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Wild Woods News

DevLog March & April 2025

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 ๐ŸŒฟ[/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 ๐ŸŒฟ 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! ๐Ÿช„And while you're at it, why not deal out a few whacks yourself?


[h2]Improve Enemy AI ๐Ÿ‡๐Ÿฆก[/h2]

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


[h3]Lobby UI ๐Ÿ–ฅ๏ธโœจ[/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 easierโ€”though that part didnโ€™t make it into the latest update just yet.


What Else Weโ€™ve Been Working On


[h2]Hot Join ๐Ÿœ๏ธ[/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 ๐Ÿคž


[h2]Next Biome: Frostbite Pass (Working Title) โ„๏ธโ›„๐Ÿฅถ[/h2]

We've started reevaluating our initial concepts for Biome 3 ๐Ÿคฉ 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 โ€” most likely set in the mountains ๐Ÿ”๏ธ๐ŸŒจ๏ธ


[h2]More Languages ๐Ÿ—ฃ๏ธ[/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.


What Happens Next


  • Hotjoin as soon as itโ€™s stable
  • Implementing more languages
  • Savegame (as soon as Hotjoin is ready)


Why does new content take time? โŒ›


The main reason is that we are just three people. Each of us takes on multiple roles, which means itโ€™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! ๐Ÿ’š


Roadmap Update ๐Ÿ—บ๏ธ


Weโ€™ve just updated our roadmap! Weโ€™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 ๐Ÿค—



With that said, we hope you enjoy the new role, and we'd love to hear your feedback!
Have a catastic day! ๐Ÿ˜ธ๐ŸŒž๐Ÿจ

DevLog February 2025

Meow everyone,

We hope you are all doing well! ๐Ÿค—

What happened since the last update


[h2]Balancing, bug fixes and small improvements ๐Ÿ—ก๏ธ[/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 ๐Ÿ˜„ 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 ๐Ÿง’โžก๏ธ๐Ÿ‘ช[/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 ๐Ÿฐ๐Ÿธ๐Ÿ—๐Ÿญ[/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.


What happens next
  • 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! ๐ŸŒž๐ŸŽฎ๐Ÿฅฐ

Patchnotes 0.1.1.

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! ๐Ÿฅฐ

DevLog January 2025

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 ๐Ÿ‘‘


What has happened since our major update


[h2]Upgrade Shop Fixed ๐Ÿ› ๏ธ๐Ÿ•ต๏ธโ€โ™‚๏ธ[/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 ๐Ÿซค A few test sessions later, however, we had a breakthrough ๐Ÿฅณ 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 โ€œ-โ€ in front of a โ€œ1โ€ in Unity. Best of all, the solution was implemented as soon as it was found: Delete the minus ๐Ÿšฎ
All in all, it took us several days to find the bug, but only a few minutes to implement the solution ๐Ÿ˜…

[h2]Bug Hunt ๐Ÿ”Ž๐Ÿž[/h2]
Thanks to your reports on Steam and Discord, weโ€™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 ๐Ÿ“ˆ[/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! ๐ŸŒž๐Ÿ’š

Daedalic Publisher Sale 2025

Hey everyone!

Did you know? Daedalic is currently having their publisher sale!
This means big discounts of up to 90% on their whole catalogue,
of course, including Wild Woods with a discount of 20%!

Our publisherโ€™s week started busy with the release of 4X strategy game YIELD! Fall of Rome, cozy game Into the Emberlands launching its 1.0 version, and - of course - Wild Woods providing its first big content update!

Check out all discounts and games here:


Cheers!
your Octofox Games team