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.
New Release Date, Playtest & Demo
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.
What’s Next?
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