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
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!
Happy New Year! We hope you had a good holiday season~ Here’s what we’ve been up to in December, what we accomplished over the year, and some goals for 2023!
December 2022
Before we dive into a big review of the year, let’s go over some of the stuff we accomplished before 2022 ended! As per usual, a lot of time was spent visiting family and friends, but we managed to accomplish quite a few things, such as:
Finished 67% (56! submaps) for the last major dungeon
Added a few MSQ skits
Completed some overworld maps
Created more animations for new enemies
2022 Review
2022 can be described as “The Year of Preparation”, which – as the name suggests – we focused on preparing the game for the big Content™ addition of 2023. So let’s go over some of the things we did!
First is the overworld maps. We went from having 3/4 regions completed to (almost) all 4 regions! All that’s missing is the little area blending between the two biomes in the bottom right which should be completed soon™.
We also did a big wildlife update during 2022 focused on creating creatures to help the world feel more alive. This also included more than doubling the number of enemies and rebalancing the turn-based battles. We now have 17 passive animals, and 12 new enemies – all with various variants. We even updated some older enemies with variants while we were at it!
Some other key highlights from 2022:
Finished rewriting the end of the game
Finished rewriting the MSQ skits
Updated SFXs for all of the older turn-based battle skills
Designed mechanics, puzzles and visual aspects of the last few dungeons
Added new VFX to the overworld
Improved UI animations
Added skip features to Skits and Cutscenes
Added more emote bubbles
Completed more Debate Portraits
Upgraded our Debate Battle Infrastructure (adding and changing debates are easier than ever!) & converted all of the old debates
Added Gamepad support (and redid our input handling in general)
As mentioned before – it’s the year of Content™. Which means our main focus for the year is to combine all of our hard work together. Our short term goals for the next few months will be:
Complete the remaining overworld maps
Complete the new turn-based enemies, animations, and skills
Add all of the MSQ skits
And as for the rest of the year we will be focused on:
Adding all of the MSQ cutscenes
Finish rewriting all of the debates and related side quests
Finish all city/town interiors and related NPCs
General bug fixes, visual & performance improvements
Hello everyone! We’re happy to report we had a productive month with absolutely NO misfortune…. probably. Here’s what we were up to!
Little Improvements
One of our focuses for the month was making a variety of little improvements from bug fixes to little performance things to animations. Some of the little animations we added include moving minecarts, windy grass, UI improvements and so on.
Skipping the Scenes Away
Another small improvement we made was adding the ability to skip cutscenes! Although… the cutscenes are not entirely skippable just yet. We have some work to do to update all of the older cutscenes to work with the new system, which we will get around to in the new year. However, the important thing to note is the tech exists, and we made sure that it would work for nearly all of the scenes (minus ones with battles or important choices). We weren’t sure whether to allow skipping if you haven’t seen the scene before, but considering that it would be a lot more work to track that information, and we wouldn’t know if people were doing multiple playthroughs either on the same device or different ones – we decided to just trust the player. If you don’t want to see it and it won’t break anything, it’s fine. You can skip.
What’s Next?
As the year is reaching the end we’ll be focusing on a few key areas in preparation for next year:
Finishing the last major dungeon’s design
Final Battle Work
Finishing all of the Overworld Maps
Have some happy holidays and see you all in January for our yearly review!
Welcome to the spookiest update yet! In the spirit of Halloween we have a horror story that is stranger than fiction~ 👻 So here’s what we were up to during the last month!
A Horror Story For the Ages
Imagine: you’ve been working on a project for over tenyears. Many people have contributed over the years and much time and effort has gone into it (Let’s just say over 6169 hours to date – such a random number!). You’re making use of proprietary software to make your project – but hey! It’s used by professionals.
You’ve been working with this software for years and yeah- there’s occasional issues – it happens – but it gets solved quickly and it’s not like anything really bad has happened.
And yet it happens:
############################################################################################ ERROR in action number 1 at time step2 of time line <undefined>:
Unable to find any instance for object index ‘96904’ name ‘<undefined>’ at gml_RoomCC_Map_4_3_8_Create (line 1) – x = inst_Map_4_3_Rob.x; ############################################################################################ gml_RoomCC_Map_4_3_8_Create (line 1)
You haven’t changed anything. You haven’t upgraded versions. This code where this error is being thrown hasn’t been touched for years.
The error – it’s curious. It says that this object – inst_Map_4_3_Rob – it doesn’t exist. So you try to wrap it in a check. Maybe it’s just being silly with instance creation order or something.
But… it exists.
And yet it doesn’t.
You decide then – ok maybe there’s something wrong with this object. You’ll just remove the offending line of code. It’s fine. You’ll get back to it later.
But then-
############################################################################################ ERROR in action number 1 of Other Event: Room Start for object obj_StatementScreenManager:
Unable to find any instance for object index ‘96400’ name ‘(null)’ at gml_Script_scr_StatementScreen_UpdateIcons (line 103) – inst_StatementScreen_StatementBttn._is_selected = type == StatementType.STATEMENT; ############################################################################################
You realized – quickly – that this is happening everywhere. Everywhere in the project where you access objects by their room names crashes. And most- terrifying – this is used everywhere. Over a thousand places. And every. one. crashes.
Quick! Go to google! Surely others have come across this! And yes- thankfully- they have! There are workarounds! But- None of them work? An explanation: It’s an error in the proprietary code. There is nothing you can do.
And so it dawns on you: Ten years of work is gone in moments – outside of your control.
…
…
…
BUT NO! You don’t give up. How could you! It’s tenYEARS of work!
And so you struggle-
And so the answer comes – what if – just what if- this works:
Cautiously, you build and run the game. You open up the areas of the code that were previously crashing and-
Finally-
They run.
It’s a True Story
Yes. Really. It might be hard to believe, but this October in the year 2022 fate decided to give us a real scary time. A good portion of the month was spent running into this issue, going through the five stages of grief, figuring out a solution and uh- logging a bug.
We hope the bug is fixed soon.
This would’ve been a very different update if we hadn’t found a workaround. So we are very happy to report that development can go on. However it is unfortunate that we must report that October had no major development.
However if you happen to be one of the many many people who have come across or might come across this – we hope a simple pass through function will help you carry on through your day.
What’s Next?
Since we couldn’t get too much done this month, we’ll be focusing on some similar items that maybe showed up last month including and not limited to:
