The experimental release for June 2023 is here! You can try it out by going to https://kate.qteati.me/ — hold down Menu, or Left Shift on the keyboard, select About Kate, and click on the update button to update!

The biggest chunk of work in this release was getting proper support for Ren’Py games. This version features an IndexedDB bridge that implements a subset of the IndexedDB API over Kate’s own storage API in order to support save data for Ren’Py games exported with Ren’Py web.

Plenty of other things also changed to make Ren’Py cartridges feel more like a first-class supported runtime in Kate, including mouse support and a bridge for automatically patching Ren’Py specific logic to work in the platform. There’s still some features missing, such as text-input support (since Kate does not allow the cartridge to receive focus or keyboard input directly).

Support for Bitsy games was also improved by filling in some of the gaps with how we prepare the HTML to run in the sandboxed cartridge process, which can now handle Audio and Video elements (but not srcset attributes).

For the next version we’ll focus on support for synchronising save data (and settings/cartridges/etc) across your own devices; importing Ren’Py games directly from Windows/etc releases; and initial support for a Kate store to make finding and distributing cartridges easier.

The release is not happening in July, however, because winter/summer vacation. You should take winter/summer vacation too. Breaks are important!

See you again in August!