Critter Cove News

Ahoy Critters!

Just a real quick note to say the second playtest is now live! If you signed up before reading this, you’ve already been approved! If you didn’t get the chance, we’ll be approving some additional play testers throughout April, so hit the “Request Access” button for a chance to join in. You can also join us on Discord where we’ll also be regularly handing out codes for instant access.

If you do get a chance to play this month, we’d love to know what you think. It really does make a huge difference knowing what people like and don’t like about the game and gives us a chance to tweak and fix things before launch!

You can drop feedback on the Steam Forums, Discord or via our form; and if you’re also signed up to our Discord, you’ll be entered into a prize draw to win $50 of Steam Credit and a free copy of Critter Cove! More info on how to take part is available here.

The Critter Cove Team

[h2]Atualização[/h2]

Olá, Critters!

Decidimos adiar o início do teste por uma semana, até 4 de abril, para garantir uma experiência mais fluida e divertida para todos os nossos aventureiros.

Pedimos desculpas pelo atraso, mas não se preocupem! Esse tempo a mais vai nos possibilitar fazer pequenos ajustes ao jogo e assegurar que ele está nos trinques para que vocês se divirtam. O teste ainda vai durar por todo o mês de abril, então haverá bastante tempo para se juntar a nós na ilha!

--

[h2]Update[/h2]

Ahoy, Critters!

We've made the decision to delay the playtest for one week, until April 4th, to ensure a smoother and more enjoyable experience for all our adventurers.

We apologize for the delay, but fear not! This extra time will allow us to fine-tune the game and ensure it's ship-shape for your enjoyment. We'll still be running the test throughout all of April, so there will be plenty of time to join us on the island!

--

Ahoy Critters!

It’s nearly time to set sail for our second – and final – closed playtest!



[h2]Playtest Timing[/h2]

You’ll be able to play starting March 28th, and the playtest will be available on Steam until the end of April, so plenty of time to check out the game.

This is a closed test, but if you sign up before March 28th, you’ll be guaranteed entry! To sign up, you need to hit the “Request Access” button on the main Steam page.

[h2]What’s New in Playtest Two?[/h2]

This playtest covers the first few hours of the game: the very start (including character creation), a little section of the open-world, and some introductions to many of the game's features like farming, crafting, exploration and tourism!

We’ve added the tourism mechanic and introduction, and this time the game will be fully playable on a controller AND in Simplified Chinese. We’ve also made some significant performance increases and Steamdeck-friendly updates!

The second playtest takes place in the same part of the game as our playtest from last year. It’s actually a little shorter and tighter than the original as we refine those opening hours, but we’d still love for you to play and tell us what you think about all the changes!


Don't forget this a playtest build of the game -- there might be a few bugs!

[h2]Win $50 and a Copy of Critter Cove in the Feedback Prize Draw[/h2]

We’re doing a little prize draw for people willing to tell us what they think about the playtest! We’ll be giving away $50 in Steam Credit and a copy of Critter Cove to five lucky winners.

To be entered, you’ll need to fill in our feedback form during the playtest, and join our Discord. We’ll provide more information when we launch the playtest on March 28th.

[h2]What’s Next?[/h2]

Our demo is the next step towards launch! It’ll be a slightly more polished version of the playtest and will be available on Steam for everyone to play.

This will be arriving at some point before we take part in the Steam Next Fest in June. After that, it will finally be time to release the game into Early Access. We’re currently planning to launch in July, but our official release date will be announced in early June with a brand new trailer!

The Critter Cove Team

Ahoy Critters! It’s time to talk about something that pops up in many life-sim games: Farming.

We don’t want to add anything to the game “just because,” it also has to make sense in our world, be FUN, and fit into one of our most important design principles: player freedom.

Improving the town for residents and tourists is important; but we don’t want you to be tied to the home island. After all, what’s the point of making a handcrafted open-world for you to explore if you only ever see it on the horizon, poking out from behind a field of potatoes!


So we’ve made the decision not to have a static farm – sorry root vegetable fans – but instead focus on “farming style” mechanics that can be enjoyed wherever you happen to roam.

In Critter Cove, any plant you can pick, you can grow – just throw the plant into the recycler back in town and you'll be on your way to start your career as a nomadic farmer.

We think we’ve got a few soil-utions (sorry) that keep farming fun and dynamic:

[h2]Planters[/h2]


You can place and grow plants within planters anywhere in the world. All the land-based plants can be grown using these, and we’re doing our best to make placement as unrestrictive as possible…

That means you can always plant loads in one area if you want to establish your own little “farm,” but it also means farming isn’t just about growing crops, but also flowers and other “decorative” style plants.

The right planters in the right place can give you access to convenient plants for your adventures, and can be used to decorate the town, increasing happiness for townsfolk and tourists alike.

[h2]Underwater Farming[/h2]


We’ve spent a lot of time making the world under the waves interesting to explore, so of course you’ll be able to take advantage by taking part in some aquatic agriculture.

Specific types of plants can only be grown underwater. Just like above-ground planters, underwater farming allows you to pick anywhere in the ocean to set up. Later in the game, you’ll be able to automate some of the gathering, too.

And let’s not forget the true benefit of farming in the sea: you’re not going to have to water anything!

[h2]Post-Apocalyptic Gardening[/h2]


We’ve been giving potatoes a hard time so far, but it’s only because we want our idea of “plants” to fit in with the colorful and vibrant post-apocalypse we’ve created. From naturally occurring drumstick bushes, to flowers that keep an eye on your activities, horticulture in Critter Cove is as mysterious as the world itself.

In fact, here are some previews of some of the weird and wonderful plants you can grow in the game when we launch into Early Access:



We’re busy cultivating (sorry again) plenty more ideas for farming and plants during Early Access, including creating healing items and even farming-specific plants for pigments in clothing.

But you’ll be able to check out Farming before we launch! We’ve added a proper introduction to farming into the new playtest, so sign up before March for the opportunity to jump back into our little piece of paradise. See you there, farmer!

The Critter Cove Team

Hey Critters... and Happy 2024!

This year is the big one! We’ll be launching Critter Cove into Early Access after many years of hard work! Look how far we’ve come:



It’s been a wild ride, and we’ve made huge progress since the playtest last year in adding new features, fixing bugs and expanding the world. We’ve also been working on everything from the way swimming feels to how farming works, and can’t wait to show you guys for free soon (more on that below).

We’re busy working on a full Chinese translation of the game too, and we’re happy to announce that both the public demo and the early access build will be fully playable in simplified Chinese. Currently it’s unlikely the playtest will be translated in time, but if that changes, we’ll make sure it’s clear on the store page!

We’ve also returned to self-publishing this year after parting ways very amicably with our previous publisher. We’re still the same core team and more active than ever, plus we have some new dates to share with you all.

[h2]New Release Date, Playtest & Demo[/h2]

Returning to self-publishing is exciting and allows us more freedom to grow in terms of our vision for Critter Cove, but it also means we’ve had to take back over the tasks that were previously handled by the publisher. We’ve moved around some resources and adjusted timelines over the last few months; so while we had planned to launch by early March, we’re now moving the release date of Critter Cove back a few months from “Q1” to “Q2” -- which is fancy marketing talk for “sometime around the middle of the year.”

We want to launch a big, chunky adventure with a huge amount of content from our very first day in Early Access, and we need a little bit of extra time to get there after this brief distraction.



If that seems like a long time to wait, we’re happy to announce TWO free ways to check out the game before we launch: A public demo and a closed beta playtest.

We’ll be making the public demo available a few months before we launch, but if you want to play even earlier, you can apply to join the beta playtest. If you signed up for last year's playtest, we’ve automatically approved you for this one as a thank you for taking part, so you don’t need to do anything at all.

If you didn’t play last year, you can register your interest via the sign up button on the store page. Keep an eye on Discord and X for more information as well, and we hope to have the beta in your paws by early March!



While both the demo and playtest will contain the opening part of the game that was included from last year, we’ll have a whole new range of features including our tourism update and farming improvements available right at the start. That’s alongside hundreds of tweaks, bug fixes, performance improvements, full controller support and many changes based on your feedback from the last test -- so it’s absolutely worth joining us in our post-apocalyptic paradise once again.

[h2]What’s Next?[/h2]

As we get ready for the playtest, we’ll be taking some “deep dives” (get it?) into the world of Critter Cove right here on Steam, starting with a look at how farming and cooking work in the game later this month.

We also post videos and updates regularly on X/Twitter, but as always the best place to hang out is our Discord, where we are happy to answer any questions and take feedback! See you there!



- The Critter Cove Team

[h3]Hey everyone,

It’s the Critter Cove dev team, Gentlemen Rat here - we’ve managed to distract Pokee, Sammi and Anchor long enough to write our own dev log!

We’ve also got a new exciting feature to talk about: tourism, but more on that below, along with a competition to win a copy of the game![/h3]


[h2]Lessons from the playtest[/h2]

[h3]We’ve had a lot of fun watching the hundreds of videos and streams our community has made. It’s gratifying to see so many people playing the game for the first time, so we’d like to thank you very much for participating![/h3]

CakeJumper getting a piece of Pokee's mind

[h3]The playtest has been incredible in helping us learn what people love - and didn’t love - about the game. There are a few things we’ve picked up from talking to players, reading posts here and on Discord and also just watching how people play that are going to shape the game moving forward.

We noticed a lot of things that people loved about the game, from spending an hour in the character creator making the perfect avatar to exploring the underwater depths and our open world, which we feel is a huge asset and unique part of the game. We’ve also looked at places where we think we can make lots of improvements.

Greater Motivation: The playtest didn’t have our opening “shipwreck” cutscene, but even if we did, we’re not sure we’ve given players enough understanding of why they are hanging out in Critter Cove.

The early game experience is a lot of characters randomly giving you a bunch of requests to clean up the town or fix buildings giving you a house, and suddenly an hour later you’re building this whole workshop. Sure, you might just want to gather the resources to stop Sammi from living in a tent his whole life but a bigger picture reason for why you’re here is missing from the early game.[/h3]

Please, somebody get this cat a house!

[h3]We’ve noticed players having a lack of a clear long-term goal leads to the game feeling either too open (in terms of the world itself) or too prescribed (simply following a checklist of quests exactly without any organic exploration). This has been a particular challenge for a limited playtest as the game does open up in mid-game.

A clearer “core loop”: There’s a single main thing that you do that everything else feeds into. This is usually called the “core loop”. In a lot of games that we’ve taken inspiration from, this core loop often involves farming.

There’s a lot to do in Critter Cove, like exploring, fishing, farming or crafting, but in the playtest everything can feel very separate. In the mid-game, the climb to new town ranks is the closest we come to the main objective of the game, but this doesn’t become clear until a few hours in. Even when it is clear, most of the town rank objectives are about finding a certain unique item or resource in the world, so they tie into exploration heavily but other systems - like personalisation - don’t touch them at all.

Tone - We’ve been enjoying watching people interact with the townsfolk, and we’ve noted that people especially love our more onerous and irritable initial resident Pokee and the way she interacts with players. We certainly don’t want every character to act like Pokee - even Pokee herself wouldn’t want that - but we do want to show more of the weird and distinctive characters and situations that can happen with the critters as early and often as we can![/h3]

What an attitude!

[h3]Today, we want to talk about our tourism system, and how we’re going to make it an earlier and larger part of the Critter Cove experience, as well as making a big step to solve some of these issues![/h3]



[h2]Introducing… Tourism and Tourism Rating[/h2]

[h3]Rather than simply washing up on the docks and starting to fix up old buildings, your job will be to help the town and its citizens become a bustling tourist destination! Every few days, tourists will visit your town on a cruise ship, and it’s your job to keep them entertained, happy and spending doubloons.

Tourism was always going to be a feature, although it was to come in after players repaired the Lighthouse, many hours into the game. Bringing it forward has a lot of advantages though - you get a real reason for being on the island right away, and you get to see a lot more of the Critters and their weird and wonderful interactions with the world much sooner. Most importantly, you get a real sense that every activity you do in the game now makes sense in your larger goal of bringing Critter Cove back to life, while putting some doubloons in your pocket.

You can do this by expanding the stores, food and entertainment options in your town, and raising your tourism rating. The higher your rating, the more new buildings you’ll be able to repair and reopen, bringing even more tourists to spend even more doubloons! Unlike the old town rank system, you’ll be able to unlock buildings in the order you choose which means you can create a completely unique town.

Tourists will be able to shop in the stores you open, eat at the cafe - even visit the museum. So you’ll want to make sure you’ve got the right Critters working in the right businesses (word to the wise: don’t let Pokee make the coffee). They’re also likely to get into mischief, hit by lightning, accidentally set themselves on fire or bury themselves in the sand. Just like regular tourists!

Of course, Critter Cove has a wide-open archipelago to explore, so you won’t just be spending all your time in town. In fact, with tourism as the focus, there’s even more reason to sail to distant shores and find special items, resources and Critters you’ll need to turn your town into the best possible destination.


We’re hard at work bringing forward these mechanics into the early game, and are looking forward to sharing more in the coming weeks. Stay tuned for more info, and check out our Discord, Twitter, and TikTok for more early looks at tourism and other features in Critter Cove!

The Critter Cove Team[/h3]


[h2]Psst… win a copy of the game![/h2]

[h3]Join the “Make your own Critter” contest on X/Twitter and shape our island’s next resident!

If you’re ready to make your mark in the vibrant world of Critter Cove, unleash your creative genius by crafting your very own character in our contest. This is your chance to design a unique Critter to join our cast! From animal townsfolk to quirky robots, your imagination and the character creator options are the only limits.

If we pick your design as the island’s next resident, you’ll win a Critter Cove Early Access Steam key!

Head over to this post for the full overview of entry rules and remember that the entry deadline is November 3rd - good luck![/h3]

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