u/wildwillowsdev

I've been building Wild Willows, a nature-restoration sim where you replant a damaged preserve and animals return as the habitat starts supporting them. It's at wildwillows.app, on the Mac App Store and itch, with a free browser demo. A few architecture decisions that mattered more than I expected:

One scene, forever. The scene list is just [WorldScene]. No title scene, no menu scene, no UI scene. Every menu, panel, the journal, crafting, settings, the tutorial: all React DOM on top of the canvas. Phaser draws the world and nothing else.

I expected to regret this and haven't. DOM gives me real text layout, real focus management, and accessibility (five interface fonts, four text sizes, three colorblind modes, fully rebindable keys), none of which I'd have enjoyed building in-canvas.

A 60-line bridge between them. React owns authoritative state. Phaser reads it synchronously off a shared object and re-renders when told the world is dirty. It's a Map of handlers and a shared blob, no observables, no state library spanning both worlds. React to Phaser: world-dirty, enter-placement, area-changed. Phaser to React: collect-node, open-crafting, animal-clicked, place-at.

Zero sprite files. Every sprite is drawn at boot with Phaser.Graphics and generateTexture(). Plants, animals, the player, habitat objects. About 8,600 lines of drawing code and no image assets at all. Shapes are authored in logical 32px pixels and rasterized 4x (2x on low graphics quality), with every sprite scaled back down by 1/4, so they stay crisp under camera zoom and HiDPI.

A frame budget for world rebuilds. Every action used to rebuild the dynamic layer synchronously, so dragging a volume slider tore down and rebuilt the animal layer about 60 times a second for a preference the world doesn't even draw from. Now that work is keyed and coalesced to at most one run per animation frame, each run is timed, and any task consistently overrunning half a frame automatically drops to every Nth frame, then recovers on its own once it's cheap again. A big save degrades to a lower redraw rate instead of locking up.

Smaller stuff: Scale.NONE plus manual zoom so I can render at native device pixels and let CSS scale the canvas back down, and a screen-space RenderTexture used as a bitmap mask to punch light holes in the night tint.

Happy to go into any of it. The two worst bugs were both Phaser internals: TimeStep.resetDelta making the player walk at a fifth speed for ten seconds after every load, and repeat: -1 tweens outliving the sprites they drove.

I’ve been building Wild Willows, a cozy nature restoration game, mostly solo since May.

I released the first version in June, but after losing my job at the beginning of August I suddenly had a lot more time to work on it, and the last couple weeks have been kind of wild.

Since then I’ve:

• launched a browser demo and new website
• shown the game at a local indie showcase
• had parents, teachers, and playtesters start reaching out with feedback
• reached over 400 players that accumulated 100+ hours of playtime
• started building educator resources around the ecology systems
• gotten players from all over the world
• been contacted by an educational game publisher about distributing it through their platform

The game itself is about restoring damaged habitats and bringing wildlife back based on the conditions you create. I’ve been iterating on it constantly based on what people actually do once they get their hands on it, which has probably been the most useful part of this whole process.

It’s still very early and I have no idea where it’s ultimately going to go, but this is the first project I’ve made where it feels like people outside my immediate circle are genuinely starting to care about it.

If anyone else here is building solo, I’d love to hear what point made your project start feeling “real” to you.

wildwillows.app or r/wildwillows

I’ve been building a small game called Wild Willows around an idea I thought people here might appreciate: the animals aren’t something you buy, breed, or manually place into the world.

Instead, you start with a degraded landscape and work on the conditions around them: water, vegetation, shelter, food sources, terrain, and other habitat needs. Once the right conditions exist, wildlife begins returning on its own.

There are 150 species across six different biomes, and I’ve been trying to make the progression feel less like “collect every animal” and more like rebuilding a functioning place that can support them.

It’s definitely a simplified, cozy interpretation of restoration rather than a realistic rewilding simulator, and lately I’ve been thinking about how much further I could take that side of it. Things like starting with invasive-dominated landscapes rather than empty ones, having existing native species that need protecting, making some restoration more passive, or having actions create unintended ecological consequences.

I’d be really curious what people interested in actual rewilding would want a game like this to represent. What would make the process feel more like rewilding to you, rather than just landscaping with wildlife as the reward?

There’s a browser demo here if anyone wants to see what I mean:
https://wildwillows.app

I first released Wild Willows on itch about 7 weeks ago, and lately it’s finally starting to feel like people are actually finding it outside of my own posts.

It’s a cozy ecology game about restoring damaged habitats and bringing wildlife back. I’ve been using itch as the main home for the Mac/Windows/Linux version, devlogs, and the browser demo, and I’ve been pushing updates pretty constantly based on player feedback.

The part I’m still figuring out is how people actually discover games on itch. I’ve gotten some traction from Reddit, word of mouth, and posting in different communities, but I’m curious what has actually worked for other devs here. Devlogs? Tags? Updating your page regularly? External traffic? Just sticking with it long enough for people to start finding you?

I also just launched a browser demo at:

https://wildwillows.app

And the itch page is here:

https://bai13y.itch.io/wild-willows

Would especially love feedback from other itch devs on the page/storefront, pricing, demo setup, or anything that would make you more likely to click through and try it.

And more generally, how are you all getting people to actually find your itch pages/websites? I’m still figuring out the marketing side of all of this as I go.

Hi! I’ve been working on a game called Wild Willows, a cozy ecology game about restoring damaged habitats and bringing wildlife back.

The basic loop is that you start with an empty biome, restore things like water and vegetation, add habitat features, and gradually attract animal species as their needs are met. There are six biomes, and the field journal explains the habitat needs and ecology of each species.

Obviously, turning restoration ecology into a game means simplifying a lot, and that’s one of the things I’m most interested in getting feedback on. I’d love to hear what people here think the game gets right, what feels overly simplified, and what concepts might be interesting to represent more realistically.

I’ve also started developing educator materials around the game, so I’m especially interested in making sure the ecology underneath the cozy gameplay feels meaningful rather than just decorative.

You can check out the game, play the free browser demo, and see the classroom resources at wildwillows.app

Would genuinely love any thoughts from restoration ecologists, students, researchers, or anyone else working in this space!