Development Update: Jul–Sep 2026

Last quarter we promised a trailer, a launch window and our first public booth at Gamescom with a hands-on demo. All three happened. Here’s a look back at the show, what the team has been building since, and what comes next.

Gate Zero launches in Spring 2027 on PC (Steam), PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S. You can now wishlist it on all three. Wishlisting is the single most helpful thing you can do for us right now.

Wishlist on Steam PlayStation Xbox

In August we revealed Gate Zero’s combat for the first time.

Since the trailer, much of the team’s focus has shifted to the Ancient World. Art, design, audio and engineering are working together to make Capernaum feel like a real place you can lose yourself in: crowded streets, watchful guards, and a city that reacts to how you move through it. We can’t wait to show you more.

Combat in a Bible-based game sparked a lot of thoughtful questions from our community: how faithful the game is to the Bible, what the Eon World really is, and whether our vision has changed. We took the time to answer them openly and in detail in Gate Zero: Answering Your Biggest Questions. If you’ve been wondering about any of it, it’s well worth a read.

Read the full answers

In August we unveiled our new official key art, bringing the Sea of Galilee, ancient Jerusalem and fragments of the Eon World together in one image. Read the story behind it.

Our Discord community has already found the Bible stories hidden in it. How many can you spot?

From August 26 to 30, the team was in Cologne at booth E060 in Hall 10.1. Thousands of people visited the booth, and for almost the entire show we had a line and every PC was full. Players smiled when they figured things out, jumped when the snake boss struck from behind a pillar, and kept playing even when the demo got tough.

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In the press:

• PlayStation 5 Getting Intriguing New Historical Adventure Game (PlayStation LifeStyle)
• Gate Zero Shows off First Combat Gameplay Ahead of Its Release in Spring 2027 (COG Connected)
• Gate Zero Shows Off Combat Gameplay, Comes To PS5, Xbox Series X|S And PC In Spring 2027 (Worthplaying)

What the press said after playing the demo:

“My absolute Gamescom 2026 surprise.” (Rescru, translated from German)

“One of my personal highlights was clearly Gate Zero. The historical setting and the switch between tricky puzzles and exciting fights convinced me right away.” (Spielkritik, translated from German)

“The concept is bold, and the combination of historical setting and time-travel mechanics feels refreshingly original.” (NintendoFans, translated from German)

“If this is what you can expect from the rest of the game, it’s clearly something you should try.” (Arkaden, translated from Danish)

Players told us the story and the mission behind the game stood out to them. Your feedback is already shaping the game: many people tried to clear the corrupted vines with their sling, so we’re adding clearer feedback when you use the wrong tool.

In July the team worked together in the office to get the demo and trailer ready. Team members from around the world flew in so we could work side by side, and those weeks together got the demo and trailer over the finish line.

Capernaum after dark. This summer our lighting team gave the town a full night pass: moonlight over the rooftops, torchlight in the alleys, and deep shadows to slip through unseen. Every street, roof and boat is being built to feel like a real first-century fishing town on the Sea of Galilee.

Moonrise over the rooftops of Capernaum.

Torchlight at dusk, and a quiet street under the moon.

A fishing boat on the Sea of Galilee, built for the harbor at Capernaum.

Miriam’s new character model: the high-poly sculpt, and the finished textured model.

For scale: Max facing the serpent boss and two smaller serpents.

Updated level art and lighting. Here’s a before and after.

Many of the trailer’s shots were built and lit by hand, like this view over Capernaum at dusk.

New effects for the serpent boss, like its glowing weak spot, plus new impacts for every surface your sling can hit.

Sling impacts on water, grass, swamp and more.

Getting around the Eon World. With the Quantum Jump, you fire your sling at a target and instantly teleport to it, so you can cross gaps and reach places you couldn’t get to on foot. We’ve also added more ways to climb and jump through the landscape.

Balance beams give you another way across.

Max’s crane swing, new idles for the zealots, and a full set of new movement and attack animations for the wolf.

Our audio team spent the weeks after Gamescom on new sounds and a full mixing pass. Turn your sound on for these clips.

Listen for the parry. It always cuts through the crow’s cries.

Aim the sling, and the world slows down. So does the sound.

A serpent hitting the ground, and getting back up.

The whole trailer was made inside the game engine, using real gameplay. For the final shot over Capernaum, we added wind to Max’s clothes and the palm trees and polished every frame to make it feel cinematic.

Right now, our engineers are digging into crowds and performance in the Ancient World.

Every frame of Gate Zero has a budget. To run at 60 frames per second, the game gets about 16 milliseconds to do everything: decide what every character is doing, move and animate them, check what each guard can see and hear, run the physics, and finally draw the picture. Go over budget and the game stutters.

Graphics get most of the attention, but a living city has a cost of its own. Every person in the streets of Capernaum is making decisions: where to walk, how to get around the people near them, and how to react when you push past or trouble breaks out nearby. One character is relatively cheap. Hundreds or thousands, all thinking at once, add up fast.

So a lot of our engineering work is about spending that budget wisely. We measure where every millisecond goes and look for work the game doesn’t need to do. A guard on the far side of a wall doesn’t need to check whether they can see you as often as one standing right in front of you. The goal is a world that feels fully alive wherever you look, on every machine the game runs on.

A crowd test: people farther from you use lightweight stand-ins (Guard model for testing purposes), so the city stays busy without slowing the game down.

Some of our Kickstarter and Indiegogo backers have been testing the combat demo from Gamescom. Thank you for playing and sharing your feedback. We’re reading all of it.

If you’d like to try the demo yourself, come see us at Reach Conference in Orlando, Florida, November 5–7. We’ll have PCs set up at our booth, so stop by, play, and say hi to the team.

Each picture below is a close-up of something you’ve already seen in this devlog. Can you name all three, and the section each one comes from?

Post your answers in the Name That Asset thread on our Discord, hidden behind a spoiler tag. Everyone who gets all three right is entered into a draw, and 3 random winners get a Gate Zero sticker pack!

Join our Discord

Thanks for following along. See you next quarter.