- Developer Log #14 - Language Support - 9 May 2026
Hi reader, Thank you for taking the time to read this devlog! As a brief recap, we are the two person dev team building Wild Haven, a nature ecosystem builder. We want to begin by announcing an update to the Wild Haven Demo with a number of quality of life features. We’ve added support in the game for Deutsch, Francais, Espanol, and Russian. Additionally, to help improve the accessibility of the game, we’ve added limited keyboard support with keybindings for the most common buttons. Finally, based on feedback from players, we’ve streamlined some of the early game text to ensure it isn’t as verbose. We think we are close to ready to announce our launch date so please be on the lookout for that! For a sneak peak, we are aiming for this Summer 2026! But in the meantime there is always stuff to fix, improve and tweak so we hope you all try out the demo and give us your feedback. We want to…
- Earth Appreciation Festival 2026 + Demo Update - 17 April 2026
Developer Log - April 17th, 2026 Hi reader, Thank you for taking the time to read this devlog! As a brief recap, we are the two person dev team building Wild Haven, a nature ecosystem builder. We want to begin by announcing our participation in Earth Appreciation Festival 2026! If you are interested in other nature themed games or dystopian games please check out the festival on Steam! The team at Slug Disco does a great job of curating a great selection of games that are focused on our planet. Additionally this year, they are partnering with Cool Earth a group focused on protecting the rain forest. For the game, we’ve spent the last month finalizing the build tree with all the wildlife you can grow within the final game and by our count we’ve added over 100 different wildlife that can be grown and nurtured through your run. From a basic shrub to wolves and eagles! We’ve also finalized…
- Wild Haven Demo Launch - 20 February 2026
Developer Log - Feb 19th, 2026 Hi reader,Thank you for taking the time to read this devlog! As a brief recap, we are the two person dev team building Wild Haven, a nature ecosystem builder. We want to begin by announcing our Wild Haven Demo and participation in Steam Next Fest for Feb 2026! If you are interested in trying out the latest build of Wild Haven please try it out! We’ve spent the last couple of months iterating on the feedback we received and trying to figure out how to build a game worth your time. To that effect, we made a number of changes to the game starting with incorporating the campaign and tutorial into one cohesive run. We leaned into an incremental design and want the forest to organically expand as your shrine becomes more powerful and you unlock more wildlife. Our game loop of explore, clean, build and grow is still alive and well. However, we didn’t feel comfort…
- Cozy Quest 2025 & 3000 Wishlists! - 23 November 2025
Developer Log - Nov 22nd, 2025 Hi reader,Thank you for taking the time to read this devlog! As a brief recap, we are the two person dev team building Wild Haven, a 4X nature ecosystem builder. First we wanted to thank the team at Secret Mode for including Wild Haven in Cozy Quest 2025! Thanks to the inclusion in the festival, Wild Haven has now passed 3,000 wishlists. This is more wishlists than we thought we could hit with our small game. Once again thank you to everyone who has checked out our game. We’ve been receiving consistent feedback through the Winter Playtest and we are humbled to see people playing our game and taking time to provide us with suggestions and ideas. With this developer log, we are releasing an updated version of the playtest that includes a new campaign level and the introduction of talents! As you add wildlife, and complete quests you’ll receive experience whi…
- Developer Log #12 - Animal Fest & Feedback - 10 November 2025
Hi reader, Thank you for taking the time to read this devlog! As a brief recap, we are the two person dev team building Wild Haven, a 4X nature ecosystem builder. First we wanted to thank everyone that took the time to try out our playtest. We had over 300+ unique players through the playtest with a median play time of 20 mins! We received a lot of good feedback on what made sense, what was confusing and some bugs that slipped through the cracks. We plan to take action on most of the feedback and all of the bugs. Specifically, we plan to change how soil is affected by wildlife and how animal capacity works. Our current implementation of animal capacity is not intuitive for players and so we plan to streamline animal capacity to a general animal supply. Wildlife will either add to the total animal supply or consume the total available when new animals are added. This way players only nee…
- Developer Log #10 - Quiet Period - 2 August 2025
Developer Log - Aug 2nd, 2025Hi reader, Thanks for taking the time to read this devlog! As a brief recap, we are the two person dev team building Wild Haven, a 4X nature ecosystem builder. Firstly, we want to apologize for how long it’s been since our last developer log. Even though we’ve been quiet, my brother and I have been working diligently on the game for the last several months. We wanted to take this developer log to catch up on what we’ve been working on and what our plans are for the game! To start with the long and the short, we’ve been driving to improve the game in two sometimes competing directions: increasing depth and refining our existing system. To do that, we’ve been working through the feedback we’ve received on not only the core mechanical loop, but gameplay depth, visual clarity, UI flow and general quality of life requests. Balancing both the feedback we’ve receiv…
- Developer Log #8 - Announcement Trailer - 30 March 2025
Hi reader, Thanks for taking the time to read this devlog! As a brief recap, we are the two person dev team building Wild Haven, a 4X nature ecosystem builder. We wanted to do something special for this release and so we are happy to show off our new illustrated key art for the game and our official announcement trailer! We are excited to have gotten to the point where we could officially announce the game and excited to keep building to launch! Our next game update will be a bit more focused on bug squashing and building out a proper tutorial! Once again we want to thank you for trying out our game and we would love any feedback on how to improve, any bugs you find etc. - K & R Log: Updates: Official cover art Announcement trailer
- Developer Log #7 - Wildlife Bonuses - 21 March 2025
Hi reader, Thanks for taking the time to read this devlog! As a brief recap, we are the two person dev team building Wild Haven, a 4X nature ecosystem builder. Our goal with this release was to release the bonus system for wildlife tiles. With this update, certain wildlife will have bonus requirements that when met will result in the wildlife providing additional coins per turn. These bonus requirements can be other wildlife being placed nearby or for plant life certain soil requirements. There are three levels of bonus: Bronze, Silver and Gold and each level provides an additional coin per turn. For animals with bonuses, meeting the bonus count against the available capacity and the system will intelligently prioritize meeting a wildlife's requirements over another wildlife's bonuses when available capacity is limited. Our next game update may take a little while as we have something s…
- Devlog #6 - Graphics update - 3 March 2025
Developer Log #6 - Version 0.2.50 Hi reader, Thanks for taking the time to read this devlog; another one that took a lot longer than planned! As a brief recap, we are the two person dev team building Wild Haven, a nature ecosystem builder. Per our previous devlog, we wanted to create an update focused on updating the visuals from 8x8 pixel art to 16x16 pixel art. With this update, we started with the goal of upscaling the graphics to improve visual clarity and make it easier for players to see what they were building. But we underestimated how long it would take, which seems like a running theme as first time game devs! To add a caveat, we haven’t upscaled all the animations for animals so we plan to keep adding new animations with future updates. To add to the challenge of getting out this update, we decided to introduce three new structure tiles: Junkyard, Metal Heap, and Trash Heap t…
- Devlog #4 - Undos and tooltips - 8 December 2024
Hi reader, You can find a new build on itch.io: https://rchava.itch.io/wild-haven Thanks for taking the time to read this devlog. As a brief recap, we are the two person dev team building Wild Haven, a nature ecosystem builder. From our previous devlog, we wanted to put out a faster update before we started work on a much larger update to the game. With this update, we’ve added a bunch of quality of life improvements(QoL) to the game. A number of ideas which we incorporated based on feedback! The biggest being the ability to reset the turn. If you don’t like the placement of specific wildlife, cleared something you didn’t want to or changed your mind you can reset to the beginning of that turn. To keep with the trend of QoL changes, we’ve added another step in the build process to make it easier to understand the requirements for building wildlife, and we’ve frozen the soil informationa…
- DevLog #3 - Soil system - 25 November 2024
Hi reader, You can find a new 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. It has been a bit of time since our last update but in the intervening two months we’ve been diligently working on the game. Specifically, we’ve been working on adding an additional layer of depth, the soil system, to your decision making for how and when to add wildlife. The kind of soil you have is important for what plants can grow and how healthy they are. We wanted to create a simplified version of this for our game. We decided to take four components and incorporate them: moisture level, pH levels, organic matter and toxicity. With each component, certain plants and fungus can only grow in certain soil conditions i.e. most plants can’t grow in toxic…
- Devlog #2 - Scoring and Build Tree Update - 4 October 2024
Hello reader, 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 hi…
- DevLog #1 - First demo release - 4 September 2024
Hello reader, Link to demo build can be found on Itch.io: https://rchava.itch.io/wild-haven Thanks for stumbling on this devlog, hopefully the first of many. As an introduction, my brother and I started building Wild Haven at the start of the summer as a fun project. Our development got to the point where we asked ourselves the question why not release this as a full fledged game and away we went. And now one summer later, we’ve gotten the game to a point where we are quasi-confidently ready to release a version to the world and hopefully receive some feedback. If you build it they will come, right? Our goal with Wild Haven is to create a sandbox where you as the player can build up the natural landscape while making trade offs based on the placement of resources. Each unit you build is a potential resource for another unit down the road. In addition, we want players to experiment and b…
