Howdy! I'm Animeliqite.

As some of you might know, unfortunately, we weren't able to write out July's progress report due to other in real life matters, and I'm sincerely sorry for that.

To assure everyone that the development is still active as it is, I promised everyone that I'd be creating a progress report in August detailing everything that has been added after June's progress report.

This devlog mostly contains other QoL changes that weren't present in previous versions alongside small features and cutscene changes.

QoL Changes — Menu Screen

First of all, let's look at the QoL changes. For those who've played the game before, you had to navigate over to the Settings Menu which coexisted with the settings from the Extras Menu in some ways. I believed that this would've created confusion among players, so I've decided that it was best to seperate them into two different parts: Settings and Extras.

Settings is where you set the major features of the game.

• You can set the volume of each sound emitters: the SFX and BGM emitters.

• You can change the borders.

• You can toggle important settings such as auto-running alongside the best option for people with epilepsy: low VFX. It's in the name.

• You can change keybinds however you like.

• You can change the language of the game if any other language files exist.

Extras, however, contains small features that doesn't necessarily affect the gameplay.

Speaking of languages that I've mentioned for the Settings part of the game, JAPARITALE is going to have an official localization of Turkish yet again! This means you'll get to experience a full localized gameplay in a completely different language!

Other than the language, with all these changes made to the menu screen, when navigating through the menu, you'll know which menus belong to which, and transitions between each menus are kept only for the Extras section.

Which creates a result like this:

Optimizations were also made for the menu screen!

1. The bottom gradient is now a sprite rather than a gpu_set_blendmode command, making computers use less CPU/GPU power.

2. Save files now ONLY load either when the menu screen is loaded for the first time or save files are deleted/copied over, eliminating unnecessary file checking.

QoL Changes — Other Stuff

Oh, and did I mention that some small missing features in v2.x.x were also complete? The room with the Cellien battle in fact has one! Just like how Toriel's pre-battle cutscene has it, there was actually going to be an effect similar to this. But that was never added because I kept procrastinating and procrastinating.

This is how it looks like now that I did the complete opposite.

Apart from the gif recorder messing with the colors, this is the result.

1. Choices are moved to the same dialogue

2. Cellien Pre-Battle VFX was added

For those who haven't seen our video that was published in June in Team Furenzu's YouTube Channel, here you go:

1. Extra dialogues for going right

2. Extended the room

3. Fixed tilesets (mainly walls and floors)

Going to the right is indeed a shortcut to The Observatory. The shortcut contains a nice playground some FRIENDS use it to engage in games and challenges.

Well, that was definitely exhausting! Here's the current mood that I have after all this.

Story Updates?

"But Animeliqite, you're only adding QoL updates into the game! What about the main story? Or the other stuff?"

I'll explain it in two parts. First of all, let's talk about alternate cutscene paths which were previously blocked by all those forcefields you see on the map.

Alternate Cutscene Paths

One thing I've noticed while replaying through the game is that most of the cutscenes generally don't have an alternate approach. Some areas are blocked with forcefields, in which I always found them completely lazy. Therefore, to end this once and for all, I decided to add an alternate path starting from one of the cutscenes. It'll then go to the other, and other, to the point where nearly every cutscene has an alternate path that you can take!

Here it is in action! No, you can't skip Zebra-chan's conversation.

Actual Story Content: Plains Area — Chameleon & Moose Duel Battle

— Summary

The duel battle consists of Chameleon, Moose and your companion Porcupine fighting over their wishes. The team who is victorious has their wishes fulfilled.

— Music

One out of two songs are complete for the duel battle! You can now listen to it on the GameJolt page itself.

1. Chameleon's Specialty - Duel Battle (now released!)

2. Moose's Specialty - Duel Battle

— Dialogues

As for dialogues, our approach for this is to first wait for our team members to translate all the original text into English. Then, we'll use these translations to add them into the game, decide the way the battle is going to work, and potentially add different approaches to the battle events. Here's the roadmap:

1. Translate all the dialogues from Japanese to English

2. Plan out the script for the battle

3. Write necessary code and functionalities

— Programming (Battle)

As for the battle, unfortunately no progress has been made right now. However, we'll cover this in the next devlogs.

— Pre-Battle Cutscene

The Pre-Battle cutscene is completely done!

New Song Names & Updated Songs in the Page

You've heard it right! The songs on the list weren't updated for a while and thus, most of them were outdated. Updated songs are as follows:

1. Beats of the New Years' Spirit to Chill and Relax To

2. Beats of a Hot Summer to Lay Down and Relax To

3. Meet the Savannah's Guide

4. The Guide's Instinct

5. Your Best Companion

6. Jungle Area

7. Destiny

Two new songs were added:

1. (Duel Battle) - Chameleon's Specialty

2. Troublemaker

This way, you'll get to know more about the new songs and add it to your playlists however you like. Speaking of playlists...

We're going to be adding the entire soundtrack for JAPARITALE (only the finalized songs) to Team Furenzu's YouTube channel when v3.0.0 is released!

Why I've Been Silent

Some of you might have wondered why there aren't significantly more updates like there were before. Actually, this is something a bit personal. It doesn't have to do with the game, nor my mental health.

There's an original game idea that I'm planning to make the prototype of. I started working on this right after the mandatory exams that I've taken in June.

It uses Unreal Engine 5; however, the engine decision making process is not final, and I might try to find a suitable one for my project for a time being.

All this search for game engines had slightly made me shift my focus away from actively developing JAPARITALE, but as halting the development indefinitely isn't in my plans list, I'm determined to finish the game first while trying my best to do two things at once. I want to finish JAPARITALE's story, create the ending battles and finally rest my head. We're actually this close when you realize that the next (and technically the final) area is right near the duel battle.

Speaking of hobbies, I've been mostly learning about making music and doing 3D modelling in my free time (I've made over ~5 themes so far) but time will tell if I will ever need someone to help.

In the upcoming year I plan on creating a game page for it, so stay tuned. This is why there were so little updates compared to years ago.

And that's it! Hope you enjoyed the devlog!

- Animeliqite