Download it now from the menu on the left, or maybe above on mobile! If you want all the details on what’s new in this version, check out the announcement here! I’ve been wiped out with the bug going around and that’s delayed things, but I’m still hoping to put together a big Dev Journal soon to talk about where we are in the grand scheme of things more. Keep an eye out!
Get all the info on what’s new in this update over here! You can download the new version from the menu on the left, or maybe above on mobile! This one definitely took longer than I’d hoped, I got carried away developing all those new skills and systems, but I think it does a lot for the player experience. The next update should come much sooner, the supporters have voted for a little update to add some much-requested features! Keep an eye out for a dev journal here before long talking more about all that!
The big feature for this update is the jump from “text game” to “text game with some flashy little animations!” I’ve had a lot of ideas for how to make Project Wild One more visually appealing and more graphically evocative, but it’s really tough to make that work when one of the core goals of the game is flexibility– characters can be many different species with drastically different forms, engaged in many different activities. (Even just the furries in the game will look drastically different from each other, but as written, the game could already theoretically support nagas, taurs, micros, macros, tentacle monsters, just about anything with a fairly consistent body shape. Slimes would probably be disappointing until I did some more work on the engine.) But yeah, how do you make any kind of art for a system like that without just slamming out an impossibly large number of pieces that each could only be used in very specific circumstances?
Download it now through the menu on the left, or possibly above on mobile! This was a HUGE update, so be sure to read about what all has been changed and added in the announcement here! My thanks again for everyone’s patience, this was hopefully the longest an update will ever take for the game, we really got a lot accomplished with this one! Keep an eye out for a Dev Journal going out to supporters before long that I think you’ll find pretty exciting, too…
This one has been a beast, partly because I have completed one of the largest and most important chunks of work for the project: getting the first chunk of the new system for controlling NPCs built and working! I’ll be talking about that in just a second. This update did get delayed some at the very end just because my personal life went a little crazy at just the wrong time, but it sounds like there’s a lot of that going around these days. Hell, the last year has been a lot of crazy stuff, but you know what? I made my first build of PWO in a similarly miserable period of my life. I guess in a way, this game has been my escape and my avenue for expressing myself in a lot of difficult times. Let’s get into what I’ve accomplished.
So where are we in development? The good news is, we’re very close to a new release! The bad news (for me) is that we’re in one of the most frustrating parts of the process. I want to make some claim about being done before the end of the year or something like that, but at this point issues keep coming up and I have to pace myself to keep motivated, so I’m not ready to set a deadline like that, just in case.
That’s the short version. To get into the details, let’s start with a quick review of what’s even going on.
On the long, strange grind of tackling this, arguably the greatest challenge of this entire project and maybe even of my career, it’s easy to lose track of time. When the last update came out, I mentioned that my next big goal was to finally and truly tackle the centerpiece of Project Wild One: an NPC engine capable of, in some basic way, interpreting the actions of others around it and choosing from the many different courses of action available to it in a way that actually makes sense. I’ve been calling it AI, but I know you hear that term used a lot for systems based on machine learning these days, and that has nothing to do with my work here– this is all hand-crafted.
A couple months ago I checked in with supporters about how immensely challenging this process has been, and how things were coming together, but it was still such a monstrous task that I could only barely even estimate how much work remained at the time. Since then, I’ve made several significant breakthroughs, and I’m close to a big turning point. Let’s talk a little about the pieces of this system.
You can play it now in the menu on the left, or maybe above on mobile! I made a whole bunch of changes with this update, so read up on all of that over here! I also fixed a few typos folks reported on the Discord since the supporter release. My thanks to everyone that lets me know when they find issues with the game!
Finally rolling this one out! It’s been a hell of a journey, but I’ve talked about the challenges I’ve run into a lot over the past few dev journals, so let’s focus on what’s changing with this update, because there’s a lot to cover! I’ve made changes across so many different parts of the game with this update, there are some obvious connections here and there, but let’s just try and organize it into major sections of the game that have been affected.
We’re putting the final pieces together now! It’s been quite a journey, and I’ve accomplished a lot I wasn’t expecting, as well as faced setbacks and challenges I didn’t see coming. Let’s catch up.