Happy May! Spring has sprung and with that a very busy time will soon be upon us.

Lakure Passive Animals

Passive animals have now been added to Lakure! We’ve also made some rather big adjustments to one town in particular: Roatte.

In our initial development of Roatte we wanted to have some pastures and animals. However we cut the animals from the game at the time because it was not in the budget. This led to the town having only crops instead. With our recent work to redo the vegetation the animals have come back and we’ve scrapped all of the crops. Some progress shots over the years are below:

2016

2023

2026

And here are the new animals that live in these pastures:

Wynoa Redo

We also got started on redoing Wynoa. Unfortunately a lot of the time was spent counting cliffs and fixing them. Here are some WIP screenshots on the pains and processes of fixing cliffs (especially those that span across maps):

Hopefully next update we can show all the lovely before and after shots as we make progress updating the oldest areas of the game!

Gamemaker Upgrade

As a quick note – the new Gamemaker version with the new runtime is scheduled to leave beta sometime soon. With it will come a bunch of performance improvements as well as a new LTS. Although it’s not clear if Gataela will move onto the LTS just yet, this is the version we are targeting for a demo update later this year. If you’re interested in more information the post can be read here.

Regarding AI Usage

As part of this announcement Gamemaker also announced a command-line interface (CLI) tool which allows users to do Gamemaker development without using the IDE. CLIs are fairly standard and a welcome addition to the engine as it will allow us, personally, to develop our own scripts to automate some of our processes. (Ex. releases, build pipelines, tests, etc.) Historically we have needed to develop some interesting and very fragile workarounds, so this development will (hopefully) help streamline automated testing efforts and easier releases.

That being said CLI tools can also be used by Generative AI (such as Claude Code) which interface with the engine externally. There has been some concern over the past week about what that means so this is a statement to reiterate the position of the team: Gataela does not use Generative AI and we have no plans to use it with development.

This position should be fairly obvious given some minor statements over the years however it seems to be needed to be stated outright. We won’t be providing reasons why – unfortunately that just brings people over to defend AI and “try to change our mind”, which is a waste of everyone’s time. Just know this is a very educated and logic-based decision. If you dislike this decision – unwishlist. If you like it – wishlist.

And to be clear due to the timeline of this project – no, using AI would not speed up development. Being able to work full time would. Donations welcome. ♥

Next Update

It’s important to note that the next monthly update will be low on information and details. Paige (main developer) has minor surgery later this May and will likely be unable to do much during recovery. Do not be surprised if we miss the deadline for redoing Wynoa come July.

What’s Next?

So with all that said we will be focusing on two areas: redoing Wynoa’s landscape and continuing on refining the debate improvements.

See you all in July!

Hello Hello! Happy March – may Spring be with us soon ❄️ Let’s go over what we’ve been up to the last two months!

Debates

As per usual – there isn’t too much we can really talk about as far as the specific content goes without there being huge spoilers. That being said, we did solve the last major (hopefully) plot hole! This plot hole was known to us during development, so we left space for it to be filled in the story. We’ll have to go back to ~3 cutscenes and fill in the space we left, but otherwise it slots in very nicely.

As for the debates itself, now that some things have been organized and some holes solved we’ve started to re-research the topics of the debates. We did initial research when the game’s development began, but it’s been a little while since then so we’re refreshing the content.

Unfortunately in this accursed AI timeline it’s been difficult to find new research done on the topics. This is particularly frustrating as some topics have become more topical in the past few years (which is unfortunate in their own ways). The most common issue has been AI-generated articles. If anyone happens to be having similar issues the following seems to be working out well:

• Restricting search to pre-2020 (or pre-covid) tends to filter out nearly all AI-generated articles, but it does remove more recent research
• The age-old advice of “Wikipedia -> Sources -> Books” pipeline has been very helpful for anything newer. Thank you Wikipedia Editors.
• Historians & Academics. There’s a lot of accredited historians and academics who make videos (long form and short form) which has been useful as well.

For better or worse – this means we’ll be picking up more books in the future.

Lakure Redo

Annnnnnnnnnnd we’re done! All of the vegetation in the Lakure province has been updated! Down below you can see how things have evolved since we started in November till now!

As a quick recap: we needed to focus on redoing the vegetation for both Lakure and Wynoa provinces to solve a few issues.

• It was very easy to get lost in both provinces because vegetation and land forms did not change over time
• Both provinces felt the same because they were using the exact same vegetation
• It did not feel like you were progressing through the region because it all felt the same
• The difference between the first few regions before the biomes being implemented for Olvia and Vescha was dramatic

Now if you pay close attention to the vegetation and the placement of it you’ll see more localized flora, or flora spread over an area that bleeds into another and blends together. It should be easier for players to have a rough idea where they are, and have a more enjoyable experience exploring the world!

Now for some close ups~

What’s Next?

With this one big task out of the way we’ll be focusing on:

• Putting in the Passive Animals for the Lakure province
• Beginning Wynoa Province Vegetation Redo
• Continuing with Debate Battle Writing

Take care to not get sick and see you all in May!

Happy New Year! Time sure flies doesn’t it? We hope everyone had a good holiday season. Let’s talk about what we were up to during November & December, how 2025 went and what our plans are for 2026!

November & December 2024

As we outlined in our last update – we’re working on two key areas: Debates and “redoing” some older overworld locations. If you’re interested in what “redo” means here we recommend you read our last post to get the gist.

There isn’t too much we can talk about the debate changes at this point but we sorted out a known “plot hole” – which is a good change.

Otherwise we’ve been chugging along with redoing Lakure. We started by wiping out all of the vegetation for the whole region and started to fill in some areas. Here’s a comparison of before and now + some close ups.

Some beaches have been upgraded.

Did anyone ask for Sheep and Shepherds?

Fields of flowers, different road design, and lots of greenery.

Upgraded our purple flowers!

2025 in Review

2025 is over and did we ever get stuff done. As per usual though, it feels like it’s never enough. On the plus side we became reemployed which meant we could spend time on the game’s development; on the downside, many health-related things came our way. That being said, we got enough done to now switch to bimonthly progress updates which means things are getting done and we’re moving into secret things. So let’s get on with what we completed!

• Created a minigame prototype which was featured by Gamemaker
• Added all the NPCs to Myranova and Ziacia
• Added all the Passive Animals to Olvia and Vescha provinces (~50% of the game’s overworld)
• Began redoing Lakure province’s overworld vegetation
• Finished designing all of the in-game Kickstarter backer custom NPCs & Houses and adding them to the game! In-game Kickstarter rewards are now fulfilled!
• Created some cutscene-specific sprites
• Created custom boss sprites
• Redid all of the water in the game + related performance improvements & toggles
• Improved other shaders (ex. House Shader, Cave Shader) + added performance improvements & toggles
• Created and added SFX for the remaining TTBattle Skills
• Reviewed all of the TTBattle sprites & fixed anchor points, missing sprites, missing shadows, etc.
• Removed the timer from Debate Battles
• Began rewriting Debates
• Upgraded to Gamemaker Version to 2024.11
• Misc bug fixes

And here are some gameplay videos we released during the year:

2026 Plans

Now let’s move onto our plans for 2026. To be honest the plans are fairly light because they rely heavily on finishing the Debate Battle rewrite. Not only do the battles need to be finished for the game to be done, but how the battles change will influence which quests become main story quests and which quests become side quests- let alone if we have to write new ones or adjust those. So with that in mind we will be planning on:

• Finish redoing Lakure’s province’s overworld vegetation
• Redo Wynoa’s province’s overworld vegetation
• Adding Passive Animals to Lakure & Wynoa’s provinces
• Upgrading the Gamemaker Version
• Releasing one Beta and Demo update with the new graphical changes
• Rewriting the Debate Battles
• Rewriting, adjusting or writing new quests depending on the Debate changes
• Implementing new Debates
• Implementing new quests, cutscenes, etc.
• Implementing the minigame prototype into the game (if time is available)
• Rebalancing economy, enemy placement, treasure placement, etc.

We hope you look forward to the upcoming changes and see you again in March!

Hello everyone! Welcome to the end of Fall as Winter is sure to hit soon!

As we mentioned last time, as we move into working on things like *~*debates*~* we won’t have too much to share until we’re done sorting some things out (and even then there won’t be too many images) so these updates will be a little small!

Passive Animals

Our original goal was to add the Passive Animals to Olvia and Vescha over the next quarter – but we actually got it done ahead of schedule! Both of the new regions now have an abundance of birds, butterflies and other (non-violent) creatures waddling around. Here’s a short video showing it off!

Debate Changes

One thing we can talk about and show with the debates is a small fundamental change that people will (probably) appreciate.

First let’s throw back to the original debate battles! Way back when we planned for the debates to have three metrics to determine if you would pass or fail a debate:

• You needed to select the correct options (or at least not get a bad end)
• You needed to select the options within a set time (don’t leave someone waiting forever – that’s awkward)
• If your score was too low then you would fail (maybe you should up your charisma)

You’ll notice that last option has been removed in the most recent versions – we found it to be really unfair. If you picked all the options and got the “best end” why would you need to level up your charisma and then do it all over again? So for a long time debates looked as follows:

You needed to select the right options and also do it within a certain period of time! With this we hoped people would still feel some tension to pick options and that unfairness would go away.

However over the last while we’ve been playing other “choice selection” games – like Ace Attorney and Disco Elysium. Some of the most interesting parts of the game – and parts we really enjoyed – were when you needed to select an option but you had the opportunity to stop and ruminate over which one was the one you thought would work best. Talking it out, thinking over what each choice meant, etc. – we found that being able to do this meant engaging with the work more deeply.

The intent of the game is to engage with the world, gather facts and information about it, then apply it in debates. The debates and your performance in them depend on your understanding of the world – and being rushed to make selections can take that away.

Plus it can still feel unfair to miss the window to click a button because you were too busy thinking and then you have to do the whole thing all over again!

So with that said – we removed the timer! We had originally been thinking about removing it as an accessibility feature, but decided that removing it was better for the whole design. (Hopefully)

What’s Next?

As we’re sliding into the end of the year we’re going to be looking at two main areas: Debates and redoing older Overworld maps. The debate work is already known, so we’ll expand on what we mean by “redo”.

Quite a while ago after we finished the second province (Lakure) we noticed that the regions looked too similar. It didn’t feel like you were progressing through the world and it didn’t feel like each region had it’s own uniqueness. This is why we took a pause to develop more assets before moving onto Vescha and Olvia (to the bottom and right of the river/lakes).

Originally the plan was to redo the vegetation in these areas closer to release (similar to the water) but we’ll be moving this ahead in schedule for a few reasons. First is that we have some time now and it works well as a break from Debate work when we need it. The second is that once we add animals, treasures, and enemies it will be very difficult to redo the areas.

Therefore we’ll be starting to work on redoing the Lakure region – only available to beta testers right now. It’s the area between Wiska Forest and Vescha. Our focus is on giving it it’s own identity and once done we’ll be adding passive animals. We expect it to be completed for the March 2026 update.

We will then focus on Wynoa – the region available in the demo. Since there’s treasures, enemies and more this will be more time consuming, but will be finished before end of Summer 2026. Once done we’ll push an update to both the demo and beta branches so people can explore the “new” areas.

We’re giving ourselves a lot of extra time on these because it’s more of a background activity while we work on non-visual changes and will require some retesting of the game and the beta before we push it out to the world.

So look forward to some more visual upgrades in the next update as well as more information on the debate changes!

See you in the new year!

Goodbye Summer Hello Fall 🍂 Here’s what we’ve been up to over the past couple of months!

Levelling up the Turn-Based Battles

Our big focus for the past couple of months was to integrate the new SFX and do an audit of all the sprites and animations we’ve added for this battle system in the past year or so, and fix any issues. It was a huge undertaking – we reviewed thousands of sprites and made hundreds of adjustments – but it’s done! We did find a few “bugs” here and there – such as missing shadows, palette swaps, etc. – so there will have to be some adjustments that have to be done in the future, but most of this is solid now and won’t need to be changed again.

But now that all that work is done let’s show off some of the new enemies, skills and their corresponding animations and SFX!

Kickstarter Rewards

The in-game Kickstarter rewards are now wrapped up! We’ll keep the location of each backer’s house or NPC a secret for now, but let’s show off some of the custom houses we designed!

This backer let us do whatever we wanted – they have 8 cats and a small messy office where they tinker on things, so that’s what we ended up making!

This backer wanted a house that looks like it’s used as some kind of laboratory. It’s a mess. It’s disorganized. Books all over the place, tables full of equipment. The person who lives there is clearly not interested in maintenance, but rather science and/or technology!

This backer wanted a tinkerer’s house, with green being the dominant colour, and any accent should be bronze. The house should be a mess of broken and half finished projects.

This backer wanted a small but tidy space with the atmosphere of a pretentious snob. Something like BBC Sherlock’s flat but not a mess of stuff everywhere.

This backer wanted a small one-floor house with three rooms, two of which are locked. In the living room, there is one couch, and two armchairs. Their custom NPC would be sitting in one of the armchairs snoring with a book on his stomach.

Cave Shader Performance

We’ve recently been updating the shaders and adding performance toggles, and one of the last shaders we needed to tackle was the Cave Shader.

The struggle with this shader was that it was pretty well optimized to begin with, but we needed to move things around and split things up so that we could have the dynamic portion and a static portion for the toggle. We’ve also shifted some code around between the CPU and GPU to get some more FPS.

At the end of the day, there’s not too much difference between the two modes so we may need to revisit this in the future if there are any reports of lag or stuttering.

What’s Next?

Now that we’ve wrapped up the Turn-Based Battles (for now) we’ll be refocusing to look at the Debate Battles! Since we need to hunker down and focus on writing there won’t be too much we can show off visually for the next little bit. We’ll also be working on some small visual upgrades and additions to the maps in the meanwhile. Specifically the next couple of months will be:

• Adding Passive Animals to Olvia & Vescha provinces
• Rebalancing Debate Battles
• Rebalancing Debate Facts/Evidence/etc.

Have a good fall and we’ll see you in November!