Happy March Everyone! This past month was shorter than normal, but oddly enough very, very productive. We’re moving along very well with the new graphics update and adding a bunch of polish to the game. One such example is the use of day-of-time shaders, like shown above, and also things like battle animations/transitions, more environmental/background effects during cutscenes and just general QoL improvements.

New Website

One of the big things we did this past month was migrate to a new site! This has been something on our todo list for a while and was one of our 2019 goals! We hope you like it, but also if you come across any problems please let us know!

One of the reasons for the new site is to post longer-form blog posts about some of the tech behind the game, maybe some creative decisions, and so on. For the moment we’ve done a quick poll with some potential ideas, so look forward to these in the next coming months!

What’s Next?

For the most part, we’re still spinning our wheels on the demo update, and will continue to do so for the next little while. This is our next big goal for the year and we are steadily approaching it thanks to the help of a couple of testers who’ve allowed us to stabilize everything much faster than expected! We’ll likely have more before and afters to show of the old demo and the new one in the next little while. In the meantime, I hope what everyone has seen so far has gotten them excited about what’s to come!

Completed:

• Final Overworld Maps – 14.2% in progress; 71.7% complete
• Worked on adding new music
• Worked on updating and adding new animations
• Worked on a new website
• Lots of bug fixes
  
• Added some quality of life fixes to the UI to improve UX
• Added a new battle results screen
• Updated some old dialogue
• Added more failure/pass options for the port debate
• Rearranged early-on debate facts
• Revealed some more characters

Coming up next:

• Bug fixes
• Graphical Update

This past month was mostly focused on bug fixes.

Demo Testing

We’ve started to enter into testing for the new demo, which means that we’ve been encountering a range of issues from crashes to little quality of life improvements.

Some of the quality of life improvements have been things like:

• Don’t allow the user to click on a button if they can’t do anything
• Play music/adjust the in game volume in real time while adjusting the settings
• Adding invisible walls to the tutorial area
• Clickable UI elements get highlighted

And so on.

As we prep for the demo we will be mainly focused on bug fixes and these QoL improvements. 

See ya next month!

Completed:

• Final Overworld Maps – 14.2% in progress; 71.7% complete
• Worked on adding new music
• Worked on updating the UI
• Worked on updating and adding new animations
• Worked on updating older maps
• Worked on a new website
  
• Optimized the new shaders
• Added Battle Screen Transitions
  
• Revealed more new characters
  
• Added a file version number to save files 
• Added location popup information to some maps
• Added shadows to Wynoa houses in the overworld
• Add a dev mode that will identify objects which will cause the player to be stuck into on map load/spawn (i.e. this shouldn’t happen anymore)
  
• Changed the run button to be a toggle between running/walking for hand comfort
• Changed Pharyon and Klatchez town layouts completely
  
• Modified some of the opening sequence changes back to the original
  
• Set the max number of file saves for the game to 10
  
• Worked on updating more dialogue for older cutscenes
  
• Fixed a bug where the new opening cutscene would lag on computers with 8GB of RAM or less
• Fixed a bug where loaded skills would be drawn off screen except in certain situations where they were on screen
• Fixed a bug where switching between the main menu and the overworld would have roofs, water, grass effects, house shading and other effects disappear
• Fixed a problem where some cutscenes would freeze
• Fixed a shader issue which caused more complicated screen transitions to draw incorrectly

Coming up next:

• Bug fixes
  
• Graphical Update

This past month focused on optimization, bug fixes, updating older maps, new music, new art, and some much needed polish.

Also this update is unfortunately very late due to a lack of internet.

2018 in Review

Now that we’re firmly in 2019 land, I wanted to talk a bit about 2018 and how much we actually got done!

I know for a lot of people who have been following the development for a long time that it doesn’t feel like much has happened the last couple of years. As you may or may not be aware, due to family situations I had to stop all work in 2017 shortly after the Steam greenlight.

When I started up work again in 2018, I spent a lot of time thinking about the feedback from everyone from the demo, how to make the game better, and how to finish it faster. Most of this year was putting everyone’s feedback into the game.

So 2018 was a really big transitional period. I’ve been working a full-time job since that time in 2017, so all my work on Gataela has been part-time since then, not to mention most of the Gataela team work part-time to begin with.

And with all that going on, here’s how 2018 went for the game:

• 468 commits; 284,735 additions; 260,291 deletions; 1 programmer
  
• 328 programming JIRAs completed
  
• Finished all of the skit/debate images, including updating older ones
  
• Changed all of the animations to be 8-frame+ instead of 4-frame
• Changed the turn-based battles to be from the side view instead of top-down
• New pixel art style for the characters!
  
• Added new character battle animations
  
• Re-did over half of the battle skill animations, and all of the character battle animations
• Re-did all of the overworld sprites
  
• Re-did all of the UI (25+ screens)
• Added a new screen for summarizing known debate facts
  
• Went to two conventions (Anime North, Otakuthon) and showed off a sneak preview of the new demo
• Added run animations + the highly requested run button
• Doubled Gataela’s soundtrack (~70 minutes long now)
• Added a screenshot function to the game
• Added a unit test framework (i.e. more future stability)
  
• Added more polish to debate battles: a countdown sfx, debate images with more expressions, the character profiles will animate more based on what was said
• Updated Vuni’s layout to make it easier to get around
• Redid Pharyon and Klatchez, and other in between maps
• Created a new opening sequence, with new animations and music
  
• Moved beta testing to Steam
• Optimized the heck out of the game, including reducing textures, switching to using shaders, optimizing shaders, etc.
• Saving is now instant (1 second or less)
• Map transitions for larger scenes are now almost instant 1-3 seconds
• Converted older methods of map making to shaders, added new cool shader effects such as walking through grass, time of day, etc.
  
• Download size for the game is stable around 250-300MB. (Final game size was originally estimated to be 2GB)
• RAM usage down, i.e. lower end devices can now run chrome, OBS and Gataela at the same time.
• Reworked a lot of dialogue and debates, removing a lot of it, adding new scenes
• Debate system was upgraded from strictly being talk-to-npc based to include facts, testimonies and evidence gathering (i.e. a little bit more detective-like)
• Revealed new characters!
• New logo
• Fancy battle screen transitions
• New Quest pop-up and Location pop-up was added to the overworld
  

So TL;DR a super busy year.

2019?

So what’s up for 2019? I’m not going to promise anything in particular, but there’s a few high-level goals which I will touch on below:

• New Website: We’ve been working on a new website for a little while that will give us more support for writing longer-form posts, and act more of a hub of information for the game which will be easier to search through. We really want to post more technical posts, like the shader work, how we approach the level design or some of the changes we’ve made and why, etc. Tumblr is a site focused more on micro-blogging, which makes posts, particularly with code, difficult to organize nicely.
• 80% Hump: We’ve been at 79% completion for a long time. Let’s get past that.
• New Demo: There will be a new demo published this year showing off all of the above work. It will be the same length as the older one, but with all of the improvements, and obviously the new dialogue/story segment.
• Beta-Testing Schedule: This year I would like to get to a point where every quarter (after the demo comes out) there is at least one new beta release to the beta testers.

Other than that, we’ll see!

Happy New Year everyone!

Completed:

• Final Overworld Maps – 14.2% in progress; 71.7% complete
• Worked on adding new music
• Worked on updating the UI
• Working on updating and adding new animations
• Added a sprint button
• Showed off our new logo
• Revealed some new characters
  
• Refactored the dialogue system to add new text effects and fix some bugs with the old one.
• Refactored the scroll lists so that you can click and drag on the scroll bar to scroll
  

Coming up next:

• Optimization Work
• Graphical Update

The past month focused on the graphical update, added some new features, and revealing some new info~

New Logo

To start with, I’d like to show off the logo again (just in case you missed it). This has been a work in progress for a while, so it’s nice to finally show it! It was designed by the lovely kathaeris.

New Characters!?

Yes. New. Characters. These characters have been around since ye-old-days (and I even teased them back in April), but here’s a more formal reveal for them all. I hope you enjoy these sneak peaks and look forward to a few more 🙂

What’s Next?

December will be a busy month. We’re planning to finish up most of the major UI and graphical updates then. We may do a stream or two during the month too, so keep an eye out on the twitter~!

Completed:

• Final Overworld Maps – 14.2% in progress; 71.7% complete
• Worked on updating Debate NPC expressions
• Worked on adding new battle animations, and updating current ones
• Worked on updating the UI
  
• Worked on more music
• Worked on optimizing the demo

Coming up next:

• Optimization Work
• Graphical Update
• Run button
  

The past month focused on the graphical update, specifically the UI update and new sprites.

Run Button

One of the big new features coming out of the graphical update is a run button. Something I heard early on, but also recently at Otakuthon, was “Is there going to be a run button?” The answer is yes!

We’ve got most of the sprites done to finally start implementing this, so we look forward to it in the next month!

UI Updates & Debates

UI updates have been going well and they’re almost finished! We’re at the point where we’re adding a few new screens, so I wanted to briefly mention one of them: The Debate Statement list!

After looking through how people played the demo (thanks for the LPs!) it came to our attention that gathering facts and remembering what facts you had gathered was hard. In a game centered around that for one of the battle system that is, uh, not good.

Plus, facts came from just talking to people, which is good, but there’s also other ways to get them. For instance, in the dungeon, you gathered facts from the environment (i.e. evidence).

We’ve now added different ways to gather these facts:

• Through evidence (i.e. inanimate objects, papers, etc.)
• By talking to reputable people (ex. in debates, the old system)
• Testimonies (i.e. by talking to many un-reputable people)

Testimonies are the big changer. There’s a lot of NPCs, and some of them say similar things in their dialogue, but are slightly different (ex. Vuni’s market). So instead of needing to talk to this one NPC located in this one place, just to have them say something you already knew from talking to everyone else…. you’ll just gain it from talking to everyone else.

And the new statement screen will show you all of this.

I hope you look forward to what’s coming up!