Author: gataela_mftu8r

Demo Update Release Notes

November 1st 2019 | Release

It’s here! It’s out! The graphical overhaul demo is complete!

Estimated Play Time: 3-5 hours

Download: Itch.io or Gamejolt or SteamN

Demo Summary

As I’m sure everyone following around is aware, we’ve been working hard on this demo for the past 1.5 – 2 years. When we released the previous demo we got A LOT of feedback from people. Most of the feedback focused on the art and how the game played.

The art feedback focused on the overworld sprites and how the battles played. The low frame count, and the design of the sprites were not appealing. For the battles, a lot of people were not fans of the vertical battle style, and preferred to have something more classically horizontal.

The game feedback was less on the story or characters but on the game engine itself. People found the collisions too floaty and bouncy, it was easy to clip through them if you tried, some people ran into crashes that was hard to reproduce, and others had some issues with how the levels were designed.

We took all of this feedback and decided to invest in getting this stuff right, but it was no easy feat. It required essentially redoing the whole game. So, yes, this last 1.5 years or so have been spent redoing the game.

We redid all of the overworld sprites, the title screen, added new battle animations, new UI, new game engine, more music, and new story.

We hope everyone enjoys the changes that we’ve made!

Release Notes

Due to the sheer number of changes (over 1000) the following release notes will be light on details, but will highlight some of the more important differences between this demo and the previous version. Note that major changes will be bolded.

Added

  • Added running and a run button
  • Added new Title Screen Illustration
  • Added new character specific themes and battle specific themes
  • Added a popup when you enter into a named area
  • Added a popup when you gain a new quest
  • Added a Statement Screen, which displays all gained testimonies, facts and evidence gathered
  • Added a new boss battle
  • Added sunset and nighttime shaders for select areas
  • Added a map screen showing the whole map of Gataela
  • Added new battle animation states for Idle, Attack, Damage, Death and Revive
  • Added a victory screen when winning battles
  • Added new options to the debate battles
  • Added a grass effect to look like objects are walking through tall grass
  • Added mountain TTBattle background
  • Added screen transition effects for battles
  • Added all of the NPC dialogue to the translation files
  • Added new endings for some of the debate battles
  • Added an indicator in the main menu to remind that some characters may have status points to be spent

Removed

  • Removed charisma stat and charisma bar from debate battles
  • Temporarily removed most crafted items from being usable in battle
  • Temporarily removed some enemy types from the maps
  • Removed one of the NPCs that provides bread during the second quest
  • Removed some homes and NPCs from the overworld

Other

  • Changed game engines from Cocos2dx to Gamemaker Studio 2
  • Redid the UI
  • Redid the opening sequence
  • Redid the portraits for all of the skits and debate battles
  • Redid all of the overworld human and animal sprites
  • Frame count for animations changed from 4 to at least 8
  • Redid all of the battle animations for enemies and party members and skills
  • Battles changed from vertical layout to horizontal layout
  • Rewrote the Klatchez main story quest
  • Rewrote almost all of the debate battles
  • Adjusted all of the skits and cutscene dialogue
  • Reset the version numbering to 0.1.0
  • Debate facts have been changed from being single statements gathered from one NPC to being divided into testimonies (gathered from many NPCs), facts (gathered from one NPC) and evidence (gathered from interacting with objects).
  • Changed being able to escape from encounters with patrol events to make Wiska Forest more palatable. May be changed to an option to toggle in the future.
  • Reduced game download size
  • The game should now run much smoother on lower-end devices and take up less RAM
  • Adjusted percentages of battle items. To be adjusted as more feedback given.
  • Simplified finding the NPCs needed to get bread from during the second quest
  • Removed most of the inaccessible houses from Vuni.
  • Changed Vuni’s layout for the market zone. This should make exiting the city easier.
  • Changed Pharyon’s layout
  • Changed Klatchez’s layout
  • Changed Vischet’s layout
  • Adjusted the western mountains layout
  • Adjusted some home designs in Wynoa

October 2019 Progress Update

October 1st 2019 | Progress Update

Hey everyone! Hope everyone’s been doing well. This post this month is super short as there’s only 1 thing on the agenda: The Demo Update!

Demo Update!

As we’ve been saying for months now, the demo update is on the way. We will have more details on the exact date sometime this month, but we’re happy to say that the demo is almost complete! Somewhere between 99% and 100% to be correct.

We had wanted to stream most of the remaining progress on Twitch last month, but due to technical difficulties it wasn’t possible. That being said, we did squash over 50 bugs! Our recent play tests have also produced very few critical bugs so the demo is all-in-all in a good place.

Speaking of bugs, we counted up just how much work has gone into this demo update. As of writing, we’ve made 887 changes! This includes either new features or bugs fixes and so on. Hopefully that number doesn’t climb too much higher…. but it’s quite a feat! This past year and a bit has been very very busy!

So once again, apologies for the delay. We hope it’ll be in your hands soon enough!

Have a spoopy October~

September 2019 Progress Update

September 3rd 2019 | Progress Update

Hey everyone! We hope your summer was sunny and cool! Here’s what we’ve been up to this past month!

127 Bugs in the Code

A bug! Zack, cover your eyes!

We’ve been working on hardening and stabilizing the demo. All of the content is in there now, but there’s a large number of bugs that need to be stomped out.

Unfortunately this isn’t the most glamorous period of time for any piece of software, but we will likely be streaming most of this process on Twitch this month if you would like to see our slow descent into bug-fix madness.

Demo Update

So with all that being said, how is the demo going?

Although we wanted to target a release for end of August/early September, it seems like it’ll be around early October at the soonest. We want to make sure this update is solid, so our apologies for the delay.

August 2019 Progress Update

August 2nd 2019 | Progress Update

Hello everyone! Here’s what we’ve been up to the past month!

99 Bugs in the Code

I’m sure everyone is aware of the old saying:

99 bugs in the code. 99 bugs in the code. Take one down, patch it around, 127 bugs in the code.

Which was more-or-less the status of the game this month. During the past month we held a play-testing stream playing through the current version of the demo, giving commentary, and finding 62 bugs. Which naturally swelled to 64+ as we proceeded to fix them all in the next coming days.

The good news? It’s 62+ bugs players didn’t find. The bad news? 62+ bugs.

In any case, we’re working on stabilizing the demo, finding weird edge cases, and making sure the game plays well. We do still get the occasional bug report from the previous demo, so we’re hoping to get everything more solid!

Ps. That play-through will be uploaded to youtube in the near-ish future.

Demo Update

So how is the current demo going? We’re still on schedule! We’re still targeting end of August/early-September!

We’re working on making a new trailer now, and gathering loads of screenshots. The downside is that we don’t have too many things to post at the moment, as we don’t want to spoil the changes we’ve made to the story. (Yes, we know we did a play test session where we spoiled everything but shhh)

So in the meantime we won’t have too much to show, but if you do want to see our slow decent into testing/bug madness Twitch is the place to go. For everyone else, we hope you’re excited to play the new demo soon!

July 2019 Progress Update

July 2nd 2019 | Progress Update

Hey everyone! Happy July! Here’s what we’ve been up to the past month!

Map Updates

This past month we added one of the more highly requested features from our backlog: The World Map!

This world map’s design is probably not surprising to people who’ve been following along for a while, but it is certainly a new addition to the game that we’ve been wanting to put in for ages.

This world map will show you all the major locations in the game, your rough position in the world, and where your next goal is, along with various warp point locations.

We hope everyone enjoys it, and it helps them navigate the world better!

Polish?

We’ve also been doing polish passes and slowly improving the quality of everything. For example, here is what the Statement Screen looked like:

And now it looks like:

There’s a bunch of other small things like that, but generally speaking we are slowly approaching:

THE DEMO

We can say for certain it will not be out this month. We have a good number of tasks to complete this month, so at the moment we’re targeting either late August or very early September.

What’s Next?

We’ll be continuing to finish off the demo. If you’re interested in checking in on how it’s going, or just want to hang out, we’ve been streaming a good portion of the development on Twitch as of late. We’re usually streaming about 3-5 times a week for 2+ hours at a time around 7pm-10pm EST.