Lancer Tactics

[ashen kindle]

Which is kinda akin to how I run it in Lancer tbh. IF a target isn't scanned I state "Damage reduced by armour/ reduced by resistance/ reduced by other means/negated by armour" or a combination of both without saying hard numbers

[mild jay]

Enkidu has the bloodsense trait that lets it know when things are at half-hp or less. Mainly bring it up for what it says about vanilla information sharing about approximate hp values, though I’m not sure if it really makes a huge difference. In my games I usually have one or two players that are good at tracking damage dealt and figuring that kind of thing out

[teal flame]

speaking of the enkidu, it’s probably worth asking if you plan to do vanilla+ frames or not

DLC, perhaps?

[rain cipher]

This is a really good point, gameplay wise it would probably feel better to have some feedback on armor and resistance on hit than having attacks look effective but not be. In tabletop it can be up to the GM to give narrative clues as to what happens when shot, but in a videogame you don't have that option. Sound cues would be nice too

Would probably feel nicer on the player side as well, to have incoming damage mitigation reinforced by feedback like word flyouts or indicators +sound difference in the moment, to validate their build or tactical choices like Brace.

[alpine sorrel]

Agree on adding gfx/audio cues for armor reductions. Right now I have it set up so certain stats are revealed naturally at certain points:

• structuring/stressing: learn max hp/heat
• missing an attack: learn edef/evasion
• landing a weapon attack: learn armor
• them moving: learn speed
• using a weapon/system: learn that weapon/system across the entire opfor

[uneven mortar]

is the comp/con import thing live yet

[alpine sorrel]

I need to figure out when passives like Siege Armor get "scanned"; it's a bit tricky because they can be checked by anyone and don't live in the event tree, but I'd like to not have to manually remember to add them to the scanpedia by whatever is consuming them.

[alpine sorrel]

nope

[uneven mortar]

dang

good luck queen

[alpine sorrel]

Also, just posted this month's update: https://wick.itch.io/lancer-tactics/devlog/820914/first-mech-talent-content-push

[little jetty]

oh it's on itch this time?

[alpine sorrel]

ah I always crosspost

it's a tossup which one I link to

[uneven mortar]

im not seeing the updated ver. on backerkit

[alpine sorrel]

At the end of the post I mention that there's not a new build live this month

[uneven mortar]

i am dumb

https://tenor.com/view/marcoelprro-gif-27525382

[alpine sorrel]

it's all good! usually I do try to get them to coincide with the update, but this was already 10 days late

[mild jay]

Knocking out lots of items from a checklist is such a good feeling

It’s like a practical organizational tool and a motivational tool wrapped up in one

[alpine sorrel]

working on a new mech license unlocker

[gaunt plume]

I completely forgot about the Lancaster placeholder sprite and was not prepared to see purple honse wheeled in

[rugged copper]

that's the mino

[gaunt plume]

Right my bad

[ashen kindle]

Purple honse

[uneven mortar]

I love the greebob wheel

[tepid temple]

The Vlad is finally isometric 😌

[fickle pecan]

glad we can get some wheel ui back in after it wasn't practical for the main action menu

[lethal leaf]

I hope that stays the sprite for the Minotaur.

[final onyx]

Alt skin unlock

[tepid temple]

Checked back on the kickstarter and got reminded that one of the backer levels was designing an alt frame skin. Those are gonna be fun.

[worldly violet]

This just served me real final fantasy tactics nostalgia

[alpine sorrel]

a little more juice

[crimson merlin]

That's rad. We all know now, but that that make it clear the frame unlocks at level 2 though?

That was a stumble when I first started looking into Lancer

[alpine sorrel]

yeah we're thinking about it as a pitfall, and are going to try and make it clear in the followup screen after you click a mech:

[glad lotus]

I love all the UI bits you show. 😄

I also love the guthub contributions timeline tech attack icon. 😉

[alpine sorrel]

ahahaha I never made that connection

that's so funny

[rain cipher]

techy UI effects
Barb has its head in the clouds a bit though. What's the weather like up there type mech

[alpine sorrel]

yeah lol I noticed but think I like the visual gag of having it so big that it's out-of-frame for the family photo, so there's a possibility that that never gets fixed

[rain cipher]

Also, are you making unique icons for every weapon and system? A courageous feat

[alpine sorrel]

It was Carpenter's idea and he's the one who has to do it so godspeed my friend

[alpine sorrel]

WIP implementation of that above design. it felt like I had a lot more screen real estate to work with in the mockup program, I'm fighting for every pixel here 😅

[tired aurora]

Keep the barbarossa like that. It is funny 🔥

[cinder island]

i also like the idea that the barb's top half is out of frame

also these look fuckin awesome

[teal flame]

i’m tempted to suggest nudging the wheel upwards a bit in the zoom-in bit just so it’s head is still baaaarely out of frame

[gaunt plume]

Love the UI! Tho if I could give a little feedback. I like how you can see the size of the mech based on the tiles under it, but the half-size mechs still just have a single tile. Could you possibly split the tile in half diagonally to represent half-size at a glance? (I am a layman on how this stuff is made on the backend so aplogies if it's either a limitation or just haven't gotten around to it)

[alpine sorrel]

That's a good thought. In-game we indicate size half by giving them a circle base instead of square; we could copy and reinforce that here

[gaunt plume]

Oh sweet! Yeah I just thought a diagonally cut square would keep the aesthetic consistent

[gaunt plume]

Something like this (I'm bored at work so I thought I'd sketch a little)

[tired aurora]

I was thinking more of a diamond shape inside the square lol

[uneven mortar]

Is this loss

[gaunt plume]

God damnit

It can't be escaped

[mild jay]

No we’re safe, it only clears the “four panels” criteria

[gaunt jungle]

:.|:;

[little jetty]

ㅣㅔ
ㅐㄴ

[quaint yoke]

i love this so much. I love the standin minotaur. he makes me so happy

[worn tiger]

temp minotaur sparks incredible amounts of joy

[teal flame]

needs to stay in somehow as an easter egg

[little jetty]

slay the spire has a playtest asset as an option

[alpine sorrel]

talents too!

[glad lotus]

Hot damn, that's fire

[alpine sorrel]

I wanna get my time's worth out of this and since it's just a glorified way to look at a list of stuff I may as well use it for other similar data structures

Considering also doing core bonuses with it

[mild jay]

This is looking super sharp

[little jetty]

are these the same icons as comp con? they look familiar but also different

[frigid shale]

They look very similar yeah (though hopefully KTB isn't on the LT docket for a while, as it doesn't have talent icons yet )

[alpine sorrel]

Yep! Beef said we could use them as long as we credited c/c and carpenter made a few tweaks.

I think mostly by adding a third grey tone

Really we owe SO much to C/C and the work put in to create the lcp files.

[fast heron]

C/C is such a wonderful app. Makes gming in the foundry system so much easier

[pastel flax]

True H0rus ethos

[magic cave]

god damn this UI FUCKS

[alpine sorrel]

something Tactical Breach Wizards does that I'm considering stealing is putting pips of armor in line with the health bar to try and emphasize that you need to get through X amount of pips before you start doing damage

it gives a way to semi-clearly show armor even on the teeny above-unit miniature healthbars

[tepid temple]

Personally I don't find it super intuitive

[alpine sorrel]

yeah I didn't either at first, but I think it's worth exploring to see if it works as well in play as it does in TBW

[little jetty]

the shield color being so drastically different from normal healthbar kinda threw me off when I was playing TBW

but I feel like it was communicated pretty clearly in multiple places

[ashen kindle]

So kinda like how XCOm does it?

[crimson merlin]

That happened in XCOM too

jinx

[mild jay]

Xcom uses a different pip shape iirc but yeah otherwise it’s the same, in line with the health pips

[alpine sorrel]

different pip shape is definitely the way to go imo; I have a little accessibility warning that goes off in my head every time I'm about to indicate something purely via color

so either icons on it or if there's not room for that, making them a different shape

[little jetty]

purple and orange combo are genrally a very good accessibility color pairs but purple on the healthbar to indicate shield would look very weird

shape sounds like the way to go for sure

[amber nebula]

It might suit better to Overshield than Armor maybe ?

[agile lagoon]

Cobalt Core also does the "ablatives at the end of the health bar" thing with its shields and temporary shields, showing them in different colours.

I think generally people can get used to any interface so long as it's suitably tutorialized, consistent, and repeated

[near radish]

My first thought when seeing two different colors on a healtbar is that the enemy has more than one bar of health and I'd expect the "top" color to drain as I do damage. KaynSD is right imo that it would need to be properly tutorialized.

[agile lagoon]

Also helps if it's obvious what each pip does when it vanishes, which CC also does; all actual health damage does a bit of screen shake while shield damage doesn't do anything to the UI. So if Armor pips disappeared with more of a ricochet noise and deflection visual effect, over shield with a capacitor discharge noise, and actual hull point loss with a crunchy effect based on damage type that would factor into getting used to it.
But that's way deep into the polishing phase (aside from the reporting each damage and what it was reduced by in your event bus for handling later)

[teal flame]

yeah but it also does armour not in that way

[agile lagoon]

Yes CC also does armored panels and weak panels and brittle panels in it's own different way but this was more an illustration of multiple types of ablative hitpoints sitting at the end of a health bar as a visual element than a full assessment of a completely different game's mechanics

[lone cliff]

Mobius Front 83 also does this

Armor is effectively regenerating pips of HP

Armor is denoted as the pips with a line in them

they disappear when an attack is committed but reappear once its over

[alpine sorrel]

oh nice, good reference

[little jetty]

Mobius 83 handles armor as a per turn thing, not per hit thing, right?

[crimson merlin]

Pretty sure per hit

[quaint yoke]

fire emblem has a similiar armour break system in three houses

[loud dove]

spoilers:Tactical Brach Wizards act 3+

I wonder if seperate-from-healthbar icons might communicate the idea better, since TBW puts both in the healthbar so that ||armor can get consumed as if it was health by certain lategame abilities||

[cold timber]

Wildermyth has similar armor mechanics to lancer (with the additional rule that any attack reduced to 0 instead shreds one level or armor away); it's healthbars use a series of shield icons under the HP bar (the purple-pink shields are "warding", effectively the same mechanic but only against magic attacks)

[quaint yoke]

honestly the armour mechanic could workr eally well if you ever wanted to adapt like ultra's or the behemoht. Big enemies with multiple health bars in a way that feels slightly less bullet spongy

[small forge]

Wildermyth Mentioned.jpeg

[cinder island]

tactical breach wizards also mentioned

as someone who has never coded, trying to make a simple mission so I can give feedback on it and agree that it's a bit unintuitive right now. In particular I can't figure out how to code in mission objectives mechanically at all, and it took like fifteen minutes of going through every part of the UI to figure out how to actually spawn units other than PCs in the Ingress Zone

So for instance it's a (sorry i can't look up terms rn) pretty standard mission about keeping enemies out of the OZ, at the end of the round enemies inside the zone count as points, if they get too many points the PCs lose, the PCs win by getting to the end of X rounds without the score being too high

but i can't even figure out how to designate the objective zone mechanically, or how to track how many enemies are in it, and I've explored all the dropdown menus but can't parse the logic, even with google, to create the sequence i need. bear in mind again, i don't know coding from the bottom of my shoe and didn't expect to succeed at this, but i'm giving input as how it felt as a complete novice.

i also made some silly mistakes like believing I had to spawn enemies inside of designated zones like the IG (slightly old picture for reference)

i hope this is helpful at least somewhat in displaying how the average player might use the scenario editor

[crimson merlin]

I'm assuming we'll get better tools later on

[cinder island]

oh def, the most recent post mentioned looking over the scenario editor for greater accessibility, thus my being specific about where i personally couldn't figure things out

[alpine sorrel]

I appreciate the feedback! thanks for laying out your experience, it's deff confusing right now.

[alpine sorrel]

Probably the best way to see how things work right now is by loading up the Holdout sitrep ("load group") or something in the trigger panel and seeing how it counted enemies to check for doing stuff.

[fast heron]

I just got my backer coin in the mail and this thing is gorgeous!!! Can't wait for the next update!!!

[uneven mortar]

post

[fast heron]

It's got some nice heft to it, too

[worn tiger]

Yeah the coin's wonderful. Super satisfying weight to it, makes a really good ting when flipped.

[crimson merlin]

*jealous

[gaunt plume]

I use it for any coin flip/d2/50% rolls. It does have a super satisfying weight to it. A lot larger than I thought it'd be too. Thought it was gonna be like a quarter but it's closer to a half dollar

[little jetty]

oh i love half dollar coins

[gaunt plume]

Yeah. They're the perfect fidget coin and this is basically that. I keep it on my desk at all times in case I need to flip a coin, also just cuz it looks cool

During sessions I'll like fidget with it and rub along the Horus blem and I swear in a few years it's gonna be worn down

[shut horizon]

Yeah, mine is already starting to show some marks just from my fidgeting with it constantly

[cold timber]

My players have gotten used to the occasional *THUNK-TING* floating through my mic after the occasionally botched flip hitting my desk

[fast heron]

I'd liken it more to a metal poker chip

[gaunt plume]

Nah it's not as thick. A poker chips is like double the thickness and the weight is in the center over a coin with even weight throughout.

[gaunt plume]

Yeah same. I've hit my mic a few times and even my face twice when I've tried flipping it in the dark

[uneven mortar]

lol

[quaint yoke]

one thing i will always long for is fire emblem style support mechancis, they make me happy

[crimson merlin]

Deployable turrets are the FE support attacks of Lancer

[frigid ocean]

holy shit thats awesome

[alpine sorrel]

added back a little dice roll animation for attacks like there was for the KS demo

[subtle sandal]

Gamers yearn to roll dice

[fast heron]

Everyone likes the clickety clacks

[cinder island]

ooh nice, gives me shadowrun video game vibes now for some reason

[teal flame]

squint is that a new archer model?

or maybe a bombard

almost definitely a bombard to die to 10 damage

[grand notch]

I'm not gonna lie, I saw "added a dice roll" and my immediate thought was Oh No, This Will Slow It Down, but then I looked at the gif and okay it's the same duration as the regular attack animation so thumbs up, shit's rad.

[tired aurora]

For dice roll animation and sfx, I recommend looking into a game called Library of Ruina, easily the most sastifying and lighting-fast dice rolling I have seen in videogames

[little jetty]

disco elysium dice are satisfying but not fast (and not meant to be)
How is it in citizen sleeper? I heard that one has dice rolls

[tepid cipher]

can you add a clickty clack sound too ?

[frigid shale]

Citizen Sleeper does the rolls once at the start of each “day” so it may not translate great to on-demand rolls

[alpine sorrel]

Oh my, that's some good juice. 😍

[alpine sorrel]

I'm not sure we want to emphasize the dice to that extent; I think it's likely the weapon sfx will take precedence

[tepid cipher]

entirely valid tbh

[sharp smelt]

BG3’s subtle click noise for dice

[alpine sorrel]

lmao I just found a bug where if a berserker is standing on jericho cover and its aggression is triggered and it targets the cover beneath itself, it ends up attacking ITSELF because the AI prioritizes hitting non-deployable targets in a space

[shy spruce]

jericho like stop hitting yourself, stop hitting yourself :)

[frigid shale]

Walls of Jericho 2: This Time, You’re Going Down

[final mesa]

~~it's a feature, an Easter egg left in by the developer 😉 ~~

[dire ivy]

Berserker hurt itself in its confusion!

[quaint yoke]

I love the little design of the pilot btw. It looks so good

It helps sell the vibe aton

[crimson merlin]

Should the Berserker target the cover at all? I thought it was characters only?

[quaint yoke]

Lancer standard it's like that ye

Oh god I can't even Imagine coding engineer

[ashen kindle]

Wait I just clocked, the damage was rounded down

This is illegal! This breaks the golden rules of lancer!!!

[lethal leaf]

Berserkers have 1 armor.

[alpine sorrel]

Yep I gotta fix that too

[crimson merlin]

At least both things revealed themselves at the some time. It's too much Fun when you have two completely different bugs affecting the same thing and if you fix either but not both it still doesn't work XD

[ashen kindle]

Oh I'm silly 💀

[alpine sorrel]

Rediscovered today that line of sight is not in fact in all cases symmetric; I'd gotten around that with metahook by just adding out-of-LOS tiles as valid targets for tech actions, but the Blinded status (I'm making it a status in LT) really does just full-stop make LOS asymmetric.

I guess it'd have come up with the metalmark flashbang, anyway.

[little jetty]

status and not condition? is it to prevent it from being cleared with stabilize?

[alpine sorrel]

exactly

that was my thought

[teal flame]

honestly, displaying some sort of “spotted” status icon would be neat

maybe have two, an “in enemy LoS” and an “in enemy sensors”

[tepid temple]

Fire Emblem style enemy engagement ranges would get real goofy with Lancer weapons

You press the mapwide button and every tile is now a different color, telling you nothing.

[alpine sorrel]

exactly; you can see how I tried to do that in the web demo and it got real cluttered

Moonbreaker solves this by drawing lines from enemies to your guys instead of showing the entire ranges:

[teal flame]

oh that reminds me, slightly a #rules-questions thing, but should sharangas be able to hit the same target twice?

[alpine sorrel]

nah, the demo is janky

won't be the case when we get to sharagas with the full game

[teal flame]

right, good to know

[teal flame]

…how have i never heard of this game before, i need to give it a look

[alpine sorrel]

I've never played, just found it during a research dive

[little jetty]

moonbreaker is a cool looking game

[gaunt plume]

It's great if you love wargames and/or miniature games as all characters are shown as wargaming style plastic minatures. You collect and build your own teams and get to custom paint the miniatures with a built in mini painting tool that's pretty robust. If you love that kinda* stuff (like me) then I can recommend

[tepid temple]

Linda?

[little jetty]

kinda, probably

[gaunt plume]

Whoops yeah missed the typo, thanks

[uneven mortar]

Linda

[glad lotus]

I kinda like Linda, but I'd have to get to know her better before I say I love her stuff

[little jetty]

Linder? I hardly know her!

[tidal tulip]

Where can I support the development of this game? i cant find the patreon

[teal flame]

backerkit would do it i think

[tidal tulip]

and is olive still posting demos or dev builds?

[crimson merlin]

Yep!

[tidal tulip]

where would i find those?

[crimson merlin]

There's a download link in the backerit emails

[tidal tulip]

oooooh

[alpine sorrel]

I'm quite excited to share the next build at the end of this month. There's soooo much more content implemented + time spent improving the combat UI. It's really settling into feeling like an actual game — once we add gamefeel multipliers like screen shake and real sfx I think it's gonna be really special.

Yesterday I finished all the NPCs and their baseline abilities that we're gonna be including in the "bones" version: Archer, Assault, Berserker, Bombard, Demo, Hornet, Mirage, Priest, Sentinel, Sniper, and Witch

There's somewhat of a snowball effect that I wasn't expecting where the more I implement, the faster it is to implement more things because there's either existing systems or copyable code. Like the witch's pred logic was really easy to modify from the minotaur's systems.

Though also as the snowball picks up momentum it's riskier/more complicated to change it as new needs come in because more stuff is relying on that bit of code. Which is where automated tests continue to save my butt.

[obsidian blade]

can I ask what you use for automated testing?

[alpine sorrel]

GUT : https://github.com/bitwes/Gut

It's my best friend in these trying times

It tells me that things will be ok

[worn tiger]

Always trust your GUT!

[little jetty]

i love libraries with goofy names

[mild jay]

Ooh this seems like a tool I should get familiar with. Thanks Olive!

[teal flame]

oh yeah, is the minotaur’s prototype art available anywhere?

[alpine sorrel]

she's perfect....

[final mesa]

Is that a seehorse? No no, it's a sawhorse, always past tense.

[teal flame]

very much so

[little jetty]

lets goooo

[alpine sorrel]

!! omg

[teal flame]

here's a higher res version if anyone wants that

[little jetty]

higher res version 😆

[cinder island]

yesss

[agile lagoon]

how do we petition to get this added as an emote on this server? 😄

[tepid temple]

It's now a sticker on here!

[agile lagoon]

yesss

[smoky glacier]

beauty

[tepid cipher]

something something featherless quadruped

"What is a minotaur PG?

Well it's generally quadrupedal and lacking spines"

[little jetty]

you dare claim minotaur is spineless?

[tepid temple]

It's true, bulls are invertebrates

[teal flame]

i am seriously considering messing around with that sprite to add the classic minotaur “head”

[final mesa]

Better to add that minotaur ass. Hashtag VexMemes

[worn tiger]

Ra's perfect creation

[compact tinsel]

This is what peak performance looks like

[final onyx]

Love my IKEA minotaur

[tepid cipher]

I meant more spikes/sharp spikes like a hedgehog

[kind fern]

Stickers that tempt me to get the fancy nitro sub so I can post it elsewhere

[jade reef]

Oh this is excellent

[tulip peak]

With a heavy heart I have finished the actual Minotaur

[tepid temple]

The Mino always struck me as on the bulkier side of size 1, was it hard getting its proportions to fit into the allotted space?

[tulip peak]

Funnily enough I did think it was a size 2 till I found out otherwise when we were doing the research

But yeah, its horns and legs very easily threatened to bump up against the edge of the allotted 80x80px canvas and I had to make plenty of nudges to refine the form

It ended up being a favorite sprite though

[teal flame]

yeah i made the same mistake at one point

was trying to kitbash the pixel art minotaur and lancaster

i think i ended up scaling down the lanny?

result: https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/1216973620685963345/1263195385112039454/image.png?ex=673e2560&is=673cd3e0&hm=a9a2ad2ed28f8bfbafe690858dfc6eaa2f0a74a893d504d93fda7a305bbbbe52&

[tulip peak]

Also shoutout to how hard it is to get the horns right with pixels

And ah yeah can see that the body needed to get shortened too

[teal flame]

i just scaled the lancaster by half lmao

then did damage control from there

[final mesa]

Shrinking the doghorse is a crime. How could you?

[tidal tulip]

the cursed anti-fomorian lancaster

[little jetty]

shrorse

[tepid cipher]

charming young fella

[uneven mortar]

it looks kinda like a fucked up lanny

[worn tiger]

Ah yes, Lancastaur

[dawn lake]

Sounds like a wildly out of genre character in centaurland

[uneven mortar]

i may be stupid

[hard saffron]

but. but you aren't dumb right?

[alpine sorrel]

sneak peak at the new UI color scheme & styling that carpenter and I spent the week ironing out

also I now realize after posting, @tulip peak's new incredible mino sprite

[glad lotus]

'Tis a very good minotaur

[crimson merlin]

All the sprites are good ❤️

[glad lotus]

Gold and blue is cool, you don't see that scheme very often!

[teal flame]

oh that’s good

[tepid temple]

It's all looking incredibly snazzy!

[teal flame]

…is that the same death’s head that we have in current demos?

[tepid temple]

Also the Death's Head. It's so chibi

[teal flame]

don’t remember the rocket pod

[tepid temple]

Okay I just pulled up the demo and it's in fact the same exact sprite

[teal flame]

huh

[mild jay]

That’s lookin really clean and sharp

[crimson merlin]

Def a rocket pod looking thing

[little jetty]

missile rack death's head

[frigid shale]

Black and yellow black and yellow (love it)

[grand notch]

I'm curious how far you'd be able to go with a team full of Basic Editions John Lancerman, which is "an Everest with a heavy machine gun." (Presumably you'd mix up the main and flex slots a little, but the important thing is everybody's built to HMG.) I presume pretty dang far.

[worn tiger]

all the way

[uneven mortar]

nah i think it's just a really fucked up compound eyeball

[grand notch]

It's a little bit this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIpIzgLX43A

And a little bit "it goes in the SQUARE hole" video that has eighty-seven fucktrillion imitations and reuploads.

You can solve any problem with enough bullets! :D

[little jetty]

that team is getting all the controllers that they deserve

witch, hornet, hive, archer
anyone that can add difficulty or dodge or turn them against each other

(more realistically, I'd probably talk to the group about why they're doing this bc I don't think I'd really enjoy running games for that team)

[grand notch]

I wouldn't inflict an entire team of Basic Editions John Lancerman on an actual GM. But I'd do it in Tactics, because I can ensure that the entire team is committing to the bit properly.

[final mesa]

Tom really said, "The most boring people you know get to be the most powerful." And I think we don't talk about that enough.

[little jetty]

oh oops forgot what chat this is in

i would be really sad if 4 hmgverest turns out to be the best speedrun strategy

[tepid cipher]

That's a beauty of a ui

[uneven mortar]

i mean some combination of HMGVerest + Asura + some support is probably going to be it

with maybe some artillery thrown in there to clear the chaff

[alpine sorrel]

I also wonder what's gonna count as speedruns with the freeform module-anthology structure. Maybe it'll be like fastest completion of all modules?

Carpenter and I were also fantasizing about a rougelike mode that mixes and matches opfors, maps, and sitreps into random 3-combat missions

[tired aurora]

Knowing the speedrun community, it can be anything! From 100% to low% to any% run

multiple category lol

[tired aurora]

with endless ramping difficulty and tournament board based off the same weekly seed Slay The Spire style?

Oh that would be a dream

[final mesa]

I wonder if it'll be like trackmania speed runs, where you go for top time on different modules.

"Module B-52 WR is held by EK with his triple monarch immediate million rocket opener. "

[shy spruce]

SPEEDRUN STRATS!

https://tenor.com/view/kill-it-with-fire-missiles-more-missiles-all-the-missiles-megas-xlr-gif-25111969

[alpine sorrel]

experimenting with slightly more elaborate healthbar-on-hover underneath units to quickly check the actual health/heat numbers

[wet ember]

will this have roguelike elements.............................

[loud dove]

might there be some kind of danger zone/low on structure/low on hp indicator so that that information is easier to read from a distance while the more granular info is readable on mouseover?

[little jetty]

seems like a maybe

[pastel flax]

Metavault Dive

[alpine sorrel]

The only things I can say for certain we'll have are the things listed on the KS page. Once that wraps up we'll see where we are for additional large swings stuff like a metavault roguelike mode... but I too dream of being able to play that.

[uneven mortar]

finally

[pastel flax]

I greatly admire your ability to maintain scope

[alpine sorrel]

I am not immune to its creep but I'm doing my best

[fast heron]

lancer roguelike sounds like amazing fun!!!

[alpine sorrel]

Yeah, they're small but there are mini-healthbars that you can see in the screenshot under the units the player has learned the hp/heat for. Plus the chits across the top gives you those values for all units on the field.

[alpine sorrel]

On that note, a thing we need to decide is whether to show those numberless red HP % blocks on the minibars+chits when the max health is unknown, or to hide them and leave it at the less-precise text estimations.

[uneven mortar]

imo I'm a fan of the former

I have no idea what the hell compromised means

[little jetty]

compromised is the "it's damaged but you don't know exactly how much"
iirc it's 75%-100%

[uneven mortar]

is there an option to see an exact number

or is this a debate over which one is the "easily seen" indicator

[alpine sorrel]

RAW players don't know the exact number until they've scanned, so the question is how much to show them before they've done so

Most GMs I've played with will give a "it's barely scratched"//"it's almost dead" description so the ideal solution would be to impart that sort of general impression

The original baldur's gate did it like this:

[tired aurora]

I think that percentage hp is enough

Lancer tactic with its medium of videogame probably should prioritise open info for quick gameplay

I think.

[flint portal]

Personally I think just the less precise message is good

otherwise all you've done is make it so people can math it out more or less

(it would just take time)

plus that way I think its more interesting to scan since you'd get roughly more info than if you didnt

[stoic bloom]

i do prefer less precise message

now, maybe the needed one is by what increments

[uneven mortar]

ooh this is for enemies and not gfor allies

no yeah making it fairly vague is good

[stoic bloom]

mhm

[uneven mortar]

bloodied is a classic

[stoic bloom]

100%: Intact
~99-75%: Scratched
~75-50%: Injured
~50-25%: Sparking
~25-1%: Falling Apart

Thinking fo like this

[uneven mortar]

unrelated note: i found out the horus sticker is glow-in-the-dark while working at night

sick

[loud dove]

tbh, to reduce that precision, might we have one less message, and only display the option after scratched once they are below 50%?

Also, I love Sparking as a phrase, it brings me joy

[rugged copper]

oh, so like

100%: Intact
99-51%: Scratched
50-21%: Sparking
20-1%: Falling Apart

i dig that, even if the uneven increments make me kinda sad

or ig 1-33, 34-66, 67-99?

[loud dove]

I was thinking perhaps something like Sparking potentially being below 25% and falling apart be <10%, to add that extra level of uncertainty and so incetivize Scanning that much more

[formal pawn]

Completely unserious joke range:
99.9-98%: MY PAINT JOB!!

[kind fern]

If you hit something that puts it to anything greater than like 97% it should say something like "Oh no" because either you got bad luck on a damage roll or that enemy's health bar is big

[alpine sorrel]

Reducing the number of categories and making the words more straightforward seems like a good idea. Here's what I currently have:

100    Undamaged
.80    Nominal
.50    Damaged
.15    Compromised
0    Critical
    
100    Critical
.80    Molten
.50    Glowing
.15    Cool
0    Zero

"Scratched" seems more clear than "nominal"

"compromised" is the other one I'd switch out for clarity... or maybe eliminate by expanding the "damaged" and "critical" ranges.

I'm not happy with almost any of the heat track

[hollow oracle]

"nominal" I've only ever heard in the context of like "nothing's wrong at all", which would make it confusing imo

scratched has my vote for sure

another thing to consider (please do ignore me if I've missed you mentioning this elsewhere) is how much you're actually telling a player by these categories, which seems like quite a lot if they're on the lower end of HP, e.g. 10. If I understand your categories, for an 10HP NPC, Undamaged is 10HP, Nominal is 8-9HP, Damaged is 5-7 HP, and Compromised is 1-4 HP

[tepid temple]

For the heat track I would keep it simple, i.e.
Cool
Warm
Hot
Molten
Critical

Keeping it as "Critical" for both to readily show that the enemy's been maxed out is a smart idea

Though thinking about it, I'm not sure the point of having a state specifically for 0 hp? Since that means the enemy is either dead or about to structure and reset HP

[alpine sorrel]

The hp track check is >= the listed number

Heat is <=

And I think that means all categories can normally show up

[alpine sorrel]

Yeah... in my mind if the player is gonna do math they already know the exact health because they could independently track damage done & have read the book

[hollow oracle]

yeah that's fair enough

[alpine sorrel]

OK this feels better. Simple words, fewer categories. Might adjust them to be thirds like @rugged copper suggested if in game the uneven segments end up feeling off.

100     Undamaged
75-99   Scratched
25-74   Damaged
0-24    Critical
    
100     Critical
75-99   Hot
25-74   Warm
0-24    Cold```

[flint portal]

Honestly I feel like Critical or Damage could be their own category, imo

Like a single thing

[alpine sorrel]

oh, like, if heat is at cap?

[flint portal]

its gonna be rare for an npc to be at 0 health (i'm actually struggling to think of an example)

Or sorry no i meant for health

[alpine sorrel]

ah I'll edit it to make the ranges more clear

[sand goblet]

how do these categories interface with statuses like Danger Zone? since an equivalent doesn't exist for HP (unless you've got an Enkidu in play) that might be a point where the two scales are unbalanced

[flint portal]

The other thing i'd note is i'm wondering how useful that state is for heat considering danger zone is something that people are generally able to tell is in play?

[alpine sorrel]

ohhhhhh right danger zone

that'd be a great thing to fold in

maybe then for heat:

100    Critical
50-99  Danger Zone
1-49   Warm
0      Cold

doing the same breakpoints for hp would keep it tidy...

but as mentioned it doesn't really work as well since 0 HP isn't a thing

[flint portal]

Here's an idea

is the "undamaged" or "not heated" bit actually needed?

As in, what if you had nothing for that state and only when someone gets heat or takes damage do these indicators appear

Would make it so in its own way that's a way to tell if something hasn't been damaged

[flint portal]

Wrecks are, if you want to have that show up on them

[tepid temple]

It's a bit messy to have the lack of an indicator be the indicator in of itself

[fickle pecan]

don't wrecks have hp like terrain?

[flint portal]

They do

The other thing I can see be a problem with Cold and Warm is environmental effects

[flint portal]

some of which, in the book, do kinda thematically link to heat or cold

[alpine sorrel]

So what'd show up in the heat section of this healthbar? I'd need to still have something down there because the stress chits are there.

[flint portal]

Ah I see

Do those show up on hover only?

[alpine sorrel]

yes

[flint portal]

Oh then that's fine probably

[flint portal]

These ones in the core book

If these do show up in the game, it could be confusing to have Cold (the reactor status) and "Extreme Cold" (the environmental effect)

[tepid temple]

I don't see any conflict here? It's not like you'd ever confused the information in the heat bar with the information regarding the map's unique modifiers

[alpine sorrel]

I'm not too worried since the context of where they show up will be so different

it won't be as bad as the Skirmish conflicts

good to keep in mind though

[flint portal]

Figured it was worth bringing up for heat specifically because of the similarity in words for players

[final mesa]

Nominal would definitely work for zero/low heat.

I'd be careful about critical for heat/damage since crits are also an attack thing. I don't think there would be too much confusion, but there could potentially be.

[tepid temple]

I also don't think "critical" would be an issue either, not every word has to have one single possible meaning in the system

Hell, Lancer itself has much worse examples of this, see Grappled the status vs Grappled the action

[little jetty]

OVERHEAT IMMINENT in full caps

[final mesa]

Another option for zero heat could be Baseline. Baseline -> Nominal -> Danger Zone -> Critical.

If we want to be wicked cool we could have max heat be Redline

or maybe we keep that exclusive for Nelson pilots

[alpine sorrel]

ohhh I like baseline

[lethal leaf]

I thought about something. Ram can normally only be done on characters. Siege Ram lets you ram objects and terrain too.

[alpine sorrel]

bug of the day: being blinded from a witch is sufficient to hide. "if I can't see them, they must not be able to see me"

[tidal tulip]

based, the real game should work like that

[little jetty]

non reciprocal line of sight is giving a lot of trouble huh

[crimson merlin]

AgreedMisread. You're normally only able to keep hidden while in cover from everyone who can see.
But also, if you feel like making hidden only become lost when they come into valid line of sight that's fine too, I think

HIDDEN characters can’t be targeted by hostile attacks or actions, don’t cause engagement, and enemies only know their approximate location. Attacking, forcing saves, taking reactions, using BOOST, and losing cover all remove HIDDEN after they resolve. Characters can find HIDDEN characters with SEARCH.

[lethal leaf]

How does knockback work with ramps? Can you knock someone up one?

[worn tiger]

Depends on how the ramps work

[uneven mortar]

can we rocket jump slide up rams

[alpine sorrel]

Right now I believe that involuntary movement can only move to tiles equal or lower... I hadn't though about ramps for that.

Ramps as a whole have some wrinkles to iron out still; right now the entire tile is flagged as a ramp, but I'd like to have directional ramps that only work from certain sides (so climbing up the non-sloped edge doesn't help)

[alpine sorrel]

Working on the new Instant Action screen

[frigid shale]

no longer do we need to rotate the map in our minds

looks sick!

[alpine sorrel]

a fun bug on display here is for the one map with water, you can see the mesh extend downwards way past the bottom of the map. Usually it's not a problem because there's a plane at ground level, but for this I'll have to actually change the height of the water column instead of just moving it up and down 😅

[tepid temple]

These are the slope rules from Icon for reference. I don't think any of the official maps have backported them onto Lancer

[alpine sorrel]

Mm, in LT they're going to count as the height of their top space because it made the pathfinding easier. I wonder what the design thought was to make them count as the base instead in Icon.

[tepid temple]

You could ask @flint portal since he was the one who came up with the idea, but it seems like it's "historical reasons" because it was originally a bespoke effect

[glad lotus]

Icon does have height confer advantage on attack rolls, so maybe it was to make that advantage slightly less easy to gain too?

[flint portal]

oh shit blast from the past

So for what its worth

here's how we did "ramps" in winter scar

[flint portal]

Personally I think that's fine, intent wise its more or less how I intended them to work like when I made use of them in Winter Scar

[mild jay]

I couldn’t say why exactly but something about how the map spins feels extremely nostalgic, n64 era specifically

Oh wait, Jet Force Gemini - I think looking at items in your inventory would just put them rotating dead center of the screen with details on the sides?

[alpine sorrel]

this opfor-editing screen has been taking up most of this week. LT is like 80% menus by weight; it feels like I've spent more time wiring up buttons than doing tricky actual game mechanics like enemy AI

[fickle pecan]

neaaaat

[teal flame]

…what sprite is the mirage using?

[little jetty]

honse part 2

[worn tiger]

Trampoline

[teal flame]

that’s what i guessed, but surely not

[worn tiger]

It bounces people around the map

[alpine sorrel]

haha I was thinking more a pool of water (oasis/desert/mirage) but trampoline is waaaay better.

[fickle pecan]

https://tenor.com/view/simpsons-trampoline-gif-5255758

[teal flame]

and honestly, “disk on legs” is a vibe

especially since it has no guns

[uneven mortar]

it's genuinely beautiful

amazing work

[naive ocean]

Those npc sprites are gorgeous and so full of character, they're perfect

[fast heron]

ooo, that berserker looks badass!!!

[alpine sorrel]

I just uploaded the next public build to Backerkit, but I think it's late enough in the day that I'm gonna wait until tomorrow to post the corresponding update. If anyone wants to check it out before the email blast, you should be able to get it through your backerkit account here: https://lancer-tactics.backerkit.com/backer/digital_rewards

This is a good one!!

[crimson merlin]

Version 0.1.9 ?

[alpine sorrel]

yep!

[crimson merlin]

Works for me

[worldly violet]

AYO YO THIS TALENT SCREEN FUCKS

[alpine sorrel]

Hell yeah it does! I think it's gonna keep getting better when we get more mechs on each ring

Mechs/talents/cbs that is

[worldly violet]

the character creator is fun, even if I just made a dude who looks like me, mr. generic white dude:

[crimson merlin]

What's the link for bug reports? ... Asking for a friend. 😉

[tepid temple]

Should be on the title screen to the right

[crimson merlin]

I was still in a hard-lock XD

[tepid temple]

Okay I am getting a primal glee from opening the pilot builder and seeing the mech colors change in realtime with mouseover

[crimson merlin]

See-through seeker tooltip causes a hard lock on pilot edit screen. It does eventually recover if you leave it for a while

About 45 seconds

If you open the licenses screen, and open a tab that isn't IPS-N, back out, then go back into licenses the previous license is blacked out

[tepid temple]

Oop, same here

[crimson merlin]

HAZE on pilot editor tooltip flickers as you move the mouse

(I'm logging all these via the form too)

Ok, there's a number of talents which cause the pilot editor to lock up for a long time. I'm not going to poke all of them to find out which 😬

Second I noticed was Walking Armory 2

The flickering and wrong sized toolboxes happens after a lockup event

[tired aurora]

Bro look like the young comedic guy of the main squad in an fps shooter from 2010

[worldly violet]

ahahaha

[worn tiger]

He's 100% catching a round in the 2nd-to-last mission

Brother is not making it to extract

[tired aurora]

Right after he went through his character arc, he died the very next scene

[worn tiger]

Such a shame

[worldly violet]

right after he proves to lead that he's a capable soldier

"couldn't have done it without me, boss!"
BANG

[crimson merlin]

Fortress protocol deployment is a bit wonky

[alpine sorrel]

Thanks! Really appreciate the reports 🙏

[crimson merlin]

I think it's everything that's supposed to have a sub-cell having played with it longer

I saw {cell} in the text block

After playing through a scenario by biggest UI wish is having cover-after-move being more obvious. E.g. xcom

[tepid temple]

Might have to play around with it more, but after 2 rounds I can't wrap my head around using Hunter

[alpine sorrel]

like figuring out how to lunge?

[tepid temple]

That and I struggled with Disdainful Blade some

Complicating factors included flying enemies and rock outcroppings making tile selection a bit finnicky

[alpine sorrel]

have you discovered the top-down view by pressing R?

it's a bit of a band-aid solution for that but sometimes you need a band-aid

[tepid temple]

Oh, forgot that was an option

[alpine sorrel]

I'll make a note to make that actually discoverable somewhere

[tepid temple]

Another thing was I was suffering under this bug, which meant I had to multi-click most buttons to get it to stick

[alpine sorrel]

I've replicated and am looking into it.... wild, no idea what might be happening & godot's debugging tools aren't helping me figuring out what it's doing. I'll definitely need to fix this for tomorrow's release, ty for telling me

[alpine sorrel]

I think it's the hyphen?? 😨 this is feeling very cursed

[crimson merlin]

Walking Armory 2 (Expanded Portfolio) after the freeze

Expanded Portfolio in the talent view

Weirdly Walking Armory 1 has the same thing were you can see [cell] but it doesn't cause the freeze. Very curse.

See-through seeker doesn't have any weird text, or special effects

Since it does that weird sizing with the talent image maybe it's related to that

There's no other lockups I can find, but Fuel Rod Gun in the pilot edit view does a weird flicker and doesn't show anything

You can spend license points on Everest frame

[alpine sorrel]

I think it was indeed the talent image. I jimmied around with its minimum size and how big it decided to be and that fixed it. I bet there was some sort of infinite loop that happened where the hyphen was triggering some kind of text wrapping which gave the image room to shrink which stopped the wrapping, etc.

[crimson merlin]

Insert starship troopers meme about killing bugs. 😛

[gaunt plume]

Hell yeah new update. Gonna give it a go as soon as I get home

[alpine sorrel]

Updated the game to 0.2.0 to fix the above bugs & posted the update: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/wickworks/lancer-tactics/posts/4268091

[tepid temple]

Did a pass and made all PC systems unique.
Does that mean all systems now have the unique tag?

[alpine sorrel]

I believe almost all of them do now, yeah. I'd love some help in figuring out which ones should actually not have it vs which ones were likely oversights (like the minotaur II invades)

[worldly violet]

I know tempest drones aren't unique, pinball builds are real

[alpine sorrel]

exactly; I'd like to make it so only the ones where doubling up enables a distinct build rather than just being letting you have a backup.

[final mesa]

Hey Olive, I know you settled on a UI colour, but have you seen Who's Lila? It has a really cool system where you unlock different colours for the UI and it completely changes them. (Now that's more simple in that it is all one colour, but the idea is pretty cool). If you're ever chaffing against your settled on UI that could be an outlet. Not to mention Compcon I think is well loved with the multiple versions of its UI.

(not to say I don't like the UI, I think what's shown is very good, just wanted to throw that out there)

[lone cliff]

@alpine sorrel how were you handling increasing/decreasing the size of your mech wrt sprites?

[alpine sorrel]

I was gonna just double the size of the graphic. It's crude but effective, and formian frame is enough of an edge case that I don't think it's worth pursuing a more expensive solution. I've tested it from size 1 to 2 and it looks fine, but haven't tested size 2 frames increasing to size 3 yet.

For the everest/GMS frames specifically, I'm already letting the player choose NPC sprites of the same size as alternate sprites as a way to express the variance in everest appearance — I could probably make it so formian everests could pick from size 2 NPCs.

[alpine sorrel]

Oh that's neat! Yeah palette-swapping is easier when you're doing a two-tone game. We could still probably rig up something like Compcon has but I think it'd be a pretty low priority. As a rule when possible to make my life easier I'd much rather make a design call to simplify a system than to leave it open to variability and player settings.

There's also a big mental & design advantage in closing off the decision & considering it settled. I'm tired of the "maybe this will change" background; having something onscreen that I can say "this is close to final" feels like finally having a foundation I can build off of.

Good question though 🙂

[final mesa]

Yeah, I get that. Having some stuff nailed down means you can start supporting stuff off of it. Just thought it would be interesting to you, especially after your deep dive into dialogue implementation mapping!

[glad lotus]

There's definitely value in sticking to a single UI theme, too. There's a pretty big overhead introduced by having to test every UI change in each theme.

[flint portal]

Hey so the game lags out and crashes when you put in the whole text of Les Misérables into the mech callsign (probably other places as well).
Is this intended?

(jokes aside this probably needs a character limit)

[glacial elm]

Congrats, you found the Easter Egg, to be added next update

[little jetty]

i love the "is this intended?" there LOL

i wonder if it's an engine limitation or like, ram issue or something

[flint portal]

I blame @steep topaz for seeing a mech name field and asking me if there was a character limit, before promptly sending me a plaintext file of Les Misérables to "check" which they had on hand ofc

[steep topaz]

you mean credit @steep topaz

[frigid shale]

classic QA testing

[final mesa]

Lorem Ipsum probably would've been good enough to test, but, you know, style points.

[hard saffron]

Love the new update so far! Playing Barbarossa fills me with unending joy as everything become pulverised on the first turn.

I do however have a question. Should the integrated weapon core bonus trigger on a tech attack and always hit for some reason? Putting a light nexus on my goblin was one of the funniest things I have done to great effect.

[alpine sorrel]

Legend 👌🤩

[alpine sorrel]

Oh nice catch! Tech attacks should not trigger that. I also wouldn't expect it to auto hit.

[flint portal]

Oh also, some stuff to report

it seems that Vanguar (and maybe overwatches in general?) are triggering on teleports

Dunno if that's a result of a glitch or a not yet implemented expection for teleports

It might be the third rank of vanguard that's at fault tho

because it also triggered when I knocked someone back

[quaint yoke]

hmm i really got become a backer, the newest version looks fire

[hard saffron]

Also the "add group" button in the enemy opposing forces section always crushes the game

if that wasn't caught already

[flint portal]

Oh there was a funny moment with a witch also when i tested it

Where it tried to make me use the impact lance on my only ally which was very far away

[frigid shale]

I identify with that Witch, using PredLogic on the wrong targets

[hard saffron]

Also, has anyone made any combats/ sitreps they want to share?

[alpine sorrel]

First I heard of this. Just tested, looks like it the crash only happens on the windows exported builds which is why I missed it.

[hard saffron]

I tried making my own but I feel a little too dumb

[subtle sandal]

i accidentally managed to get 2 grunt berserkers to destroy each other by proccing aggression on one of them, and that attack proccing aggression on the other. i'm pretty sure that it was unintended that the 2nd aggression actually happened, since that berserker would've been destroyed before it would go off

[alpine sorrel]

I've been slow to fix that one because I enjoy seeing a chain of berserkers all hit each other and die

I should probably still do it

[subtle sandal]

it was very funny, since they hadn't activated in the match yet lol

[alpine sorrel]

Just uploaded 0.2.1 for PC to backerkit, which should fix that crash. I'm gonna see if I can get code signing working for the mac one before I upload it as well.

[teal flame]

oh yeah, it’s worth asking, do you plan to include mechs and other items from official supplements, or just the core rule book?

i’d honestly assume just the CRB, but the demo did include the kobold

[toxic badge]

100% core rulebook was a stretch goal that was met (so that's the idea), but afaik it is not guaranteed - not sure if there's more up to date info than https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/wickworks/lancer-tactics/posts/3747043
I believe there are no plans for other supplements / 3rd party stuff

[teal flame]

3rd party stuff was specifically a no iirc, and no plans for modding tools or specific support

although i can bet there will be some modders crazy enough to take a crack at it lmao

i’m going to take a guess that the lich is probably going to be a no, though because dear god that’s going to be a pain to code

[cinder island]

lich does sound insane

i have a kinda dumb question, not a glitch but rather a code/choices question: why am I allowed to target my own deployables with attacks? i'm trying to think if blowing up a low-health turret would cause splash damage on an adjacent enemy

[teal flame]

it wouldn’t, most of the time

[cinder island]

thanks, i thought not (currently scanning rulebook)

[teal flame]

however, you can slash your own turrets accidentally

or if the enemy is barely out of range of your Annihilator, you can use the bonus attack from that

[cinder island]

I was thinking in a coding friendly-fire kinda way. in the TTR, I can't accidentally target my friend because I misclicked.

and the iso made it so there was a thin difference between my own turret (on a one-block hill) and the enemy "behind" it

[alpine sorrel]

Yeah I should at least add a "are you sure" confirm prompt. Added to the lists

[cold gyro]

Gave the update a spin, it's really fuckin, love the Tokugawa implementation- managed to just about fully recreate my pilot from my Wallflower game with it

[alpine sorrel]

I also played toku in my wallflower run!

Juggling heat & bonus damage with it is really what got me hooked and made me make witchdice which led to this I guess lol

I'm glad you like it 🙂

[little jetty]

is the sample character on witch dice the build that you used?

[alpine sorrel]

Yeah!

Or what the ll6 version would have been

But duskwing evasive systems + false image is a great set of defensive systems, and autopod autoburn was just a bonus

[crimson merlin]

That's a nice combo

[tepid temple]

The Witchdice deeplore...

[cold gyro]

Oh based- yeah right from my very first oneshot in an everest I was told I have the mentality of a Tokugawa player lmao

Surely enough I give it a spin in WF and I discover it's a free serotonin button for me

[quaint yoke]

holyshit! it's her! jenny witch dice

[sharp smelt]

woahg

[near radish]

Speaking of the Toku, the Deep Well Heat Sink seems borked in 0.2.1. I submitted a report via the form.

[alpine sorrel]

testing out the new in-battle speech bubble style, pulled from the visual novel mode

[little jetty]

"I'm literally just a turret"
"yeah me too"
🔥✍️

[subtle sandal]

https://tenor.com/view/fire-writing-gif-24533171

[sharp smelt]

I'd recommend giving the mech a thick outline since I thought there was a giant nelson

maybe in white idk

[final mesa]

God, the dialogue, so compelling, so incredible. Eat your heart out Shakespeare.

[teal flame]

hm

ideal image may not be blocking LoS for tech actions

that or the enemy is tall enough to peek over it, could be that

[alpine sorrel]

I think the second one. Size 2 units can see over size 2 cover

I added the ability of maps to have environmental effects today! Got particulate storms, thin atmo, corrosive atmo, and extreme heat in-game.

[cinder island]

that looks fukkin awesome

[final mesa]

Oh my God Olive that slaps

[outer trail]

have you considered adding bowties?

[fickle pecan]

barbarossa is just endlessly comical

[alpine sorrel]

hahaha it really is

[final mesa]

Here's the question, is Olive brave enough to break RAW and give us Fomorian Frame Barbie?

[frigid shale]

given that the goal is close-to-RAW as possible imma guess "that's not in the cards"

[little jetty]

if modding support makes it through, I'm sure some brave soul will try to push the engine to the limit and make some size 10 mechs or something like that

[alpine sorrel]

It is my sincere hope for modders that life will imitate art and there'll be a decentralized internet community dedicated to creating mechs that push the bounds of possible realities

I wonder if it'd be possible to create an NHP analog where a mod can't be transmitted over the internet and has to be passed around IRL via USB stick or something.

sorry, USB casket

sorry, Union Science Bureau stick

[alpine sorrel]

Pretty proud of getting this shader working that pulls terrains across voxel boundaries to somewhat break up the minecraftyness feeling of the maps.

[wraith cradle]

Ooh, that's real slick!

[lethal leaf]

Hell yes.

[agile lagoon]

This is looking great Olive!

[ashen kindle]

🔥

[cinder island]

oooooh

[hollow oracle]

ooh slick, I like it. It's still clear where the squares are but is much more visually interesting

[cinder island]

yeah, it makes it look less like blocks and more like biomes

looking forward to making a map on the edge of the White Cliffs of Dover

maybe choked in ivy and hanging moss if the tool ever has the ability to attach that kind of cosmetic sprite

either way, just being able to make the tops green and the sides white and have it face over nothing but water

[alpine sorrel]

oo I like this idea, remind me about it in like a year if we haven't gotten to it. I'd probably want to implement it by just making a block type with vines on the edges.

[cinder island]

lol i will

(*try)

[alpine sorrel]

the engine could technically let you mix & match surface and side textures but we decided to bundle them together for ease of use

and it simplifies what we have to store (one ID for a block instead of 5 for surfaces and side types)

[cinder island]

😔 sensible, i suppose
i shall just have to terrify my players on foundry then
(joke's on me i'm the one terrified of heights)

[quaint yoke]

Tbf. I kinda like the mine craftiness of the maps. Has a real feel to it

[lone cliff]

helll yeahhhhhh
would it be possible to set this to a per-block basis? would be a bit weird to have this sort of thing on concrete and pavement stuff

[alpine sorrel]

Each block type has a rating where lower ratings have terrain come in instead of out, so pavements will be lower like this:

[mild jay]

That’s lookin real good

[trail canyon]

Ooooh that looks incredible

[lone cliff]

hell yeahhh

[quaint yoke]

Olive I appreciate the time and effort you put into this game. It's glorious

[quaint yoke]

My only request. Fire emblem style support mechanics. I wanna date my fellow mechs pilots

[alpine sorrel]

We're sticking to the core rules as closely as we can as a matter of managing scope.... maybe someone'll make a mod someday

[quaint yoke]

😦

[orchid pendant]

Game design is a ridiculously involved process, especially when you're trying to represent something with as many moving parts as Lancer.

[tepid temple]

Romance between mech pilots is exactly the same as in the tabletop version: you ask the players for consent. Unfortunately, LT is a single player game,

[alpine sorrel]

I have hopes that the narrative VN mode could have some pilot romance because I too wish to mix mechs and dating, but that depends on what the writers end up going with

[final mesa]

What if we kissed inside the INTERNAL METAFOLD.... jk.... Unless?

[cold timber]

Then I consent enthusiastically.

[little jetty]

if a campaign creator supports like, some way to remember what you picked earlier on
it should be pretty easy to make a dating sim type story

[lone cliff]

Yeah

[quaint yoke]

romance is the most importat part of lancer

[final mesa]

Ah yes, the romance between me and my rapidly deteriorating reactor.

[trail canyon]

Hot stuff indeed

[worn tiger]

You've heard of slow burn, now get ready for really really fast burn

[turbid flint]

Rank 1: greetings
Rank 2: Eye contact
Rank 3: wedding during active combat

[ashen kindle]

New talent just dropped

[tepid ginkgo]

Isn't that just Bonded?

[naive ocean]

MGS4?

[alpine sorrel]

I've started (somewhat dangerously) using a persistent 5x5 world for the automated tests instead of tearing it down and creating a new world for each test. This has literally halved the time it takes to run the suite & has the added bonus of making the run way more fun to watch:

[shy spruce]

enter the thunderdome

[little jetty]

anime fight vibes

[mild jay]

They’re so fast I can’t follow their movements… what power…

[quiet meteor]

New GMS system: Flash Step

[tepid temple]

https://tenor.com/view/aurelius467385-bleach-byakuya-kuchiki-zommari-rureaux-gif-24994082

[ashen kindle]

What your average ll12 game looks like to someone who's not left their everest

[turbid flint]

If I'm an enemy and i see a LL12 everest on the field I'm getting the fuck out of there Immediately
You know that thing's going to do some game breaking shit if it's lasted this long

[ashen kindle]

Sorry, hasn't left their everest because they don't have the LL's to

[lethal leaf]

Imagine taking 1 LL in 12 different licenses.

-- GMS Everest @ LL12 --
[ LICENSES ]
  IPS-N Tortuga 1, IPS-N Nelson 1, SSC Death’s Head 1, SSC Black Witch 1, SSC Mourning Cloak 1, HA Genghis 1, HA Gilgamesh 1, SSC Metalmark 1, HA Sunzi 1, HORUS Pegasus 1, IPS-N Caliban 1, IPS-N Zheng 1
[ CORE BONUSES ]
  Overpower Caliber, Mount Retrofitting, Heatfall Coolant System, Reinforced Frame
[ TALENTS ]
  Vanguard 3, Combined Arms 3, Technophile 3, Skirmisher 2, Hunter 2, Black Thumb 2
[ STATS ]
  HULL:6 AGI:2 SYS:0 ENGI:6
  STRUCTURE:4 HP:33 ARMOR:0
  STRESS:4 HEATCAP:12 REPAIR:8
  TECH ATK:0 LIMITED:+3
  SPD:5 EVA:10 EDEF:8 SENSE:10 SAVE:16
[ WEAPONS ]
  RETROFITTED MOUNT: Deck-Sweeper Automatic Shotgun / Fold Knife // Mount Retrofitting, Overpower Caliber
  FLEX MOUNT: Smartgun
  HEAVY MOUNT: Krakatoa Thermobaric Flamethrower (Supermassive Mod)
[ SYSTEMS ]
  Ferrous Lash, Blink Charges x6, High-Stress Mag Clamps, Bulwark Mods, Emergency Repair Module x4, Reactive Weave

[little jetty]

take only level 1 talents too

[ashen kindle]

Bonus points if you get all the +1 accuracy to X stat core bonuses

[lone cliff]

the barbie sprite looks amazing!

[ashen kindle]

:O

Big guy

[stuck falcon]

Barbie's not a shrimp

[ashen kindle]

got that gamer posture

[alpine sorrel]

The barbie design is great, it's gonna make for some sick environmental storytelling in five hundred years when its half-buried wreck is overgrown with moss on a long-forgotten battlefield and the protagonist has a picnic on its head

[sharp smelt]

EHEHEHEHEHE

[cinder island]

this took me a minute

[teal flame]

wait was there an update i missed that added the ability to colour it?

oh wait, new devlog!

[shy spruce]

come on barbie let's go party

[lone cliff]

i forget, was there any plans for alt sprites of frames or was it just color changes?

if not will there be options to add your own sprites for your specific mech? :o

[alpine sorrel]

The ability to upload custom sprites is still in debate between Carpenter and I (though I'm in favor; I've seen what people've done with Retrograde's stuff), but the compromise we're currently sitting on is that at the very least the Everest gets to pick from any of the size 1 NPC tokens as alt sprites.

[torpid orbit]

How developed is the paid version?

[tired aurora]

I hope it will be easy to mod this, cant imagine dropping some img file to replace existing art to be too hard

[loud dove]

Also, if the modding community gets their hands on this they will go bananas with it

[torpid orbit]

so I played the demo a while ago and it only had like 2 missions. Has it improved since then? Is there a paid for version? Is it worth it?

[tepid temple]

There were also alt-sprite designs as a kickstarter reward, yeah?

[tough urchin]

There was a Kickstarter and now a full game is currently in development.

[torpid orbit]

so can we still donate and get access to a more complete build? Or do we just have to wait?

[tidal tulip]

backerkit has a store to preorder that gives you access to the beta builds as they come out

[final mesa]

But also understand that it isn't a "game" yet. All of the ingredients are being assembled and prepped, but the actual part where content that is made to be enjoyed will come later.

[teal flame]

there is, however, a very good level editor

[glad lotus]

There are recent dev builds available if you've backed it, but my advice is DO NOT think of this like a Steam Early Access game or whatever. They're dev builds, they're not meant to be fully playable games.

[hard saffron]

Is there a place with some peps levels? I'd love to play some!

[crimson merlin]

We need somewhere to share maps

[alpine sorrel]

Hm I wonder what the easiest way to set up an online map repository would be

It'd be nice to have it integrated someday but a halfway solution before that might be handy

[crimson merlin]

Yeah, I was just thinking a dropbox or something that only accepts LT files

No idea how to set that up

[tepid temple]

Reposting my iceberg here in anticipation that some of these mechanics will be bugbears to implement

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/566317602834743296/1327423267124019271/lancermechanicsicebergFINISHED.png?ex=6786f741&is=6785a5c1&hm=d6199da4a1a70070287f3c6238f0e3d5120385da47f7f13acfc5ff276cc0a70f&

[shut horizon]

I'm guessing a good number of those are going to be deliberately avoided for various reasons, difficulty included

[rain cipher]

Difficulty to implement, complexity to understand, and silliness that comes from interpreting rules literally are all good reasons to smooth some of these down. Though a videogame cannot help but be literal so some will carry through I'm sure.

Crackshot Sekhmet for example, that's using mechanics to install an emergency brake lol

[mild jay]

Some are also just not actual rules but just shitposts

[agile lagoon]

At least one or two are just wrong. HASE follows the rounding rules fine; it doesn't use them, it's instead "For every two", same as Core Bonuses and Falling Damage are "For every three"
-# the take away clearly being that Core Bonuses don't follow the rounding rules and you should get a core bonus at LL1 😄 😄

[mild jay]

Plus the first rule in the game is “specific overrides general” anyway

[frigid shale]

I think the bigger issue the image is trying to convey is that there’s a lot of Specifics overriding stuff that need accounting for in code

[flint portal]

A fair few of those are easy to not include at least since they’re not really all weird rule interactions as much as reading some rules a bit obtusely (stabilize reloads the universe for example)

[tepid temple]

Man, that's one Olive came up with herself

[lethal leaf]

What is "Can't brace against NPCs raw"?

[ashen kindle]

Brace states you after damage is rolled, npcs have fixed damage

[little jetty]

that's a pretty funny misread
that does make me curious how they're gonna handle brace though, especially with systems that modify brace

[flint portal]

I brought that one up a while back as an example of a clear unintended rule reading as a joke and people took it seriously as a genuine argument you can make about how Brace works

[little jetty]

i think there was some sort of "brace option doesn't come up unless you get hit real hard" to avoid having the brace dialog pop up constantly

[flint portal]

I believe Olive mentioned the brace prompt only showing up if it would save you from structuring

as a fix to avoid the game constantly prompting you to ask if you wish to brace

[tepid temple]

Structuring or it's over 50% of your health

[tepid temple]

(unless they have a trait that lets them roll for bonus damage on crit)

[mild jay]

Yeah it’s like, everyone reading through the rules for the first time is going to read brace’s trigger and understand it as “once I know how much damage I’m taking,” you have to know a lot more about the game and then go back to it to even have a chance of reading “can’t brace against npcs” into it, and at that point I’d argue it’s not even RAW if you have to go through that many hoops to interpret it that way

[alpine sorrel]

couldn't help myself

giving myself permission to not think about non-core yet

[ashen kindle]

Anti gravity immunity. Biological targets are immune to tech actions including iskanders tesseract

[flint portal]

the mino maze thing is about this

Oh also good to know Momentum Banking is something you were made aware of

its a really good strat for Nelson

[ashen kindle]

Elaborate?

[flint portal]

Momentum just requires you to boost

not boost in the same turn you attack in

so you can turn 1 boost

then turn 2 attack and have the momentum damage

[ashen kindle]

Ok

[alpine sorrel]

How would you get a hidden grappler?

[ashen kindle]

I was curious if it was, momentum stacks multiple uses until you use it

[flint portal]

Nah, Momentum only stacks once

[alpine sorrel]

Something about avoiding engagement while already grappling?

so you can hide?

[ashen kindle]

If a spector uses prowl when in control of a grapple?

[turbid flint]

Morning cloak + Blackbeard?

[flint portal]

Its quite difficult to do since you can't hide if someone is adjacent to you

so I believe you'd need to have a way to weirdly decouple the grapple?

I don't actually know if you can do that

[turbid flint]

the empakaii can grapple from threat 3 though

[frigid shale]

Heads up: Ghast Nexus + Drone Commander is core though, I don’t know if the interaction requires Legion alongside those though

[flint portal]

Yes but when you grapple you get people next to you

and that wouldn't really work even with emp since grapple is hostile

so it breaks it

the hide I mean

[ashen kindle]

I need to check if it's the hide action that can't be performed when engaged or the hidden status. If it's action then any action that can hide that isn't the hide action can possibly hide

[flint portal]

Its the action

[ashen kindle]

So anything that gives the hidden status outside of that or anything that can grapple in an aoe template

So empekai, or say using prowl when grappling

[frigid shale]

Gonna have to look up the Heaven’s Fortress Incident

[tepid temple]

Oh, don't worry, that's the Hecatoncheires, so it isn't even released yet, nevermind core

[little jetty]

I'm guessing it has to do with flying drake deploying bunker and the bunker doesn't fall because you fall at the end of your turn?

[frigid shale]

Ah, that’ll do it

[alpine sorrel]

oh that's funny

[tidal tulip]

what's with dusk wing in 0G?

[frigid shale]

“Immune to involuntary movement means technically immune to falling” stuff

[subtle sandal]

the original reddit post has an explanation for all of the iceberg stuff

https://www.reddit.com/r/LancerRPG/comments/1hyiiak/lancer_mechanics_iceberg/

[little jetty]

idk if "up" is a valid space for deploying stuff though

like could i always just deploy the turret drones mid air? that changes things a lot

i thought it had to be on the ground and respect los

[tepid temple]

You could with an earlier draft of the Taraxacum, since all its drones were flying

[little jetty]

damn i haven't been keeping up, that got removed?

[subtle sandal]

i guess it would make sense if you can only deploy things on spaces they are allowed to be in? similar to the no involuntary movement up thing

[tepid temple]

Yeah, it turned out to be a bit of a ribbon trait that warped how players thought out their tactics

[little jetty]

but anyway that's too off topic maybe
i think you just can't deploy stuff midair unless it says it can

[tidal tulip]

oh that's hillarious. DW's Hover is a frame trait, not a flight system. 0g requires a flight system to not be slowed

[ashen kindle]

Yep, lmao

[tidal tulip]

i would never rule it like that, that's just cruel XD

[ashen kindle]

All of these are tbh

[little jetty]

can you make objects flying in LT?

idk that kinda sounds silly and should not be allowed

[little jetty]

honestly i can see this accidentally being a bug if you don't catch it while programming

[tidal tulip]

and.. the whole thing with "legally inflicting fall damage" is probably about how you're not supposed to be able to knockback someone off a ledge, because the air is not a space they could stand on?

[little jetty]

that used to confuse me a lot

[tidal tulip]

you can "legally" apply fall damage if you manage to destroy a size 3 object someone is standing on

but who has the time for that

[subtle sandal]

whats a bit of fall damage, as a treat

[little jetty]

there's fall damage in LT and pretty generous knockback mechanic

having a bit of freedom to choose which way the knockback applies

[tepid temple]

Nah I'm just riffing on how that's the only legal way of inflicting it

Because every other way had to be patched out during development

[alpine sorrel]

oo thx, here's the update on my question mark ones then:

GUN: GUN => GUN, GUN.
Melee attack variety => ✅
Metafold maze AoE => !
Scan quick tech => non-core
Ordnance friendly fire => ✅
Telekinetic hug => non-core
Range 79 => non-core
Mino anti-spector => ❌
Heaven's Fortress => ❌
Antigrav immunity => yellow X
Size 3+ blindspot => lol
Aggressive infiltrator => yellow check
Hidden grappler => non-core
Inequitable Aegis => non-core
>20 eva => non-core

[alpine sorrel]

No. Heaven's fortress is a fun idea but anything causing a standable overhang is something I've made some baseline assumptions will never happen for simplicity's sake

I think I'm also not gonna include flying drones/deployables, even if you can fly

[tepid temple]

Will terrain under a character's feet be rendered invulnerable or does the character on top get shuffled until their footprint is legal?

[ashen kindle]

Size 3+ blindspot?

[alpine sorrel]

the latter. if there's no legal space they can be shuffled to (I tested this by putting a drake at the bottom of a well with uneven ground) the engine just throws up its hands and says fine you can stay on uneven ground until something better comes along

[tidal tulip]

Threat is measured from the edge of a token. So threat 1 doesn't actually reach into the center space of a Size 3 token. So atlas can be unthreatened inside a Goliath for example.

[ashen kindle]

...

Funny

[frigid shale]

This assumes that the edges of the spaces inside the token don’t count, I suppose

I think the Overhanging issue is a relevant one to think about though

[tepid temple]

Unthreatened if the Goliath had a threat 1 melee weapon. As it stands, it has a shotgun.

You don't even get to deploy this against Ram, because that's against any adjacent target

[frigid shale]

Size 3 Monstrosity forgotten

[ashen kindle]

Ship

Squads

[frigid shale]

They accounted for Ship, since Ship can’t make melee attacks except ram

[tepid temple]

Well it does say "The edge of a character" specifically

[frigid shale]

Same with Squad

[ashen kindle]

Threat works on ranged weapons

So they can't overwatch if you start in the...

[frigid shale]

Mm fair

[ashen kindle]

Wait the bottom of a mech is the edge...

Unless you're slap bang in the MIDDLE not on the floor

[frigid shale]

Checkmate

[frigid shale]

“I’m in your mech”

[ashen kindle]

I think a goliath has other problems if the Atlas is inside the goliath

[frigid shale]

You know, I might allow this, easy Atlas synergy bonus

[ashen kindle]

If i have a flight system Atlas flying inside a size 3+ mech I'd give it to them purely for the sake that their reactor is cooking

[tulip peak]

https://tenor.com/view/yippee-happy-yippee-creature-yippee-meme-yippee-gif-gif-1489386840712152603

Took so long adjusting its shoulders and bits because it's so big and square

[void hornet]

lol 10/10

[little jetty]

sad prepare noises
but totally reasonable

[agile lagoon]

Correct response to any game system that has Prepared actions 🙂

[teal flame]

hey can someone just check here, is exposed not doubling damage correctly, or does the demolisher have resistance that's getting canceled out (and just not shown)

[rugged copper]

exposed doubles KEX damage

not burn

exposed is not doubling damage correctly

in that it's correctly not doubling damage

[mild jay]

I think the weird think here is that it’s calling out exposure doubling during a situation where it both isn’t and is not supposed to double it

[frigid shale]

Demolisher has a few resistance traits so it might not hurt to check

Using it vs a different exposed target without resistance traits may help diagnose the issue

[little jetty]

demolisher has a reaction that gives it resistance to all damage from an attack
doesn't seem like it triggered. Burn shouldn't be doubled, so this is probably just a case of exposed text getting mentioned automatically despite not doubling burn damage

also a bit strange that it gained exposed twice

[worn tiger]

I suspect the flow there is "when an NPC gains heat, if their total heat becomes/would become greater than their heat cap, they become exposed", and it doesn't check if they're already exposed. Because its a 1-stress NPC the heat bar doesn't reset, it just gets clamped to the heat cap. So the NucCav1 proc puts it over its HeatCap, exposes it and sets its heat to equal its heat cap, then snow crash triggers and goes "yep, HeatCap+2 is greater than HeatCap, demo's exposed now".

[teal flame]

NPCs gaining exposed that aren’t multi-stress don’t reset their heat cap after getting exposed, in the current build

[orchid pendant]

That's how single-Stress NPCs work. They don't reset, they just stay at cap. (So any DZ effects, or Last Argument of Kings or whatnot still get to apply.)

[flint portal]

yes, they need to stabilize to clear it

[teal flame]

oh huh

[north horizon]

@alpine sorrel i gotta ask, and i dont know if this has been asked (spoiler for wallflower) ||are/will egregorians be playable? and if so will they be playable immediately or after compleition of a quest?||

[alpine sorrel]

no plans for such, the setting of LT's shipped campaigns will be in the dawnline shore, far from the events of wallflower

[north horizon]

aww shoot

thanks for answering tho

[worn tiger]

If the game gets mod support I give it 12 hours max from release before there's a mod to let someone play as ||an egregorian||

[worldly violet]

people lika da ||Moths||

[little jetty]

this just means custom profile for pilot, right? and maybe custom model for dismounted pilot?

[final mesa]

I mean, I think to really do it justice you'd have to somehow incorporate ||witness||, which feels like a much larger thing than just custom models.

[worthy holly]

thats just what the empath talent is for

[quaint yoke]

incorporating that with mod support... that would just be the text change the same way they do in the module right?

[lethal leaf]

I know you aren't going to have any kind of general Prepare, but could you have a specific action for "When an enemy ends its movement in my weapon's range, skirmish"?

That seems to be 90% of what Prepare is used for, and the rest is edge cases that make the game worse.

[alpine sorrel]

huh that's a thought

sorta like an XCOM overwatch

I'll put that in our "good ideas we don't want to lose" list but the priority for it is gonna be pretty low tbh

vvv stealing starcraft's solution for firing missiles across the map without having to deal with it clipping into terrain :: just make it go up offscreen and then it can come down wherever you'd like.

[tepid temple]

That's gonna pop off with the Monarch core

[alpine sorrel]

yes it will

[shy spruce]

and then it won't stop

[alpine sorrel]

struggled with visualizing the nexus attack but I think this is an acceptable placeholder. feeling like I'm starting to get the hang of particle movement

[amber nebula]

Bees, attack.

[tired aurora]

I think if the drones get launched in a curve from the back at the same time instead of a straight line, it will be awesome

the animation of the drone attacking at the target spot is perfect

(ms paint illustrated example)

[agile lagoon]

From far enough away it looked like they were being attacked by angry PlayStation Dual Shock controllers and now I can't not imagine drones just being that forever now

[tepid temple]

Will there be any weapons with custom animations?

[glad lotus]

Get bonked by bees, fool

I assume you've got two particle emitters, one at the firer and one at the target? I wonder if you could place the 2nd emitter between the target and firer and emit the drones toward the target's center, instead of having them come up from the target? That's my only critique, the behaviour of the drones at the target after they're spawned is perfect.

[rugged copper]

https://tenor.com/view/miku-gif-9459514941117936950

it's peak...

[fleet hatch]

Oh right, almost forgot this

How playable exactly is the current version right now?

[tepid temple]

It's an alpha! You can make a combat encounter and play it! With differentiated mech builds even!

[alpine sorrel]

there's two mechs per manufacturer, a handful of talents and NPCs, and two sitreps you can play as one-offs

[north horizon]

oh this is GORGIOUS

[crimson merlin]

I like this a lot

[alpine sorrel]

We're coming up on the "bones" release in the next month or two, which is when I want to start putting the early access builds for sale up on itch.io (our budget buffer is getting a bit thin, and I'm hoping this'll help refill it). The raises the question: what do I do with the old demo (https://wick.itch.io/lancer-tactics) ? I'd like to poll the room about the options:

🔀 Swap the new build in on the same page, switching out screenshots and everything. Make a new page for the old demo & link to it prominently. This is the best Biz tactic since we'd get to inherit all the algorithmic traffic to the old demo (100 views/day) for the build we're now selling, but might be annoying to players looking for that old free in-browser version.

🛄 Stuff everything onto the same page. Keep the demo freely available where it is and also start selling the new build there. This leaves things where people will expect them, but will be more confusing what you'd be buying because the new screenshots won't match the demos & I'll have to have text for explaining both versions.

🆕 Make a new page for selling the new early access builds, leaving the old one as-is. Swap them at some point in the future. This is the worst Biz tactic since who's gonna find this new page.

4️⃣ Secret forth option, tell me your idea.

[frigid shale]

Swap the new and migrate the old sounds like the best way to preserve traffic, which sounds best for your budget and time (regarding combining everything: confused people ask questions and answers take time to compose)

[flint portal]

Absolutely go for the better biz option tbh

[tepid cipher]

while i would like for people to have access to the old builds, maybe you could have a wayto access the old one built in later , when it's convenient for you

[glad lotus]

I think 🛄 has a significant risk of being accused of a bait and switch, which would be very bad. That leaves "swap them now" or "swap them later", and I think now is the far better option of those two.

[stuck falcon]

For what it's worth, I would expect that most people would expect the current Lancer Tactics page to be the place where the full game would end up

So my vote is 100% 🔀

[glad lotus]

I think the old web demo is somewhat important to preserve, but it also doesn't really reflect the current state and vision of the project. For that reason I think it makes sense to move it off to a different page.

[alpine sorrel]

I know a fair number of people have linked to the current page as "go here to play a lil demo to get a handle on the basics of lancer rules" so I definitely do want to preserve the ability of people to find it from there.

But that's a pretty definititive poll lol. Thanks

[stuck falcon]

Yeah just put a big link to the new page where the old demo is hosted

[final mesa]

This is giving me major C&C/SC2 vibes, "Nuclear Missile Launched" I love it.

[grand notch]

I assume the overall status is still "doin' fine 👍"?

[trail canyon]

Sounds like you're planning to keep the old one accessible, just another link away — so def the 🔀 bc you're bringing more attention to the new cool thing and at worst are causing a very minor disturbance to some people

[torpid orbit]

I'm confused, are they removing the demo?

[crimson merlin]

Moving it to a new page

[alpine sorrel]

A thing that's unexpectedly kinda difficult: Bristlecrowns. Damage is normally rolled up-front, then applied variously to targets depending on if that attack crit and whatnot, right? Well these thorny boys want to change their up-front "rolled" damage to 3 depending on the status of the target.

Combat drill does something sorta similar but at least it's all in bonus-damage land, not base-damage land.

[flint portal]

Ah do you mean rolled as in, their damage is decided right, since they do static damage

[alpine sorrel]

yeah

sorry lol in LT static damage is just a very consistent die that always rolls the same number

[flint portal]

This is a weird hack, but is it not possible to set up Grappled/Biological and being able to take additional damage from certain stuff?

Potentially I guess that could help with some weird effects which inflict heat on biologicals but instead inflict energy damage

(its relatively rare tho)

[alpine sorrel]

I need to modify the original roll though to keep it as just one instance of damage

oh I see, on the 1 damage received there's some sort of flag that turns it into 3?

[flint portal]

Yeah

like give it +2 before exposed and whatnot

[alpine sorrel]

Interesting thought... I think I need do it further upstream though so things like brace/dig in can inspect the damage on the event queue to decide whether they should trigger

[flint portal]

Tho you'd need to make sure it doesn't stack since someone being both grappled and biological doesn't make the weapon deal 5 damage

But yeah my thought is like, maybeeeee it could probably work like this rule does?

In some way?

The other option I could see is you actually make it two weapons lmao

[alpine sorrel]

I should implement that rule too I suppose

[agile lagoon]

I assume it's not like a flow of commands where the damage steps for a weapon are like [AssignDamageForAttackCommand(2d6+1)] -> [AssignCriticalDamageForAttackCommand(2d6+1)] -> Foreach Hit Target [ApplyDamageCommand(DamageAssigned)] and that for BristleCrown it's not a case of going [AssignDamageForAttackCommand(1)] -> Foreach Hit Target [BristlecrownDamage(1, 3)] and making a custom Damage Command subclass?

[alpine sorrel]

I don't follow sorry 😅 I'm ending up just making a action.modify_final_damage function in to the last step of an individual attack that doesn't do anything normally but bristlecrown overrides it, throwing out all the work the system did before that and just putting in a nice neat 3 for the non-bonus-damage rolls.

Oh and I can use this system actually for Sniper's Mark as well! It's currently giving a buff that resists 99 damage from the shot in order to reduce it to zero, but just zeroing out the incoming damage in the first place would simplify matters.

[crimson merlin]

Nice

[flint portal]

You mean by dropping prone? I think its supposed to do regular damage instead of a structure, which must be hell to code lmao

[crimson merlin]

Pausing your stack for an interrupt prompt is a pain

[alpine sorrel]

But when all the conditions for inflicting a structure are checked, I need to keep it from doing the normal damage

[flint portal]

aaaaah I see

[alpine sorrel]

turns out I couldn't re-use the modify_final_damage anyway because that's a function on a weapon, but sniper's mark is a system that's external to the weapon. alas.

I've gotten very sidetracked from "I need to get the mino's metafold maze to affect everyone in a logic bomb" -> "huh the burst AOE preview isn't working" -> "I'll make a quick burst weapon to test: bristlecrowns"...

[flint portal]

Quick and easy burst weapon, 15 minutes adventure

[alpine sorrel]

there we go, now to do the original metafold AOE thing

Does anyone know of any other AOE tech attacks that Metafold Maze should apply to all targets for? Is it just logic bomb?

[tepid temple]

Does Electropulse qualify? It's multitarget but not strictly AoE

Er, is it even a tech attack?

Otherwise that would be it, except for the Chomolungma's core, which obviously isn't going to apply

[mild jay]

At this point, whenever something code wise turns out to be easy, I get an uncanny sense that something’s horribly wrong

[alpine sorrel]

I think not because it's not a tech attack

[flint portal]

"oh wow this was easy to code"
the background soundtrack:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhlZ-cPO0Xw

[frigid shale]

Kobold 3's IMMOLATE: Eject Slag has one iirc

Also: H0R_OS 1: Eject Power Cores does (2 energy to all adjacent characters)

Another: Manticore 1's Beckoner: Summon (pull all characters in range 3 of target)

[alpine sorrel]

Eyyy thanks

Honestly I am probably going to skip hooking up eject power cores to work with it, that thing needs zero buffs

[tepid temple]

Does Eject Power Cores even count RAW? It only identifies one target

[frigid shale]

The FAQ point is that Metafold Maze affects all characters affected by the tech action and that Viral Logic Suite: Logic Bomb benefits from it for that reason. Therefore other tech attacks with AOE effects also benefit

https://lancer-faq.netlify.app/#5b5d51

[tepid temple]

I didn't think that was generalizable, because the other tech attacks specify a singular "target" while logic bomb says "all characters of your choice", and the clarification was over Metafold Maze saying "your target" singular

[frigid shale]

Logic Bomb also mentions the singular target, so yeah

Like I don’t know, if there’s this much contention, maybe ask #rules-questions to divine the intent and specific wordings in order for Metafold Maze to affect multiple characters at once

[tepid temple]

That "even though the rules as written currently do not indicate as such." is really biting lol

I'm trying to follow the link back to Tom's original statement but Discord's comment linking is a pain

[frigid shale]

Yeah no, I’m simply just going off the Tom’s stated dev intent and not getting fixated on the language

Because clearly the language didn’t matter lol

[tepid temple]

Tom is on voice chat rn we can bug him if need be haha

[frigid shale]

Imma leave him be tbf

I’m sure if Olive desperately needs a Word of Tom, she can reach out to him about it

[alpine sorrel]

yeah since we've definitely left the realm of RAW I'm fine just making calls. It's more important that an in-license ability works than trying to keep consistency

[agile lagoon]

Feel is more important anyway 🙂

[final mesa]

Actually that might be the easiest way to do it? Have bristle crowns fire 2 different weapons, one that does one damage to certain targets but none to bio/grappled, and a second one that does zero damage to most targets but 3 to bio/grappled?

[glad lotus]

I expect that still requires logic to modify the base damage based on the target's status

[smoky glacier]

if you have a weapon that is coded to be able to do 1 damage to most things but 0 damage to bio/grappled, then you'd already have the infrastructure to make a weapon that does 1 damage to most and 3 damage to bio/grappled, wouldn't you?

[final mesa]

You know, maybe this is why I'm not someone that codes things.

I was thinking like it would check and not attack the ones without the correct conditions.

[crimson merlin]

There's no One Right Way. There's certainly ways that are more efficient. It's not like we're running computers from 20 years ago, we can afford a lot of dumb overhead

[dire ivy]

Gawd... Programs were still occasional being wrote in Assembly back then. The idea of Lancer tactics sharing a language with rollercoaster tycoon is a funny thought though.

Hey Olive wanna start over in Assembly?

[tidal tulip]

lancer tactics on the NES

[agile lagoon]

So to kinda explain what I mean with the Command and Queue system from a few days ago...
Most things when it gets down to it in a combat system are going to start to hew towards the Command pattern; thing Executes a command, then executes the next one. Simple, undoable, extendable. Problem is that there's an immediate thought to do an AttackCommand(FromCharacter, ToCharacter, WithWeapon) kind of thing... which has so many interrupt steps and reaction steps that it starts to get unweildy.
Instead each of your steps more complicated than a single effect becomes a CommandQueue; an attack now becomes a queue of Commands of SelectTarget(), RollToHit(), CheckForCrit(), AllocateDamage()... etc, which the system can then interrupt once each these steps resolve. And then for each weird attack type you can make a different Queue that has its own procedures to follow, allowing weirder things like Mimic Gun or Bristlecrowns or Gravity Gun to be coded easier and reactions to trigger off of individual steps without a load of clauses in between.

[alpine sorrel]

That sounds a bit like how Magic Arena does it? Here's the article I wish had been written a few months earlier, before I'd started the 2.0 work: https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/mtg-arena/on-whiteboards-naps-and-living-breakthrough

[trail canyon]

Tangential but I think the IRS in the US still hand-writes assembly for their ancient machines

[dire ivy]

Ewww

[cold timber]

For security reasons yeah, or at least they do asm code reviews post compilation. And if it works, don't knock it. Most finance tech runs on COBOL.

[final onyx]

I was genuinely shocked they went with that approach but it does seem to work

And makes sense the more you think about it

[tiny dune]

What do I need to do to actually play lancer tactics in its latest build?

... Ah it's Kickstarter backers only isn't it

[teal flame]

or backerkit late backers

[tepid temple]

Looks like next build won't be so exclusive

Okay maybe that message was better as an old-school reply instead of a forward

[alpine sorrel]

We were hoping to get the itch.io build ready by the end of this month but I don't think it's gonna quite happen, so there's going to be one more kickstarter/backerkit-only build before bones. It'll be available via backerkit sometime next week along with the next project update.

[teal flame]

oooh can’t wait!

[alpine sorrel]

just added the ability of map setpieces to get attached animated effects/particles

[tepid temple]

Nice

[wraith cradle]

Ooh, that looks neat! Probably good for representing dangerous terrain!

[glad lotus]

Stanky

[alpine sorrel]

The most direct useful thing it's gonna be for is actually going to be showing how many charges the aegis field generator has left on-map! Since it's now an efficient way to attach persistent graphical effects to any game entity.

[lethal leaf]

I'm imagining "3"s puffing up from the reactor like smoke.

[alpine sorrel]

Just sunk a half hour into trying to figure out why I Kill With My Heart's bonus damage wasn't coming through even though the AP tag was working fine, only to discover the working-as-written pitfall that followup aux attacks on a mount completely skip bonus damage. LT is apparently now teaching me rules interactions.

[final mesa]

Oh yes, that is one of those things that you have to be very careful about ordering and such. Unless you just have a permissive/unaware GM.

[mild jay]

Huh. Is that not considered a more specific rule overriding the general?

[stuck falcon]

No, it isn't a rule that is contradicting another rule

[little jetty]

we did it, we automated rules lawyers

[west stirrup]

Pour one out for the HA sticker I had to cut because I had unknowingly placed it on a removable panel

The and the kitties are fine though

[agile lagoon]

It suffered Stress and now it is Exposed

[west stirrup]

🤣

[lethal leaf]

Does the extra aux come immediately after the first one, or can you choose the order?