Hellooooo Summer! We hope everyone’s doing well and toughing out the heat alright. Here’s what we were up to over the past couple of months.

Water 🌊

The water has been upgraded!!!!!

This was our big project over the past two months as we needed to upgrade the water across all of the existing levels including making the new shader! This was a big undertaking so let’s go over some of the reasons why this needed to be done.

The first and most obvious reason will be that it was for appearance and it’s true – that was a big motivator! Take a look at how the overworld has developed over the years.

In 2016 we were still using Cocos2dx as the game engine and although it was not the best implementation for the water – the water had a smooth gradient, some underwater transparency, some noise coloration and the colors were more vibrant. Part of the reason why this was possible was because we weren’t using shaders – they were PNGs. (If you have old demos you might be able to see our past sins.)

When we moved to Gamemaker as the engine in 2021 we made a quick water shader to get most of the previous strategy across but it was by no means great. We didn’t know how to make a very performant shader so we used large images in the shader for the “blurs” and just sort of got the idea across. That’s why the colors are pretty close but not as great – and large areas of water are all one tone. We also lost being able to see things underwater.

Now that brings us to a few months ago – it was finally time to implement a proper shader! We got runtime configurable blurs, “edge detection”, underwater transparency, better colors, noise coloration AND we even added some nice water movement and reflections. Though most importantly – we added a performance option.

And performance was the second big motivator for this work!

The last couple of updates we’ve been slowly adding some more user settings for performance, such as for the tall grass. As we’re working our way through some performance audits one thing we noticed was that the water shader we had since 2021 was just… bad. Did it’s job alright – but it was constantly recreating itself when it didn’t need to. If you’re on a lower end PC or with an integrated graphics card you might’ve noticed some lag here and there.

One of the things we focused on with adding this option was that all the new fun features with the water shader were mostly carried over between modes – and that you could easily toggle at runtime. The only real change feature-wise would be for runtime animations, such as reflections and water animation.

Overall we’re very happy with how it turned out! There may need to be some tweaking here and there but that can come in the future. And now some zoomed-in comparison images. Enjoy!

House Improvements

Now if you watched the videos there you may have noticed another little performance option called Dynamic House Shadows.

We had a bug report from a very long time ago about how when the player entered interiors performance would dramatically drop. At the time we assumed it was due to the fact they were running Gataela through an emulator on an older Mac but when we took a look it turns out the House Shader might not be good either.

Similar to the water shader – we split up the shader into dynamic and static, and turned the dynamic portion into a performance option. The shadows add a little more oomf to the levels, but it still looks pretty good without it!

Other Misc Things

We also completed a few other things:

• More Kickstarter Rewards added
• TTBattle SFX
• More sprites!

We’ll go over some of this stuff next time!

What’s Next?

Our main focus for the next couple of months will be mixed between the TTBattle work, some general overworld improvements, and wrapping various things up. This more specifically means:

• Adding all the new TTBattle SFX
• Reviewing the TTBattle visual/audio expansion & fix bugs
• Adding Passive Animals to Olvia & Vescha provinces
• Remaining Kickstarter rewards
• Bug fixes & performance fixes

Have a good Summer and we’ll see you all in September!