Hello everyone! Welcome to the end of Fall as Winter is sure to hit soon!

As we mentioned last time, as we move into working on things like *~*debates*~* we won’t have too much to share until we’re done sorting some things out (and even then there won’t be too many images) so these updates will be a little small!

Passive Animals

Our original goal was to add the Passive Animals to Olvia and Vescha over the next quarter – but we actually got it done ahead of schedule! Both of the new regions now have an abundance of birds, butterflies and other (non-violent) creatures waddling around. Here’s a short video showing it off!

Debate Changes

One thing we can talk about and show with the debates is a small fundamental change that people will (probably) appreciate.

First let’s throw back to the original debate battles! Way back when we planned for the debates to have three metrics to determine if you would pass or fail a debate:

• You needed to select the correct options (or at least not get a bad end)
• You needed to select the options within a set time (don’t leave someone waiting forever – that’s awkward)
• If your score was too low then you would fail (maybe you should up your charisma)

You’ll notice that last option has been removed in the most recent versions – we found it to be really unfair. If you picked all the options and got the “best end” why would you need to level up your charisma and then do it all over again? So for a long time debates looked as follows:

You needed to select the right options and also do it within a certain period of time! With this we hoped people would still feel some tension to pick options and that unfairness would go away.

However over the last while we’ve been playing other “choice selection” games – like Ace Attorney and Disco Elysium. Some of the most interesting parts of the game – and parts we really enjoyed – were when you needed to select an option but you had the opportunity to stop and ruminate over which one was the one you thought would work best. Talking it out, thinking over what each choice meant, etc. – we found that being able to do this meant engaging with the work more deeply.

The intent of the game is to engage with the world, gather facts and information about it, then apply it in debates. The debates and your performance in them depend on your understanding of the world – and being rushed to make selections can take that away.

Plus it can still feel unfair to miss the window to click a button because you were too busy thinking and then you have to do the whole thing all over again!

So with that said – we removed the timer! We had originally been thinking about removing it as an accessibility feature, but decided that removing it was better for the whole design. (Hopefully)

What’s Next?

As we’re sliding into the end of the year we’re going to be looking at two main areas: Debates and redoing older Overworld maps. The debate work is already known, so we’ll expand on what we mean by “redo”.

Quite a while ago after we finished the second province (Lakure) we noticed that the regions looked too similar. It didn’t feel like you were progressing through the world and it didn’t feel like each region had it’s own uniqueness. This is why we took a pause to develop more assets before moving onto Vescha and Olvia (to the bottom and right of the river/lakes).

Originally the plan was to redo the vegetation in these areas closer to release (similar to the water) but we’ll be moving this ahead in schedule for a few reasons. First is that we have some time now and it works well as a break from Debate work when we need it. The second is that once we add animals, treasures, and enemies it will be very difficult to redo the areas.

Therefore we’ll be starting to work on redoing the Lakure region – only available to beta testers right now. It’s the area between Wiska Forest and Vescha. Our focus is on giving it it’s own identity and once done we’ll be adding passive animals. We expect it to be completed for the March 2026 update.

We will then focus on Wynoa – the region available in the demo. Since there’s treasures, enemies and more this will be more time consuming, but will be finished before end of Summer 2026. Once done we’ll push an update to both the demo and beta branches so people can explore the “new” areas.

We’re giving ourselves a lot of extra time on these because it’s more of a background activity while we work on non-visual changes and will require some retesting of the game and the beta before we push it out to the world.

So look forward to some more visual upgrades in the next update as well as more information on the debate changes!

See you in the new year!

Goodbye Summer Hello Fall 🍂 Here’s what we’ve been up to over the past couple of months!

Levelling up the Turn-Based Battles

Our big focus for the past couple of months was to integrate the new SFX and do an audit of all the sprites and animations we’ve added for this battle system in the past year or so, and fix any issues. It was a huge undertaking – we reviewed thousands of sprites and made hundreds of adjustments – but it’s done! We did find a few “bugs” here and there – such as missing shadows, palette swaps, etc. – so there will have to be some adjustments that have to be done in the future, but most of this is solid now and won’t need to be changed again.

But now that all that work is done let’s show off some of the new enemies, skills and their corresponding animations and SFX!

Kickstarter Rewards

The in-game Kickstarter rewards are now wrapped up! We’ll keep the location of each backer’s house or NPC a secret for now, but let’s show off some of the custom houses we designed!

This backer let us do whatever we wanted – they have 8 cats and a small messy office where they tinker on things, so that’s what we ended up making!

This backer wanted a house that looks like it’s used as some kind of laboratory. It’s a mess. It’s disorganized. Books all over the place, tables full of equipment. The person who lives there is clearly not interested in maintenance, but rather science and/or technology!

This backer wanted a tinkerer’s house, with green being the dominant colour, and any accent should be bronze. The house should be a mess of broken and half finished projects.

This backer wanted a small but tidy space with the atmosphere of a pretentious snob. Something like BBC Sherlock’s flat but not a mess of stuff everywhere.

This backer wanted a small one-floor house with three rooms, two of which are locked. In the living room, there is one couch, and two armchairs. Their custom NPC would be sitting in one of the armchairs snoring with a book on his stomach.

Cave Shader Performance

We’ve recently been updating the shaders and adding performance toggles, and one of the last shaders we needed to tackle was the Cave Shader.

The struggle with this shader was that it was pretty well optimized to begin with, but we needed to move things around and split things up so that we could have the dynamic portion and a static portion for the toggle. We’ve also shifted some code around between the CPU and GPU to get some more FPS.

At the end of the day, there’s not too much difference between the two modes so we may need to revisit this in the future if there are any reports of lag or stuttering.

What’s Next?

Now that we’ve wrapped up the Turn-Based Battles (for now) we’ll be refocusing to look at the Debate Battles! Since we need to hunker down and focus on writing there won’t be too much we can show off visually for the next little bit. We’ll also be working on some small visual upgrades and additions to the maps in the meanwhile. Specifically the next couple of months will be:

• Adding Passive Animals to Olvia & Vescha provinces
• Rebalancing Debate Battles
• Rebalancing Debate Facts/Evidence/etc.

Have a good fall and we’ll see you in November!

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!