Gosh is it already June? We’re just about halfway through the year, so here’s what we were up to during May!

A Storm to Remember

Before we get into the update we wanted to talk briefly about a recent weather event. On May 21st, Ottawa was hit hard with a storm that knocked out power for most of the city for over 3 days. Some people didn’t have power return for 10 days and some still don’t. The storm? It lasted 15 minutes.

There’s a whole whack of damage done ranging from felled power lines to toppled trees to roof damage. Everyone on the team is safe and sound, although some were affected. As a result this update will be smaller than usual and you can expect the next one as well as we deal with the aftermath.

Province Update

As we mentioned last month, our big focus was on the capital city, Ziacia. Ziacia is modeled off of a star fort city, with the palace located to the north on an island accessible by bridge. Our plans were interrupted due to the storm, but we were able to complete the main buildings of the city.

We also ended up expanding the city slightly, by replacing the existing moat with raised cliffs to give an impression of a wall or hill, and expanded the moat outwards in all directions. You can also see we started on plans to replace the south entrance to the city with an extra island.

So now that the inner city is complete, our big goal for June is to finish off the surrounding areas. Look forward to more details on the capital and it’s design next month!

What’s Next?

Now that we’re approaching the middle of the year, we’ll be starting to wrap up the big projects we’ve been working on thus far. The cities will be complete! The passive animals will have their animations! The writing will be done! And we’ll be starting on new things! Not only that, but we will be doing a presentation on Level Design in Gataela for Dirty Rectangles this month. If that sounds of interest, keep an eye on our Twitter for more information and we’ll see you next month!

Spring has sprung and May has arrived! Here’s our progress over the last month~

Province Update

Our major focus right now has been on completing the last province of the game. Last month we showed you how the bottom left of the province was developing, and this month you can see that we’ve just about completed it!

Our main focus in April was to finish off those two towns and most of their surrounding areas. With their completion, we’ve officially finished all of the small towns!

The small areas to the north near the river will be handled when we start dealing with the transition maps between provinces. As for the area to the bottom right, we’ll start working on it when we get to the center of the province.

Our next focus is to finish our last city – the capital Ziacia! Cities take a lot of work to get done, as you can see below with our progress on Olvia. Hopefully it’ll be done and dusted as we move into June!

What’s Next?

As we’ve mentioned, our two major focuses right now is the province and writing the end of the game. As you would expect – there’s not a whole lot we can say about that! We’ll be continuing on that this month, as well as working on more passive animals.

Happy April Fools Day! Here’s what the team was up to during March!

Demo Update

First and foremost, if you happened to miss it, we had a demo update (and a patch) that went live during the start of the month! This update comes with a Gamemaker Engine upgrade, various bug fixes and some tweaks here and there. It is available to download on Itch, Gamejolt and Steam.

Province Update

We’ve been continuing to work on the last province. Now that Olvia is complete we’ve been slowly working our way out into the surrounding areas. Our main theme for this province is “grey and rocky”, so for example areas closer to the mountains in the south will have more grey rock showing and less vegetation, while areas north towards Wiska Forest will be more green and lively. We’ve also thrown in a colorful wildflower field and a small pond ✨

Most of this work is done weekly on our Twitch channel, so feel free to stop by and get a behind the scenes preview.

And speaking of the new province, we released a short video showing off the new overworld theme!

SFX Update

We’re happy to announce that all of the previous SFXs have been updated! These SFXs have been updated to match the new battle animations, and we’ve added a few new special ones for the new provincial designs.

What’s Next?

We are continuing to work our way through creating the last province, as well as writing updates, new passive animals and so on. We’re hoping to finish off writing some difficult scenes at the end of the game in the next few months, and begin working on improving both the turn-based and debate battles!