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!

Happy March! We hope everyone was well during February. That month always seems to go by so quickly. Here’s what the team was up to!

Olvia

This month our key focus was to get the city of Olvia complete. Olvia is the major city of the last zone (excluding the capital) and was intended to be the most Steampunk feeling city. Pictured above, is the city stitched together across two separate maps.

Olvia is located snug into the base of the Saren-Croix Mountain range, and is known far and wide as a city of opportunities. In the past it was primarily a mining town that grew in size, but with the advent of steam technology it was the first city to fully convert to the new power source. Many people come to the city either to strike riches in the mines, or to try their luck with steam technology.

Debate Portraits

It’s been a while since our last update on the Debate Battles, but we are continuing to make progress on all of the major character debates by focusing on adjusting expressions and updating older placeholder assets. For example, pictured above we have Wislaw, the Lord of Wynoa, and Brianne, the Lord of Vescha giving us their best smiles~

What’s Next

Now that Olvia is complete, we will begin working on the neighboring areas as we fill out the mountain range. We will also be continuing to work on SFX, writing and other items. In the meanwhile, earlier in January we mentioned that we were considering releasing a demo update with all of the bug fixes we’ve accomplished in the past year. This update will be coming out sometime in the next week!

We hope everyone continues to stay safe and keep well, and please look forward to the update~

We hope everyone had a good start to the new year! Here’s what we’ve been up to during January!

The Last Province

This month we started working on the last province – a mountainous region surrounded by the Saren-Croix Mountains! This area is the southern-most of Gataela, and is home to both the capital Ziacia, and the mining and research city Olvia! A lot of our work this past month was setting up and deciding on the design for the region. We also began designing Olvia, which is intended to be our most Steampunk looking city. We hope to finish this off this month, so look forward to more details then!

More Friends

We’ve been continuing to work on adding more friends and animals into the game. Pictured above are just some of the different variations of birds we will be adding. Can you guess what each type is?

What’s Next

We will continue to focus on levels and story! Our main goal for the next month will be to complete Olvia, and begin working on filling in the surrounding regions.

Happy New Year! We hope everyone had a relaxing holiday season. Here’s what we’ve been up to in December, what we accomplished over the year, and some goals for 2022!

December 2021

December was a little bit of a slow month, as we took some time to relax and visit family and friends. That being said, we did get a few things done, such as:

• New enemy animations
• Finishing some palette swaps for cats/dogs/birds
• Finished updating older maps with the new biome
• Fixed all user reported bugs (and a few others)
• TTBattle infrastructure upgrades & planning
• More cutscene writing

2021 Review

The past year was hectic and we accomplished a lot more than we expected. The biggest example of this is what happened with the in-game world map. Just to show off how much has changed, take a look at the images below!

As you can see, we increased the game world size by at least 25%, leaving only the bottom section left to go. We also:

• Released a Beta Update
• Fulfilled some Backer Rewards
• Added Font Accessibility Options
• Upgraded and added all the Battle animations and SFXs
• A variety of TTBattle Upgrades such as:
  • Group Skills
  • Respawn Timers
  • Battle Class Visuals for Player Characters
  • Reimplemented Status Effects with new animations
  • Added differing chances for group-wide status effect skills
  • Skipping turns now has an animation
• We added a bug and feature report form
• We released a new trailer
• The new overworld tiles for the new biomes were completed
• As seen above, we completed a new biome/province
• We worked on new VFX for the overworld, such as flag animations
• New enemies, emote bubbles and running animations!
• Skill and Item icons were updated with a 1080p version
• We worked on creating passive animals, such as cats, dogs, birds, frogs and others
• We worked on UI animations and improvements
• Almost finished the soundtrack
• And we’ve been streaming regularly on Twitch!

2022 Plans

So what do we have planned for 2022? Well, it’s a little bit more of the same, but we want to focus on finishing up a lot of areas that are currently in progress, such as:

• Finish TTBattle planning, upgrades, and implementation
• Finish adding new enemies and skills, including relevant SFX
• Finish adding all of the overworld maps to Gataela (that bottom section in the above images)
• Shader improvements, such as the house shader for performance, or the water shader for visuals
• Finish end of game rewrite
• Add all of the cutscenes and skits for the end of the game
• Rewriting debates
• Writing and adding side quests

We are also considering releasing a demo update with all of the bug fixes, and maybe a TTBattle specific demo to get feedback on how the system plays at some point during the year.

In the meantime, we hope you all continue to stay safe!

Welcome to the snowy season. We hope everyone enjoyed the last little bits of fall! Here’s a brief update on everything the team was up to during November!

Finishing the Biome

Making Friends

One area we’ve really been focusing on recently has been creating more passive animals. We talked about it briefly last month, but it’s things like cats, dogs, bugs, birds, frogs and other animals that exist to give the world more life. One thing we really noticed when traveling throughout the world is that other than NPCs and enemies (and treasure) there wasn’t too much else. These little things can add a lot of extra movement so we hope it will help.

Twitch

We’ve begun to do regular weekly Twitch streams every Tuesday from 8-10pm EST. If you’re interested in watching, follow on Twitch or keep an eye on Twitter for when we go live. And if you miss it a VOD is available on Twitch for the next little bit.

What’s Next?

Our big plan over the next few months will be to:

• Continue writing and reworking the end of the game
• Developing the last biome
• Upgrading the turn-based battle system

The general theme of this next work is to finish “preparing for content”. In other words, although the story might be written, it hasn’t been implemented in the game just yet. We need all of the levels to exist in order to do that. At the same time we’ll be upgrading the turn-based battle system and fleshing it out more. After that’s gotten it’s turn, we’ll look at the debate battle system – which is heavily dependent on the story.

Our next update will focus more on a year in review and what our plans are for the coming year, so in the meantime we hope everyone stays safe during the holiday season!