Happy New Year! We hope you had a good holiday season~ Here’s what we’ve been up to in December, what we accomplished over the year, and some goals for 2023!
December 2022
Before we dive into a big review of the year, let’s go over some of the stuff we accomplished before 2022 ended! As per usual, a lot of time was spent visiting family and friends, but we managed to accomplish quite a few things, such as:
Finished 67% (56! submaps) for the last major dungeon
Added a few MSQ skits
Completed some overworld maps
Created more animations for new enemies
2022 Review
2022 can be described as “The Year of Preparation”, which – as the name suggests – we focused on preparing the game for the big Content™ addition of 2023. So let’s go over some of the things we did!
First is the overworld maps. We went from having 3/4 regions completed to (almost) all 4 regions! All that’s missing is the little area blending between the two biomes in the bottom right which should be completed soon™.
We also did a big wildlife update during 2022 focused on creating creatures to help the world feel more alive. This also included more than doubling the number of enemies and rebalancing the turn-based battles. We now have 17 passive animals, and 12 new enemies – all with various variants. We even updated some older enemies with variants while we were at it!
Some other key highlights from 2022:
Finished rewriting the end of the game
Finished rewriting the MSQ skits
Updated SFXs for all of the older turn-based battle skills
Designed mechanics, puzzles and visual aspects of the last few dungeons
Added new VFX to the overworld
Improved UI animations
Added skip features to Skits and Cutscenes
Added more emote bubbles
Completed more Debate Portraits
Upgraded our Debate Battle Infrastructure (adding and changing debates are easier than ever!) & converted all of the old debates
Added Gamepad support (and redid our input handling in general)
As mentioned before – it’s the year of Content™. Which means our main focus for the year is to combine all of our hard work together. Our short term goals for the next few months will be:
Complete the remaining overworld maps
Complete the new turn-based enemies, animations, and skills
Add all of the MSQ skits
And as for the rest of the year we will be focused on:
Adding all of the MSQ cutscenes
Finish rewriting all of the debates and related side quests
Finish all city/town interiors and related NPCs
General bug fixes, visual & performance improvements
Take care and see you all next month!
December 2022 Progress Update
Hello everyone! We’re happy to report we had a productive month with absolutely NO misfortune…. probably. Here’s what we were up to!
Little Improvements
One of our focuses for the month was making a variety of little improvements from bug fixes to little performance things to animations. Some of the little animations we added include moving minecarts, windy grass, UI improvements and so on.
Skipping the Scenes Away
Another small improvement we made was adding the ability to skip cutscenes! Although… the cutscenes are not entirely skippable just yet. We have some work to do to update all of the older cutscenes to work with the new system, which we will get around to in the new year. However, the important thing to note is the tech exists, and we made sure that it would work for nearly all of the scenes (minus ones with battles or important choices). We weren’t sure whether to allow skipping if you haven’t seen the scene before, but considering that it would be a lot more work to track that information, and we wouldn’t know if people were doing multiple playthroughs either on the same device or different ones – we decided to just trust the player. If you don’t want to see it and it won’t break anything, it’s fine. You can skip.
What’s Next?
As the year is reaching the end we’ll be focusing on a few key areas in preparation for next year:
Finishing the last major dungeon’s design
Final Battle Work
Finishing all of the Overworld Maps
Have some happy holidays and see you all in January for our yearly review!
November 2022 Progress Update
Welcome to the spookiest update yet! In the spirit of Halloween we have a horror story that is stranger than fiction~ 👻 So here’s what we were up to during the last month!
A Horror Story For the Ages
Imagine: you’ve been working on a project for over ten years. Many people have contributed over the years and much time and effort has gone into it (Let’s just say over 6169 hours to date – such a random number!). You’re making use of proprietary software to make your project – but hey! It’s used by professionals.
You’ve been working with this software for years and yeah- there’s occasional issues – it happens – but it gets solved quickly and it’s not like anything really bad has happened.
And yet it happens:
############################################################################################ ERROR in action number 1 at time step2 of time line :
Unable to find any instance for object index ‘96904’ name ‘’ at gml_RoomCC_Map_4_3_8_Create (line 1) – x = inst_Map_4_3_Rob.x; ############################################################################################
You haven’t changed anything. You haven’t upgraded versions. This code where this error is being thrown hasn’t been touched for years.
The error – it’s curious. It says that this object – inst_Map_4_3_Rob – it doesn’t exist. So you try to wrap it in a check. Maybe it’s just being silly with instance creation order or something.
But… it exists.
And yet it doesn’t.
You decide then – ok maybe there’s something wrong with this object. You’ll just remove the offending line of code. It’s fine. You’ll get back to it later.
But then-
############################################################################################ ERROR in action number 1 of Other Event: Room Start for object obj_StatementScreenManager:
Unable to find any instance for object index ‘96400’ name ‘(null)’ at gml_Script_scr_StatementScreen_UpdateIcons (line 103) – inst_StatementScreen_StatementBttn._is_selected = type == StatementType.STATEMENT; ############################################################################################
You realized – quickly – that this is happening everywhere. Everywhere in the project where you access objects by their room names crashes. And most- terrifying – this is used everywhere. Over a thousand places. And every. one. crashes.
Quick! Go to google! Surely others have come across this! And yes- thankfully- they have! There are workarounds! But- None of them work? An explanation: It’s an error in the proprietary code. There is nothing you can do.
And so it dawns on you: Ten years of work is gone in moments – outside of your control.
…
…
…
BUT NO! You don’t give up. How could you! It’s ten YEARS of work!
And so you struggle-
And so the answer comes – what if – just what if- this works:
Cautiously, you build and run the game. You open up the areas of the code that were previously crashing and-
Finally-
They run.
It’s a True Story
Yes. Really. It might be hard to believe, but this October in the year 2022 fate decided to give us a real scary time. A good portion of the month was spent running into this issue, going through the five stages of grief, figuring out a solution and uh- logging a bug.
We hope the bug is fixed soon.
This would’ve been a very different update if we hadn’t found a workaround. So we are very happy to report that development can go on. However it is unfortunate that we must report that October had no major development.
However if you happen to be one of the many many people who have come across or might come across this – we hope a simple pass through function will help you carry on through your day.
What’s Next?
Since we couldn’t get too much done this month, we’ll be focusing on some similar items that maybe showed up last month including and not limited to:
Adding more UI animations
Fixing some minor visual bugs; and
Adding a skip feature to cutscenes
October 2022 Progress Update
Hello everyone! It’s spooky season! Here’s what we were up to over the past month~
Gamepad Support
Our primary focus this month was finishing off adding gamepad support which we started in August. Great news: It’s done! Thanks to everyone who hung out with us on stream as we powered through this!
As we mentioned last month, we are considering pushing out a demo update with these changes along with other improvements and minor bug fixes. We have a little more work to make this 100% user friendly – for example we need to display gamepad buttons on UI elements where there are handy shortcuts. This will take a while, so we can’t give a solid date as of yet, but please look forward to it when it comes!
Adding Some Juice
Between adding gamepad support, working on the final debate and turn-based battle improvements – we started to focus on adding some UI animations! These don’t really add too much other than some etxra visual interest when playing, but it should help the game feel a little more polished. For example, above is an example of the new party swap animation, and below is an example of new button hover effects!
What’s Next?
Moving into October we will be focusing on more miscellaneous improvements as we work to finish the last debate, primarily around:
Adding more UI animations
Fixing some minor visual bugs
Adding new emote bubbles and passive animals; and
Adding a skip feature to cutscenes
September 2022 Progress Update
Happy? September to you all! Summer is just about over here, which means it's time for another update. Here's what we've been up to over the last month!
Planning, Improvements & More
Last month we focused a lot on improving our development processes and planning out a significant portion of work over the next few months. We completed the debate upgrades (and redid all of the debates) and did some end of game dungeon design! But we can’t show that… Or talk about that…
So instead here’s some of the overworld VFX we added!
Gamepad Support
Another big focus of the month was adding the long-requested gamepad support! We swapped out our input library with Input 5, and began the long process of replacing our existing input support (keyboard + mouse) as well as add gamepad.
The good news:
Adding Input 5 was easy, and swapping out the input libraries was even easier
We can now support all sorts of different controllers
Input 5 supports easily swapping different input configurations (future work)
WASD and arrow keys will be supported for movement (a highly requested feature)
The bad news:
We’re still working on adding support
We’re hoping to finish off most of the basic support this month and looking to roll out the basic support into the demo sometime before the end of the year.
In the meantime, enjoy what it looks like to debug scroll bars:
What’s Next?
Our big goals for the next month are:
Finish basic gamepad support
Begin working on writing the final debate battle (!!!)
Add some UI FX juice
Adding more animals and enemies to the game
Expanding the TTBattle and creating new graphics
August 2022 Progress Update
Happy August! We hope everyone is continuing to stay happy and healthy. Here’s what we were up to during July!
The Last Province Update
Yes you’ve read the title right. We’re done! Well kinda. There’s a few spoiler areas that need to be sorted out still, but we can’t show that, right? So that means today we’ll be showing off the “mostly final” overworld.
It’s been a lot of hard work over the past few months! We’d also like to thank everyone who came and hung out during streams while we worked on this. We’ve come a long way!
QOL Improvements
One focus for us in the last month was adding some QOL improvements. For example, we added in Skit Skipping! We also adjusted the inventory screen so that character portraits will always be shown, and adjusted the inventory battle items to auto assign when new items are gained.
The auto assign is particularly important since at the beginning of the game we got feedback that lots of people tend to not realize they need to assign the items they gain. This should help out a lot on this front – and as an added bonus it gives parity with the battle skills (since those auto assign).
Other than that we’ve also been doing some general performance improvements! For example we doubled the performance inside buildings!
Debate Improvements
As part of our effort to improve the debates, the first place we looked for improvements was in our own workflow. After all, the faster and easier we can add and edit the debates, the quicker we can get them done!
Thus far we have been designing the debates in Twine. Twine was a great choice when we started because of the node editor and the fact that we could preview the debate flow. BUT we ran into a bunch of road blocks and sticky points:
We could not export Twine files to Gamemaker
We had to recreate the whole debate and all of the nodes and connections through code manually
Debates started to have over 50 nodes at the START of the game – not scalable
Ctrl-S does not save in Twine. We lost entire debates we had to rewrite if it crashed.
So we looked around a while ago and found Yarn/YarnSpinner. It seemed like a good solution since all of our pain points would be solved! So we implemented Chatterbox this month and it’s been a big improvement. A lot of the debate logic has been significantly simplified and it’s much faster for us to create new debates – after all we have to convert all the old ones over!
We’re hoping to finish off this round of improvements this month so that creating new debates will go more smoothly.
What’s Next?
Our major goals for the next little while will be focused more on planning and general improvements. We will be:
Starting on expanding the TTBattle and creating new graphics
Finishing the Debate Technical Improvements
Designing some end of game dungeons & puzzles
Adding Overworld VFX
Gamepad support
July 2022 Progress Update
Happy July! We’re entering into the swing of summer, which means we’re leaving the first half of the year behind. Let’s take a look at what we’ve gotten done over the past month and so far this year!
Province Update
One of our biggest focuses for the last half of the year was completing the final province/biome. In particular, the last two months we heavily focused on the capital – Ziacia. This month, we completed it.
June 2022
July 2022
Now doesn’t that look great? The province has also come along, and is looking quite good!
We’ve got just a handful of maps/levels left to knock out of the park! Transition maps along the upper left and right, and a little bit of the core province to the bottom.
Naturally we fell a little behind from the storm last month (which we are still dealing with), but we’re hoping to finish most of this during July. The areas that won’t be completed (mostly to the right) have some gameplay mechanics we need to sort out first so we don’t need to redo them later. No need to make them pretty if we need to move all the roads around for plot reasons.
However, all in all, this goal is pretty much completed, which means the overworld of Gataela is just about done! Wow.
Rewrite & Skits
A big big BIG thing we have also been working on over the past WHILE has been the end of game rewrite & their related skits. As a reminder, Gataela has been in active development for just over 10 years now. The development of the game also started plot-first. We didn’t start with visuals, programming or level design – just the narrative and the game script. As you can imagine, it’s the oldest part of the game and hasn’t aged as well as we would’ve liked.
The purpose of the end of game rewrite was to refresh everything, make gameplay adjustments, fix some logical inconsistencies among other things. We scrapped a lot of old dialogue, we rewrote entire sections, we moved the locations of events and all sorts of things.
It’s nice to now have this done although we will likely revisit over the next while and make small tweaks here and there as needed.
Passive Animals, SFXs, Portraits and More
Now as for all the other stuff the team has been working on – and there’s a lot. Here’s a quick round up of some of the other accomplishments:
Passive Animals – We’ve got cows, we’ve got pigs, we’ve got chickens, we’ve got sheep. We’ve got horses, dogs, cats, birds, bugs, squirrels, mice, crabs and even a capybara. Owen has done an amazing job getting all these different animals done and we’re looking forward to adding them to the game and getting the worlds to feel more alive.
Emote Bubbles, VFX and UI Animations – We’ve also been expanding the number of emote bubbles to express more in cutscenes. On top of that, we have more overworld VFX and even some UI animation designs to help everything feel more polished. Once again, thanks to Owen’s hard work. We’re looking forward to showcasing a lot of these things as we move into the second half of the year.
SFXs – We highlighted this earlier in the year, but thanks to Chris’ amazing work, all of the SFXs have been updated for the new battle animations!
Debate Portraits & Designs – We also can’t forget the great work Cie has been doing to finish up the remaining debate portraits and character designs.
Now that a lot of our major projects for the first half of the year are complete – just what are our plans for the second half? Well – it’s something like this:
July will focus on finishing up about half of the remaining provincial maps that have not been updated. These are mainly the transitions to the left, and some of the central maps. We’re also planning to add some of the VFX work to the world, work on some usability features (ex. skipping skits) and a couple small bug fixes.
Moving out of July and into the second half of the year our goals are the following:
Add game controller support
Update UI to work with gamepad
Add some UI animations and polish
Features – Skip Skits & Cutscenes
VFX & visual improvements
Debate battle rewrites & improvements
TTBattle improvements, rebalancing and expansion
Add cutscenes & skits
Complete the rest of the province
That’s a lot coming up and we’re hoping to slowly complete them over the next little while. In the meantime, we hope everyone has a relaxing summer and we’ll see you next month!
June 2022 Progress Update
Gosh is it already June? We’re just about halfway through the year, so here’s what we were up to during May!
A Storm to Remember
Before we get into the update we wanted to talk briefly about a recent weather event. On May 21st, Ottawa was hit hard with a storm that knocked out power for most of the city for over 3 days. Some people didn’t have power return for 10 days and some still don’t. The storm? It lasted 15 minutes.
Aftermath of May 21 2022 storm (Photo/Hydro Ottawa)
There’s a whole whack of damage done ranging from felled power lines to toppled trees to roof damage. Everyone on the team is safe and sound, although some were affected. As a result this update will be smaller than usual and you can expect the next one as well as we deal with the aftermath.
Province Update
May 2022
June 2022
As we mentioned last month, our big focus was on the capital city, Ziacia. Ziacia is modeled off of a star fort city, with the palace located to the north on an island accessible by bridge. Our plans were interrupted due to the storm, but we were able to complete the main buildings of the city.
We also ended up expanding the city slightly, by replacing the existing moat with raised cliffs to give an impression of a wall or hill, and expanded the moat outwards in all directions. You can also see we started on plans to replace the south entrance to the city with an extra island.
So now that the inner city is complete, our big goal for June is to finish off the surrounding areas. Look forward to more details on the capital and it’s design next month!
What’s Next?
Now that we’re approaching the middle of the year, we’ll be starting to wrap up the big projects we’ve been working on thus far. The cities will be complete! The passive animals will have their animations! The writing will be done! And we’ll be starting on new things! Not only that, but we will be doing a presentation on Level Design in Gataela for Dirty Rectangles this month. If that sounds of interest, keep an eye on our Twitter for more information and we’ll see you next month!
February 2022 Progress Update
We hope everyone had a good start to the new year! Here’s what we’ve been up to during January!
The Last Province
This month we started working on the last province – a mountainous region surrounded by the Saren-Croix Mountains! This area is the southern-most of Gataela, and is home to both the capital Ziacia, and the mining and research city Olvia! A lot of our work this past month was setting up and deciding on the design for the region. We also began designing Olvia, which is intended to be our most Steampunk looking city. We hope to finish this off this month, so look forward to more details then!
More Friends
We’ve been continuing to work on adding more friends and animals into the game. Pictured above are just some of the different variations of birds we will be adding. Can you guess what each type is?
What’s Next
We will continue to focus on levels and story! Our main goal for the next month will be to complete Olvia, and begin working on filling in the surrounding regions.
January 2022 Progress Update & Year In Review
Happy New Year! We hope everyone had a relaxing holiday season. Here’s what we’ve been up to in December, what we accomplished over the year, and some goals for 2022!
December 2021
December was a little bit of a slow month, as we took some time to relax and visit family and friends. That being said, we did get a few things done, such as:
The past year was hectic and we accomplished a lot more than we expected. The biggest example of this is what happened with the in-game world map. Just to show off how much has changed, take a look at the images below!
As you can see, we increased the game world size by at least 25%, leaving only the bottom section left to go. We also:
So what do we have planned for 2022? Well, it’s a little bit more of the same, but we want to focus on finishing up a lot of areas that are currently in progress, such as:
Finish TTBattle planning, upgrades, and implementation
Finish adding new enemies and skills, including relevant SFX
Finish adding all of the overworld maps to Gataela (that bottom section in the above images)
Shader improvements, such as the house shader for performance, or the water shader for visuals
Finish end of game rewrite
Add all of the cutscenes and skits for the end of the game
Rewriting debates
Writing and adding side quests
We are also considering releasing a demo update with all of the bug fixes, and maybe a TTBattle specific demo to get feedback on how the system plays at some point during the year.
In the meantime, we hope you all continue to stay safe!
