Hey everyone,
First of all, I want to apologize for the long silence.
I know many of you were expecting the next major Wild Planet update much sooner, and I was expecting it too. Unfortunately, the past months have been much more complicated than I anticipated, and development slowed down considerably.
But I want to make one thing clear:
Wild Planet is still alive. I haven’t disappeared, and I’m still working on it.
What has been happening?
Development hasn’t completely stopped.
Over the past months, I’ve continued working behind the scenes on bug fixes, existing systems, new features, improvements, and content for the next biomes.
The problem is that progress has been slower than I wanted, and I haven’t done a good job communicating that progress with you.
At the same time, I started working on another, much smaller game project.
This wasn’t because I wanted to abandon Wild Planet. After spending years carrying such a large project mostly alone, I needed the opportunity to work on something smaller and more manageable for a while.
It allowed me to explore something different, regain some creative energy, and continue developing without constantly dealing with the enormous scope and pressure that comes with Wild Planet.
Wild Planet remains my main long-term project.
The reality of solo development
I also want to be transparent about the situation behind the game.
Over the past year, I’ve had to take part-time jobs alongside development in order to cover my bills and keep everything moving.
Naturally, this reduced the amount of time I could dedicate to Wild Planet and slowed development much more than I originally expected.
Building a game of this scale without a proper development budget or a full team has been extremely difficult.
Wild Planet has been an incredible learning experience, but it has also been a complicated story of development, funding, technical challenges, redesigns, and difficult decisions.
I’ll probably talk more openly about that journey in the future.
For now, though, things are slowly starting to move in the right direction again.
The road toward full release
My current goal is to create more dedicated development time for Wild Planet, push the next updates forward, and finally move the project out of this long Early Access period toward a proper 1.0 release.
As part of that process, I’m also taking another look at the overall scope of the game.
Some of the features and ideas originally planned years ago may need to be simplified, redesigned, reduced, or removed entirely.
I would rather focus my available time on making the core Wild Planet experience as polished, enjoyable, and complete as possible than continue chasing an unrealistic list of features indefinitely.
That means focusing on what matters most:
Exploration, progression, survival, crafting, base building, combat, the world itself, and making the overall experience feel much more complete and cohesive.
I want your feedback
This is also where I would really appreciate hearing from you.
If you’ve played Wild Planet, please tell me what you think the game needs most before reaching full release.
What currently feels unfinished?
What systems need more depth?
What parts need more polish?
What features do you consider essential?
What should be improved, expanded, simplified, or potentially removed?
And most importantly: what would make you want to come back and play Wild Planet again?
I’m not looking only for positive comments. Constructive criticism is genuinely useful right now because it can help me decide where my limited development time will have the biggest impact.
You can leave your thoughts directly in the comments or on the Steam Discussions.
Thank you
Finally, I want to sincerely thank everyone who has supported Wild Planet over the years.
Some of you have been following and playtesting the game since the earliest prototypes around 2020.
You’ve reported bugs, tested unfinished systems, explored broken worlds, watched the project evolve through multiple versions, and continued supporting the idea behind Wild Planet even during periods where development was much slower than it should have been.
That support means a lot to me.
And for anyone worried about the future of the project:
I’m not gone.
I still stand by what I’ve said before.
I want to finish Wild Planet and bring it to the best state I realistically can.
There is still work ahead, and there will probably be some difficult decisions regarding scope, but the goal remains the same: to bring Wild Planet to a proper full release.
Sorry again for the lack of communication.
And thank you for still being here.
More soon.
See you around, space cowboys.
— Sawcisson