We hope everyone had great holidays!

Build 0.6.2

We're fully back in operation this week and resuming our weekly builds! This latest build mainly focuses on the AI. We redid a lot of the core workings of the AI to make it more flexible, more easily moddable and smarter. Without getting into too many details, the AI should now favor the best course of action amongst all the things it could do, whereas before it would only look through a specific "set of things" (like "doing damage") before even considering other options (like "buffing allies"). The new AI uses weights for all these "sets of things", so the big melee fighters will still favor "kicking your face in" over "healing teammates" in general. But now, if it could land a 5-men Haste somehow, it might just do that rather than auto-attack your Knight.

Highlights:

• AI: Redid significant portion of the AIs and the way it makes decision. It should be significantly more versatile in combat now. It should also be easier to mod enemy behaviors more precisely.
• Recruits: Changing the way AP calculations are handled for new recruits to use the "average AP of the 6 highest characters for each class", rather than the "average AP of the 6 highest characters in total". This should result in more consistent and higher AP values in general.
• Visuals: Adding spell effects for Sales Pitch and Flipkick.
• Infused Edge: The damage prediction will now account for the damage dealt by the spell part of Infused Edge.

As always, the full notes will be at the end of the post.

Progress Report:

Even with the holiday season upon us, we've been pretty busy recently. We wrapped up the console ports a bit ago and then moved on finishing adding all the story cutscenes to the game. We've been working on adding the new "optional character events" to the game and those are coming along nicely. We should be able to have most of them in for the next big content update. Otherwise, we'd been planning on an AI system revamp for a while now and finally got to it during the holidays. The system will make the AI much more flexible and much easier to mod as well. It probably has a few kinks that need working out still, but it's already looking like a nice improvement :) On the art front, we're working on finishing all the missing visuals and sounds and while we haven't added that many to the build this week, we have a bunch of new ones getting added, including that cute little guy at the top of this post. Here's a new spell still in the works, but that should be ready soon:
We have a few more, but those are tied to the final boss, so we'll keep them under wraps until release. Once again, we hope everyone had fun holidays and we wish everyone a great upcoming year!

Change log:

01/04/2019 - Version 0.6.2

New Content:

• AI: Redid significant portion of the AIs and the way it makes decision. It should be significantly more versatile in combat now. It should also be easier to mod enemy behaviors more precisely.
• Visuals: Adding spell effects for Sales Pitch and Flipkick.

Balance:

• Recruits: Changing the way AP calculations are handled for new recruits to use the "average AP of the 6 highest characters for each class", rather than the "average AP of the 6 highest characters in total". This should result in more consistent and higher AP values in general.
• Patented Usage: Updating it so it uses the item range values rather than a fixed value from the ability.
• AI:
  • Killing Blows: Making the AI smarter by not valuing debuffs at all on the target if the hit would kill it anyways.
  • Mystic Shield: AI should be smarter in the way in deals with Mystic Shielded targets.
  • Charm: Charmed units will no longer run towards healers when they have low health and instead focus on being active with actions.
  • Charm: Charmed units will be very unlikely to heal themselves.
  • Crits: AI will factor critical chances better when calculating the worth of different abilities (including the fact that debuff have a 100% accuracy on crits).
  • Smarts: Improving the way the AI calculates "secondary effects" worth to be more accurate.
  • Patented Usage: The AI will now be able to use this ability.
  • Delayed Attacks: Enemies that use a blast that will land "next turn" will now favor targets that are rooted, asleep or will have their turn come up after the attack would land.
  • Behavior: Adding a new AI behavior style where the AI will not care about friendly fire and just focus on hurting its targets.
• Archafflictor: Reducing cost of Vilerot to 12 MP (from 14MP) and reducing debuff chances to 33% (from 50%).
• Coronal Plume: One of the later maps gave this item and it wasn't meant to. Changing the drop to a Dark Core. This change is not retroactive.

UI:

• Spells: Various spells received small tweaks to their animation speeds.
• Performance: Various small performance optimizations and reduced memory usage.
• Infused Edge: The damage prediction will now account for the damage dealt by the spell part of Infused Edge.
• Enemy Movements: Moving the "show all enemy movements" away from the "details button" and into the "free movement" navigation. The feature is still there, just not "forced on" the details button, as it was distracting.
• AI: Speeding up the AI decision process a little bit.

Bug Fixes:

• Skyjack: Will now check for traps at the end of the spell for the target.
• Patented Usage: Fixed a bug where it wouldn't remove the MP used.
• Starting MP: Fixing a bug where characters present in cutscenes would often start the battle with full MP.
• Buffs/Debuffs transfers: Abilities that transfer buffs/debuffs in combat wouldn't always update the tooltips correctly before.
• Blood Armor: Fixing some issues with the Blood Armor and making it more modable (less hardcoded values).
• AI:
  • Leech: Fixing an issue that made the AI overvalue abilities with HP/MP leech.
  • Stealing: Fixing various issues with Stealing where the AI didn't value the abilities correctly.
  • Accuracy: Fixing an issue where the AI would value "less accurate" attacks positively rather than negatively.
  • Focus Fire: Fixing a fairly infrequent issue where the AI of Bzils wouldn't check for all their Focus Fire options and just check for a random one.
  • Infused Edge: Fixing an issue where the AI would pick a random spell rather than "the best option" when using Infused Edge.
  • Positioning: AI could make weird decisions when player had some "really high movement" units on the field.
• Charm: When a charmed unit charms another unit, the newly charmed unit should be of the "charmer's current faction" now.
• General: Fixing a very rare initialization issue that could cause data corruption with some tables.
• Maps: Fixed some small sprite ordering issues on many maps.
• Abilities Menu: Fixed an issue where the user could press confirm/cancel in quick succession in the abilities equip menu and it would act strangely.
• Protect: When a character was protecting another character and both of them were in the same AoE, the protect would still trigger even though it shouldn't, which lead to weird behaviors. Fixed.

Modding:

• AI Behavior: Adding options when spawning characters in Encounters.txt to change their base weights (eg: weightstyle:debuffer) and updating the Encounters.txt file that gets generated in the My Documents\Fell Seal\customdata folder (the one with all the explanations) to have more information. You'll have to delete/move your current file if you want the game to generate a new one to see the added text.

Hotfix:

Removing unfinished "character events" that were left in the game and crashing. Very sorry about that!