters. The way it works is that all the enemies will start with a "??? level" and their final level will be calculated from the levels of the 6 characters you deployed once you're done selecting your team and start the encounter. This means there's always a spot that will be "the right level" for your units, regardless of what level they're at. The enemies have been tuned to be a little challenging though, so we might end up tweaking the difficulty based on your feedback.

The Tournament

Finally, the Tournament is also held at the arena and the arena itself won't be "ready for business" until you finish the Tournament. The Tournament was supposed to become accessible after the 2nd Temple though, so for a save file "at the end of the content", the encounters will be pretty easy. Let us know how it goes!

Highlighs:

• Story: Adding 4 new story battles, 2 patrols and 1 lengthy cutscene.
• Arena: Adding the Centina Arena to the game. The Arena is a good spot to level new characters, as the enemies levels will only be calculated AFTER you have fielded your team and always match the level of the characters on the field. It acts like a regular Patrol, but tends to be more randomized and offers more gold (but no components). Big thanks to Dabor for setting up these encounters!
• Tournament: There is a Tournament at the Centina Arena with a shiny prize. The Tournament opens up after the 2nd Temple normally, so if your save file is much passed that, it might be a little easy for you. You must complete the Tournament for the Arena to become accessible.
• Outfits: Some new outfits were added to the game.
• Portraits: We added a few new portraits to the game.

Full notes will be at the end of the post.

Progress Report:

It's been a big week for us! We started work on our PS4 version, which is running smoothly. It's still missing the achievements system and the save system. Our Xbox One version should only be missing its achievements system. Other than that, we've been incredibly busy getting today's build ready. Lots of bug fixes and new features. On top of the tournament, arena, new battles and optional cutscenes, we've been adding some new functionalities to the Encounters.txt file to allow modders to modify the terrain a bit (adding blocked tiles and platforms) as well as better control over the AI of spawned enemies. We also have a lot of new spell effects ready, although we haven't had time to integrate them to the game itself yet. They should be added in a week or two. Here's some of the new stuff we have going:
Concept art for our next Summon style spell.
Initial work on the digital game manual.
A few such spells are done, but still need to be added to the game's data.

Change logs:

12/14/2018 - Version 0.6.0

New Content:

• Story: Adding 4 new story battles, 2 patrols and 1 lengthy cutscene.
• Arena: Adding the Centina Arena to the game. The Arena is a good spot to level new characters, as the enemies levels will only be calculated AFTER you have fielded your team and always match the level of the characters on the field. It acts like a regular Patrol, but tends to be more randomized and offers more gold (but no components). Big thanks to Dabor for setting up these encounters!
• Tournament: There is a Tournament at the Centina Arena with a shiny prize. The Tournament opens up after the 2nd Temple normally, so if your save file is much passed that, it might be a little easy for you. You must complete the Tournament for the Arena to become accessible.
• Optional Event: We added an optional event. It's the end of a chain of events that we've been adding over time.
• Outfits: Some new outfits were added to the game.
• Portraits: Enemy portraits for special classes have been added to the game.
• Portraits: New player portraits have been added to the game.

Balance:

• Counter Cripple: Changing it so it procs from all ranges rather than just from melee.
• Marked: Changing Wrathful Beam to Magical damage and Wrathful Burst to Physical damage.
• Boon, Focus: Changing both of these effects to be regular buffs (although they will still wear off automatically after being used), which means they can now be dispelled.
• AI: AI should be smarter with dispelling effects.
• Kawa: Increasing their stats accross the board.
• Monsters: By default, monsters would mostly spawn without accessories. This has been changed to mirror humans better.

UI:

• Damage Prediction: Damage number will be shown in red if it's a healing spell that will do 0 healing (because of Weaken).
• Counter Debuff: Counters that apply a debuff will be marked as "not activating" if the character that would get countered is immune to the status effect or already has it.

Bug Fixes:

• Assets: Fixing an issue with the new asset system that could cause silent errors
• Sounds: Fixing an issue that could cause the sound cache to get bloated over time.
• Scout: Fixing an issue where the Crit % bonus from Scout would only be applied after the character got targeted by an action.
• MouseWheel Icon: Icon wasn't animating correctly before (icon is shown when you could use the mousewheel to switch heights on the terrain).
• Pile On: Fixed an issue where Pile On had 0% chance since last update.
• Shove Damage: Fixing an issue where shove damage wasn't being reported accurately in the prediction damage after last update.
• Summoned Creatures: Fixing an issue where their stats could be off for their level.
• Boon: Fixing some issues between Boon and Infused Edge. Fixing issues with Boon and certain counters.
• AI: Fixing an issue that could cause the AI to auto attack when trying to use only items.
• Modding: Fixing a bug where "nomove:true" would only work on human generated characters.
• Level Up: Fixing an issue where some buffs could vanish upon gaining a level under certain circumstances.
• Evade Magic/Melee/Skills: For abilities that only do a Debuff and no damage, the corresponding Evade:Thing counter wasn't triggering correctly. Fixed.

Modding:

• Encounters.txt
  • AI: Updating enemy generation so the AI style can be inferred from the job if the job is provided but not the AI.
  • Abilities: Adding the ability to add a weight to individual abilities per character to increase the chance of the character using them. The command is: "weight:MERC-A2|10" to give ability MERC-A2 a 10% increased weight. You can add as many "weight:" to a line as you want to select multiple abilities.
  • Terrain: Adding a command to add a sprite on the terrain and turn that terrain into a block, or change its height. The Arena uses that command, so that's a good example to check. We'll have to work on a list of sprites that could be used at some point.
  • Abilities: When generating a character via the Encounters.txt file, you can now specify abilities:all to have the character know all the abilities for that job.

Hotfix:

• Story Scene 3: There was a softlock in the latest build after story scene 3. It's fixed.
• Bzil: Fixing incorrect abilities for the Harvester class.
• Patrols: Adding missing patrol description to 2 maps.