Welcome to the first Wildbound devlog. We're Kody Dennon and Terry Forrester (Dennon Developments), and Wildbound is our first game. Here's where it stands in late October 2026, and what we've been building.
The idea
Most creature games hand you a ball and a collection screen. Wildbound hands you binoculars and a notebook. You're a field researcher in a valley that runs whether you're watching or not. Animals graze where the grass is good, predators follow them, chipmunks dam a stream and a meadow becomes a pond. You learn how it all works, and the animals that come to trust you become your companions. There's no compulsory story: you choose what to study and where to go.
Pre-alpha 0.1.0
The first internal build pulled the core pieces together: the seeded valley with its regions, physical water and weather, nine species with real needs and gene-blended bodies, taming and breeding, the field tablet and journal, a camp with power and building, field equipment and two scooters. That's what the first playtest waves get.
This month: foundations
Most of October went into work you won't see directly but will feel: making the world hold together.
- One way to change the world. Every action, the player's and the animals', now goes through the same command layer. That makes saving reliable, and it's the groundwork for co-op later.
- Saving mid-hunt. A predator's hunt (its quarry, how aware the prey is, the chase) is now part of the save. Load a save taken mid-chase and the chase carries on.
- A creature pool. Animals far from you live as lightweight records and become full actors as you approach, so the valley can hold far more life without the frame rate collapsing.
The field book
The main menu is now a real three-dimensional leather field book: brown leather, a strap with a gold clasp, raised spine bands, gilded page edges and parchment pages that wear with your hours in the field. Opening it is how you start, load and create worlds.
Coming in later builds
- The radial walker. A new ambush predator: a many-legged, seven-eyed animal that spends the day in the water, crosses to the trees at dusk, and waits dark and still above the paths. Its photophores react to what's around it. It's in development now; you can tame one, but it's meant to be very hard.
- Gliding primates. The canopy primates' gliding membranes were rebuilt in a flying-squirrel style: furred, wrist to ankle, taut in the glide.
Distribution, without DRM headaches
We sell from our own site. The launcher activates your PC once, and after that the game plays offline for good. A copy works on three PCs at once, and you free a slot yourself if you need to. Updates download only what changed. In our tests an update between two builds was about 70 MB instead of 3.4 GB.
Made with AI
We use AI assistants (Claude, by Anthropic) for much of the code, the tools that build our original models, materials and sounds, and much of the in-game writing. The full credits, including every artist and scan we build on, are on the credits page.
Thanks for reading. If you'd like to play, apply to the playtest. If you'd like to help us keep going, memberships start at US$5 a month and include the game.