We’ve started work on some of the in-game backer rewards. Below are some of the custom NPCs made by Owen!
Font Options
One of the things we’re planning to tackle this coming month is font options. We’ve been slowly adding accessibility settings to the game on an as-needed basis, and this is an option that has been requested a couple of times before. There’s a lot of work that needs to go into this, but here’s a sneak peek!
Battle Animations
Another thing we’re looking to add in this month is a bunch of new battle animations made by Owen and Louis! Look forward to seeing more gifs of these in the future!
0.4.0 Beta Update Released
Our Winter Beta Update is now here! This update finishes off the story in Lakure! Look forward to traveling the province, conversing with locals, and convincing Lord Katerina to help you!
This update also contains a large number of technical improvements we made over the summer which were previous released in the demo update a few months ago. Another thing of note is that all of SFX has been redone and updated, and we've added some new features like books and eavesdropping.
We recommend making a copy of your save files (the .sqlite files) in your game directory before continuing. There should be no issues, but we do upgrade the files in this release.
If you come across any issues, feel free to send us a Tweet or DM, message on the Discord Server, or shoot us an email. Bug reports and feature requests can also be logged here.
It’s been almost one year since we released our graphical overhaul demo! This demo was really big since not only did we redo a TON of assets, we also switched game engines to Gamemaker, adjusted story content, and addressed a lot of feedback.
We’ve been working hard on development since then, and decided to release an update to the demo with all of the improvements we’ve made! We hope you all enjoy it, and maybe find some requested features down below!
We recommend making a copy of your save files (the .sqlite files) in your game directory before continuing. There should be no issues, but we do upgrade the files in this release.
If you come across any issues, feel free to send us a Tweet or DM, message on the Discord Server, or shoot us an email. Bug reports and feature requests can also be logged here.
Highlights
Status Point Shortcut
We often watch people who post Let’s Plays or do live streams of the game, and something we noticed a LOT was that people would often forget to use their status points they gained when levelling up.
Generally speaking, setting one or two points can make a very big difference in battle, so after going through a whole area, and then facing a boss, you might find yourself in a lot of trouble. In fact, lots of people failed when fighting the first boss battle because they forgot to set points.
Although we have a reminder in the main menu screen, it wasn’t enough, and we wanted to provide an unobtrusive way to remind you about it. So now when you have status points to spend, you will have a shortcut on the HUD to the skills screen beside the main menu icon!
Full Screen Support
Something that was highly requested was the ability to fullscreen the game. A big reason why we haven’t supported it thus far is that Gataela’s UI is not pixelated, while the game itself is. This means that either the pixel art is blurry or the UI is pixelated when scaling.
We took the first step to add this to the game, and it’s now available in the demo!
Please keep in mind this is more “experimental” and will be improved over time, but we hope that this will help those who had difficulty with the smaller windowed size of the game.
Difficulty Options
We’ve started to add difficulty options! Two options that are now available in the demo is “Enemy HP Multiplier” and “Enemy EXP Multiplier”.
If you’re finding turn-based battles take too long, try decreasing the amount of HP the enemies have. If you dislike grinding, increase the amount of EXP you get from battles! These options can be changed at any time while playing, so we hope you can tweak the game to your preferences!
Battle Improvements
We have made a TON of battle improvements within this release such as displaying levels, adding criticals and misses, adding chances to fail escaping from battles among other fixes such as fixing the block and dodge skills, and how stats are used during battle!
Hello everyone! We normally post monthly updates on our website and wanted to share these devlogs here on Steam! So here’s what we’ve been up to for the past month!
Battle VFX Upgrades
This month we wanted to show off some of the Battle VFX Upgrades we’ve been working on!
[table] [tr] [td] TT Battle System (2016)[/td] [td] TT Battle System (2020)[/td] [/tr] [/table] In the old battle system layout, we had the layout of the screen be top-to-bottom instead of left-to-right. We got a lot of feedback on this, and ended up changing the layout, but that meant that all of the battle animations needed to be changed with the new view. So if you played the old demo there were a lot of skills available, but if you’ve played the new one, there were not nearly as many.
We’ve been making good progress on this recently, so below are a couple animations that will be available in the next few beta updates. [table] [tr] [td] Hammer Blow Skill[/td] [td] Bullseye Skill[/td] [/tr] [/table]
Gust Attack
Cutscene Upgrades
Last month we talked about the cutscene upgrades we’ve been working on, and we promised to go into some depth on the kinda changes we were making from a coding and workflow perspective. As a quick reminder, this work was necessary to fix a number of bugs with the old system, and streamline the workflow for the rest of the cutscenes for the game.
The old cutscene system used the timeline asset provided in Gamemaker with each moment being a “node”. The idea was that other than in a few places, each cutscene would be more or less linear, so it would work well. However, we started to find a lot of issues with this. For example, you can’t reorganize moments easily, you can’t insert moments either. If we wanted to making a small change to the cutscene it was a lot of work. We also noticed that a lot of these nodes were very empty code-wise.
[table] [tr] [td] Old Layout[/td] [td] Empty Nodes[/td] [/tr] [/table]
At this point in development, content addition is what we spend the most time on, and not so much on bug fixes and engine-level issues. So maps, NPCs, quests, and cutscenes need to be easy and quick to add, edit and delete.
One of the other main issues with the old cutscene system was that the API we chose was very verbose, and wasn’t very specific on what we were trying to do during the cutscene. In the example below creating actors, changing the BGM and playing a SFX were not obvious at a glance. Now it’s much more clear about what we are doing.
We also did a lot of copying and pasting of code because typing out the full function or also including all of the options was very time consuming. When we need to write out the same sort of information over and over again, we can simplify it by using wrappers around these functions.
Thanks to these changes, the improvements with the workflow was felt immediately. It was much easier to remember what the functions were, and it took much less time to rewrite all of the cutscenes than it was to add them in the first place. Everything is also much more streamlined, and we fixed a large number of bugs. We went from something like this:
To something like this:
Demo Update
So with all that said, the game is now stable again. There’s still a number of improvements we would like to make behind the scenes to clean up and streamline a bunch of code, but for now we can call the Gamemaker 2.3 Upgrade complete!
We’ll be working on doing some regression testing to make sure everything is good, and work on releasing an update for the demo near the end of the month! Afterwards, we’ll be back to working on the Christmas beta update!
0.3.0 Beta Update Released
The Summer Beta Update is here! As mentioned previously, this update is quite large, as we’ve finished off the story in the province of Wynoa for now, and have moved on to province of Lakure!
We’ve added a large number of maps, skits, story, a new dungeon, a new party member and new art, along with more bug fixes and enhancements.
Please note that due to the current work to rebalance the economy and battles that the new province lacks items and enemies in the overworld. This will be adjusted over time, as the next beta update plans to flesh out the province more.
We recommend making a copy of your save files (the .sqlite files) in your game directory before continuing. There should be no issues, but we do upgrade the files in this release.
If you come across any issues, feel free to send us a Tweet or DM, message on the Discord Server, or shoot us an email.
This is the first beta update of 2020! As mentioned previously, this update is fairly small to both get in the habit of quarterly releases, and also to prepare for Summer’s beta release which will be quite large.
This update continues the main story, adds a new debate, skits, new art, and contains a number of bug fixes and enhancements.
We recommend making a copy of your save files (the .sqlite files) in your game directory before continuing. There should be no issues, but we do upgrade the files in this release.
If you come across any issues, feel free to reply here, send us a Tweet or DM, message on the Discord Server, or shoot us an email.
This is a small patch to address a couple of bugs reported by people. For full release notes please click here.
Demo now available!
[previewyoutube="-lnYR9du9sA;full"]
A Victorian Steampunk RPG where saving the Kingdom requires more than just brains and brawn: you also need to talk to people! Featuring a debate battle system, talk, debate, convince and negotiate with NPCs in order to save the country!
Hey everyone! Gataela's demo is now available on Steam! This demo features approx. 3-5 hours of playtime.
Please consider giving it a look, and letting us know what you think!
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