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!