First Public Test Build Release

~ Saracen

galatea_schoolDownload Page

Okay, so I’m putting out the first public test build of the game today. As stated before, this release is still very light on overall content, not really containing any actual gameplay or characters, but will allow you to explore part of the environment due to appear in the full game (which has unfortunately also had to be scaled back for now due to performance reasons cited in earlier posts). This should at least reflect some aspect of the game, since exploring 3D environments will be a part of it, and this is something of rarity for this particular genre. Honestly though, I didn’t really want to put out anything playable at this stage, but a lot of people had requested it and are likely eager to see some of the stuff being worked on, so here it is as promised.

Now, a few facts about this release: first of all, it will likely have bugs, it’s built from a custom fork of the unstable development branch of the Godot game engine I’m using, and I’m already aware of a couple of bugs which have not yet been fixed in this release due to the seemingly random nature of their occurance.

Secondly, it’s more or less what you see is what you get; this release is simply to show off an in-progress look at the school environment and nothing more. Again, some people might be let down here, since there is no real gameplay and there are no characters as of yet. I did manage to get the phone camera to work as some of you may have already seen, so there’s that I guess. However, I’ve already teased at a character model I’ve been working on, and finishing and integrating her will be the primary focus for the next major release, which should be a LOT more interesting than this one. I’ve also exchanged some emails with the lead programmer and maintainer of the engine I’m using, and said he will fix support for GPU skinning in the next few weeks, which should help performance when I introduce characters in the next major release. I will also be merging some of my own code in the mainline.

A lot of people on the YouTube channel commented that they felt the default FOV was too wide. While I personally think a 90 FOV is a good default value (I think most modern games have what essentially amounts to glorified tunnel vision), I’ve lowered it down to 80. However, you can still configure it yourself by changing it in engine.cfg file distributed with the game with a text editor, or by using the console command ‘set_fov’. You can also change other configurations in the engine.cfg file, including resolution and key bindings. The lighting is also a lot better this time, although still not ideal.

Finally, in order to justify the existance of this release somewhat, I’ve hidden a very small secret/easter egg in this build. See if you can find it.

Enjoy!

60 thoughts on “First Public Test Build Release”

  1. I could not find the secret, i’m a disgrace to my family T-T.
    I have some FPS issue, but i can’t tell if it comes from the game or my old computer.
    Otherwise, i like it. I can’t wait to see the next release !
    (Sorry if you doesn’t understand what i said, i’m french and i’m not really good at speaking english)

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    3. Thank you, performance in the game is a well-documented problem which I’m hoping to recify. I know some ways it could be improved, but it if I’m correct, it would require significant changes to the renderer.

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  2. dear friend tried it in 32-bit mode and honestly did not run at all. No, if I ran through the game but it was the slowest, at all playable opened the console to enter commands but not respodieron even sincerely lack of control, the fps rate was minimal, even may improve before I lansarlo proof insurance is achieved it, it increases the rate of FPS sure that complaints reach

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    1. Hmm…yes, performance is indeed a problem, but this will likely improve in future releases once revisions have been made to the renderer. As for the console, I assume you mean accessing it. I’ve discovered that the specific key for accessing varies from keyboard layout and region, so I can only suggest trying every key.

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      1. That was actually something added in my one of the people contributing models, and to be honest, I’ve only noticed that it might have been a reference to that now that you’ve pointed it out. But no, that’s not the actual secret, and so far, it looks like no one has found it yet, and it’s not Love Live related.

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  7. Hello Nice first release thank you for this! šŸ™‚

    I ran around and looked everything, perfect fps all the time and the Game is running smoothly on my computer :).
    Cant wait for the next build šŸ™‚
    Keep up the good Work!

    Cheers

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    1. Thank you, the control is indeed fairly unconventional, it was essentially intended to try and bridge the gap between the freeroaming and visual novel segments while being a kind of a modern-day throwback to the interfaces in the original System Shock and Ultima Underworld games. I will, however, be creating alternative control schemes in future, including one for gamepads.

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    1. That’s very specific. I’m not sure where you got Minecraft specifically, but no, it has nothing to do with Minecraft. It’s actually just a very small thing, just put in for the sake of giving people something to look for, but some people might find it kind of neat.

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      1. Ah, found the actual easter egg ^^

        As for where I got the Minecraft idea, is the small room which you can go into by stepping through the purple panel on the wall. It looks exactly like the nether portal from Minecraft šŸ™‚

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        1. Good job! I can actually tell you exactly what that purple spot is, it was unfinished part of the light baking process that would have taken too long to fix and I didn’t want to delay it any longer.

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  10. Is the secret connected with Suzumija Haruhi, bad-ass fighter girl and impressionistic ocean creature (fish)? If not, I’m searching further šŸ™‚
    Game runs OK. 30-45 FPS on my non-gaming laptop (smooth, in my interpretation). Got graphics related BSOD (0x116: VIDEO_TDR_ERROR), when Windows wanted to take over the screen (engine didn’t wanted to minimise the game). For the sake of not going through that again, from now on I’ll run in windowed mode.
    Keep up the good work!

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    1. Yes, you found it. (: While you might feel it’s okay, It is indeed a shame that the performance is so bad right now (I’ve never considered anything below 60fps acceptable), and it’s basically because there’s no occlusion culling outside of what gets culled by the view frustum, simply because culling methods are pretty much broken in the engine right now. This will be improved in the future though, either by a brand new renderer the engine maintainers are planning or some improvements I personally intend to bring to it.

      That’s worrying that it resulted in a crash of that scope. I’ll be sure to log this with the engine maintainer and even look into it myself, but can I ask, would it be possible to give me some more information about your specific setup, like what graphics card you’re using?

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      1. I’m sorry that I made You worried, yesterday I didn’t had time to research into that error. That BSOD probably was driver related. After updating Intel drivers it went away. And after forcing Your application to run on AMD graphics card only (vs integrated), performance went up to 50-70 FPS.
        Dell Inspiron 3537, Windows 10 Home 64-bit (10.0, Build 10240), IntelĀ® Core(TM) i7-4500U CPU @ 1.80GHz (2 cores, 4 threads), ~2.4GHz, 8192MB DDR3 RAM, AMD Radeon HD 8850M

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  11. I tried again to find the easter egg, after looking in every toilet hole, checking every lockers, speaking 30 minutes to the loudspeaker, fly to a place where the character couldn’t escape and watch him die like a sims in a swimming pool, suicide myself, throw myself in the void and click 1536 time on a door in the hope to unlock the secret ending of the game (what ?), i didn’t find it … Is it even in the school ? I mean i spend like 4 hours looking for it x) (or maybe i saw it but didn’t understand it was the thing).
    By the way, i was thinking when i was playing, the character is a boy or a girl ? Or it will be our choice (sorry if you already said that, i didn’t see it)? And for the next release, if you can add some music, that would be great !

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    1. Sorry that you’ve not been able to find it yet. ): There’s actually no cryptic method to accessing it, it’s simply a hidden object in the environment which will give you access to a secret room. Since some people here have already found it, I’ll tell you that it’s actually hidden outside, though hearing some of the things you’ve mentioned, I may consider incorporating secrets accessible by similarly cryptic means in future releases. :p

      The character you’re playing as right now, I haven’t really considered it since it’s just a very early showcase build for the artwork and you’re controlling a stand-in for the player. That being said, in the a near future release, I may add in an experimental third-person camera, and since I only have a female character model right now, it’ll use that by default. However, the original design for this game was inspired by classic bishoujo games which commonly feature male protaganists, and for a while, the design was only going to permit a male MC. When the character creation system is completed however, you will have an option to play as both a female and male MC.

      Music is something we’ve got in the pipeline, and there may even be a feature appearing soon to allow players to import their own custom music which can be played on the phone.

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    2. Ah, thank you. As you didn’t say how to get there, but still showed a picture of what the easter egg was, I could easily get there myself, using that picture is a clue! I can say one thing: I would never manage to get there without a clue… Again, this one was sufficient enough.

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  14. I found something that slightly frustrates me a teeny a bit. I’ve managed to hit the ESC button by accident once or twice…and well yeah ._. It would be really nice to have a “Are you sure you want to exit?” promp, because it’s quite unnerving to just have the game go ‘POOF!’

    Other that that, everything looks good. The game looks exceptionally beautiful and I’m eager to see the progress šŸ˜€

    Oh, I’m also wondering about music and voice acting for characters. I’ve studied theatre and performance in high school as well as classical/opera singing in my spare time. I also do some freelance composing here and there, and would me more than willing to volunteer as a voice actress/musician in the future.

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    1. Yeah, that was a feature omitted simply due to not wanting to delay this release any longer, and should hopefully appear in the next one. The reason it didn’t appear is due to the complexitiy of the game’s dynamic scene hierarchy and some parts of the gameflow not having fully implemented functionality, like setting up pausing select game elements and leaving others intact, as well as a robust focus stack for that kind of ingame UI overlay, so in this case I just did the press escape to kill game cop-out.

      By all means, if these are skills you think you could bring to the project, I would love to talk to you. One person did initially step forward with an interest in voice acting, but never followed up after my initial reply. If possible, could you send me an email with some examples of what you can do?

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      1. Will do šŸ™‚

        I’m finishing my college semester exams this week, and will be able to work on some examples starting on Monday, so I’ll hopefully be sending an email by next weekend šŸ˜€

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  15. Awesome! I absolutely love it so far! Starting to get addicted to it lol. As for the easter egg, I’m still searching, but I won’t give up!

    As for the performance, I’m not having any problems with frame drops nor any problems with crashing. Either my computer is a lot better than I thought it was, or I just got lucky :p. Some very minor rendering glitches on the roof top, but other than that, it seems all good!

    I have high hopes for this project, and I’m really looking forward to see how it goes from here! To me, this is a really good first impression!

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    1. Thank you, it’s only small thing, but I’m sure you’ll find it if you look very carefully. (:

      I’m glad to hear that performance has been okay for you, and it does indeed vary between setups. The actual performance issues are really more CPU-bound than GPU-bound, so people with fairly modern CPU’s will likely be able to deal with it in this optimized probably even more so than those with powerful GPUs. This is just a temporary issue though, and eventually, I hope we’ll get it running well even on low-end setups.

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  16. Still haven’t found a way into the Art Room. But I did find something else nearby that I found interesting.

    “The sign says ‘Science Lab’.”

    Are we going to be playing with chemicals in later versions of the game?

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      1. While using noclip is one way of accessing it, there is actually a legit non-cheat way to access the room. I’ll say right now, there’s a key hidden in the scene.

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        1. Didn’t find it, i don’t understand, i tried my hardest, look :

          by the way, i wasn’t able to find the pictures i take with F12, is it because my computer is in french, so the files doesn’t have the same name, so it doesn’t work (i wasn’t able to find the file) ?

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          1. XD That’s brilliant! With regards to the screenshots and photos, they get put inside a folder called AppData, but by default, it’s hidden on Windows. If you type the path in directly, you should be able to find it. By the way, I noticed some issues with the shadows in that screenshot where the shadows look kind of glitchy. I don’t suppose you could give me some information about your particular setup, GPU and the like.

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    2. The science lab is simply going to be where one of the classes you attend takes place. As a game mechanic, you will be expected to attend a schedule of classes, and you can choose to either focus and pay attention (at the cost of stress and stamina) or slack off. There are planned to be three stats which you can gain through classes: creativity, fitness, and intelligence (might consider renaming this logic), and attending science class will broadly count towards the third. Although I would like to have some minigames for clubs and special events, I don’t think there will be an equivilent to something like Bully’s chemical mixing minigame.

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    1. Thank you. A lot of people have pointed out the potential horror implications of this kind of environment, and I’ve often thought about to a legitimate horror spinoff someday.

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  18. Damn, this looks great, the scale is amazing, it does feel comparable to a real school, keep up the good work.
    No FPS problems whatsoever, I was actually expecting it to hitch a lot because of godot3D not really being that well developed, but it runs flawlessly šŸ˜›
    (AMD FX8350, Geforce GTX970 xD)

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  19. I’m not having any FPS issues with this build, everything runs smoothly for me.

    I can definitely see now why you were so reluctant to release a build. The issues with the light baking and shadows make the experience a little disconcerting, but i’m sure with more work you’ll be able to get the lighting up to standard.

    But everything else looks great! šŸ˜€ Keep it up!

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  21. Pingback: A First Glance and Understanding of… Galatea (The Modular Waifu Simulator)! | The Gaming Realm

  22. I do think that the benches are rather tiny, the player seems to be a tall person with such a small gap to the top of the doorways too.

    Those benches are way too small though, regardless of how buff the player is.
    Great work though!

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    1. Yeah, they are a bit small. One of the reasons is that the guy who made them built them in a different program with different coordinates, so there’s a few inconsistencies with his objects appearing slightly smaller than mine. I’ll try to address these when I do the next revision to the school scene. I’ve also adjusted the default height down a bit, but it’s planned to have this be customisable anyway.

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