Dear Wild Life Community,
We hope you are all doing well.
We are excited to share an important update with you. But before that, we believe it is a good idea to take a quick look back at the path behind us, so you can understand where we are coming from.
Reflecting on Our Path
Wild Life started as a humble Patreon project with just two of us—Steve and Chris—dreaming of crafting an open-world sexy RPG. As our community grew, so did our ambitions and the team. We shared roadmaps to outline our plans, but unexpected hurdles meant we couldn’t always follow through as promised. Those challenges taught us tough lessons about the complexities of game development. Your patience and encouragement through all highs and lows have always been our anchor and we cannot thank you enough.
A Demo Released and Lessons Learned
A pivotal moment came with our Steam demo release. It was a sobering wake-up call, exposing problems in our development process we couldn’t overlook:
Our vision for the tone, story and feature set of the game had not been as clear as we had thought. The demo helped with nailing the tone and gameplay, but central questions regarding the main plot and lore remained.
Our environment pipeline was inflexible and too focussed on premature polish over defining the overall level structure first. Every change to the level was a hassle. Our assets and materials were also ill-suited for the performance requirements of an open world many times the size of the small demo level.
Our core systems, while technically functional, were way too cumbersome to work with - we would hardly be able to create and balance the huge amount of quest and combat content needed for the full game with these. Others, such as animation and pathfinding, would need performance optimization, if we ever wanted to realize locations with many NPCs.
All this led us to big overhauls in all departments:
- We went over the entire setting and lore in detail, really nailing down all factions, locations, important characters and plot points of the main quest.
- We went with a smarter blockout approach for building the new world map. This allowed us to make changes quickly and test quests and pathfinding without a location needing to be finished first.
- Code went to work on making the core systems cleaner, more robust and easier to edit before we would throw more content into them.
Putting in this effort on the foundations is now paying off and development is running smoother than ever.
Creating the demo also convinced us to make the leap to Unreal Engine 5. The transition has been quite bumpy, to say the least. But it has been worth it for us, as the open world tools it offers, most importantly Nanite, World Partition and PCG now allow our environment team to build our world map much more efficiently. It would have been a major struggle to realize a map of such size and detail on UE4, if we could have done it at all.
Why This Time is Different
Today, Wild Life rests on its strongest foundation yet. Here’s what has changed since the Demo:
- Strengthened Team: Finding the right people for your team is always a difficult process. After some growing pains, we’ve assembled an amazing crew over the years, also bringing in seasoned game developers with a track record of shipping successful titles. Their expertise makes us more confident than ever that we can overcome any obstacles thrown our way.
- A Smarter Workflow: Our improved, iterative process makes asset creation more straightforward, predictable and structured, ensuring a steady speed of development.
- Core Systems Locked In: Dialogue, combat, NPC routines and navigation are no longer just plans or prototypes - they’re stable, tested, and maintainable systems.
- Unreal Engine 5 Power: UE5’s tools are now well integrated into our pipeline, unlocking capabilities that we couldn't achieve with Unreal Engine 4.
Our Final Roadmap: From Here to Launch
We’re proud to present our final roadmap—the battle plan to bring Wild Life to completion:
- Rooted in Reality: This isn’t a wishlist of maybes and nice-to-haves. It’s a definitive task list based on finished systems, a proven workflow, and a clear endpoint.
- Launch Window Locked: Wild Life will launch on Steam as a FULL RELEASE—not Early Access—between August and December 2026. Expect the complete story of Wild Life on day one, with the sandbox editor following shortly after as a free update. This will ensure that both modes can each receive our full attention for their releases.
Summary of Our Development Process
Our task planning for the game is straightforward. In Trello, we’ve captured about 90% of the tasks required to complete the game. Our sprints span two months each, and at the end of every sprint—aligned with the end of the month as listed in Trello—we hold a meeting. During this meeting, we review whether we’re on schedule and make any necessary adjustments to the plan.
The planning process is split into two phases:
- Rough Planning: This has already been completed for the entire development period. We analyzed all tasks and desired game content and roughly distributed them across the sprints.
- Detailed Planning: The detailed plan for the first half of the year is finished. Once the first half concludes, we’ll create the detailed plan for the second half. In this phase, we dive into each task, discussing its content, dependencies, estimated duration, and who will handle it.
This structured approach ensures we work efficiently while remaining flexible to adapt as needed.
This roadmap is our leap of faith, and we’re going all-in—no half-measures, no turning back. We’ll pour every last drop of ourselves into making Wild Life real, and we won’t rest until it’s in your hands.
What’s Next
Behind the scenes, we’re tantalizingly close to being feature complete. All our open questions are answered and content production is going full steam ahead in all departments.
We invite you to follow our progress on the Trello board and join the conversation on Discord. Your feedback keeps us focused and motivated!
A Final Thank You
None of this would be possible without you. Your support and critique has fueled us through every trial, and we’re determined to make Wild Life worth the wait. Let’s make this shared dream a reality - together.
With deepest gratitude,
The Wild Life Team