Happy Belated Halloween! We hope everyone had a spooktacular night! Here’s what we’ve been up to over the past month.

Misc Additions & Improvements

As we mentioned last month, progress was expected to be pretty slow. That being said, we got a few things done, and have a few things coming along the way such as:

• The Stealth skill animation was updated to match the new battle animations
• All of the Skill and Item icons were updated to match the new 1080p UI resolution
• We fixed a bug where when you changed the selected quest in the quest log and left the menu the mini map was still pointing to the old quest until you changed levels
• Added an area identifier to the mini map for quests that have an objective in a general area
• Working on an animation that plays when turns are skipped during battle
• Working on adding passive animals to the game, such as cats, dogs and birds
• Designed some new VFX for when walking on dirt, sand, and through shallow and deep water
• Working on juicing up the game with new transition animations for battles and menus
• Creating new emote bubbles for cutscenes, and updating the debate battle bubble to be more clear
• And More!

What’s Next?

As we outlined before, we’ll be continuing to focus on various improvements through the month of November. We hope to finish off most of the transition maps/levels between the new province and the old ones, and start planning out the last province and the battle improvements.

Happy Spooky October! Here’s what we were up to over the past month!

Province Update

Misc Additions & Improvements

This month we also worked on a variety of other small tasks such as:

• Fixing the remaining bugs from the public bug list
• Creating running animations for bear, moose, cougar and wolf enemies
• Creating a special boss skill
• Creating more emote bubbles and working on improving the debate emote bubble
• Creating various VFX
• MSQ writing improvements

What’s Next?

As we previously mentioned, progress will be slow over the next few months due to some sudden important real-life responsibilities and events. Now that the new province has been added, we’ll be working on the following for the next little bit:

• General animation improvements, such as running animations, more VFX, etc
• More MSQ writing improvements
• Updating the Skill and Item icons with a a higher resolution version
• In-between levels/maps blending and connecting the new province with the older ones
• Planning for battle improvements and the next (and last) province

Hello! Summer has gone and passed, and Autumn will soon be arriving ?

What’s Next?

Next month we’re looking to finish off the rest of the province, more writing and finish fixing all the user-reported bugs.

It’s also important to note that the next couple updates for the month of September and October will likely be short on content due to some sudden real-life responsibilities and events. We thank you for your understanding during this time.

Hello everyone! We hope you are all doing well as we enter into the last official month of Summer!!! Here’s what we’ve been up to during July.

Battle Animations

This past month we hit a big milestone for the development of the battle system. As a brief reminder for everyone, in the past the turn-based battles used to look as follows:

When we released the demo and did Steam Greenlight in 2017, we got a lot of feedback about the battle system and the general look of the game. For example, a lot of people expected the stage to have enemies on the left and your party on the right. We also didn’t have proper battle idles, death animations, and so on. A lot of people also critiqued the art style of the overworld characters and the UI.

From late 2017 to the graphical demo update in 2019 we worked on updating all of these key areas, but as you can imagine redoing a significant number of assets takes a LONG time. When the demo was released in 2019 we only had a few skills available to the user and the enemies.

This past month we hit a very big milestone, which was the completion of adding in all of the new animations for the skills! There’s still some work ahead, such as rebalancing the battle system, adding a few small visual improvements, and adding the new battle stances, but we’re quite happy with how far things have come! We’ve been working towards this goal for a while, and so it’s nice to finally be able to say that they’ve all been updated!

Levels & Music

As we mentioned last month, we’ve been working hard on updating some of the older areas to add more visual interest and diversity into the world of Gataela. William has been doing an amazing job with the soundtrack, and last month we posted a sneak preview of it:

We’re still working our way through adding the new province, and we’re still on track to finish off this work for the end of September.

What’s Next?

Next month we’re looking to complete the rest of the new weapon animations for all of the characters, continue work on updating the story, and heavily focus on creating the levels for the new province.

Happy Summer! We hope everyone is keeping cool and safe. Here’s how the development of Gataela went during June!

Levels & Music

We’ve been chugging along working on the updated levels and music for the new areas, and pictured above is a comparison of one of those! This level is located just north of Vescha and used to have some of the city spilling out into it at the bottom. With the changes we made last month to the city’s layout, this isn’t happening anymore, so there’s more room for vegetation!

It’s been great seeing a lot more visual interest being added to the world of Gataela while working on these changes, and it should help everyone traveling through the game feel like each area is more distinct. But if on the off chance the visual changes aren’t enough, we completed the soundtrack for these to help too!

Speaking of the soundtrack, William has been doing an amazing job and it’s now at 60 tracks! With such a monumental number, it’s a good time to mention that the soundtrack will also be released for sale at some point in the future! We’ll be posting a sneak preview of the new music for this area later this month, so look forward to it!

Battle Upgrades & SFXs

Another big focus for the last month was more battle animations, but in particular the SFX for them. We finished off our first round of work back in December, which updated all of the existing SFX in the game. For the last couple of months, we’ve been focusing on adding SFX for all of the battle skills! This is a huge step forward, and we’re looking forward to sharing it with everyone!

What’s Next?

As per usual, we’ll be focusing on the three key areas: levels, battle upgrades & story. We’re aiming to finish off adding the rest of the updated skill animations for battles in July, as well as finishing creating the new weapon animations for all of the characters. Another big focus in the near future will be level work, and we’re hoping to round out the end of the quarter with a whole new province added.