Wild Woods News

Meow adventurers,

It’s time for a big new update!

[h2]Balancing[/h2]
The idea behind the balancing was to make the game easier for single players, as well as making the hard mode more achievable. As well as other things, we've tweaked the boss attacks so they don't deal as much damage as they used to.

[h2]New Player Role[/h2]
The new update provides you with a new role: The herbalist.
Use your staff to heal those in need - or to deal out a few whacks to anyone who comes too close.



[h2]Official Patchnotes 0.1.2.[/h2]

[h3]New[/h3]

- Playable Herablist Role: Use your staff to heal allies in need – or to whack enemies who get too close!
- New Role Selection Menu in the Lobby: You now get additional information about each role before the match begins.
- A brand new skin is now available – unlock it by completing a new achievement!

[h3]Quality of Life Improvements[/h3]

- The rings below the players and their emote ping now always retain their intended color and are no longer influenced by postprocessing.
- Attack telegraphs (the red shapes before you get damage) are no longer influsenced by postprocessing. That should improve the general readability.
- Increased the enemies pathfinding performance.

[h3]Balancing[/h3]

- Player health upgrades now increase your health by a percentage rather than a fixed value. The overall amount of health gained has also been increased.
- The ranged character now starts with less health instead of receiving reduced damage.
- There are now more trees and branches at the start of the game.
- The range for charging a totem has been increased.
- "Out in the cold" challenge is now worth 3 challenge badges.
- The prices for "Detect Loot", "Detect Weaknesses" and "Sixth Sense" have been increased.
- Guarded camps now have a smaller trigger area.
- Added a cooldown after a knockback that protects your cat from another knockback for 0.5s.
- Resources are now longer protected from flying out of the wagon when the wagon has just been hit.
- The damage values of all enemies have been changed to achieve a more linear progression.
- Some attacks from bosses dealt way too much damage, these damage spikes have now been adjusted.

- All runs now begin with the same starting resources at all difficulty levels.
- The amount of cauldron healing has been increased on easy mode.
- In an Ambush event, enemies now have less armor in easy and medium mode.
- Damage from Smelly Berries in medium and hard mode has been increased.
- The health of all enemies (including bosses) has been reduced by approx. 15% in hard mode.
- The amount of cauldron healing has been increased in easy mode.
- Enemies in hard mode do 10% more damage in an Ambush event.
- The porcupines' arrows fly more slowly in easy mode and medium mode.

- Single player: The speed of the wagon has been slightly reduced.
- Single player: The number of hits to destroy road blocking tree trunks has been reduced.
- Single player: In medium and hard mode, you get cold more slowly.
- Single player: Get double the amount of herbs at the start of the game.
- Single player: Have now a 5% chance to get extra ressources.
- Single player: Now warm up a little faster in the fire range.
- Single player: Will not slow down while carry things anymore on hard difficulty level.

[h3]Bug Fixes[/h3]

- Enemies should now navigate the forest more intelligently.
- The knockback effect of the adventure sword now works as intended.
- Fixed an issue where incorrect text was shown in the voting circle at the end of the final biome.
- Fixed an issue where connecting with a new device in the selection menu prevented immediate joining.
- Fixed a problem that caused the wrong button prompts to be displayed if you lost the connection to the gamepad in the main menu.

Hello everyone,

We've been working full speed on the new update for the last few weeks. It's all good to go live now, and it includes a new player role, a new lobby UI, and an improved enemy AI:


[h2]New Role 🌿[/h2]

Creating the new role meant we had to pick one of all your great suggestions, as well as deciding on a new weapon, new visuals to match their skills and more. The staff belongs to the herbalist. They can use herbs to charge their special skill and heal others 🌿 So, if your teammates are out in the dark fighting nasty badgers and urgently need some herbs, run over and use your special healing powers! 🪄And while you're at it, why not deal out a few whacks yourself?


[h2]Improve Enemy AI 🐇🦡[/h2]

To improve enemy behaviour and pathfinding, we're polishing their AI. This is also in preparation for future roles.


[h3]Lobby UI 🖥️✨[/h3]

We reworked the lobby UI to better highlight the differences between roles, making it easier to see their abilities at a glance. The rework also makes finding your favourite skin a bit easier—though that part didn’t make it into the latest update just yet.




[h2]Hot Join 🏜️[/h2]

We're still working on the HotJoin feature! Implementation is taking a bit longer as we need to account for all possible scenarios when someone joins a group. Plus, it needs to be built cleanly so we can reuse it for the savegame system later. But be reassured that this sought-after feature is already on the horizon 🤞


[h2]Next Biome: Frostbite Pass (Working Title) ❄️⛄🥶[/h2]

We've started reevaluating our initial concepts for Biome 3 🤩 A lot has changed since we first worked on them, and we've learned a great deal along the way. This time, we want to approach things differently: instead of designing the environment first, we started by creating the boss concept and will build the biome around it. What we do know for now is that Biome 3 will be a cold, high-altitude region — most likely set in the mountains 🏔️🌨️


[h2]More Languages 🗣️[/h2]

In order to make Wild Woods accessible to even more people, we are currently having it translated into more languages: Ukrainian, Italian, Turkish, Polish, Hungarian, Czech and Hindi.

• Hotjoin as soon as it’s stable
  
• Implementing more languages
  
• Savegame (as soon as Hotjoin is ready)
  

The main reason is that we are just three people. Each of us takes on multiple roles, which means it’s difficult to fix bugs and develop new content at the same time. When a critical issue arises, the creation of new content inevitably has to slow down to ensure the game remains stable. This means we must carefully manage our limited resources.
We sincerely appreciate your support and understanding. Things might take some time, but we are excited and motivated to make Wild Woods the amazing game we all want it to be! 💚




We’ve just updated our roadmap! We’ve been listening to your feedback and hope the changes reflect your wishes and priorities. As always, the best way to share your thoughts is to join us on Discord 🤗



With that said, we hope you enjoy the new role, and we'd love to hear your feedback!
Have a catastic day! 😸🌞🍨

Meow everyone,

We hope you are all doing well! 🤗



[h2]Balancing, bug fixes and small improvements 🗡️[/h2]
We've been busy improving and fixing a lot of small things for the latest minor update, you can find a detailed list in our last patchnotes. For example, we've improved the visual effects of ranged attacks and made the knives a bit more durable 😄 If they don't hit anything, the knives will now get stuck in the ground instead of vanishing into thin air.



We've also been tweaking the endless mode, trying to make the difficulty curve a little steeper. In the long run, we're considering making the endless mode the default way to play Wild Woods - more on that soon. For now, it's still experimental, but give it a try if you haven't already!

[h2]Hot Join 🧒➡️👪[/h2]
This is still our top priority right now, enabling you to easily rejoin after a disconnect for example. We decoupled this feature from the Session Browser though - so instead of working on and releasing both features at the same time, we'll re-evaluate once the more important feature, Hot Join, is finished.

[h2]Enemy Behavior 🐰🐸🐗🐭[/h2]
We are in the midst of reworking some of the enemy AI with the goal of smoother enemy movement, especially to prevent enemies from clumping or getting stuck. This is a big one though, so it takes time. It's also a prerequisite for what we want to tackle next, which is new character roles that influence enemy behavior more directly.

• more hot join + enemy behavior reworking
  
• expanding the character role system and adding a new role
  
• endless mode iteration
  

We wish you all a joyful weekend! 🌞🎮🥰

Hello everyone,

the new patch has gone live and includes:

[h2]New[/h2]

• The kunai is now stuck in the ground if it has not hit a target.
  
• We added a shrine that you can only solve together.
  
• The Potion Station Wagon Upgrade's placeholder model was replaced with finished visuals.
  

[h2]Quality of Life Improvements[/h2]

• We reworked some elements in the option + main menus and removed most of the weird behaviour in some menus when navigating them with a mouse.
  
• Visual improvements of rosis "Resting Stomp" upgrade.
  

[h2]Balancing[/h2]

• Range role: can now attack faster.
  
• Range role: the combo now resets faster, which makes fighting feel much better.
  
• Reduced the amount of armor for all armor challenges by 1.
  
• Increased the amount of health the enemy has per crossroads in endless mode.
  
• Increased the amount of damage players get per crossroads in endless mode.
  
• Increased the amount of health banners get per crossroads in endless mode.
  
• Reduced the score multiplier per crossroads in endless mode.
  

[h2]Bug Fixes[/h2]

• Wrong visual effects for left and right hand while throwing knives.
  
• In the second biome, the player trader upgrades were different between host and client.
  
• It should hopefully no longer happen that the titles are not displayed correctly at the end of the game for clients.
  
• Some performance improvements (e.g. when entering the camp).
  
• Sometimes players could not join the local lobby.
  
• Sometimes some mysterious floating rings appeared in the level.
  
• The endless mode tile had a Russian translation instead of a Thai one.
  
• Chinese & Japanese glyphs didn't have the correct outline sometimes.
  
• Some font glyphs had boxes around their shape on low resolutions.
  
• Sometimes the second boss area could not load correctly, which led to consequential errors for clients.
  
• Parts of the Traveling Merchant were sometimes not affected by firelight.
  
• Cats did not stop auto attacking when you exited the menu after you opened it while holding the attack button down.
  
• Coins should not be able to spawn on top of Sydds head.
  
• You should not be able to teleport on top of Sydds head.
  
• The traveling merchant always offered free upgrades.
  
• The join menu had the wrong button propts.
  
• It was possible to insert characters into the join input field that were not allowed.
  
• In the menu, some buttons sometimes did not play a sound.
  
• Incorrect navigation icons were used in the options menu on the Steam deck.
  

Stay wild and pawsome! 🥰

Hello adventurers,

we're excited to see how many of you are enjoying our new experimental endless mode. If you want to share your highscores and see other players' final scores, head over to our Discord 👑




[h2]Upgrade Shop Fixed 🛠️🕵️‍♂️[/h2]
Bug hunting can sometimes feel more like detective work than development, so let us take you behind the scenes of the player upgrade bug:
Some of you may have come across a bug where two of the three players' upgrades were swapped in camp. At first, we thought it was a client-side bug, possibly caused by a network problem. So we built a tool to test our theory. The result was: Nothing, according to the numbers, everything was working fine. So no way to reproduce the bug 🫤 A few test sessions later, however, we had a breakthrough 🥳 The bug only occurred for the host, and only in the second biome. More importantly, only the game's visuals were suspicious. With this information, the solution was quickly found. To make a visual change in the second biome, we wanted to mirror the player's upgrade shop. This was done by adding a “-” in front of a “1” in Unity. Best of all, the solution was implemented as soon as it was found: Delete the minus 🚮
All in all, it took us several days to find the bug, but only a few minutes to implement the solution 😅

[h2]Bug Hunt 🔎🐞[/h2]
Thanks to your reports on Steam and Discord, we’re able to reproduce a good number of bugs quite quickly. Others take a little longer to find and fix (see our story above).

[h2]Several Performance Improvements 📈[/h2]
Through bug fixing and constant development, we have improved the performance of Wild Woods further.

Future Plans

Hot Join (joining runs that have already started)
Session Browser


We hope you all have a fantastic weekend! 🌞💚