Welcome Photographers to the new year! 2026 is the year of the horse! Unfortunately we won't be able to add horses just yet – we gotta make far too many new animations for just one new creature to make it happen. Just prefacing that heh.
Anyways… 2026 is gonna be a big year for our development team. Lets breakdown our plans and goals!
Starting off hot, we have a patch for the beta branch 90% ready. The original goal was to have it done before Christmas last year but we ran outta time (and I won’t ask anyone to work over the Christmas break). This patch includes v1 for the camera upgrade system using the workbench, v1 of the in-game shop system for purchasing camera upgrades (toys, tools, throwables coming later), v1 of the bounty system for making additional money to use the shop. There are also a bunch of fixes for the photo saving system. We resized all models to be identical to fix clipping inconsistencies (still needs a lot of work to make it perfect), updated the model meshes to include buttholes and genitals controllers for animations, new animations for general acts (way more grooming animation locations away from water sources). We are also in the process of redoing all the sex animations with a brand new rig to focus on penetration quality.
Character customization is coming along great, with each photographer having a bunch of skintones, eye, face, breast, and weight sliders. Along with hair styles and colors.
Work will begin in earnest for creating the male variants of the existing species, this is why we focused on reworking the pipeline for the rig sizes and animations so we do not compound our workload too much.
As lastly we will begin the labor-intensive AI Lifestyle Director system and overhaul to spawn mechanics (things like adding species nests and the related systems there). The estimation here is that this will take about four to five months to build. But during that period the beta branch will be constantly updated with the new stuff coming in. So join that if you wanna see the cool stuff coming into the game.
Which means by the end of March 2026 the roadmap should look like this:
Green lines showing things we have fully added, and the orange showing things still in production.
The Lifestyle Director will likely take up a lot of the dev time and focus here, but we will also be trying to knock off as much of the Phase One roadmap as we can. The biggest priority is to finally start implementing the narrative content we have been sitting on for the longest time. The addition has been effectively blocked due to the shop, bounties, and global event systems not being in game as the early narrative content “introduces” those elements to the game world. This ideally includes the main quest line (for the plains region only) and possibly additional side quest activities. To make this possible as stated we will be adding the missing “events” system to the game (the rest should be done in Q1), the map tool ideally needs to be overhauled (but it isn’t a priority to get it functional, just if we have the time to build it). With the showdown system also being the least important update for the main systems. So we hope by this point we will have the rest of the systems done.
It is around this point, if we are hitting our marks and doing everything correctly, the dev team will be moving into what I call the “content cycle”. The game as it stands has all the bones it needs to be considered a fully competent product. Work will begin on the second biome region, the Forest. It will begin as a landmass expanse, followed by the introduction of new species. It is likely that we will be building one at a time as with the inclusion of male variants means we need to build two models and find two new voice actors to fill their roles. The Forest (much like the Plains) will mirror the content already available, things like main quests, hidden areas, nests, unlockables, achievements etc will be made in the new space as well.
As you can see, lots is coming in 2026! Thank you all for the support and care you’ve all shown us, we will make Sapphire Safari amazing, we owe you all that much at least! Bring it on 2026!