Hello reader,
TLDR: Updates to build tree and scoring system added to demo build on Itch.io: https://rchava.itch.io/wild-haven
Thanks for taking the time to stumble upon this devlog. As a brief recap, we are the two person dev team building Wild Haven, a nature ecosystem builder. We received a lot of great feedback from putting out an early build of the game and want to thank everyone who is trying out the game in its unpolished state. From the feedback, we wanted to spend the last couple of weeks on two main areas; the first being the end game and the second being the build tree for the game.
Each run has an ending once you’ve reached 100 turns but it was pretty unclear how to compare your runs. To answer that, we’ve worked on building out a scoring system. Now when you reach the end, you’ll receive a score based on how many and what kind of plants, and animals you’ve built. You receive a higher score for adding more complex animals and for filling up the map. We plan to iterate on the scoring system with bonus modifiers and a task system that is to be implemented later.
The second piece of feedback was on the balance of the build tree. It felt like some wildlife was super important to place on the map such as Beehives but other wildlife went nowhere (Birch). We feel like this is going to be a long work in progress as we iterate through the game but we took another pass with a focus on how plants interact with one another. We’ve separated them into three groups, brush, grasses, and trees. Brush and grasses affect the type of trees with brush growing Oak trees and grasses growing Maple trees. Additionally, we wanted to make the choice of types of plants that grow on toxic soil more impactful with specific ones unlocking different parts of the build tree.
This leads us into our plans for our next release. We plan to add more depth to the tile system with our next release. Currently, there are five static tiles: empty land, grass, water, polluted land and polluted water. We want to add more complexity and interesting choices to this system by moving to a system where soil has different properties and different plants can grow and impact the soil based on the mix. Once again thank you for trying out our game and we would love any feedback on how to improve, any bugs you find etc.
-K & R