Hello adventurers,
We hope you’re all doing catastic! ☀️🍦😺
What we’ve been working on
The Guardian ⚔️🛡️
We have finished our work on the new Guardian character role and are super happy with how it turned out 🥳
The Guardian adds a new way to protect the team and take control in dangerous situations. We are looking forward to releasing the Guardian with the next update and seeing how you use the role in your adventure ⚔️🐇
Meta Progression ✨
We have read through your feedback, discussed different ideas, and tested early versions.
We already know one thing: meta progression in Wild Woods should mainly influence your personal playstyle, rather than unlocking global world content. In online multiplayer, global unlocks can become hard to communicate and synchronize when players have different progression states.
One system we are exploring is perks. You could unlock and improve them over time and choose one at the start of your adventure. These perks should create small but noticeable playstyle differences without making players permanently overpowered.
For example, a perk could make destroyed vegetation damage nearby vegetation as well, with higher levels spreading the effect further. Another perk could give the camp a small chance to spawn an additional upgrade podium 🎁😍
These are still early ideas, but always to have more personal choices, long-term goals, and ways to shape how you like to play 🤗
Rebalancing, Nights, and Resources ⚖️🌜🪵
As a separate topic, we are currently working on a larger rebalance for Wild Woods. This is not only about adjusting numbers, but also about making the overall rhythm of the game clearer: When should players gather resources? When should they fight? And how can upgrades remain meaningful throughout a run?
The first topic we want to address is “The Wagon stops at Night”, more details about additional topics will follow in upcoming dev logs.
Rosie Stops at Night 🫸🐐
Until now, the wagon kept moving even at night. We noticed that many players felt they still had to keep gathering resources during fights. However, that was never meant to be the main focus of the night phase. Gathering resources at night should feel like a bonus, while the main focus should be defending the wagon, positioning, fighting enemies, and working together as a team 🦁🐯⚔️🐰🛡️ By stopping Rosie at night, the main focus becomes much more obvious.
This also opens up new possibilities for the future 💯 For example, if the wagon stops at night, we can build mechanics around combat preparation, defensive decisions, and other systems that would be much harder to support while the wagon is constantly moving.
Our first experiments show that this change also gives players significantly more resources overall, because they can continue gathering more comfortably after the night. This is intentional, but it also means that we will most likely need to adjust camp prices again so that resource decisions remain meaningful.
All of these changes are still experimental and not part of Update 0.5.0. Our goal is to make the flow of the game clearer, create more interesting resource decisions, and make upgrades feel better throughout an entire run 🌳🦊
As always, we welcome your feedback here or on Discord, but especially since parts of the gameplay would change significantly, we'd love to hear your initial thoughts 🤗 So, what do you think about these ideas? Any other part of the current game balance or night phase we should take another look at? 🤔
What happens next
Continuing with meta progression and rebalancing
Giving Update 0.5.0 its final touches
Have a wonderful rest of the week! 🐯🐿️🐻
