Wild Haven Developer Log #3

Hi reader,

Thanks for taking the time to stumble upon this devlog.  As a brief recap, we are the two person dev team building Wild Haven, a nature ecosystem builder.  It has been a bit of time since our last update but in the intervening two months we’ve been diligently working on the game.  Specifically, we’ve been working on adding an additional layer of depth, the soil system, to your decision making for how and when to add wildlife.

The kind of soil you have is important for what plants can grow and how healthy they are.  We wanted to create a simplified version of this for our game.  We decided to take four components and incorporate them: moisture level, pH levels, organic matter and toxicity.  With each component, certain plants and fungus can only grow in certain soil conditions i.e. most plants can’t grow in toxic soil but certain fungus can.  You can see the current soil levels by clicking on an exposed tile and you can see if wildlife has soil requirements within the requirements section.  

To add onto this, we added abilities for wildlife.  Right now they are pretty basic with abilities able to affect the tiles around them by changing their soil properties.  We plan to expand on these systems by providing bonuses if plants have optimal solution conditions and adding unique abilities.

Based on feedback, we made another big change in design by removing the real time timer.  We received consistent feedback that it was stressful and didn’t mesh with the overall feeling of the game.  Instead, now each turn has a fixed number of actions and when you are ready you can go to the next turn.  We plan on adding an undo action button next and the ability to see your actions up to that point across turns.  Finally, based on feedback we’ve started to add tooltips to help you understand what the different icons mean.  We’ll keep iterating on this as we go.

For our next release, we are going into the holiday season which is busier for us and we want to be a bit faster with updates.  We plan to add an undo and history feature, add a couple additional wildlife types and clean up the UI for certain abilities. 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