Hellooooo Summer! We hope everyone’s doing well and toughing out the heat alright. Here’s what we were up to over the past couple of months.

Water 🌊

The water has been upgraded!!!!!

This was our big project over the past two months as we needed to upgrade the water across all of the existing levels including making the new shader! This was a big undertaking so let’s go over some of the reasons why this needed to be done.

The first and most obvious reason will be that it was for appearance and it’s true – that was a big motivator! Take a look at how the overworld has developed over the years.

In 2016 we were still using Cocos2dx as the game engine and although it was not the best implementation for the water – the water had a smooth gradient, some underwater transparency, some noise coloration and the colors were more vibrant. Part of the reason why this was possible was because we weren’t using shaders – they were PNGs. (If you have old demos you might be able to see our past sins.)

When we moved to Gamemaker as the engine in 2021 we made a quick water shader to get most of the previous strategy across but it was by no means great. We didn’t know how to make a very performant shader so we used large images in the shader for the “blurs” and just sort of got the idea across. That’s why the colors are pretty close but not as great – and large areas of water are all one tone. We also lost being able to see things underwater.

Now that brings us to a few months ago – it was finally time to implement a proper shader! We got runtime configurable blurs, “edge detection”, underwater transparency, better colors, noise coloration AND we even added some nice water movement and reflections. Though most importantly – we added a performance option.

And performance was the second big motivator for this work!

The last couple of updates we’ve been slowly adding some more user settings for performance, such as for the tall grass. As we’re working our way through some performance audits one thing we noticed was that the water shader we had since 2021 was just… bad. Did it’s job alright – but it was constantly recreating itself when it didn’t need to. If you’re on a lower end PC or with an integrated graphics card you might’ve noticed some lag here and there.

One of the things we focused on with adding this option was that all the new fun features with the water shader were mostly carried over between modes – and that you could easily toggle at runtime. The only real change feature-wise would be for runtime animations, such as reflections and water animation.

Overall we’re very happy with how it turned out! There may need to be some tweaking here and there but that can come in the future. And now some zoomed-in comparison images. Enjoy!

House Improvements

Now if you watched the videos there you may have noticed another little performance option called Dynamic House Shadows.

We had a bug report from a very long time ago about how when the player entered interiors performance would dramatically drop. At the time we assumed it was due to the fact they were running Gataela through an emulator on an older Mac but when we took a look it turns out the House Shader might not be good either.

Similar to the water shader – we split up the shader into dynamic and static, and turned the dynamic portion into a performance option. The shadows add a little more oomf to the levels, but it still looks pretty good without it!

Other Misc Things

We also completed a few other things:

• More Kickstarter Rewards added
• TTBattle SFX
• More sprites!

We’ll go over some of this stuff next time!

What’s Next?

Our main focus for the next couple of months will be mixed between the TTBattle work, some general overworld improvements, and wrapping various things up. This more specifically means:

• Adding all the new TTBattle SFX
• Reviewing the TTBattle visual/audio expansion & fix bugs
• Adding Passive Animals to Olvia & Vescha provinces
• Remaining Kickstarter rewards
• Bug fixes & performance fixes

Have a good Summer and we’ll see you all in September!

We hope everyone is enjoying spring! Here’s what we’ve been up to over the past two months.

Ziacia

We finished adding all of the NPCs to Ziacia! Not only does this complete the city itself, but it also wraps up adding NPCs to all of the cities, towns, and other structures around the game! We will likely have more NPCs to add as we add side quests and other fun goodies, but for now it’s done! Here’s a few of them:

Kershuffle

As a quick recap – we made a mini-game for Gataela during Pirate Jam 16 named Kershuffle! In April Gamemaker posted a feature of the games made during Pirate Jam and we were included! We added some words about the development so please check it out!

Other Misc Things

We don’t really have anything visual to show yet but some other work done include:

• Began creating and adding SFX for the remaining TTBattle Skills
• Finished designing all of the in-game Kickstarter backer custom NPCs
• Created some cutscene-specific sprites
• Working on creating custom boss sprites
• Began working on Kershuffle sprites to port into Gataela

What’s Next?

We’ll be a bit all over the place for the next few months as we try to get a variety of things complete. Roughly speaking we’ll be focusing on:

• Finish adding all Kickstarter custom rewards
• Continue & hopefully finish SFX for TTBattle Skills
• Creating Kershuffle sprites for Gataela
• Redoing the water shader and updating all of the maps with water on it
• Other general polish & visual improvements

Have a great spring and start to summer! See you in July!

Happy March! Before the time turns back let’s go over what we did last month!

Myranova

We wrapped up adding NPCs to Myranova – one of the last huge cities. Here’s a few of the NPCs and areas.

Monthly BiMonthly Updates?

Now if you’ve been reading these for a while you have noticed that updates are getting shorter and shorter- and this is a good thing. Honestly.

We’re reaching the point in development where a lot of stuff is just… gluing everything together. There’s not a whole lot visually going on, and on the other side of the spectrum it’s stuff like “wrote a debate which we cannot share because spoilers”.

So what does that mean for the updates? Well… we’ve decided to have less of them.

These updates are a way for us to communicate the status of development, but we also want them to be meaningful and not just a report of things we’ve done. However at the same time we want to share the things we’re doing and why some decisions are made and also to sort of be like “hey guys yes development is still ongoing”. So for now we think the best thing to do is to move to BiMonthly Updates.

In terms of months and updates this means:

• May: Update
• July: Update
• September: Update
• etc.

What’s Next?

March’s main focus will be to finish adding Ziacia’s NPCs. This will be a big task since the city is by far the largest. We’re also going to be starting on additional SFX and VFX work and hopefully working towards wrapping up the turn-based battle upgrades!

As we move into April we hope to wrap up the remaining custom in-game Kickstarter backer rewards, and begin work on updating the water shader to make it look closer to how it was before.

As for other things – we’ll be working on rebalancing in the background. We’ve got a lot of battle, economy and debates to work on.

We hope everyone stays healthy as we move into the final months of winter!

Wow January just flew right on by! Let’s go over what we were up to and where we’re going!

Minigame Prototype

This past month we focused on adding NPCs and animals to Myranova, and although we aren’t just ready to show that off just yet – in the process of that work we talked about adding a minigame.

See Myranova is a big tourist area and in big tourist areas there’s always people looking to scam play some games with visitors. One thing we wanted to add was little carnival games you could play to get scammed make some money. Originally we wanted to add a custom minigame, but that requires a lot of work and- oh. It seems a game jam is right around the corner. Well let’s see what the theme is maybe it’ll give us ideas- Oh. Well. We have a minigame now.

Oops.

We’ll be working on polishing up the mechanics for the game over the next year here and there, but we welcome everyone to try it out and provide feedback. We’ve also been asked before what our Game Design Documents for Gataela look like. Great news! This one has one. And for even more bonus behind the scenes – we streamed about half the development! (VODs will be uploaded during this week)

So enjoy playing! We’ll be adding this to the game closer to completion as it’s technically scope creep. At least it’s in the same engine so porting should be straight forward.

Kickstarter Rewards

We’ve been talking about it for a while and it’s finally here – the shop is now live with leftover Kickstarter Rewards! We’ll be keeping the shop up until April or so after which we will temporarily close it until the Fall. We’ll remind you all before the closure but keep the dates in mind in case there’s something you’re interested in!

What’s Next?

Next month is some work, some prep and some upgrades. We’ll be:

• Finishing Myranova NPCs
• Starting on Ziacia NPCs
• Upgrading Gamemaker Version
• Preparing for additional SFX and VFX work

Happy New Year! We hope everyone had a good holiday season! Let’s talk about what we were up to in December, go over 2024 and talk about our plans for 2025!

December 2024

December was a very busy month! To give a brief idea, we added a good chunk of Kickstarter backer rewards, added a lot of NPCs and passive animals, and fixed a bug here and there. Here’s some of the NPCs we added:

2024 in Review

Well, this year was quite a strange one. If you remember the plan – we were going to focus on adding content and putting everything together and- to some degree- we did succeed! BUT we were heavily impacted by layoffs. Other than just personally being out of a job – we could not pay other members of the team for remaining work – putting a standstill on certain parts of the project (ex. SFX). Another impact was that we could not spend more than a set number of hours per week on the project or we might lose employment insurance. So the project itself was also pretty heavily affected. That being said, we were able to get a few things done so let’s take a quick look!

We finished:

• Adding all of the MSQ
• Adding all of the city interiors
• Adding puzzles & mechanics for a certain dungeon
• Creating all of the new TTBattle VFX and then adding them to the game

We also:

• Made a number of performance improvements and bug fixes
• Released a couple demo updates in February, August and November
• Added some SFX for some Battle VFX
• Added passive animals & behaviour
• Added NPCs and Passive Animals to many of the cities
• You can pet the animals
• Implemented battle images change depending on what weapon you’re holding
• Added most Kickstarter rewards

2025 Plans

2025 is going to be our year! Maybe. Probably. Hopefully. And why? That’s right! We’re employed!

Not to get too much into the details, but the job search this time around was by far the worst experience. To everyone else still busy looking we wish you the best.

As for what this means for the project, to put it broadly, we’ll be unchained from money and time restrictions and be able to get back into it. It should be expected though that this first quarter is going to be very, very rough as we get back into the swing of things. That being said, because of 2024 we want to put a lot of effort into 2025. This means:

• Finish adding all the Kickstarter rewards
• Finish adding NPCs, animals, treasure, etc. to the maps
• Finish the TTBattle SFXs
• Rebalancing Debate battles & related facts/evidence/side quests etc.
• Add debate battles & side quests
• Map visual upgrades (ex. the water shader)
• Performance and bug fixes as needed
• Demo updates as needed

We will also be launching the shop with the old Kickstarter physical rewards mid-late January (keep an eye out).

Thank you for all the support and we wish you all a great start to the new year!