Hello everyone! We hope you are doing well! Here’s what we were up to last month!
Klechate
Along with finishing Myranova’s interiors, we also wanted to focus on getting Kelchate’s interiors complete. Kelchate is a small fishing town located off of Myran Lake to the South-East of Myranova. It is also the town closest to Rical so sometimes visitors can be found passing through. Here are some of the homes you can find here:
There happens to be a hoarder living here. Maybe they are willing to sell you something for cheap? Like a couch! You’ll need a couch on your adventure, right?
There’s a local bookworm who – well – might need some help cleaning up. Be careful not to trip over anything – oddly enough those books ARE organized.
The local inn is a small Bed & Breakfast. Kick up and relax – you’re probably the only one staying here. At least the owner keeps things clean and there’s usually a snack or meal ready for you whether you asked for it or not.
TTBattle Skills
This is just a small note to say we are doneeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee. (Kinda)
New skills have been made (on paper) and we’ve cross checked that there shouldn’t be much if any overlap with existing ones. Our next steps are to get some graphics and SFX made for them, and then it’ll be implementation, play testing and balancing!
Which is to say there is still more work, but we’re good on this front for now. Once we’ve got some visuals we’ll go over some of the new skills and enemies. Look forward to it later this year.
Brief Note
Last month we mentioned that our cat was having a rough time and unfortunately she passed away from cancer a few days ago. We’re unsure how it’ll effect the next few months but we thank you for your understanding.
What’s Next?
Now that we’ve caught up on work we’ll be focusing on:
Falaz Interiors
Adding MSQ Cutscenes
Misc Improvements such a adding a splash screen, adding new animal behaviour, etc.
Hello everyone! We hope you are handling the humidity well because – wow it’s been hot, humid and ever so smokey here. Here’s what we’ve been up to over the last month!
Assets Assets Assets
Over the past year or so we’ve worked on a graphical update and on expanding the turn-based battle system by adding new enemies, skills and animations but…. well… it seems it hasn’t been added to the game yet. Whoops.
We did a small audit and it turned out a lot of various animations were missing, so we worked on adding them and- y’know- there were just a few missing. A few hundred. Close to a thousand really. Well more than that. So… that was our month.
Also taking care of this cat.
This spry young 15.5 year old cat needed an emergency operation… after more than a week of various tests, late nights (and mornings) at emergency clinics etc. No need to worry – she’s doing fine (although she hates the cone) but this sort of meant that this month was dominated by mundane work and cat care.
Ambience Improvements
As for polish improvements, we made a small change so that when you walk through ambience the BGM will quiet down. You’ll now be able to hear the buzz of the forest, the roaring waves and the hum of markets much more clearly!
Also we made our first test room as we will have incoming VFX and SFX surface improvements!
What’s Next?
We’ll be mainly catching up on last month’s work:
Finish adding Myranova interiors
Finalizing Cutscene music
TTBattle Skills and Balancing
And if we happen to finish catching up before the end of the month, we’ll be moving onto more interiors and cutscenes!
Happy Summer Everyone! We hope you have enjoyed the two weeks of spring and are now ready for the impeding heat wave. Remember to hydrate! Here’s what we were up to over the last month~
Interiors Interiors Interiors
We started on the long road of finishing the maps this month. And by long road we mean the interiors for all of the cities and towns. The first city we are starting with is Myranova: a seaside resort city!
Cities are pretty big, so we split it in half vertically and got started. We mainly focused on the port, some shops and some household interiors. Here’s a couple screenshots:
A kitchen/living area for a large family in a small house. They are in the middle of putting away and organizing groceries.
The downstairs of a house used for temporary sleeping arrangements for sailors. A small makeshift stage is in the corner for performing sea shanties. How much sleep the sailors get upstairs with the racket downstairs is questionable.
A common sitting area and rooms in an upper-class hotel in Myranova. Very large and spacious, but quite empty feeling without many people passing through.
Cutscenes & Improvements
We began to implement cutscenes again this month – but not just any cutscenes. No. It was the difficult ones. The long ones. The ones with lots of NPCs moving around and reacting to things. Which suffice to say went well – but we needed to make a few improvements.
Generally speaking cutscenes look like this:
Here is the opening cutscene of the game with Rozalia walking in, calling out to Zack and then dragging him out of the stall.
Everything in this cutscene is scripted out in a single function – which basically means that the function is “single-threaded” in terms of what events happen. If you have background NPCs who can go about their own merry way, it’s fine, but as soon as you need them to do things and react but only when they need to but you don’t know at what point they’ll be at – things get complicated.
Sure, you can have everything in the main function. Most of the cutscenes work like that. But when you want to have more moving parts this can make the world feel very stutter-y. For example let’s say you have an NPC walking around for a cutscene. What if the NPC reaches the end of their movement path, but the player hasn’t advanced dialogue? They will stop moving and wait for the player to continue. What if you have more than one NPC? It becomes very obvious when the world stops moving – or what parts of the world are involved in the cutscene.
So it makes sense to make things “multi-threaded”. We have infrastructure for that already! But it’s through Gamemaker’s Timelines system, which can be difficult to use. Not to mention that for each timeline we create it’s a new asset. For a one-off scene. Here’s an example of a timeline where a character wanders around, thinks and then wanders around again:
So what to do? Infrastructure!
Here we have a timeline for an Officer walking on the screen. They do some actions, react to some things, then leave the screen. No need for a separate asset and all of the cutscene code is contained in the main function, but executes in parallel. Plus we can reuse our preexisting cutscene helpers. The cutscene system will also clean up the created timeline at the end appropriately to boot.
“But what about Gamemaker’s new Sequence tool?” You may ask. This project is old. We redid the cutscene system twice before to make it easier to use. Let’s save that for…. not this game.
BUT WAIT A SECOND! There’s more.
Yes, more.
You’ll notice above that in earlier cutscenes we had these path assets defined. Paths are basically a list of points with speed values set to them. The idea was that if we ever needed to modify the movement in cutscenes we would edit the paths instead of the cutscenes. However we haven’t needed to do that – ever – and many of the paths are short without any change in speed, like this:
So we put in some infrastructure. Let’s create a path asset, add some points to it, then execute within the cutscene:
Similar to the timeline helpers made, the cutscenes will manage the temporary cutscene paths and make sure they get cleaned up just right. No one likes memory leaks.
So with all that said, we got some improvements to make fancier cutscenes. We put in fancier cutscenes. Wow. Cutscenes.
What’s Next?
The big content update continues! We’ll be breaking down the scope a little bit more outside of maps, cutscenes and battles:
Hello everyone! We hope you are surviving the spring allergy season (we sure aren’t). Here’s what we were up to during April!
Improving Performance
Our main focus for the last month was on improving loading times for levels/rooms/screens of which you can see above. We had noticed for a while now that loading times seemed to be just a little too long.
We previously expected that if a transition would take 1 second animation-wise, then the actually loading of the screen shouldn’t take more than a second. Yet on average we were seeing screens take 4-7 seconds just to load – weird. Was it perhaps a recent GameMaker update that broke something? Is it our recent work to add in more assets? Are we reaching the limit of the engine?
A mystery was afoot.
So we debugged and fixed a few things here and there that seemed like they were causing issues but it was still taking a REALLY long time to load. And so we did more debugging, and more, and more and found… that it was GameMaker’s draw events taking up all the time.
Uh oh.
So we poked around on the internet. Surely someone must’ve run into this before, right? Nope. And then we started to poke other people. Did they ever see anything like this? Not quite.
We were given a handy hint to take a look at texture_debug_messages and we found that with each screen transition the textures were being wiped from memory – so it had to unpack them all over again. The function that was causing this was draw_texture_flush. We had added it at some point over the years. With a quick delete we were suddenly loading MUCH faster.
We did still notice that the initial load of the files were taking a while – anywhere from 1-5 seconds. The cause was the overworld texture pages being unpacked into memory. We changed that to preload on game start (where a splash screen will eventually be) and now it’s as speedy as can be.
How speedy? 0.03 – 0.2 seconds.
Now that we’re loading faster, we also sped up the speed of the room transitions going from an average of 1 second long to 0.5 seconds.
And all of this is to say that the game is thankfully in good shape (phew) and now better than ever. In the future you’ll be able to play at maximum speed.
Crafting New Skills
In addition to our performance improvements, we made some progress on skills and more animations. Above is a wonderful cauldron animation made for the crafting screen and a future craft skill! Yes – that’s right – you can craft items to fill up your inventory in case you run out mid battle! Assuming you have the materials that is… We’ll go into more details about this handy little skill in the future~
What’s Next?
Now that performance woes are over and we don’t have to worry about the content updates causing issues, we’ll be heading right on back to adding them in and focusing on:
Happy Post-April Fools and welcome to the start of Spring! Here’s what we were up to during the month of March!
New Enemies New Skills
Last month we showed off some of the new enemies that we’ve been working on and this month we started on that long process to add new animations and work on rebalancing the battle system!
When we initially started on Gataela, the thought was that the enemies would be somewhat like Pokemon in that we would have certain types, and as the game progressed their levels would go up and they would get some new skills, but it would still be the same type of enemy.
As we added the overworld and added biomes to it, it became apparent that not all enemy types will belong in the same biomes. (Not to mention that would be kinda boring.) So we expanded our initial list going from 9 different common types to 23. That’s a whole lot more!
But with more enemies means the need for more skills.
Each enemy before had a maximum of 5 different skills that it could use. With only four skill slots, there would be quite a bit of repetition in enemy encounters. We’ve been working on expanding that so that each enemy has 10 different skills, with different levels associated to those skills. For example, if you run into a level 2 snake they probably shouldn’t have skills that could cause an instant kill. As your enemies level up, so do the skills it has available going from more basic skills, to intermediate, to expert.
God-level skills are saved for bosses 🙂
So we doubled the enemies and doubled their skills, does that mean 4x more skills? Nope. This is the “fun” part of breaking down who has what skill and looking for overlaps. For example, both snakes and wolves can bite. Does that mean two different Bite skills? Maybe in terms of stats since a snake would have a poisonous bite, but the animations can probably be the same. But then is the only difference in stats the poison aspect, or do we need to consider the skill level as well?
Lots of excel sheets have been made and continue to be made.
Over the next few months this will be something being done in the background and we’ll probably bring this up every once in a while to introduce some of the cooler skills.
Interior Time
Now that the overworld is complete we’re beginning to focus on interiors. In particular this past month we worked on the interiors for the Palace. I wonder what happens there? :3c
We’ll be continuing on various areas over the next few months, including adding backer houses. Look forward to more in the future!
