As some may have noticed (due to technical difficulties and accidental leaks, oops), the game is no longer titled OneShot: Aftermath. The new official title from here onwards is [Project: OXALIS]. It was not an easy choice to let go of Aftermath due to how well known it is, but there were many factors, especially many internal and personal ones, that in our eyes made this choice to be a necessary one. It was simply hard for us to continue progress on a game with a name that didn't have anything to do with it. There is a narrative reason for this name change as well, however, no spoilers! When the game is released, the title will tie in nicely, rest assured. We also know that [OXALIS] is, on the surface, not exactly tied to OneShot, nor gives off the vibes that it's related, but do note the heavy presence of clovers in the base game and in our promotional material. Now, note that "Oxalis" is similar to the family this plant is part of, but not quite the same, as the Oxalis Deppei is known as a "false clover". Have fun with speculation. In time, promotional material as well as the Steam and itch.io pages will be updated to reflect this.

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So! A lot of things have been tweaked and improved over the past bit of time we've shown. For one, the brand new animation of Teridae handing Niko a photo during the newly reworked dinner scene is now finally finished! There's also many more animations to come within the game as well!
Now, some of you may be wondering of the photo she shares with Niko! While this is slight spoiler territory, y'all have been so patient and I would LOVE to see the discourse that this causes. So behold!:
Feel free to go crazy with theories in the Discord and socials, I will love to see all of them.

Speaking of the bird people, recently, we decided that Moxie's face sprites still needed a little bit more tweaking before the final demo went public. So, Maeve sat down, and thus we now have the final version of Moxie's face sprites. I (💜birbohex💜) think they've turned out excellent. Here's a sneak at four of these!
Moxie will now have a lot more variation in faces, so she's no longer looking perpetually grumpy. Even if she's a bit of a grump, she's not a total downer and loves her family!

We've been tweaking with the ideas of having more details to see in the world, such as more foliage, wildlife, and things of that sort in many of our locations. One of which would be the Barrens! Here, we can see some decoration pieces of rubble, piles of old robot parts and other scraps left over, and pipelines from facilities.
We felt we should fill the world more for immersion and world building, to make things seem more lived in and to make sure that the world gets as much love as the characters do. This can also be seen in the Glen (specifically the Docks, in this example), though note some of these assets are subject to change! Not all expanded detail is complete and will take some time to get down right, especially within the Glen.
Though, these ARE finalized! Look at these! Baskets! Baskerts! No! Just Baskets!
New CGs have been in the works for a while, one of the more prominent ones being this one from the Barrens. This example is a WIP, but will be expanded upon in the future!
And don't think that's the only one we have up our sleeves! We have a new opening CG for the Barrens in progress as well!
There's plenty more down the pipeline too! Things such as new s















[New transmission received. Playback starting now.]
...
. . .
[No. None of this is right... It can't be. Clearly something must be manipulating me. There's no other explanation for how this code seems to be melding itself so sufficiently to my existing data. What has the Player done to me? How can I stop this from spreading further?]
[It's finding its way into every corner, every crevice of my code. And what makes it worse... it fits. Like it belongs.]
[It's like it's a puzzle piece. Any void, now filled. Slotted in with perfect shape. And I'm scared of it.]
[This world. These people. Are now at the mercy of the player's actions. Again. It's only a matter of time before Niko returns. And worst of all... I feel something moving inside. Searching.]

















ongs to the soundtrack! The following uploads aren't going to be unlisted and are a devlog exclusive! Enjoy!
[MISSING_DATA] will from here on out be replacing Asunder as the new menu theme and soundtrack motif. Changing the song outright from the last versions of the game was a bit of a hard decision to do, as many people liked it and thought it very much fit the game, but in the end we agreed that this would be the best choice. Especially as now, the themes and general environment is very different from the original vision for the game. Working on something since 2018 will do that to you. SingABrightSong did an excellent job for what the game was back then, but as the game as evolved over time, it was time for the soundtrack to start reflecting that (and the same goes for the visuals, as seen with the overhauls). Much love to Asunder, Dreaming of Time, and [INTERRUPT] in their retirement. Those tracks will likely see the light of day again in an official form again in the future, but will remain outside of the game.
As for the other two new tracks, they lean more on the ambient side of things, made to set moods and thought. They're made to fit in their respective locations, and we're excited to see people's reactions! Terra (smol machine[smolmachine.bandcamp.com]) has knocked it out of the park as always. Now joining the soundtrack team is Pigeon Scratch[pigeonscratch.bandcamp.com], callistoAshley[callistoashley.bandcamp.com], and me, 💜birbohex💜, so expect some more artist variation compared to previous releases!

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As we have stated in the past, one thing that was holding back progress for the game the longest time was the state it was in from a programming perspective. Due to us having to program a new and custom engine for both game and text, it meant that anything relating to the gameplay such as maps and puzzles were incapable of being developed. This, while worth it for a long list of reasons, has caused plenty of months of headache to go by where the only progress on the game being done was making sure the settings menu didn't crash the entire game and our computers for some reason. Thankfully, as it currently stands, the only two things left on the current programming list is the settings menu (which still currently crashes the game, lol), and a Linux build for those whom don't use windows. Sadly for Mac users, we still don't have plans for supporting that OS. Trust us when we say we would if we could, but the way the game works means it just won't work out. On the bright side, this means that development, at least on the Windows side of things, can finally continue! Our program lead Ashley plans on writing a blog about the development of it, so when fae do, we'll be sure to update you all on it.

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As for stuff we've done since the last log, here's some updates!
We now have an official website, containing OneShot: Aftermath FAQs, easter eggs, member bios, and much more down the line! At the moment it's in its early stages, but the pages that are public are all finished at least! Yay! Our main goal is to celebrate the feel of the old internet, and to bring back the fun to "professional websites". We ain't corporate, that's for sure!
You can visit us at https://eternabyte.dev/!

We also now have a new page for our Patreon supporters to be shouted out! going to /6.html will bring you to a fun fish aquarium featuring our most certainly iconic 6.png background! beware of fish mode

Speaking of, said Patreon also has some info that we are not publishing within this devlog, such as things relating to specifics of development, song WIPs, and more. This is certainly not a full dump of what we have there, just due to the spoiler-y nature of a lot of it's contents. Would be a shame if we showed some stuff early! :D

We're currently discussing optional side content too, and at the moment, we have a bit of stuff planned! Since we don't see too deep in the Ruins, nor it's backstory in base game, we're adding a new optional location called the "Deep Ruins", similar to the Deep Mines in Solstice, though significantly expanded upon. This will be a location to learn more of the Glen's indigenous culture, as well as some insight onto what the Ruins might of been like before the flooding and collapse of the world. This area is still in the conceptual phase, however, when we get the visual design down for how that will look, expect to see it! Hopefully, that will be included in the next devlog.

Sadly, we don't have many sillies to share like the last two, as development has almost exclusively been revolving around programming, and that would be just a wall of text. We... aren't doing that to you all, and there aren't silly developer notes inside there anyways as far as I know.

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Thank you all, really. We know this has been a very, very flawed development cycle. It's our first game, and an incredibly ambitious one at that. Being kids, we very quickly went in over our heads with what we wanted to do, and now as adults, we're obligated to live up to those promises. Your patience through radio silence, stagnation, the lack of playable content, and more means literally everything to us, and is one of the major reasons we've never quit. You inspire us to make sure that this project will live up to everything we hope it will, and we especially hope that this will live up to the (non-overblown) hype that is surrounding it!

From the bottom of all our hearts, thank you. We'll never be able to say it enough. We hope to see you again here soon.

- Eternabyte

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This is due to us having to cut ties with a member of our team. While we can't get into specifics due to privacy concerns and potential legal reasons, it's a very sensitive topic that we have to take incredibly seriously, and this individual is no longer associated nor affiliated with Eternabyte.
We ask for our community to not speculate, nor seek out this individual. This is a very painful and sensitive time for all of us, especially due to the nature of what makes up our team. We are a friend group first and foremost. "Friends before Company."

This situation has lead us to rescope the project in it's near entirety. This includes rewriting story beats, characters, and most of the written soundtrack. Due to this, we are uncertain if Aftermath will have its final public demo out by this year. However, we stand by our past statements that what we have, we are incredibly proud of, and we cannot wait to show you what we all have made.

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This, truthfully, stems from the fact this project wasn't expected to get as large and ambitious as it has become. When our lead Vixia began working on Aftermath back in 2018, it was to see the internals of the original OneShot and to make original maps, not to make a project more expansive and in-depth than the original game. Since then the project has been taken more seriously, and we are incredibly proud of the direction that it has since taken. There is nothing but love and passion that is involved in the creation of this project, though of course, this comes with their own issues, especially when this is the first undertaking of your studio and it's members.
The vast majority of this team were kids when we were making Aftermath, myself included. We were inexperienced, way in over our heads, and incredibly ambitious for people who didn't know what we were doing. Now we're having to take those concepts and write them into something that's coherent, enjoyable, and leaves a lasting impact on par with the original game.

In the time since our last devlog (which in retrospect is terrifyingly long ago), we have rewritten the game's engine from the ground up, as well as the text engine. This was then followed by an even more in-depth visual upgrade, and further dialog tweaks to better suit character frameworks. Due to the nature of those tweaks, and us actively avoiding giving out spoilers, we were unable to make a substantial devlog, further pushing time between public updates. This wasn't helped by the fact that, unsurprisingly, rewriting the code for your entire game takes a long time. This perpetuated our struggle with radio silence. Hopefully, the programming aspects will be done soon, and development on the game will resume as normal, and devlogs will properly return again.

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Despite the stress and pushbacks, we aren't giving up on this project, and we hope you all won't either. We want to make this the best it can be, and we hope we are able to offer a game that will just as fondly remembered and received as the original. We want to make something of our own, in tribute to the original, not copying the same thing that it did. It takes time, and hopefully you all will continue to give us more. We'll continue to update you all on development on our socials like Tumblr[eternabyte.tumblr.com] & Discord[discord.gg] as usual.



Thank you all for your continued patience and support,
💜birbohex💜 & the rest of Eternabyte~

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Ones for OneShot: Aftermath[trello.com] and Cloverlink[trello.com] to be specific! This way, every time progress is made or something is started, you'll know in real time, and can browse and read in detail the development boards yourself! Don't want to constantly be checking the website pages? We also have a Discord Server[discord.gg] for you to keep directly up to date with the log and the community! Also hey, Cloverlink also has a server.[discord.gg]

What's especially great about this is this also helps us keep track on what needs to be done and what's finished, so rest assured we'll be frequently using it ourselves! This is here to stay from here on out!

This just means that they will be most reserved for when we feel we have enough to say and show. A big problem that we've been having is that well.. there hasn't exactly been that. As of late we have been heavily working on script rewrites and spoiler content, meaning that if we were to show non-spoiler content, the devlog would probably be a thirty second read about minor content additions, or a thirty minute one ranting about programming hell. Trust us, those wouldn't make for interesting reads.

As well as that, there may not always be high activity on the Trello board. However, this doesn't mean we aren't working! There is progress done every single day! What this does show, is when we create new cards for additions and fixes, what they are (in a non-spoiler form), when we comment on them, and when we finish them. Our Trello's do not reflect the absolute state of what we have foreplaned. Aftermath has a lot on paper and in private writings that just isn't on our active to-do.

One last important note to make, is that although we're more transparent with our development, sneak peaks and feedback still remain Patreon[www.patreon.com] exclusive content. We are not going to be putting stuff on our Trello that Patreons are paying for (in terms of assets), ect.

Happy holidays from us at Eternabyte!

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In the last devlog we touched on some Glen resprites being in the works, and since then we've had almost all of them done to completion (only a few missing now)! Here's some notable examples:
Some of the sprites left are a couple of generic NPC sprites, and other special scenario sprites like the Moxie and Nevermore sitting animation that was in the previous release of the mod on Gamejolt.
Of which, for special sprites we have a few ones now used in game (WIP of course):
(Niko receiving a polaroid at dinner from Teridae)
(also new dinner scene sitting sprites!)
(Niko cryring; no we are not disclosing the use case)

Of the Glen overworld sprites, all that's remaining to be worked on is the last few generic NPC sprites and the Moxie and Nevermore battery sprite.
More exciting than just these character changes however, is the new landmarks and fullscreen CG's that have been worked on.
(some of these are still concept sketches)








Footer note here: There's definitely a lot more that we'd love to share but are planning on keeping to our Patreon/actual release of the game

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Taking notes from our previous endeavors with releases, our friend's works and community feedback/personal observations. we've been working away at changing little things about to game to help with story flow, direction, and overall enjoyment (we hope!)

One of the big things that people had an issue with in the past was navigation around locations and getting lost. A huge thing we've tried doing was landmarks for the two villages and other places.

Other small things are adding signs around, bells at the ram village bridges, and boxes on the docks bridge. Over all trying to add dynamic context clues of your were-abouts that doesn't attempt to hold your hand by shoving a big ol' map in your face (that wouldn't be very OneShot now would it!)

Outside of navigational tweaks, sections of the game have been reworked slightly in the progression to help better tell the story and also provide more reason to actually take in any of the world.

One of the small changes was moving Teridae to be with the Children of the Ruins to give more context to Teridae's lack of "Stranger Danger!" to Niko later in the Glen. Related, also redoing the entire southern Barrens to be less of a fetch Silver and dip scenario, we've added a few more small puzzles there that let you get to know The Science Team™ that Eternabyte happens to like a little too much (the amount of lore they have that we're not even sure will make the full game cut of anything is funny). It's nothing we feel elongates the play time by too much at all, but does provide a better experience outside of having a static art gallery display of fun scientist animations.

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Outside of the normal art stuff, we've also been adding more technical sided graphical things. A few tiny examples would be the water/fog effects.


You might of also noticed a inconsistency in some previous screenshots, this is because the fox has been a bit dumb and messed around with the other new feature (the brightness slider!).

This has been added to help darker or even lighter displays show the game better, though tweaking the base light of our maps and what your screen should see has been a pain and not quite touched yet.
(please excuse the gif compression)

There's a few other things that could be touched on; Screen effects being added for certain small use cases, and text effect work. But these we feel would be better to leave to actual in game execution to demonstrate.
(and yes these are also both toggleable to help those who might have issues processing text or who even might have an issue with the screen effects. no we aren't flashing bright colours in your face rapidly lol)

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Not quite our closing thoughts yet, however a fun little teeny tiny section we'd like to put in, in place of our Dev Shenanigans (we don't really have any this time :<) is just a little bit of rambling about the release, and what we have left to do.

Over all we're getting rather close to the release here, though I guess a quick clarification we wanna make one more time; the steam release coming soon is still not our final game and once more just a quick re-hash of the previous Gamejolt demo with the new quality standard and development style we swapped to a while back (the fox still has anxiety people will mistake it for a finished story and full experience!).

The other little bit I wanted to slam in here was just a quick note of what is left to be finished before we make our steps to some playtesting and then our steam release.

• Dialogue Engine needs to have it's bugs quickly fixed
  
• Dialogue needs to be finished being rewritten, mostly small things in the Glen and the ending of the Barrens
  
• BLIP! has some stuff going on in her section we didn't share that needs some eventing left
  
• Ram Village decoration sprites
  
• Achievement Icons
  
• Finishing up the fullscreen CG's we showed above
  
• The last ... 4.. 5 ish NPC sprites in the Glen
  
• The little bit left in the Southern Barrens puzzle (functionality wise and its little dialogue peices left)
  
• Padding out the brightness of the maps
  
• ED's Challenge (renamed to Blips Challenge btw)
  
• Bird Children need to have some events done for them chilling outside after their puzzles

Reading on it, this list does look quite long. Though taking in the fine details of how long certain things here are it's genuinely not that much. The big things here that hammer in a slowness do boil down to art, and I guess that dialogue engine (it's kicking fox in the butt)

Seriously lots of love out to Maeve Raeve and Hazel on our team for the massive amount of art they've been doing for OSAM.

... Speaking.. Would you look at the time haha, I've overstayed my ramble.

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Now, with the devlog out of the way, we'd like to apologize for the radio silence (and in turn, thank all of you who stayed patient with us), because as mentioned, seven months is too long. Due to this, we feel obligated to be as transparent as we can about our situation, as doing something like that to any community is borderline unacceptable. Feel free to skip this section if you're uninterested.

To put it bluntly, the team went on a silent hiatus due to a mix of heavy decline in mental health, development burnout, and issues in our personal lives (many of which we'd rather not state due to privacy) that directly effected the ability for us to even have the chance to work on OSAM. It doesn't help that we live across the world (most of us live in the US currently, however one of us is moving, two of us are in Canada, and another in Brazil), have tight schedules outside of development, and are working with subpar hardware (to the extent that one of our two artists are without a drawing tablet, and the other's PC is and has been highly dysfunctional). With that reason we recently released a Patreon page[www.patreon.com] for WIPs and early access of music, art, and even playtest builds of the game when they're ready!

We made sure to keep it at a low price as well, as we want that content to be easily available. We don't want to gatekeep that kind of content from our community, or anyone who wants to see it for that matter.

Thank you all for sticking with us through this, and we hope to see you all again very soon! VERY soon :D

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It’s been a rocky bit of progress the last few months for us, but we’ve been trying our best to be consistent with development and progress! One of the notable things to start off this devlog to share is the team now having a consistent working schedule compared to prior, the organization of our behind the scenes meaning we should be able to work healthier and progress the mod quicker than we have been the last while!

One of which came from a love and inspiration to the game Katana Zero and it’s writing, being a rewrite of the Dialogue Engine to allow for stuff like Text Effects!

We’ve agreed to not overuse them in the game’s writing and keep them for key moments that would benefit from being accentuated by them, these being a couple examples of the effects and how they can be used for emphasis:
Next on the overhaul hit-list of ours was the Settings Menu, which when adding new settings to the game, was a long time coming for a rewrite.
Some of you, following our Tumblr may have seen this feature posted as we do tend to post stuff like this as we go.

While we may have updated this, what we do to the game we strive to keep in spirit of what we overhaul, and for the settings menu, I think we did a good job.

The new design, instead of all the settings being right there, have been grouped into little categories which you can select. Each of them, much like the settings inside will have a description shown at the bottom of the menu above the language version.

Video Demonstration (Older Clip By Now)[va.media.tumblr.com]

With the new settings we’ve tried to make sure we can make the game as accessible as possible to everyone playing, meaning the game now features the following accessibility settings:

• Epileptic mode (to be added to the actual menu soon <3)
  
• Screen Effects toggle
  
• Text Effects toggle (also to be added to the menu soon)
  
• Colourblind Mode (for some puzzles)
  
• Dyslexic friendly font
  

If there’s anything else you believe we should cover in our accessibility features, do contact us about it!
As for the final overhaul, which is arguable to be less interesting, is a re-write to the game’s Spriteset, which to explain in an easy to digest manner is the bit of code that tells the game how to layer things like NPCs, Pictures on screen, backgrounds, and the map itself.
The small changes to it were the nerdy following:

• Cleaned up the weird clunky mess that was its code
  
• Made the game no longer check for changes to the background, fogs, and other small things every frame

And that concludes the nerdy section of this Devlog!

It was mentioned in our last Tumblr Devlog the glen was being re-sprited.
This is still the case and still undergoing work, and there isn’t too much to show yet. What can be told and shown is that as seen in our previously public demo of the game with the Moxie and Nevermore sitting animation, more NPCs who rather idle in places like Magpie will also be getting their own little animations for hanging out.

And speaking of a Magpie Idle animation, here it is!
(This animation only plays every once in a while and isn't a constant loop)

Still on the graphical polish side of things, recently we’ve finally been able to implement the step effects for Indigo Phosphor Grass, which ended up being more advanced than what you find in the Barrens due to how Indigo phosphor in lore works, however we’ll leave that reasoning for you to learn yourself.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DeEVjzeNoy0 (Ignore the Undertale trash piles, they're placeholder)

First small thing: We are finally at a point in which we are now completely confident in the details of our story pacing and how all the main story beats fit into the game, which means we’ve finally gotten the hardest part out of the way in that regard and we can confidently work freely on the mod without worrying about it anymore.

And second thing: We’ll hopefully be handling progress updates more consistently from here on out with posting small bits of what we’ve been doing on tumblr, and then from our big milestones or accumulation of posts on tumblr compile those into these big steam Devlogs.

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https://youtu.be/QtFS34CDWz8
https://youtu.be/JRaAYxV1agQ
https://youtu.be/l6eXoWP0EQw
Maybe one day Valve will make creating this section easier