Meow adventurers,
Welcome to our first Monthly Dev Log of 2026! 🎆
Since all our work currently revolves around finishing the third biome, we’re breaking our usual “What we’ve been working on” and “What happens next” structure and dedicating this entire log to the biome and its evolution ☃️
We also hope you don’t mind that this one’s a bit longer than usual, we just had so much on our minds to share with you 🙂
Back in May, we asked you for ideas for a cold biome. Many of your suggestions were surprisingly close to our own ideas, and that’s exactly what encouraged us to plan the third biome on a much larger scale. Snowsickle Peaks is meant to feel like the top of the world: dangerous, freezing, and far above everything else 🥶 From a gameplay perspective, it also needed to clearly distinguish itself from the first and second biomes. For the first two biomes, we had plenty of ideas as well, but often we simply didn’t have the time to turn them into truly new mechanics (something we want to change going forward).
Originally, we wanted the third biome to be cold at all times, forcing you to rely on fire permanently. In playtests, however, that felt more like constant stress than an interesting decision. The idea isn’t gone, we see it more as an option for a later challenge, when you can deliberately choose “I want to suffer” 🥶
Next, we experimented with fire bowls: scattered heat points that you can light, so warmth forms a kind of network of safe spots along the route. In practice, this quickly turned into a balancing nightmare: too many bowls and the cold doesn’t matter; too few and it becomes frustrating. With our procedural world generation, it would also have created a placement problem.
So we needed a tool players can truly control: the torch. You take it from the wagon, carry it with you, and can place it wherever you want. It provides warmth and can thaw frozen resources. In an early version, the torch was a real temporary weapon you could swing. But playtests showed that many players prefer fighting with their own weapons. The torch wasn’t meant to replace your weapon, so we fully focused on warmth and placing it in the world.
Once we committed to the torch, we could design the world more freely again. Initially, we had two concepts on the table: traveling along the side of the mountain with a constant drop on only one side, or traveling along the ridge at the very top. The first option turned out to be much harder to implement than expected and didn’t give us the freedom we wanted. In the end, it made more sense to drive along the mountain ridge, because it let us convey the illusion of height and vastness much better 🔝🏔️
Wild Woods supports local co-op, online co-op, and combinations of the two. All mixed setups need to work: two players local, two online, different latencies and effects, sounds, animations, and the world still has to stay as synchronized and clean as possible. That’s why we test new mechanics briefly in Unity first, then locally by running the game twice on the same machine, and at least once a week in a real online session with the entire team, because that’s the only place you’ll see the issues that slip through in smaller setups. Before bigger releases, we also get support from an external team that tests the entire game for several days. On top of that, we’re helped by a few community members who have found major bugs so many times before anyone else even noticed them 🙏🏻🥰
What people often don’t see from the outside: as a small team, we rely on external support for sound, animation, VFX, and writing. That means many building blocks come together at different times and require a lot of coordination. Mechanics and level layout might already be in place, but it’s only when sound, animations, and the final visual details come together that it truly feels “finished.” Those are the moments we love most: when everything suddenly clicks, and individual parts turn into a real biome ✨
Of course, there were still several other mechanics we would have loved to implement for Biome 3. For the torch alone, we also built an entirely new system that lets us temporarily swap out weapons, and that’s exactly the kind of system we want to expand and bring to life more in the future.
In the end, a large part of the mechanics had to bow to the realities of production, we already mentioned the extensive multiplayer testing. On top of that, there were recurring topics outside of the third biome as well, like the Anniversary Update we implemented spontaneously, or the security vulnerability in the Unity Engine that we had to fix immediately, which unfortunately triggered additional follow-up work, and many more things. With the Anniversary approaching in December, we made a deliberate call: rather than rush the third biome, we chose to put our energy into a dedicated in-game event and give Snowsickle Peaks the time it needed 🙂
Still, we believe we achieved our main goal: Biome 3 should feel clearly different, not just visually, but also in terms of gameplay. With the torch and the melting mechanic, we have something that defines the biome and gives it a distinct character of its own 🌨️🔥
Since this January, the core team has also grown by 25%, which means we’re back to four people 🥳 Right now we’re in the final stretch, putting the finishing touches on the new biome so you’ll be able to play it yourselves in March 🔥😯💯
With the third biome nearly finished, we’ll be updating our roadmap in the next few weeks.
If you made it this far, thank you so much for reading, have a great one! 🤗🥰