Thank you all for the amazing start! The Wandering Village has sold 50’000 copies in the first two days and currently has an 89% positive rating.
After putting our hearts and souls into this game for the past 3 years, we’re honestly just super relieved that you guys seem to enjoy it so far!
However we are also aware that many things still need to be improved. We’re reading through all your submitted feedback and will have a meeting with the whole team next Wednesday to plan the next few weeks. In the meantime, we have started working on a first small patch, fixing some of the bugs you reported, and adding a setting to switch the primary mouse button.
Aside from fixing and improving current features, we also have so many plans for new ones! We're planning to stay in Early Access for at least one year and are aiming to update the game continuously during this time. Following is a list roughly outlining our current update plans. While some features are already confirmed, we are constantly listening to your feedback and adapting our plans accordingly :)
Confirmed features: New biome - Water New biome - Ruins New locations and events New buildings Tameable birds Flying merchants to trade with An additional Onbu skin Controller support Steam Deck support Xbox version
Things we want to improve: More story content New and improved Onbu interactions More city building mechanics Better villager AI Better balancing of the difficulty UI interactions/understandability
Some of these features were stretch goals that we reached during our Kickstarter :) Onbu Petting has already been implemented a while back!
The future of the game looks bright and our team will have a celebration dinner next week and rest up a bit after the intense launch days. Once again, thank you all from the bottom of our hearts! We can’t wait to hop back onto our Onbu and travel into these bright new lands with you ✨
Cheers & Thanks, Stray Fawn Studio
Steam Early Access Out Now!
Dear Onbu Riders
The day has finally come :D After three years of work, The Wandering Village has just launched into Steam Early Access! There is a 10% launch discount for a limited time. We have also released a collector’s edition that includes the soundtrack and some special goodies :)
While this is a day for celebration (pizza for the whole team has been ordered!), it’s only the beginning of our journey on the Onbu. We’re planning to keep working on the game for at least a year (most likely longer), so if you’d like to take a look at what’s next, check out our roadmap.
A huge thank you to everybody who participated in our beta testing. As previously announced, all beta keys have now been deactivated. Please check the beta channel on our Discord for further infos.
If you encounter any bugs in the game, please refer to this post in the Steam forums. We’d greatly appreciate it if you could report bugs with the in-game bug report tool so we can fix them :)
We’re so happy to have finally taken this next big step and can’t wait to keep improving the game with all of you :D
We have finally chosen a release date for The Wandering Village! The game will be released into Steam Early Access next week on September 14th, 9AM PDT. We have also decided on a price point: $24.99. There will be an additional 10% launch discount. 🥳
We’re now entering the most crucial phase to make The Wandering Village a success: its release. This first week of the game’s life will have a HUGE impact on all the months and years that follow. We would like to keep working on The Wandering Village for a long time, but in order to make this possible we all have to push together to make the release as successful as possible. If you want to help with this, please join us over on Discord ^_^
A huge thank you to everyone who helped us get to this day with your helpful feedback, inspiring ideas and encouraging words, we would never have made it this far without you ❤️
Cheers & Thanks, Stray Fawn Studio
Launch Info Coming Soon & Gamescom
Dear Onbu Riders
The Wandering Village is getting closer and closer to its Early Access launch 😱 More infos about this coming very soon!
That aside, we wanted to give you a quick heads-up that we will be attending Gamescom in Cologne later this month. So if you’re around, please come visit us at the Indie Arena Booth in Halle 10.2 ❤️
Cheers & Thanks, Stray Fawn Studio
PS: Come chat with us devs over on the game’s Discord!
Development Update May&June
Dear Onbu Riders
It has gotten really hot here in Switzerland over the past few weeks, but we’re still hard at work on The Wandering Village 💦
We reworked and added a LOT of content to the game in the past two months. A huge beta update is coming very soon. So now is a great time to sign-up for it if you haven’t done so already!
Here is a sneak-peek at what we’ve been working on lately. Like every month, our artist Steffi was busily sketching up new building types:
And she also made assets for the new ‘damaged’ building state:
Our animator Markus animated pretty much all the buildings in the game. And new Onbu animations have been added too:
We finally found the time to address a long-standing issue of the game: Villager priorities! Our programmer Micha put a lot of work into improving how our little villagers handle their tasks. Players now have a great deal more influence using the prio tool.
Our newly added ‘moving events’ on the world map needed another iteration too. Our programmer Na took on the difficult challenge to add some UI to make their movement more understandable:
She also added lots of other UI/UX improvements to the game, such as overlays and precalculated efficiency bars:
Our game designer Arno added a whole new system to the game: Knowledge points. These are required to unlock some buildings in the tech-tree. He also spent a lot of time rethinking our poison system and reworked many aspects of it, such as how the poison plants spread.
Our jack of all trades Roger wrote stories for event decisions, added various visual effects and UI improvements and recorded trailers for events in the past weeks:
Our sound designers Claudio and Nico created new Onbu sounds and reworked some of our music.
And me, I drafted lots of new events, buildings, new mechanics like Onbu digestion, added a separate tutorial area (thanks to Micha’s great tools) and designed some new crops:
This was really just a glimpse at all the things we worked on in the past 2 months. Lots of polishing, balancing, performance improvements, system refactorings and bug fixes kept us busy too.
While continuing the work on the game, we’re currently getting ready to show The Wandering Village at Gamescom. So if any of you will be there, it would be lovely to see you there!
That's all for today, we hope you enjoyed the update! If you'd like to see more of the game, join us over on Discord :)
Cheers & Thanks again, Stray Fawn Studio
Development Update & Going Rogue Festival
Dear Onbu Riders
We're currently participating in the Steam 'Going Rogue Festival'. As part of the festival our demo is now live again for a limited time.
As for the beta, we have invited about 4000 people so far (first come first served). We’re slowly starting to catch up with our long list of applications. Thank you for your patience!
Meanwhile our team is knee-deep in The Wandering Village development again 🙂 In the past two months we were kept busy with localising the game and refactoring (aka reworking) some of the game’s systems for better maintenance in the future. Since the Early Access release this year is hopefully only the start of the game’s life cycle, it’s important to keep the game (in this case the world map spawn settings) easy to use and expand. We also made some tests to get the game running on Xbox.
On the more visual side of things, our lead artist Steffi has started working on our art book!
And she painted some new buildings:
Our UI team drafted a first version of what decisions on the world map might look like. And our programmer Naemi implemented a first version of moving world map events!
Our animator Markus added lots of small movements + particle effects to many buildings:
Our Sound/Music team has added lots of new atmospheric sounds, extended some of the biome soundtracks and recorded new sound snippets for Onbu. Lastly, our game designers have been doodling all kinds of ideas for new plants, resources and events 🙂
Thanks for stopping by and we wish you a nice weekend :D
Cheers & Thanks, Stray Fawn Studio
Developer Livestream for Simfest 2
Dear Onbu Riders
A huge thanks to everyone who hung out with us during the dev stream today! We have a second stream coming up on our store page tomorrow as part of the Simfest. So if you'd like to come and say hi, please set a reminder <3
On a side note, we recently dug through our old notes and screenshots of the game and found this super early walkcycle test of Onbu :D
If you'd like to see more of this stuff, join us over on Discord!
Cheers & Thanks, Stray Fawn Studio
Developer Livestream for Simfest 1
Dear Onbu Riders
Just a quick heads-up that The Wandering Village will be taking part in the Steam Simfest next week. We're planning two developer livestreams as part of the Simfest, so if you'd like to come and say hi, please set a reminder <3
And while we're here, let me give you a quick development update too! In the past month we've been busy setting up our localisation system. We're finally done now and our beta testers are already hard at work to help with translations.
Cheers & Thanks, Stray Fawn Studio
Steam Next Fest Demo Removal Notice and Thanks
Dear Onbu Riders
We have now removed The Wandering Village demo from Steam. As you may already know, this demo was made especially for the Steam Next Fest, which has ended two weeks ago.
Thank you everyone for playing the demo and providing us with tons of feedback, bug reports and kind wishes ❤️ If you want to continue helping us to improve the game, we have a closed beta program running which everyone can join: https://strayfawnstudio.com/sendy/beta-test/ (We know many of you already signed up and are waiting for access, rest assured that it will come :))
We have a long list of things we want to work on until the Early Access launch, but here are a few of the most important ones: * Reworking and improving the poison system * Improving and deepening the animal interaction system * General balancing and quality of life improvements * Stability and performance improvements * Localizing the game * Adding more content
We haven't decided on a release date yet, but our current best guess is late summer 2022. As we continue working on the game, we'll keep you updated about our progress!
A big thanks again for all your support! Please look forward to the Early Access launch :D - The Stray Fawn Team
Steam Next Fest Demo
Dear Onbu Riders
The Steam Next Fest is in full swing and many of you have already tried out The Wandering Village demo! If you haven’t, make sure to download it on our store page :D
Please keep in mind that this is a temporary demo. It will be removed again 2 weeks after the Steam Fest ends, on March 14th. However, if you enjoy the demo and want to help us to further improve the game, you can sign up as a beta tester via our newsletter.
If you’d like to meet the devs and ask questions about the game, make sure to tune in for our livestream/AMA in a bit! It takes place on our Steam page at 18:00 GMT and runs for 1-2 hours.
We hope you enjoy the demo and we’re looking forward to your feedback in the Steam forum, our forums or on Discord <3
