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!
