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:

• Finish adding Myranova interiors
• Work on adding dungeon puzzles
• Finalizing Cutscene music
• TTBattle Skills and Balancing

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:

• TTBattle Skills and Balancing
• Adding Cutscenes
• Adding Overworld Interiors

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!

What’s Next?

Next month we’ll be focusing on these areas:

• TTBattle Skills and Balancing
• Adding Cutscenes
• Adding Overworld Interiors
• Improving Map/Level Load Times

What a short month! But this update is jam packed with good news so get ready! Here’s what we were up to over the past month~

Overworld Completion

Oh me oh my it’s true it’s done! Here is the complete overworld and the country of Gataela! This past month we spent a lot of time finishing up the last little bit blending the biomes between the rocky region of Olvia and the marshland of Vescha!

This area was quite difficult to work on as there were no shared ground tiles between the two regions. In the end we used the marsh-ness of Vescha to break the area up into blocks of land, which allowed for a more natural transition between the two.

There are more improvements that we would like to make – such as fixing the water or updating the older regions in the northern part of the overworld – but those things will come in due time. Due time being… probably after release.

But! We are done for now! Enjoy!

Turn-Based Enemy Completion

Another thing we completed this month was a bunch of new enemies and all of their animations! Owen’s been hard at work to help diversify the group and they are now complete! Above are just a few of the many now completed. We might show off more information about them in the future!

MSQ Skit Completion

And finally we crossed off finishing the non-debate MSQ skits! The debate MSQ skits will come after the debates are rewritten (since, y’know, they need to directly mention debate content). But this is a huge step forward for getting content into the game!

What’s Next?

Wow, what a banger month, huh? Going forward we will continue to focus on the two battle systems, and working our way through the towns, cities and their interiors. Or in summary:

• Begin completing the Turn-Based Battle Skill VFX
• Rebalancing the Turn-Based Battle System
• Finish rewriting all of the debates and related side quests
• Completing city/town interiors

Have a great March! See you in April~

Happy Deep Freeze! We hope you are all keeping warm. Here’s what we were up to during the last month!

Completing the Forest

This month our main focus was on completing the layout for one of the last dungeons of the game! It was a lot of hard work to get everything done but with this we have a nice base to put in events, enemies and cool effects. We can’t show you all too much, but here are a few screenshots of various locations.

Skits

Another key focus for this month was skits! As we mentioned last month one of our main goals this quarter was adding all of the MSQ skits. Good news! We’re almost there. Excluding MSQ skits directly related to debates, we have 3 left. How exciting!

What’s Next

Our focus for the next month will be:

• Completing the rest of the overworld maps
• Finishing adding the rest of the MSQ skits
• Complete the new turn-based enemies