[Dev Diary #33] A Year in Review: Gilded Destiny in 2025

Season's Greetings, industrialists!

I'm Marc, a Producer on Gilded Destiny. Yet another year has come and gone. As we wrap up 2025, I hope this year has been as gilded, merry, and industrious for you as it has been for us at Aquila Interactive. In this Dev Diary, we will reflect on what has been accomplished this year on Gilded Destiny.

In 2025, both Gilded Destiny and Aquila have had several significant developments. First, as you may be aware, Gilded Destiny partnered with the publisher, Hooded Horse. We also released the Closed Alpha of Gilded Destiny to our backers on Kickstarter and Modian! We have received great feedback and suggestions on Gilded Destiny from them, and look forward to sharing the game with a wider audience soon.

And before we begin some of the updates to Gilded Destiny, I want to express my gratitude, on behalf of everyone at Aquila, to all of you for being part of our growing community over the last year.

And most of all, I personally want to thank everyone at Aquila for making it a productive and enjoyable year. Aquila has grown significantly since this time last year. We've welcomed new designers, programmers, technical designers, content designers, artists, and quality analysts—and, we have built our global publishing and marketing team. To all of my fellow Aquila Interactive clerks, artisans, intellectuals, capitalists, bureaucrats, factory workers, soldiers, and aristocrats, thank you.

If you haven’t already, please wishlist Gilded Destiny on Steam and subscribe to our YouTube. You can additionally join our Discord or Reddit community to stay up to date.

You can find the video version of this Dev Diary here:

Without further ado, let's dive in.

Accomplishments

Sneak Peek of the Military System

First, a sneak peek of an exciting feature that we plan to implement in 2026, which we know is very important to grand strategy gamers—the Military. We have teased the Military UI and army units in recent dev diaries, and plan to share more soon in a dedicated Dev Diary. Specifically regarding the Navy system: A lot of initial design work has been done already, but we're still refining the design and plan to implement it soon. While we cannot show too much in-game at the moment, I can say that the Navy System will largely follow the same pattern and design we use for land-based units.

Summary

• Sneak Peek into Military Feature.

• Initial design work has been done on the Navy system.

Improving the Economy

Behind the scenes, our design teams are working tirelessly on bringing Gilded Destiny's economy to life through a major rework that we hope will bring a never-before-seen depth to grand strategy economics.

Summary

• Implementing the improved economy soon.

Leader Portraits

We recently discussed updates to the Leader system, focusing on our new art style, animations, modding, and the importance of Leaders in the game. Since the publishing of that dev diary a few months ago, we have finalized a few more leader portraits, with many more still on the way.

Summary

• Learn more here: The Faces of History: Leaders Update (Gilded Destiny Dev Diary 30)

• More leader portraits have been finalized in the game, with more still to be finished.

• Leaders will be the men and women you appoint to lead important positions in your country, including roles in government, research, and the military, including both the army and the navy.

HUD

Since the HUD Dev Diary in March, we have updated quite a few things. Whether