I’m Derek, the designer and developer behind the game, and founder of our studio Past Imperfect Games.
As the game design and art has come together for our game, the team at Past Imperfect has fallen in love with this world of straw people, with their cute homes and their struggle to survive. I hope you will fall in love with this world too, and enjoy the challenge and fun of guiding these adorable villagers as they learn to farm, build relationships with their gods and trade their way to a successful city state.
In upcoming devlog entries, we will dive into nerdy details behind the game design and development, like “Why Straw People?”, “Why have gods and build temples?”, and “Temples? Or Factories?”. But for our first entry, I’d like to zoom out and share where we are at in the development cycle and what the future holds - and most importantly, when you can play the game.
Wheat & Wrath has a playable demo allowing players to play the first 10 years of the game on a tutorial map. This is a small map, with goals guiding new players to learn the mechanics of the game in easy mode. Experienced players can win it, but new players may still find it challenging.
We are actively play testing, so getting early access to the game is as easy as joining our Discord Server and clicking on the play test link there. This playtest demo is not feature complete yet, so you have an opportunity to help set the direction of the game development.
In the next 4-6 months (Dec ‘26 to Feb ‘27) we will release the public demo of Wheat & Wrath on Steam. The demo will be structurally similar to our current playtest demo, but will be feature complete with hopefully very few bugs.
An early access release of Wheat & Wrath is planned for mid 2027. This will include the completed base feature set, with multiple maps and difficulty levels. Expected time to play each session to victory is 5-10 hours.
Many city builders and strategy games spend years in Early Access, so it’s difficult to predict. Wheat & Wrath is a relatively small city builder game, so I doubt there will be a 3-5 year gap between Early Access and Final Release. But I could be wrong. At any rate, our focus now is getting to the Public Demo and Early Access, and building a fun, replayable, challenging city builder set in a fantasy world you’ll love.
Thank you for joining me for our first devlog. Don’t forget to wishlist the game and follow here for more updates!