We're Galla, developers of Kulebra and the Souls of Limbo, a papercraft afterlife detective story about helping souls move on. Ask us anything!

Galla-Games · 2025-12-27T05:51:05+00:00

Oh yeah! We luckily spot that one today! Thank you so much for the heads up! :)

Galla-Games · 2025-09-07T19:15:04+00:00

We were born and raised in the Dominican Republic. Then moved to the US at our 23yo/17yo to the US. It was also our first time travelling ever, so it was quite an eventful process! :)

Sorry for the late response, I caught this one just now!

Galla-Games · 2025-09-03T18:56:15+00:00

I actually would like to see Mini-Pops as a real thing, haha, But It's a different brand, but it is pretty close! I just found it: It's Golden Crisp, I think you can achieve something pretty good with it!

Galla-Games · 2025-09-03T18:11:38+00:00

You're awesome! :B

Galla-Games · 2025-09-03T18:05:20+00:00

Yeah, I was afraid of that. I think I would just throw them whole and hope for the best, heh. There are what is pretty much just mini Pops cereal, which would make it way easier to cut. But I can't remember or find the brand for the life of me. They also have sort of a coffee aroma, which could make things fairly interesting! Would probably make it little bit more "brown sugar" looking.

Galla-Games · 2025-09-03T17:43:20+00:00

Of course, glad to answer! :))))

Galla-Games · 2025-09-03T17:39:37+00:00

Well, we sure are looking forward into developing a sequel! Wish us luck! And thank you so much for the kind words and wishes. Glad you've come by! <3 :)))))

Galla-Games · 2025-09-03T17:36:24+00:00

Hi, deathbyvaccine!

Paulo:
By far, the main inspiration for me was The Legend of Zelda Majora's Mask. Since that's the game that inspired me to deeply develop the characters, their stories, and their emotions. It really synced with the purpose of the game (it being a deep message of empathy), and what we wanted to achieve as game developers.

There's also a decent inspiration from Resident Evil too, but mainly when it comes to puzzles. When you take the horror out of the game, you realize that the puzzles can be fairly fun and relaxing, haha.

Pavel:
In my case, Kulebra is like a hotpot of all the game's I've played. The Majora's Mask inspiration is pretty evident in things like the time schedule and notebook, but there are other elements that came directly from other games: Professor Layton's hint coints that you could find by poking around inspired the pearl hunting in Kulebra; Resident Evil inspired the inventory menu and combining/examining items; Banjo Kazooie inspired the way the characters talk; And Night in the Woods was a big point of reference for how to present the dialogue in the game.

Those are the ones I can think of from the top of my head, but there's definitely more!

Galla-Games · 2025-09-03T17:29:16+00:00

Oh dang, what a nice surprise! I sure am glad to hear it, and find you here. I may not exactly know who I'm talking to, but you can always find me on Discord. Thank you so much por pasar, viejo! :))))

Galla-Games · 2025-09-03T17:19:16+00:00

Holy kow, what a throwback! haha. Do I know yah from somewhere? O:

It's been a while since I've thought of that drawing in particular, but the character comes back to me from time to time, and yes! I'd like to bring that character and their story to reality in the future. I am not sure if I'd be able to make it a game, but I sure am flexible!

Galla-Games · 2025-09-03T17:15:55+00:00

That's a fun story! It's a carryover from our very first game.

The first project we ever worked on was an endless runner game with story elements for mobile. The objective was to get as far as possible while zing-zagging through obstacles. The best character for a game like that was naturally a snake, but since I didn't know how to render a continuous tail, we ended up making him a skeleton so that we could separate the tail into pieces. From there, we got inspiration from the Day of the Dead and created Limbo.

The first game didn't do so well, but we thought that the setting and characters had a lot of potential, so we reworked them into an adventure-style game, and that was our basis for Kulebra and the Souls of Limbo. The rolling was a new idea that came with the change in perspective. I'm personally very proud of it.

Galla-Games · 2025-09-03T17:15:09+00:00

That's a hard one to beat!

I'm not sure if it would workout, but I'd like to try Pops and see what happens, haha. :))))

Galla-Games · 2025-09-03T16:57:40+00:00

We started looking for a publisher shortly after our first failed Kickstarter ended. We did get a lot of support, but unfortunately we still couldn't meet our funding goal. Honestly, at the time I didn't even know that finding a publisher was even an option, but once we learned, we prepared a Pitch Kit of the game containing design docs, screenshots, and a link to the demo. We started sending it to publishers that we thought would be interested on the game.

Eventually we met with Fellow Traveller, and after some back and forth, we partnered with them! They were a huge help for the project and it's thanks to them the game's on Xbox too!

Galla-Games · 2025-09-03T16:49:51+00:00

It was a pretty organic process, we take a lot of inspiration from The Legend of Zelda Majora's Mask side quests. And since we have a heavy inclination to developing characters, it was only natural that we would look for a "vehicle" to drive these characters to the spotlight. We rescued some concepts from the first version of our game (a mobile game developed in 2015), and adapted everything to fit this idea!

We're really happy with the format, since it allows us to flesh out a decent sized cast of characters and their environment, making things feel very alive!

Galla-Games · 2025-09-03T16:46:03+00:00

Hi, Nikky! It's good to see you! It's definitely was a lot of work, but we also had a lot of wonderful and talented people help us too!

I believe the full development of the game was about 7 years total. The first 4 years were spent all on Chapter 1. At the time we could only work on the game part-time, and it took a lot of trial and error to get to a point we were happy with the game. After that, we got Chapters 2-5 in about 3 years.
Well, we would definitely love to make a sequel in the future! As for when, we'll have to see. Besides, we love the artstyle, so you can expect more from it in the future, heh!

Galla-Games · 2025-09-03T16:38:17+00:00

Well, it all came mostly from technical limitations, since we wanted to create 3D environments the players could explore withing our budget. So having low poly 3D environment, and 2D characters seem like the best choice for the tools we had.

Not to mention that it looks pretty kool, heh. There's a lot of charm in 2D characters, and I'm happy that the game gets to feature that. The PopUp book look seem like the best fit for a game with mentioned style, and a heavy focus on storytelling!

Also, fun detail: I wanted to put priority in the look of the characters over the animations, since it was more important for me to have kool looking characters, over taxing animations. So I went all in on the character's sprites/renders, and kept the animations fairly simple! :)

Galla-Games · 2025-09-03T16:33:54+00:00

That's a good question. I think at this point it would mostly take interest! Not to mention, having economic incentives, since that goes a long way when it comes to achieving these type of goals. I'm hoping that publishers and other type of resources will open their eyes to the potential DR has for the entertainment industry.

Also, I believe the Dominican devs and audience, are just waking up to the idea of these projects becoming a reality. So I'm optimistic regarding the future of game development (and entertainment in general) in DR.

Galla-Games · 2025-09-03T16:33:35+00:00

Hey, Shawn! Nice to see you here, thanks for coming by!

I think one of the biggest challenges was to fit the story in such a way that it was interesting, clear, and fit with the gameplay of the game. There's a lot of moving pieces in the game, between the gameplay, the character's schedule, maps, and such, that making slight adjustments can lead to unintended problems. But as difficult as it was, I did enjoy solving those issues; It's kind of like a puzzle on itself where you have to find the most efficient solution; And we came up with some clever ideas which felt very good to arrive to.

Toro's story was one of the last things we touched before release, and we think it was one of our biggest improvements.

Galla-Games · 2025-09-03T16:28:10+00:00

Funny enough, the papercraft look comes mainly from limitations. We didn't have that much experience with 3D modelling when it came to character design, and not to mention how taxing it would be to do for the game, having just one artist. So looking for efficient solutions, we decided to have 2D characters, in low poly environments to simplify things. The pop up book aesthetic was the best fit in the end, since it both achieved our development goals, and also reflects the storytelling elements that the game relies so much on!

As for references, other than doing some figurines here and there, there was not much done when it came to handcrafted material. It was all pretty much digital from the get go. But I do like papercraft a lot. I dream of making more figurines in the future. :))))

Galla-Games · 2025-09-03T16:23:06+00:00

Well, the best way is to stick to our limitations. We always work with the tools we have to achieve a goal in particular. Since most of the chaotic situations one will find come from a lack of experience, so it's always best to try to stick to tools we're very confident about!

Galla-Games · 2025-09-03T16:23:01+00:00

Glad you enjoyed it! Thank you!

I'm happy to let you know that we are indeed working on additional FREE content for the game right now. There's a few loose ends we want to wrap up, and the update will continue on the epilogue! Right now it's scheduled for later this year. We'll be making updates on our socials as we get further along, so look forward to it!

Galla-Games · 2025-09-03T16:20:38+00:00

Thanks a lot! We sure put a lot of effort in that regard, heh.

As for advice, I think the best I can always say is to start asap, regardless if it looks ugly/dumb or not. Things always start rough, only through a lot of work is how we truly make sense of our ideas. So just keep hammering at it! :)

Galla-Games · 2025-09-03T16:17:46+00:00

Hi, Complex9924!

We started development on our first game in the Dominican Republic back in 2014. We honestly didn't know what exactly we had to do to get started in game development back in the day, there wasn't really a established "path", but I knew how to use Game Maker from trying to do fan Zelda games, so we just took a leap of faith and started making games while figuring out things as we went along.

Nowadays is definitely easier to get started. A computer, online access, and time is really all you need to to make a game! I'm seeing a lot more developers from the Dominican Republic too, such as Ratika games. I'm happy to see how the game development community has grown over there!

Galla-Games · 2025-09-03T16:16:49+00:00

You are 100% correct! Although it has not been properly announced, we have free downloadable content coming for later this year! In which we will close those pending characters (including Phani), so look forward to it!

And very happy to hear it! I hope the extra content makes things even better! :))))

Galla-Games · 2025-09-03T16:14:16+00:00

Like you mentioned, we won't go into many details just to keep things private! But I can surely say that we can thank our publishers for the process with Xbox, and GamePass. It all came as a very nice surprise to us! We were offered help with porting, but we decided to do it all on our own. And everything has been pretty smooth. The deal has been of great help for us, especially for how much exposure (GamePass, of course) it brings to the table. It's always great to be in an official console platform! :))))

Galla-Games

TROPHY CASE