Frameland – A short RPG with a big heart

Version 1.2 is here!

This late-game update brings fresh side content, powerful gear, tougher enemies, and hidden secrets. Whether you're exploring new areas or revisiting old ones, there’s plenty to discover!

Check it out here!

Explore New Territories, Revisit Familiar Grounds

The airship's fast travel system has now been unlocked! Give previously-seen locations like Jasper, Trovo & Ailròs a second visit and discover what has changed during the events of the game. Or discover brand-new places where additional challenges wait!

The Facility

Located on an island far from civilization, this place seems a bit ... different. But not only that, the Swarms seem to be much stronger as well. If you're looking for a challenge, this is it!

Weapons, Remnants & Loot

Over 10 new weapons & armors including each character's ultimate gear!

2 new remnants with powerful abilities

Many hidden treasures containing stat boosts and Sol

And more!

6 new enemies in previous locations

New ability for the Borax Remnant: Shieldwall (Lv4)

Fixed an issue where you could get softlocked at a savepoint. Thanks for the report @Litronom!

Fixed several small typos

Minor bugfixes

Dear friends,

We’re excited to launch version 1.1 of Frameland today!

German Translation

As promised, we're releasing the German translation today. Since our team is German-speaking, we handled the translation ourselves, so we're confident that both the English and German experiences are equal in quality.

For now, you’ll need to switch the language in Settings on the Title Screen. Automatic language detection based on Steam settings is not supported.

Reviews & Feedback

If you’re enjoying the game, leaving a review on Steam would be awesome! Every single review makes a big difference in our visibility, helping more players discover the game.

We also love reading your honest feedback—what you like and what could be improved—whether in Steam discussions, on Discord, or on our social media, so we can continue refining the game.

Patch Notes

We've fixed a few minor bugs:

Resolved an issue with the castle minigame that could cause players to be placed out of bounds

Fixed screen flickering that occasionally occurred after battles

Corrected an issue where an ability wouldn’t KO an enemy even when their HP reached 0

Fixed item descriptions to prevent them from breaking out of the screen during battles

Minor script and wording improvements

Thanks for the amazing feedback so far! Next stop: side content — we've got some exciting stuff that we will announce soon!

Dear friends,

After more than eight years of development, we are thrilled to announce that the full version of "Frameland: A Binary Tale" is OUT NOW!

Starting today, you can dive headfirst into the world of Condorra and accompany Ryiu on his journey home — from start to finish. We believe that if you're a fan of JRPGs, engaging combat, 90s gaming nostalgia, captivating stories, and immersive worlds, then Frameland is for you!

If you're still on the fence, try the demo, where you can play the first two chapters (out of seven). Save games carry over, so if you decide to buy, you can pick up where you left off!

Be sure to check it out soon, as there’s a 15% launch discount available for a limited time.

🚀 What's still to come

We want to be upfront: As first-time indie developers, we underestimated the effort. There are a few things that didn't make the cut for release date, but we'll deliver them as soon as possible.

🇩🇪 German Translation — November 1

We need two additional days to flesh out the German translation. It's 99 % done, but we want to make sure that the English and German version of the game are of equal quality, and free of any mistakes. This final polish needs just a little more time.

🎮 Side Content — Early November

The main story is 100% complete, but additional late-game side content will unlock at a later date. Think of it as a free DLC — no spoilers, but it’s worth the wait!

Even without this content, playtime will still range from 8–15 hours, depending on your playstyle. We’ll announce a release date for this content soon, but it’s a matter of days, not weeks.

This is a dream come true for the three of us. We're deeply grateful for the amazing support from all our talented freelancers, our testers, our community, and — of course — from you.

🥳 Happy Launch Day! 🥳

Cheers, Markus, Sebastian & Mario

We’re excited to announce that Frameland will be part of the Steam Turn-Based RPG Fest! 🥳 As the name suggests, this event celebrates turn-based role-playing games — just like Frameland!

To mark the occasion, we’re thrilled to unveil our first playable demo. We can’t wait for you to dive in, experience our timed battle system, and get your first look at the world and narrative we’ve been building.

⬇️ Download it here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2137750/Frameland_A_Binary_Tale/

But that’s not all! We’re also happy to reveal the full release date — and the wait is almost over! After eight years of hard work, Frameland: A Binary Tale will release worldwide on October 30th, 2024 for Windows and Mac, available in English and German.

Here’s how you can get involved:

Download and play the demo

Share your thoughts with us! Either here, on our other socials, our Discord or via mail

Wishlist the game on Steam

Spread the world and tell your friends about Frameland

We’re absolutely thrilled for you to finally step into the world of Frameland. Thank you for your patience, and we hope the adventure will be as unforgettable for you as it has been for us in creating it.

Dear friends,

What a year! 2023 was arguably the most productive in our seven-year history. Here are some stats:

Two weeklong in-person workshops in lovely Vienna

Roughly 1,000 commits

Countless empty bottles of Mate

But most importantly, it was the year where Frameland finally came together. What was previously just a loose collection of maps, scripts, scenes and music — now becomes an actual game.

This was an overwhelming feeling for us, as this is what we've been working so hard to achieve. And as we were approaching the end of 2023, we realized two things: "Hey, this is fun!" but also "This needs more polish."

And with that, we’ll give you the final status update of 2023:

If you take a look at the calendar, you might realize we're not gonna make a 2023 release. We realized that the game is still a bit rough around the edges in certain parts. This is not us being perfectionistic, we just need to sand off these edges to make a consistently good experience. It was always quality over quantity for us, and as a short RPG, we want to make sure every scene, every fight, every map is as good as it can be.

So, we need to postpone to 2024. But we will be releasing next year, that's a promise!

We also want to say thank you. Thank you for your comments, your encouragement, your patience, and especially the amazing response to our gameplay trailer. Mark our words. 2024 will be the year of Frameland!

Happy new year from all of us.

Watch Frameland's first trailer!

Friends, we have just released our first official trailer! While we're focusing on the timed-and-turn-based combat here, we also offer glimpses into the world of Condorra — and our protagonist's journey back home.

It'd mean the world to us if you shared the trailer, and — if you haven't already — wishlist the game on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2137750/Frameland_A_Binary_Tale/

Let's talk about the music of Frameland today! As a game that prominently features a retro pixel art aesthetic, it was only natural for the music to reflect that as well.

Realistic-sounding instruments would feel out of place, and so we decided to adhere to the limitations of the Super Nintendo, music-wise. Listen to the first town's theme as an example:

The biggest limitation here is the 8-note polyphony. That means only 8 sounds can play at the same time, including percussion and drums!

To get that typical SNES feel, you'd also need to have the right samples. As file size was an issue in the 90s, these samples were usually very short and looped to allow for longer notes.

Also, you'd typically just have one pitch and let the system play the sample faster or slower to allow for different notes — yet another thing that gives the SNES its characteristic sound!

In order to find samples with the right ✨ vibe ✨, we found and sampled some vintage machines:

A toy piano from the late 90s

Two different synthesizers/romplers from the late 80s

Input everything into a DAW (music software) of your choice, load up your favorite sampler (we love chipsynth SFC) and off you go:

Here's the first status update for Frameland! We want to keep you posted with these as we approach the finish line. As this is the first post, a quick explanation about what means what:

Maps: Layout and art for the maps/areas the game is set in

Story: Mandatory story segments like cutscenes

Gameplay: Includes battles, mini games, equipment and the UI

Graphics: Sprites, animations, bosses, facesets – all visuals

Environment: Optional NPCs, lore, and object descriptions

Music/Sound: The game's original soundtrack and sound effects

We've made especially good progress on the story in the past weeks, especially on the more story-heavy sections of the game where all the big revelations come to light!

We've implemented a brand-new lighting system into our game, Frameland. This post shows the process of how we got there! But first, a before-and-after:

This post is a bit more technical, but you should still be able to follow along as a non-programmer.

1 – Starting point This cave is alright, but it looks a bit bland: everything's well-lit — too well-lit! That's not how light works in a cave, and it lacks atmosphere.

2 – Adding light sources The first step is to define points where light will be emitted, which we call light sources. We want everything to be darker than usual, except around a light source. So we "carve" out some space where things are NOT dark.

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🗒️Note: This is a shader, a program that defines what happens for each pixel on screen. Here, we use GLSL (Open GL Shading Language).

3 – Removing smoothness In a pixel-art game, a smooth lighting system looks out of place. Instead of nearly infinite shades, we want discrete steps. We can achieve this by using a process called quantization, which reduces the number of values. In our case, we'll reduce the number of colors from our light source circle to three:

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4 – Pixel density As our sprites and maps have a different pixel density (pixels appear 'larger'), we need to adapt our new lights to that. We'll first reduce our resolution to 50%. Then, we use that low-res version and scale it up to 2x. This achieves a more pixelated look. (You may only be able to see the difference when you enlarge the images.)

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5 – Overlapping lights Right now, if two light sources overlap, their color will add to each other, creating a weird bright spot in the middle. Instead, they should merge together — like a 'blob'.

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6 – Color temperature But the light seems a bit cold for a torch. Let's change that by adding a light color that we can change per map — the color temperature.

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7 – Animation And, for a final touch, let's make the light move a bit.

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This system is far from perfect, and there is still room for improvement, but we're pretty happy with the results.

Timed-Turn Based Battles!

[🔊 audio on for narration]

Dear Tumblr, thanks for the warm welcome. 💙

Here's a short overview of our battle system. It's all about the right timing! You can boost attacks, defense — even items. Practice makes perfect!

Dear people of Tumblr,

We're a small Austrian-German team that's hard at work building Frameland: A Binary Tale — a short RPG with a big heart. 💙

With just 6–8 hours of playtime, our aim is to deliver quality over quantity.

Development started all the way back in 2016, and now, in our seventh year, we're slowly but steadily approaching the release! The game is inspired by the (mostly Japanese) RPG classics of the '90s — but with some unique modern twists and turns.

We're super excited to show you all the hard work we've put in so far. Hope you like what we're about to show you!

Big shoutout to our portrait artist @sabbitabbi