Developer Log - Aug 2nd, 2025
Hi reader,
Thanks for taking the time to read this devlog! As a brief recap, we are the two person dev team building Wild Haven, a 4X nature ecosystem builder. Firstly, we want to apologize for how long it’s been since our last developer log. Even though we’ve been quiet, my brother and I have been working diligently on the game for the last several months. We wanted to take this developer log to catch up on what we’ve been working on and what our plans are for the game!
To start with the long and the short, we’ve been driving to improve the game in two sometimes competing directions: increasing depth and refining our existing system. To do that, we’ve been working through the feedback we’ve received on not only the core mechanical loop, but gameplay depth, visual clarity, UI flow and general quality of life requests.
Balancing both the feedback we’ve received and the limited time and budget we have as indie developers, we’ve decided: 1/ to reduce the scope of the game by removing the Jumbo map size and alternate biomes. This will help reduce the pure volume of content and additional systems required to make a Jumbo map size fun and wildlife for biomes such as wetlands/mountains/deserts feel alive. 2/ to focus on adding depth to our current gameplay systems by adding more variations on existing wildlife from different combinations, providing a more impactful questing and story system during runs, and reducing the number of talents but making each talent more impactful to the gameplay. 3/ to help align our game more with the 4X genre, we intend to change how pollution works to become a more active challenge for players. Additionally, in the spirit of the genre we intend to add multiple win conditions for a run outside of just the final score. 4/ Finally, we made the hard but logical decision to postpone the games launch till 2026. We do not believe we have the bandwidth for an Early Access game and so want our first release to be the v1.0 release.
As for next steps, we believe constant but targeted feedback is important to understand if we are on the right track. In that spirit, we intend to launch a limited time playtest of the game on Steam in August. The playtest will focus on the introductory(tutorial) campaign and provide players with a much clearer understanding of Wild Haven’s core gameplay mechanics. We will post a developer log update when we launch the playtest and hope to see you there!
Once again we want to thank you for trying out our game and we would love any feedback on how to improve, any bugs you find etc.
- K & R