At Project House, Leeds over 40 games will be demoing, along with 300+ developers, game industry publishers, investors and platforms in attendance for GaMaYo 26! Join us on the 21st of May for a day full of demos and round tables, networking and more.

This event is brought to you by Game Republic along with their Official Partners Red Kite Games, Xsolla and Double Eleven, with event sponsors Plus Accounting, Kudos Games and Steel City Interactive.

Today we are looking at ‘Gata Guressi’ which is confirmed to be at the event, from Elliot George Mann!

Gata Guressi, from Elliot George Mann

What would be your description of your game?

Learn to communicate with the people of Hierre by speaking their languages and understanding their cultures in this sci-fi translation game. Use your translation skills to navigate Kallay Tirridor, uncovering its dark secrets while solving the sudden disappearance of your brother.

How did development start? (Were there any key inspirations or ideas that drove you?)

Gata Guressi started out as a university project for a 3D modelling module, where I made a sci-fi bar with loads of characters speaking different languages for you to translate. The idea really stuck with me and I continued working on it afterward, reinventing the project to be much more linguistics-focused (inspired by other language translation games like Chants of Sennaar and Heaven’s Vault). It’s now a story-driven adventure where you’re on the hunt for your brother, who disappears on a trip to a high-class tourist destination on another planet. You go after him, but realize nobody on this planet speaks your native language. To find your brother, you need to learn the languages of the people here, and with the varied demographics at the bar, that means learning 11 different languages used by the different peoples of the Hierre star system.

Tell us about the team behind the game?

I’m Elliot George Mann, a game & XR developer based in Leeds. I graduated from University of York BSc Interactive Media in 2024 and now work on a variety of VR and AR projects at Reflex Arc (some projects here: https://reflexarc.co.uk/). I love all sorts of games, but language translation games have been especially interesting to me in recent years. The genre’s criminally sparse, so I’m really excited to contribute to it with Gata Guressi and hopefully inspire more developers to create their own language games in the future!

What kind of experiences do you hope to bring players?

I want players to feel like multilingual detectives, figuring out the dictionaries and ways of thinking of different peoples in the search for their brother. This game has lots of opportunities to learn more about the world around you, and it’ll come in handy to contextualize what people are saying and properly translate what they’re saying. The worldbuilding of Hierre (the solar system the game takes place in) is very dense – as you play the game you’ll pick up on the smaller details of the places, events, and cultures of the world, all to the end of immersing the player and making these languages and cultures feel alive and real.