Happy August! We hope everyone is continuing to stay happy and healthy. Here’s what we were up to during July!

The Last Province Update

Yes you’ve read the title right. We’re done! Well kinda. There’s a few spoiler areas that need to be sorted out still, but we can’t show that, right? So that means today we’ll be showing off the “mostly final” overworld.

It’s been a lot of hard work over the past few months! We’d also like to thank everyone who came and hung out during streams while we worked on this. We’ve come a long way!

QOL Improvements

One focus for us in the last month was adding some QOL improvements. For example, we added in Skit Skipping! We also adjusted the inventory screen so that character portraits will always be shown, and adjusted the inventory battle items to auto assign when new items are gained.

The auto assign is particularly important since at the beginning of the game we got feedback that lots of people tend to not realize they need to assign the items they gain. This should help out a lot on this front – and as an added bonus it gives parity with the battle skills (since those auto assign).

Other than that we’ve also been doing some general performance improvements! For example we doubled the performance inside buildings!

Debate Improvements

As part of our effort to improve the debates, the first place we looked for improvements was in our own workflow. After all, the faster and easier we can add and edit the debates, the quicker we can get them done!

Thus far we have been designing the debates in Twine. Twine was a great choice when we started because of the node editor and the fact that we could preview the debate flow. BUT we ran into a bunch of road blocks and sticky points:

• We could not export Twine files to Gamemaker
• We had to recreate the whole debate and all of the nodes and connections through code manually
• Debates started to have over 50 nodes at the START of the game – not scalable
• Ctrl-S does not save in Twine. We lost entire debates we had to rewrite if it crashed.

So we looked around a while ago and found Yarn/YarnSpinner. It seemed like a good solution since all of our pain points would be solved! So we implemented Chatterbox this month and it’s been a big improvement. A lot of the debate logic has been significantly simplified and it’s much faster for us to create new debates – after all we have to convert all the old ones over!

We’re hoping to finish off this round of improvements this month so that creating new debates will go more smoothly.

What’s Next?

Our major goals for the next little while will be focused more on planning and general improvements. We will be:

• Starting on expanding the TTBattle and creating new graphics
• Finishing the Debate Technical Improvements
• Designing some end of game dungeons & puzzles
• Adding Overworld VFX
• Gamepad support

Happy July! We’re entering into the swing of summer, which means we’re leaving the first half of the year behind. Let’s take a look at what we’ve gotten done over the past month and so far this year!

Province Update

One of our biggest focuses for the last half of the year was completing the final province/biome. In particular, the last two months we heavily focused on the capital – Ziacia. This month, we completed it.

Now doesn’t that look great? The province has also come along, and is looking quite good!

We’ve got just a handful of maps/levels left to knock out of the park! Transition maps along the upper left and right, and a little bit of the core province to the bottom.

Naturally we fell a little behind from the storm last month (which we are still dealing with), but we’re hoping to finish most of this during July. The areas that won’t be completed (mostly to the right) have some gameplay mechanics we need to sort out first so we don’t need to redo them later. No need to make them pretty if we need to move all the roads around for plot reasons.

However, all in all, this goal is pretty much completed, which means the overworld of Gataela is just about done! Wow.

Rewrite & Skits

A big big BIG thing we have also been working on over the past WHILE has been the end of game rewrite & their related skits. As a reminder, Gataela has been in active development for just over 10 years now. The development of the game also started plot-first. We didn’t start with visuals, programming or level design – just the narrative and the game script. As you can imagine, it’s the oldest part of the game and hasn’t aged as well as we would’ve liked.

The purpose of the end of game rewrite was to refresh everything, make gameplay adjustments, fix some logical inconsistencies among other things. We scrapped a lot of old dialogue, we rewrote entire sections, we moved the locations of events and all sorts of things.

It’s nice to now have this done although we will likely revisit over the next while and make small tweaks here and there as needed.

Passive Animals, SFXs, Portraits and More

Now as for all the other stuff the team has been working on – and there’s a lot. Here’s a quick round up of some of the other accomplishments:

• Passive Animals – We’ve got cows, we’ve got pigs, we’ve got chickens, we’ve got sheep. We’ve got horses, dogs, cats, birds, bugs, squirrels, mice, crabs and even a capybara. Owen has done an amazing job getting all these different animals done and we’re looking forward to adding them to the game and getting the worlds to feel more alive.
• Emote Bubbles, VFX and UI Animations – We’ve also been expanding the number of emote bubbles to express more in cutscenes. On top of that, we have more overworld VFX and even some UI animation designs to help everything feel more polished. Once again, thanks to Owen’s hard work. We’re looking forward to showcasing a lot of these things as we move into the second half of the year.
• SFXs – We highlighted this earlier in the year, but thanks to Chris’ amazing work, all of the SFXs have been updated for the new battle animations!
• Debate Portraits & Designs – We also can’t forget the great work Cie has been doing to finish up the remaining debate portraits and character designs.

Gataela’s Level Design

In case you missed it, we did a presentation about Gataela’s Level Design for Dirty Rectangles. The VOD is available here, and if you are just interested in the presentation slides they are available here. Thanks for everyone who came out to listen to us talk about our recent work!

What’s Next?

Now that a lot of our major projects for the first half of the year are complete – just what are our plans for the second half? Well – it’s something like this:

July will focus on finishing up about half of the remaining provincial maps that have not been updated. These are mainly the transitions to the left, and some of the central maps. We’re also planning to add some of the VFX work to the world, work on some usability features (ex. skipping skits) and a couple small bug fixes.

Moving out of July and into the second half of the year our goals are the following:

• Add game controller support
• Update UI to work with gamepad
• Add some UI animations and polish
• Features – Skip Skits & Cutscenes
• VFX & visual improvements
• Debate battle rewrites & improvements
• TTBattle improvements, rebalancing and expansion
• Add cutscenes & skits
• Complete the rest of the province

That’s a lot coming up and we’re hoping to slowly complete them over the next little while. In the meantime, we hope everyone has a relaxing summer and we’ll see you next month!

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!