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.
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?
Transparent Tiles Not Visible
Transparent Tiles Colored Pink
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.
We hope everyone is having a nice July now that summer’s in full swing! Here’s what we were up to last month!
Puzzles
Last month we finished off some puzzle work – so let’s talk about it!
One type we added was pipe puzzles since…. well… they feel rather steampunky don’t they? They do have a in-game reason for them too – trust us. As you can see above we’ve got a slew of pieces to add to solve the puzzle on the right. You need to connect the pipes together and so steam can flow through them! Though I wonder what will happen if you turn them all on? 🤔
There’s still a little bit more work to do – such as UI elements, some cool steam effects and so on – but we hope you like how it’s looking so far.
Next 6 Months
It’s been 6 months since our last check in on our plans – so let’s go over what the rest of the year will look like! That being said… lots of things are up in the air given the state of employment, so please keep that in mind and that things may change.
Our main “theme” for the next 6 months is “making the world alive”. This means adding things like NPCs, enemies, treasures, passive animals, etc. We’ll also be putting things together and plugging everything in – for example battle animations. By the end of the year we hope we’ll be in a place where we’ll be able to focus on side quests, things we missed, accessibility and so on.
In the short term (3-6 months), this means:
Adding new Battle VFX (and SFX?)
Adding NPCs, animals, treasure, etc. to the maps
Rebalancing Debate battles & related facts/evidence/side quests etc.
Finish adding all of the Kickstarter backer houses
And looking beyond that (subject to change):
Map visual upgrades (ex. the water shader)
Adding Side Quests
Performance and bug fixes as needed
General balancing & AI difficulty (battles, economy, etc.)
