Happy August! We hope everyone is handling the heat wave well. Here’s what we were up to the last month~
Cutscene Completion (For Now)
We are happy to announce that (for now) all of the Main Story Quest (MSQ) cutscenes have been added to the game! This is a big hurdle we’ve now passed so let’s go over what this generally means and next steps for cutscene work!
The MSQ is the main content that anyone needs to play through to get from the start of the game to the end – and for cutscenes that means they’re mandatory. Having them all added means that you could theoretically play the narrative from beginning to end – a big accomplishment! For a lot of games this means that the beginning of the end is coming. Although we would love that, we aren’t quite there yet. BUT! It’s very nice to have happen and a big step in that direction.
So why aren’t we there yet? A few reasons.
MSQ in Gataela are a little dynamic. Beta testers may be aware of this with the first Lord debate – but if you got certain facts earlier on certain quests become side quests. If you didn’t get those they become main quests. For speed runners or others who hit certain conditions through exploration and so on, they can get rewarded by skipping ahead, but people who hadn’t found these won’t get locked out. We mention this because right now our debates are being rewritten. Once completed their facts will be extracted and matched with side quests and other gameplay mechanics for gathering them. This means that some current side quests may also be main quests. So we’ll have more main quests to add.
Another factor is that the cutscenes and story has been added, but little details to the world such as NPCs, enemies, animals, etc. haven’t yet. This means that a cutscene previously added might suddenly have elements appear in undesired locations, or maybe we need to fill in more NPCs to make the scene feel better. Then you get into all the little things like music and SFX cues and so on.
So all of this is to say the first pass is done! We have a second pass to do and that will be coming along a little later. This is why our big concern for the next 6 months will be adding NPCs, animals, etc. to maps as well as rewriting the debates.
Though… we did figure out a good stopping point if we were to do early access… so perhaps that might be a thing… or not… we will see… no promises.
Battle VFX
Another big effort this past month was adding in all the lovely VFX work that has been done over the past year as we mature the turn-based battle system. We still have a fair amount of work to do but most of them are complete so let’s highlight a few!
Here is our fave DDR Boar showing off their dance skills with “Crush” – a high damage skill that crushes anything in it’s way.
Our dear wolf friends can use a skill called Endure which will allow them to survive a hit that would normally kill them. They won’t give up that easily!
Our animal friends like a nice little Hibernation every once in a while to recharge and refresh – though they may be a little out of it once they wake up.
And y’know what? If you’re having a bad day just seek some Refuge inside your shell. The problem will go away… probably.
What’s Next?
Next month we’re going to be focusing on:
Wrapping up the Battle VFX
Adding fish to oceans and rivers
Some bug fixes & improvements
See you in September!
July 2024 Progress Update
We hope everyone is having a nice July now that summer’s in full swing! Here’s what we were up to last month!
Puzzles
Last month we finished off some puzzle work – so let’s talk about it!
One type we added was pipe puzzles since…. well… they feel rather steampunky don’t they? They do have a in-game reason for them too – trust us. As you can see above we’ve got a slew of pieces to add to solve the puzzle on the right. You need to connect the pipes together and so steam can flow through them! Though I wonder what will happen if you turn them all on? 🤔
There’s still a little bit more work to do – such as UI elements, some cool steam effects and so on – but we hope you like how it’s looking so far.
Next 6 Months
It’s been 6 months since our last check in on our plans – so let’s go over what the rest of the year will look like! That being said… lots of things are up in the air given the state of employment, so please keep that in mind and that things may change.
Our main “theme” for the next 6 months is “making the world alive”. This means adding things like NPCs, enemies, treasures, passive animals, etc. We’ll also be putting things together and plugging everything in – for example battle animations. By the end of the year we hope we’ll be in a place where we’ll be able to focus on side quests, things we missed, accessibility and so on.
In the short term (3-6 months), this means:
Adding new Battle VFX (and SFX?)
Adding NPCs, animals, treasure, etc. to the maps
Rebalancing Debate battles & related facts/evidence/side quests etc.
Finish adding all of the Kickstarter backer houses
And looking beyond that (subject to change):
Map visual upgrades (ex. the water shader)
Adding Side Quests
Performance and bug fixes as needed
General balancing & AI difficulty (battles, economy, etc.)
What’s Next?
Next month we’re going to be focusing on:
Wrapping up the last few cutscenes
Adding all new Battle VFX
Happy summer!
June 2024 Progress Update
Happy June everyone! Here’s what we’ve been up to for the past month!
Interior Completion! Puzzles! Cutscenes!
Yes that’s right you heard it – we finished off all of the interiors! (Well, minus a few special ones and some backer houses) We also “found” time to complete adding some puzzles for a dungeon, and doing a whole lot of cutscene work!
Since cutscenes don’t have anything visually to show without spoilers, we’ll be showing off the city of Olvia and it’s interiors this month, and talk about the puzzles next. Keep an eye out though since next month we’ll be talking about the next leg of development.
Olvia
Olvia is a mining city located beside the Saren-Croix Mountain Range, which divides Gataela and the Ovion Empire. Lots of raw materials are available thanks to industry in the area, and so the city is also home to Steam-powered research, technology and advancements.
The Miner’s Association has a convenient break room in the quarry outside the mines for any workers to use. The entrance contains a register of current people working in the mines along with what equipment was rented. This room is usually filled with people coming and going, as well as those chatting. A quiet space/nap room is available in the back for those who need it.
Olvia is home to one of the most prestigious printing houses in the country – although they may not look it. Covered in paper, coffee stains and filled with overworked editors – this publishing house is famous for discovering and publishing My Fairest: Gataela’s most popular romance-adventure novel series.
The city may be covered in dirt and grime but the inn keeper will fight tooth and nail to keep his business clean and spotless. That being said, the children have taken this as a challenge and often try to barge in, make a mess and get out as fast as possible.
A warehouse was recently converted into a laboratory of some sort. They call it a “garage” – whatever that is. Rumour says they are making a horse-less carriage, but how can that be possible?
What’s Next?
This month will be strictly focused on finishing off adding the MSQ cutscenes! Look out for more news next month!
Take care everyone! Happy Summer!
May 2024 Progress Update
Hello everyone! We hope you had a good start to spring! Here’s what we were up to last month!
Turn Battle Animations
Guess what? We arealmostdone!
To be specific – we have basically all of the VFX complete. A few need some last minute touch ups but otherwise it’s there. It’s real. It’s… not in the game yet… But it’s there.
We’ll be doing a big round up about the animations next month and start showing them off with some explanations, but a big shout out to Owen who popped off coming up with these guys.
As for what’s remaining – well we need to stick them in the game and assign them some relevant stats so they do what they are supposed to do. And SFX. Yeah these guys need to make sound too. But we’re just about there for the turn-based battle re-balancing we started last year. Look forward to more information soon!
Layoffs & Future Development
Well, with the good news out of the way let’s get to the unpleasant news.
Unfortunately this week I (Paige) was subject to layoffs. That on it own sucks, but I’ll be explaining what that means for the project.
For those who are not aware, this project is 99% self-funded. Yes, we had a small Kickstarter and got a small grant in 2014, but it only covered the initial tileset & visual assets (which was the purpose of the Kickstarter). Most of the game’s development costs are covered out of my own pocket. I obviously don’t pay myself either. I was using a certain % from my monthly pay to pay for development. This is why development is on the slow side – we need money to pay people to do work, we need money to live, but there is no money. So we work to pay for people, which means not working on the game.
But I digress – what does this mean for “Gataela”?
Well- simply put the next quarter is going to be a weird one.
In some ways development might be faster, in other ways it might be slower. For example, all of the work assigned to myself might suddenly zoom since – well – other than job hunting what else do I have to do? However for anything where others are involved that’ll probably be put on a stand still.
So please have some understanding over the next little while.
What’s Next?
We’re going to move into some REALLY vague goals for the next quarter below since there’s no guarantee on what will be tackled. Some things to look forward to include:
Wrapping up the remaining TTBattle animations (minus SFX)
Happy April! Let’s get into what we were up to last month!
New Battle Effects
Last month we added another new set of battle effects to the game with their accompanying audio. Here’s a couple of them below.
Splash is used only by Turtles. They do a little hop and a skip (it’s really quite cute) in order to lower your guard (and all of your stats with it).
Drum is only used by Crabs. They wave their pincers around in the air and psychs up the other Crabs on the field, raising their defence.
Birds, Cats and Ducks
Another improvement we made was adding movement to the birds, cats and ducks.
Cats have three distinct modes: wandering, sitting and sleeping.
Birds can be wandering around, stationary or in flight. If you walk passed them they don’t particularly care, but run and they’ll be spooked and fly off. As for the ones in flight, well, they’re too high up to care.
Ducks are similar to the other birds, however they are water-bound. If you run near them they’ll get spooked and fly off.
With this all the animals now have some sort of movement logic which means they’re ready to be added to all of the maps!
What’s Next?
We’ll be wrapping up Olvia’s interiors and hopefully the Kickstarter interiors with that along with the usual Cutscenes & Battle effects. If all goes well, we’ll also be putting in some dungeon puzzles!
Olvia Interiors
Kickstarter Interiors
MSQ Cutscenes
TTBattle VFX & SFX
Dungeon Puzzles
May you have April showers!
March 2024 Progress Update
Hello everyone! We hope you’re having a Feb- Wait- It’s March?
Demo Update
This update will be a bit of a short one as what we did last month was *checks JIRA* the demo update. That’s it. It was a lot. But that’s it.
Introducing all the performance changes and some QoL changes
Gamemaker Engine Upgrades
Engine upgrades are pretty straight forward in terms of bugs – upgrade the engine and run into API changes, lifecycle changes, Steam extension changes, etc. So this led to random crashes, weird artifacts on the screen and so on. One upgrade actually broke the starting map and it required an interesting use of excel, php, and scraping the raw map files to figure out what what affected and how to fix it.
As for performance, well, things ran too fast so we had problems with flickering – cutscenes, screens and maps loaded so fast you could now see state changes (ex. showing and hiding NPCs based on completed events).
So we ended up replaying the demo a few times to fix all the various issues, which came out to 70 or so bugs, if not more, all of which were fixed during the month! Then as for getting the update out, we had to scrub all of the cutscene additions we’ve made to the game from the demo due to ✨spoilers✨
Suffice to say, there won’t be a big update for the next while.
Please don’t find bugs. But if you do please tell us.
What’s Next?
We’ll be going back to our original plan for the month which was:
Olvia Interiors
Kickstarter Interiors
MSQ Cutscenes
TTBattle VFX & SFX
Happy March!
0.7.0 Demo Update
Summary
Welcome to the big ol’ grand ✨ Performance Update ✨. We’ve improved loading, we’ve improved transitions, we’ve improved shaders, surfaces, FPS stability, memory usage – the list goes on! We’ve also added a few QoL changes, a little bit of polish and a bunch of various bug fixes. Plus a bunch of engine upgrades! See the change log for the full list of changes.
Fixed white border on fighters in opening cutscene
Fixed action events not visible after valid cutscene without map reload
Fixed post cutscene events may run out of order when loading a map
Fixed shaders breaking when entering into the menu from inside of a house
Fixed an infinite popup that may occur when interacting with a locked door
Fixed input may be checked when the window is unfocused
Fixed double shader effect inside buildings
Fixed laggy skill up button
Fixed being able to click on buttons during a screen transition
Fixed infinite dialog box popup
Fixed minimap crashes
Fixed interior crashes
Fixed title screen buttons disappearing when pressing back at the start of the game
Other
Upgraded Gamemaker to v2023.11.1.160 Runtime
Upgraded Steamworks SDK
Upgraded DLLs to work with x64 configurations
Reimplemented all Debates to use Chatterbox
Changed input handling to use Input
February 2024 Progress Update
We hope everyone is having a Feb-ulous Fab-ruary! Here’s what we were up to for the last month~
Ziacia
Ziacia is the capital city of Gataela and home to the King’s Palace, just north of the city across a small bridge. The city itself is surrounded by a star fort, but it’s still easily accessible by boat if needed. (And we hope that won’t ever be needed.)
Ziacia is home to many tall buildings, many of which function as apartments. For example, this building contains four apartments with two on each floor. Pictured are two small units on the first floor:
Left: Someone with quite an expensive taste in furniture, but it seems they blew all their budget so they don’t have much else
Right: A single parent lives here with their child. It seems they’re getting ready for a picnic.
Some of the buildings also house groups of students all renting together… although it seems like this particular one has someone cramming for an exam, thesis or some other important thing. Let’s wish them luck, it seems they’ll need it.
Ziacia has a “famous” local bar down by the pier. Many sailors and military officers stop by here everyday as their favourite spot so it’s always packed. That being said there’s never any reports of issues because, after all, no one wants to anger the bar manager. Or else.
A small home belonging to a local sailor. It doesn’t seem like they are home very often, or perhaps they just haven’t cleaned in a while. But hm? Is that something behind their wardrobe?
What’s Next?
We’ll be focusing on the following for the next month or so:
Olvia Interiors
Kickstarter Interiors
MSQ Cutscenes
TTBattle VFX
Olvia will be the last city we need to do interiors for and will contain most of the Kickstarter interiors (as most of you guys picked the same theme for your interiors. Wow.) It’ll take a month or two to complete, so we’ll have more about it in April’s update. A few people also reported some bugs in the demo, so we’ll begin to look at pushing out an update for that in early March which should contain other performance improvements and so on since the last update. It’ll be quite the patch notes.
Take care everyone!
January 2024 Progress Update
Happy New Year! We hope everyone stayed happy and healthy over the winter holidays! Let’s go over 2023 and our plans for 2024!
December 2023
Before getting into 2023 in review, let’s go over December quickly! As per usual, our focus was on cutscenes, interiors, and animations. We also worked on some bug fixes and updating Gamemaker! As we are now tackling larger cities, we’ll save an overview of the city and it’s interiors after they are completed. In the meantime, here’s a look at one bug we’ve fixed:
Did you know that if you happen to be in an interior with camera movement that if you entered into the main menu and returned it broke? No? Neither did we. It was a bit of a surprise when we stumbled upon this. Most interiors are made such that a camera isn’t needed, but in this case one was! A quick check in the menu for something led to… well… this. But it’s fixed now, so all’s well that ends well.
We also spent time this month upgrading our development machines (they were 10 years old) and the Gamemaker version from Feb 2023 to Nov 2023. A few important things came out from this:
This bug from October 2022 is now fixed. This was one of the major blockers for the demo update since we use that feature of the engine quite extensively. We didn’t want to release an update that could randomly crash.
Between the development machine upgrade and the Gamemaker engine upgrade, Gataela’s compile times have dropped from 10 to about 1:30 minutes. What a huge improvement!
We are also now able to build YYC (native) for machines because of the bug fix. This means better runtime performance on machines.
Gamemaker has a number of build-related changes coming in the future so likely things will continue to improve as we upgrade over time. This largely means that development time is spent developing instead of waiting for things to compile.
And that’s it for December!
2023 In Review
Now let’s talk about 2023! And man, 2023 was a thing. Lots of exciting things happened, but there was a lot of interruptions and difficulties. Let’s go over some of the highlights and see what we accomplished!
Maps Maps Maps
The first big thing was completing the overworld! That was back in Feburary! Wow! We’ve gone through since then and added interiors for nearly all of the cities – we are left with half of Ziacia and Olvia (those two big cities in the south of the map). Once those are done nearly all maps, and sub-maps for the game will be complete! Kinda. We will still have to add NPCs and such but, well, that can’t be done until the maps exist.
MSQ Cutscenes & Skits
Another major focus for the year was adding Main Story Quest cutscenes and skits. These are the main meat of the game. We spent a lot of time working on these and finished adding all of the skits, and most of the cutscenes! We also did some general cutscene infrastructure improvements.
Turn-based Battle Improvements
Lots and lots of time was spent on working to improve the turn-based battle system. In particular:
We doubled the number of enemies, created their animations, and their alternate palettes & added them to the game
Generally speaking we’ll be doing more of the same with adding content and putting everything together. Our year will focus on cutscenes, maps, battle systems (turn-based and debate) and general bug fixes and performance.
In the short term (3-6 months), this means:
Finish adding all of the MSQ
Finish adding all of the city interiors
Finish adding all of the Kickstarter backer houses
Create & add more turn-based battle skill VFX & SFX
And looking beyond that (subject to change):
Adding NPCs, animals, treasure, etc. to the maps
Rebalancing Debate battles & related facts/evidence/side quests etc.
Map visual upgrades (ex. the water shader)
Performance and bug fixes as needed
Demo update? Beta update? Who knows.
So with all the being said, thanks for reading and have a good start to 2024!
December 2023 Progress Update
Happy Winter! Here’s what we were up to during November!
Vescha
Vescha is the largest city in the region, sporting a healthy forestry industry as well as the southern military headquarters. It is on the edge of Viche forest – a large forest along the border that divides Gataela and Aerand.
One of the nearby residents has renovated their living room to be a small classroom. Whether the owner is just well off in general or has expensive tastes – no one really knows. However, they are an excellent teacher and know quite a lot of various things.
It seems we’ve stumbled upon someone in the middle of moving in! Located in a prime location in the city, they managed to get this place for cheap because the wallpaper in the house was pretty terrible – at least as far as they are concerned. One of the first things they’ll be replacing for sure.
A home-grown florist. They spend a lot of time on the first floor growing and taking care of plants – specifically plants for the local general store. It’s said that ever purple plant in the town originated from this one place.
Triage
This month’s new skill is Triage – a party wide heal! Our dear friend Zack here is demonstrating what it’ll look like when it plays over a single member.
This skill comes from our recent review – did you know that we had plenty of party-wide damaging skills but no healing skills? Whoops.
Besides the obvious gap this presents, it also is a big problem for gameplay and general turn-based battle enjoyment. When you have one party member and a single heal everything is fine. Throw in another and you might have some turns where you only heal, but most of the time you’ll be spending it doing damage or supports. When you have more than two party members then… well… you have one party member dedicated to healing.
This wouldn’t be a problem if there was a dedicated healing class – but we don’t have one. So you end up with a damage dealer that’s healing instead of doing damage and battles drag on. You may even have the whole team healing themselves with items or skills instead of attacking for whole turns very often as enemies also have party-wide damaging skills. Not very fun.
So with that said – the addition of the Triage skill is super important.
And there’s your hint for how to eventually unlock this beauty.
What’s Next?
Goodness! The year is almost already over? We’ll be focusing on wrapping up work we started during the year, and doing our 2024 planning. We’ll also be doing:
