I'm Marc, lead developer on Woodland Rebels. And in this article I wanted to share a bit about our progress on the game. The first playtest was extremely useful to collect feedback and I want to thank everyone who participated.
There will be a 2nd playtest phase soon with update 0.03. So I wanted to talk a bit about the major changes and additions to the game. The update will focus on combat and exploration.
When generating a new world, the game now creates an entire underground map! That is as big as the outside world. With it's own map, biomes, enemies, and mysteries.
The underworld has human mining camps, rivers, ruins, forests, spiders, bats, treasures, rare objects, and more. There are still some hand-crafted dungeons areas like in the previous version, that can be accessed by going even deeper into the caves!
For example, this is a new zone where you will encounter an old statue of the human king, the lore surrounding it, and some puzzles to reach the end-room with a boss fight!
The combat system has been improved with more accurate targeting, better hit indication, less floaty pushback movement and better animations. But also! Some enemies can now perform special attacks, such as charging, leaping or hitting the ground around them.
As an example, the lumberjack human can now charge in your direction, a red circle will appear, indicating the area that will be hit. During a charge, the enemy will not be pushed back by attacks, and you can't block a charge with a shield. Putting instead the focus on avoiding the charge, which breaks a bit the repetition of constantly hitting, blocking and pushing the enemy.
We've added new points of interest to discover on the map. They are objects or structures that appear only once in each world, and that have some kind of interaction mechanics (sometimes a secret interaction), that can be dangerous or rewarding.
There are now mini-bosses that you can find and fight. Kappa, Banshee, Yeti, Troll, and more...
Defeating one will reward you with an emblem of the boss element, which can be equipped in the accessory slot for a passive bonus.
The Engineer is a new human enemy that can throw bombs at you. Beware of the collateral damages!
Skeletons are underground enemies that will revive many times, unless you also destroy the pile of bones they leave on the floor.
Rats, Bats, Snakes and Spiders now also have nests that will spawn more of them!
Mysterious Scrolls can be found in the underworld, they normally help you solve a mystery, gain a reward, or access a new area. Can you figure out their meaning? (Scrolls in this image have been edited to avoid spoilers, you'll have to find them in game!).
The walrus herd appears only in winter. They come from the sea, and will migrate through the map as the days progress, and leave the world from the other side of the map when winter ends.
They helps make winter a bit less harsh, as they provide a lot of meat! But if you don't want to hunt them, they can also be tamed, and even mounted!
We are testing an alternate gameplay mechanic for when your character dies. Instead of having to reload, you become a spirit of the forest, you can then use that spirit to possess any other animal, and take control of that character to continue the game. You still have the option to reload your save of course if you want to keep the same character! We are really curious of what you will think of this one. It is a test and so it may be reworked or removed in future versions.
There are also tons of gameplay and QoL improvements. For example we made the Wanted Items mechanic less tedious, limited to only 1 special item per villager. You can now add multiple pins to the map, and can have more than 2 pinned quests on the side of the screen.
There are also many new craftable items and objects, such as a bed, tame potion, flooring decorations.
We will show the full list of changes when we release the 0.03 update!
We will start the next playtest in a few weeks, if you already joined the first phase of playtest, the game will automatically update. If you try the new version (0.03) when we release it, you can fill the form again as we definitely welcome additional feedback! If you haven't played yet, you can join the playtest on our Discord. Or Wishlist the game if you prefer to wait for the public demo!