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)
• Upgraded Gamemaker to the current version (and maybe suffered for it)
• Released a few updates (0.6.0 & 0.6.1)
• Did a presentation on how we go about level design
• General Bug Fixes, QoL & Performance Improvements

2023 Plans

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

Take care and see you all next month!

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 ten years. 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 ten YEARS 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:

• Adding more UI animations
• Fixing some minor visual bugs; and
• Adding a skip feature to cutscenes

Hello everyone! It’s spooky season! Here’s what we were up to over the past month~

Gamepad Support

Our primary focus this month was finishing off adding gamepad support which we started in August. Great news: It’s done! Thanks to everyone who hung out with us on stream as we powered through this!

As we mentioned last month, we are considering pushing out a demo update with these changes along with other improvements and minor bug fixes. We have a little more work to make this 100% user friendly – for example we need to display gamepad buttons on UI elements where there are handy shortcuts. This will take a while, so we can’t give a solid date as of yet, but please look forward to it when it comes!

Adding Some Juice

Between adding gamepad support, working on the final debate and turn-based battle improvements – we started to focus on adding some UI animations! These don’t really add too much other than some extra visual interest when playing, but it should help the game feel a little more polished. For example, above is an example of the new party swap animation, and below is an example of new button hover effects!

What’s Next?

Moving into October we will be focusing on more miscellaneous improvements as we work to finish the last debate, primarily around:

• Adding more UI animations
• Fixing some minor visual bugs
• Adding new emote bubbles and passive animals; and
• Adding a skip feature to cutscenes

Happy? September to you all! Summer is just about over here, which means it’s time for another update. Here’s what we’ve been up to over the last month!

Planning, Improvements & More

Last month we focused a lot on improving our development processes and planning out a significant portion of work over the next few months. We completed the debate upgrades (and redid all of the debates) and did some end of game dungeon design! But we can’t show that… Or talk about that…

So instead here’s some of the overworld VFX we added!

Gamepad Support

Another big focus of the month was adding the long-requested gamepad support! We swapped out our input library with Input 5, and began the long process of replacing our existing input support (keyboard + mouse) as well as add gamepad.

The good news:

• Adding Input 5 was easy, and swapping out the input libraries was even easier
• We can now support all sorts of different controllers
• Input 5 supports easily swapping different input configurations (future work)
• WASD and arrow keys will be supported for movement (a highly requested feature)

The bad news:

• We’re still working on adding support

We’re hoping to finish off most of the basic support this month and looking to roll out the basic support into the demo sometime before the end of the year.

In the meantime, enjoy what it looks like to debug scroll bars:

What’s Next?

Our big goals for the next month are:

• Finish basic gamepad support
• Begin working on writing the final debate battle (!!!)
• Add some UI FX juice
• Adding more animals and enemies to the game
• Expanding the TTBattle and creating new graphics