Hi reader,
Thank you 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. First we wanted to thank everyone that took the time to try out our playtest. We had over 300+ unique players through the playtest with a median play time of 20 mins!
We received a lot of good feedback on what made sense, what was confusing and some bugs that slipped through the cracks. We plan to take action on most of the feedback and all of the bugs. Specifically, we plan to change how soil is affected by wildlife and how animal capacity works. Our current implementation of animal capacity is not intuitive for players and so we plan to streamline animal capacity to a general animal supply. Wildlife will either add to the total animal supply or consume the total available when new animals are added. This way players only need to manage one number instead of individual ones for each wildlife. For the soil system, we are still thinking through the re-designing so stay tuned for that!
We haven’t just been reviewing feedback though. We’ve also been adding our next major system to the game, talents! Each run, players will start with a set of talents. As they add wildlife, and complete quests they’ll receive experience which can be used to unlock the talents. Talents can be as simple as giving plants an additional bonus or unlock new wildlife within the run. We hope talents will give players a dynamic way to play each run!
We hope to have an updated playtest with all three improvements ready within the next couple of weeks to try out. Until then, 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