Can you believe Summer is just about over? The year goes by so fast. Let’s go over what we’ve been up to in the last month!

Wynoa Redo

Yes it’s true – redoing the Wynoa region is done! And not only is it done – we also completed adding all of the Passive Animals for the region too! The entire starting region of the game has gotten a refresher! So check out some comparison images below and some more screenshots!

GameMaker Upgrade

In addition to finishing redoing the region, Gataela is now sitting on Gamemaker 2026 LTS. We still haven’t decided if we will be parking ourselves here permanently or continuing through the monthly releases – but we upgrade once a year so regardless of what we choose that’s a 2027 problem.

As for the upgrade itself it went quite smoothly with only two known immediate issues which were quickly resolved. We also did a round of testing for the upcoming demo update and most of the issues that arose from that are directly related to the province redo or little things that have been around for a while.

Demo Update?

And with that being said – the demo update is coming soon! September soon! Probably.

The demo will mainly be covering the recent province redos, the GameMaker version upgrade as well as some miscellaneous bug fixes we have done since the last one. This will not include any changes to the debates or the turn based battles – those changes will come in future updates.

We have some bugs to fix and then we will push out an update so keep your eyes peeled!

What’s Next?

September will be focused around upgrades and demos. We will be getting the demo out to everyone (hopefully) and then upgrading our third party libraries.

We will then be switching into a technical improvement role as outlined in the last update. In other words: we’re going to make it so we can release faster with more stability and setup for long term success. This will probably only take the month of October to get done and then we will focus on gradual improvements side by side with development.

November onward we’ll be back to the two main outstanding items for the game: re-balancing the turn-based battles and redoing the debates.

See you all soon!

Happy Summer! We hope everyone is staying safe a cool as the temps heat up. Here’s what we were up to over the past couple of months.

Wynoa Redo

As we mentioned last update, there was a good chance that finishing the redo of Wynoa would be missed for July, and sure enough we have. That being said – we have redone a good chunk so we’ll show off some screenshots below. Hopefully if you’ve played the demo you’ll be able to spot these areas.

Why it seems like the ocean floor is now visible! Do you spot any trash?

Looks like a certain yard has gotten an upgrade – no white brick walls though.

Well doesn’t this look fancy? Care for a cuppa tea?

Where a house once stood now grows a tree.

I could’ve sworn there was a bridge here?

We’ve made some space for some animals! Wonder what will end up here?

Would you say sleeping on rock is an upgrade from dirt?

What’s Next?

Now that we are halfway through the year we’ll outline some changes/next steps for the next few months. We will be temporarily pausing our work on the debates for a little bit to focus on finishing redoing Wynoa, adding Wynoa’s passive animals and the upcoming Gamemaker upgrade. This is so that we can release a demo update later this year, which was one of our main goals. We hope to get that out for September / October. After which we will be focusing on both the debates/content and infrastructure for the game.

We’ve talked about debates and content changes before, but the infrastructure might be some new news.

The team is very small. Very very small. Throughout the years we’ve had a few people temporarily join to help test releases, but as we move towards completion, release, and post-release support the fact that the team is so small and limited in hours becomes a problem: how can we release bug fixes, patches, content, etc. in a timely manner without introducing more problems? How can we check to make sure that the balancing for the economy, exp, health, stats, etc. is fair or fun?

If you recall the other year we did some research and what it comes down to is automation and simulations, which is where the infrastructure focus will live. We will make it such that:

• it is easy to generate releases for itch/steam/everywhere else
• it is easy to upload builds (if you’ve ever uploaded a build to steam you know what we mean)
• we will not have to replay the whole game to verify some key components
• we will automatically be able to check for missing translation strings, etc.
• we will automatically check for some easy soft lock situations
• and so on

Eventually we would like everything to be automated (ex. cutscenes) but that will slowly be built up over time. In the short term, not having to replay the demo for the 100th time would be ideal.

Please.

So with that said, look forward to more tech posts come the new year. In the mean time we will be wrapping up the visual changes for Wynoa, doing some upgrades and hopefully have some good news in September. See you then!

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!