Happy New Year! We hope everyone had a good holiday season! Let’s talk about what we were up to in December, go over 2024 and talk about our plans for 2025!

December 2024

December was a very busy month! To give a brief idea, we added a good chunk of Kickstarter backer rewards, added a lot of NPCs and passive animals, and fixed a bug here and there. Here’s some of the NPCs we added:

2024 in Review

Well, this year was quite a strange one. If you remember the plan – we were going to focus on adding content and putting everything together and- to some degree- we did succeed! BUT we were heavily impacted by layoffs. Other than just personally being out of a job – we could not pay other members of the team for remaining work – putting a standstill on certain parts of the project (ex. SFX). Another impact was that we could not spend more than a set number of hours per week on the project or we might lose employment insurance. So the project itself was also pretty heavily affected. That being said, we were able to get a few things done so let’s take a quick look!

We finished:

• Adding all of the MSQ
• Adding all of the city interiors
• Adding puzzles & mechanics for a certain dungeon
• Creating all of the new TTBattle VFX and then adding them to the game

We also:

• Made a number of performance improvements and bug fixes
• Released a couple demo updates in February, August and November
• Added some SFX for some Battle VFX
• Added passive animals & behaviour
• Added NPCs and Passive Animals to many of the cities
• You can pet the animals
• Implemented battle images change depending on what weapon you’re holding
• Added most Kickstarter rewards

2025 Plans

2025 is going to be our year! Maybe. Probably. Hopefully. And why? That’s right! We’re employed!

Not to get too much into the details, but the job search this time around was by far the worst experience. To everyone else still busy looking we wish you the best.

As for what this means for the project, to put it broadly, we’ll be unchained from money and time restrictions and be able to get back into it. It should be expected though that this first quarter is going to be very, very rough as we get back into the swing of things. That being said, because of 2024 we want to put a lot of effort into 2025. This means:

• Finish adding all the Kickstarter rewards
• Finish adding NPCs, animals, treasure, etc. to the maps
• Finish the TTBattle SFXs
• Rebalancing Debate battles & related facts/evidence/side quests etc.
• Add debate battles & side quests
• Map visual upgrades (ex. the water shader)
• Performance and bug fixes as needed
• Demo updates as needed

We will also be launching the shop with the old Kickstarter physical rewards mid-late January (keep an eye out).

Thank you for all the support and we wish you all a great start to the new year!

Happy December! The snow is starting and so has the holiday season so let’s go over what we’ve been up to over the past two months!

Demo Update

In case you missed it, we put out a small demo patch last month fixing a crash and providing a small performance update. A number of other non-critical bugs were logged (thank you!) and those have since been fixed on our end.

NPCs & Animals

We’ve been working on adding NPCs and Animals to some of the newer maps. Let’s look at a couple locations!

Storefront Shenanigans

We mentioned before that we were working on setting up a shop for older merch we’ve made… and it’s here! Except… well… have you heard of Canada Post strikes? They started when we were hoping to launch the shop. So the shop is ready but we can’t ship anything yet and we’re certain no one is interested in paying 50CAD for shipping. So instead please take some time to peruse the photos and if there’s anything of interest take note – we’ll be launching officially sometime in the new year once the strike is over.

What’s Next?

As we are entering into the holiday season and things are slowing down, we’ll be trying to get as much as we can get done before the end of the year. It’s been a roller coaster and we’ll be trying to cross off at least a few goals from earlier this year:

• Kickstarter Rewards – We’ll be trying to add all of the interiors and NPCs this month
• NPCs & Animals – Focusing on the remaining towns and cities before revisiting older maps
• Balancing Planning – Now that most of the battle upgrades are in we need to rebalance them. This means research!

We hope everyone has a relaxing holiday season and we’ll see you in the new year!

Hello Chilly October! Here’s what we were up to in the last month!

Making Olvia Come Alive

Our main focus for the month was adding NPCs to the world and we decided to start with Olvia!

Olvia is the first city with the new animals added to them – so there was a little bit of trial and error to get them working for the first time and well integrated – but we think it worked out! Let’s go over some highlights of some of the NPCs you can meet here!

Let’s start with the obvious – there’s a dog on the loose and his name is Buddy and oh boy will he never be caught. It seems it’s a Wednesday.

Wow look at all those birds! It sure would be a shame if someone ran through them!

Huh… that’s strange… Oh look! Birds!

Nothing suspicious here at all. Not at all. Huh? Did you hear something?

Yes, You Can Pet Them

A small little feature we added was for- you guessed it- to pet the dog! And the cat. And the horse. And the cow. And the sheep. And the chicken. And the- You get the point. You can show the animals love. Just don’t pet the snake.

Old Merch New Merch

While we were tidying up we stumbled upon a box filled with Gataela merch we made for the Kickstarter. The photo above is from when they were originally produced (we’ll take better ones). There’s some buttons/pins, some art books, and even some wood charms we made for Otakuthon pre-lockdown. If you’re interested we’ll be putting them up for sale sometime within the next month or so.

What’s Next?

Next month we’ll actually be taking a little bit of a break from Gataela. As a reminder, layoffs hit us in May and we haven’t gotten employed yet. It’s quite difficult as you can imagine. On top of that the seasonal sickness has hit (which is why this post was late). All in all – it seems like some rest is in order. So next month’s post will likely either be very short or non-existent. Thank you for your understanding.

Happy September! Here’s what we were up to in the last month!

Demo Update

In case you missed it, we released a demo update at the end of last month providing some bug fixes and a new performance toggle. Thanks to all the demo players who logged bug reports!

VFX Completion

We wrapped up the rest of the VFX work this past month. There might be some adjustments that need to be made, but this means that most of the visual effects for the turn-based battles are complete! The next steps for the turn-based battles will be creating the skills, adding the SFX, hooking things up, and (eventually) balancing! For now, here’s some of the last ones we put in:

Our favourite “absolutely not a Turkey” is showing off their feathers and Fluffing them Up to Raise their Critical charm points.

Our friendly Lynx is just giving you a small Body Slam out of love and affection. Probably.

Did you know Badgers will Stock Up on food? We’ve heard it’s to Raise all variety of things.

Finally we have a pot of gold showing off our Alchemy skills. This little fellow will now appear on Crafting screens and for the future Crafting skill in battles.

Tile Troubles

One of our focuses for the last month was adding a “walking through water” effect to all of the swamp maps. We have a cave map that already has this effect, but it was specific to the map. It was a little bit of work to make it work on all the swamp maps, but not too hard. No. The difficulty came up when dealing with the tile detection system and the cursed transparent tiles.

Now this is a rather common problem when it comes to the tile system for Gamemaker. Tilemaps are formed off of images, and if there are any spots in the image which are transparent they become transparent tiles. However they are not considered “empty” because there’s an associated image section assigned to it.

Now for Gataela we have a large image – particularly for the background tiles – which has empty spaces to fill in over time. We would rather have a single large image with empty spaces to fill in rather than recreating tilesets and redoing maps as development went on, or having a lot of different small tilesets and many tile layers.

Our tile checking – which is used for the water effect, VFX, and SFX – goes from top to bottom through the layers, finds a valid tile (i.e. a tile that is non-empty and has image data) and then determines the type. Although these transparent tiles are considered a valid tile by the engine – they aren’t valid for the tile checking algorithm.

Sometimes what happens while creating maps is that these transparent tiles will be accidentally be added. We could go through every single map and clean up every tile layer so there are no transparent tiles but… there are hundreds of maps. There must be a way to do it without that, right?

Most of the advice for this situation revolves around checking every single pixel for the tile. With the size of our image, we would be checking essentially every pixel in the tileset image worst case. That’s 2048×2048 checks. Even if we store the result that’s still a pretty expensive check. BUT! There’s a way to do that easier: using bounding boxes.

Gamemaker allows you to create image assets at run time, and these assets can be created from tiles. When we first run our tile checking algorithm, we will check all the tiles in the Background tileset once by turning them into temporary images and generating an automatic bounding box. If the bounding box’s LS >= RS then this tile is fully transparent so we’ll add it to the list of tiles to ignore. This means that instead of 4,194,304 checks we have 1,024.

What’s Next?

A bit of a switch up for next month – we’ll be working on adding NPCs (including dialogue) to the world over the next little while. If you’re interested in getting in a line or two, we’ll be streaming it every Tuesday & Sunday at 9pm EST.

Have a good start to Fall and a relaxing last bit of Summer!

Happy August! We hope everyone is handling the heat wave well. Here’s what we were up to the last month~

Cutscene Completion (For Now)

We are happy to announce that (for now) all of the Main Story Quest (MSQ) cutscenes have been added to the game! This is a big hurdle we’ve now passed so let’s go over what this generally means and next steps for cutscene work!

The MSQ is the main content that anyone needs to play through to get from the start of the game to the end – and for cutscenes that means they’re mandatory. Having them all added means that you could theoretically play the narrative from beginning to end – a big accomplishment! For a lot of games this means that the beginning of the end is coming. Although we would love that, we aren’t quite there yet. BUT! It’s very nice to have happen and a big step in that direction.

So why aren’t we there yet? A few reasons.

MSQ in Gataela are a little dynamic. Beta testers may be aware of this with the first Lord debate – but if you got certain facts earlier on certain quests become side quests. If you didn’t get those they become main quests. For speed runners or others who hit certain conditions through exploration and so on, they can get rewarded by skipping ahead, but people who hadn’t found these won’t get locked out. We mention this because right now our debates are being rewritten. Once completed their facts will be extracted and matched with side quests and other gameplay mechanics for gathering them. This means that some current side quests may also be main quests. So we’ll have more main quests to add.

Another factor is that the cutscenes and story has been added, but little details to the world such as NPCs, enemies, animals, etc. haven’t yet. This means that a cutscene previously added might suddenly have elements appear in undesired locations, or maybe we need to fill in more NPCs to make the scene feel better. Then you get into all the little things like music and SFX cues and so on.

So all of this is to say the first pass is done! We have a second pass to do and that will be coming along a little later. This is why our big concern for the next 6 months will be adding NPCs, animals, etc. to maps as well as rewriting the debates.

Though… we did figure out a good stopping point if we were to do early access… so perhaps that might be a thing… or not… we will see… no promises.

Battle VFX

Another big effort this past month was adding in all the lovely VFX work that has been done over the past year as we mature the turn-based battle system. We still have a fair amount of work to do but most of them are complete so let’s highlight a few!

Here is our fave DDR Boar showing off their dance skills with “Crush” – a high damage skill that crushes anything in it’s way.

Our dear wolf friends can use a skill called Endure which will allow them to survive a hit that would normally kill them. They won’t give up that easily!

Our animal friends like a nice little Hibernation every once in a while to recharge and refresh – though they may be a little out of it once they wake up.

And y’know what? If you’re having a bad day just seek some Refuge inside your shell. The problem will go away… probably.

What’s Next?

Next month we’re going to be focusing on:

• Wrapping up the Battle VFX
• Adding fish to oceans and rivers
• Some bug fixes & improvements

See you in September!