Update log
Full Together in Battle update
The complete published notes, normalized for clean reading and source attribution.
Repeated intro
Greetings, tactics fans! It's been a little while since I pushed a real update, hasn't it? If you were the worrying sort, you might even have started to suspect that I'd stopped working on Together in Battle. But as Cher Horowitz, protagonist of the classic 90s film Clueless might say: as if!
Extracted changes
- Gameplay
- Maps
- Store
- UI and audio
No, friends--after months of relative silence, I come to you with a major update to Together in Battle. There's a whole lot to talk about here and I'm already tempting the carpal tunnel gods as it is, so let's get right into it!
First, we have a new game mode!
- New unlockable game modeMultiplayer Arena ! Upon reaching the Monkey League Qualifier in the main campaign, the game will unlock a new, built-in play mode called Multiplayer Arena, selectable as a campaign within the New Game menu of the title screen.
Multiplayer Arena lets you assemble small teams of custom characters, name them, customize their AI, and pit them against each other in small-scale fights with 2 to 4 teams in a brutal free-for-all!
All of the maps in Multiplayer Arena are hand-designed and unique to the mode, with symmetrical layouts designed to avoid giving any one team an unfair advantage.
Each battle can be player-versus-player, player-versus-AI, or AI-versus-AI: you decide.
At the start of each fight, all characters are auto-leveled to a level of your choosing; you can turn on random item drops or keep characters limited to whatever they bring into the arena.
The campaign will automatically track how many wins each team has for your convenience!
Since Multiplayer Arena is treated as a normal campaign by the game, this means you can start different instances of Multiplayer Arena with different teams and different settings, each assigned to a different save slot; then, whenever you feel like playing a skirmish against the computer (or running a tournament with friends, or simply watching the AI battle against itself), you can just load your saved game the same way you would any other campaign!
Pretty cool, eh? But that's only the tip of the proverbial iceberg...
I took advantage of this break to come back with a fresh pair of eyes, hunting for simple-but-impactful UI improvements I could make...and I found a lot:
UI improvement: a new Inventory Quick View mini-window now lives in the Actions Bar in battle! The Inventory Quick View lets you quickly browse, use, equip, drop, and give the selected character's items without ever opening up their full character screen.
For gamepad support, this uses a new, deterministic 2D "grid" framework that allows multi-axis gamepad without depending on error-prone floating point math. (The game now also supports two layers of nested submenus for gamepad UI, a further improvement that was necessary to implement this feature.)
- UI improvementa new route tracing method for character movement! When you move a character, the game now follows the exact sequence of spaces you traced out onto the battlefield instead of picking a path on its own. You can even backtrack and the game will remember the previous bits of your route, then let you reroute from there. (Note that if you draw a route that exceeds the mover's maximum available steps, the game will throw out your route and generate its own route as before--however, you can simply move the cursor back over the selected character to start over with your own route again.) All of which is to say: the game will no longer ignore your path and route your characters through traps.
Source