Development in the Skies, What's next after Steam Nextfest
- Wild Sky Crew
- Mar 26
- 5 min read
Ahoy Adventurers!
We want to extend a heartfelt thank you to everyone who played the demo and helped it become one of the most played demos during Nextfest, reaching over 400,000 wishlists! From the bottom of our hearts, thank you. Seeing this level of excitement is both humbling and incredibly motivating.
As we continue developing the game, we want to take a moment to share what this project means to our team. We believe the best games grow alongside their communities and continue evolving long after launch. Our intent is to keep expanding the world, refining systems, and pushing the game as far as we can for years to come. Heck, we have a whole sky to work with! It even makes you wonder… what lies below the clouds…
Before we jump into all the changes we’ve been making, we have one big announcement to share first.
Mod Support Starts on Day One!
From the very beginning, we’ve believed that Guardians of the Wild Sky can serve as a foundation for modding support. We’ve been building the game with mod support in mind and we are incredibly excited to share this update. With our mod tools, you’ll be able to push the boundaries of what’s possible in the game.
Create everything from new items and Guardian types, to more ambitious creations like new islands, unique biomes, quests, gameplay systems and much more. Whether you're expanding the world or reinventing it entirely, the tools are in your hands. You’ll be able to create an entirely new game within the Guardians of the Wild Sky ecosystem.
Simply put: if you can imagine it, you can build it. We will share more details about mod support in a future post.
What’s Coming Next
Nextfest was a big moment for the game; it gave us a better understanding of what matters most to all of you. We’ve received a ton of feedback across Steam, emails, Discord, and social media and we’re actively working through all of it. Your feedback is directly shaping the skies.
Right now, we are working hard to content lock and thoroughly test the mid and endgame content you haven’t seen yet.
With that being said, let’s jump into some of the major changes & improvements coming to the game, starting off strong with the most requested update:
Improvements to Build System Functionality & UI Overhaul
Building has received a makeover. The old hammer system is now gone; we’ve completely redesigned the building interface to make the process smoother and more intuitive. Getting started is simple; just press B to enter build mode where you can open a full-screen building menu. Here, you can browse and place structures more easily than before. A lot of our UI system has been updated as well (we were using many placeholders during the demo) and we’re excited to introduce a fresh set of brand-new icons.
Rotation Snapping
We have also updated our building system such that walls and floors will now automatically rotate to match the surface you’re looking at while building. This makes placing structures much smoother and intuitive. We have a toggle for those of you who would like to enable or disable this feature, depending on your preference.
Gamepad Support
We’ve heard loud and clear that many of you want full gamepad support and rest assured, your feedback has not gone unnoticed. We’re excited to share that full controller support will be available for our Early Access launch. We have been making adjustments to our UI to ensure that playing with a controller feels as smooth and intuitive as possible. This includes improving navigation through menus, refining input responsiveness and making sure core gameplay systems from building, battling and inventory management work comfortably with gamepad controls.
Improvements to UX/UI
Alongside our work on gamepad support, we also received a lot of feedback around readability and clearer instructions within the UI. During the demo we made a few quick improvements such as resizing and making the repair button more visible to help players navigate systems more easily.
We are continuing to refine and reskin parts of the UI., with a big focus on UX and ensuring a more user friendly experience. Our goal is to ensure that menus, prompts and key gameplay interactions are clear, readable and intuitive for everyone.
Example of the updated buying/selling window from Merchants
Language Support
During the demo, we only had partial translations available. For Early Access, we’re happy to share that the game will feature full translations in the following languages:
English
French
German
Spanish (Spain)
Portuguese (Portugal)
Italian
Russian
Japanese
Traditional Chinese
Simplified Chinese
Korean
Tutorial Improvements
Originally, our tutorial was designed to be fairly hands-off, giving you the freedom to explore and learn the game at your own pace. While many of you enjoyed that approach we also heard that some areas could benefit from clearer guidance, especially when first starting out. Our goal is to help new players understand the core mechanics easily while still preserving the sense of discovery as they begin their adventure.
It’s a careful balance and we’ll continue iterating on this as we develop.
Smarter AI: Improved Pathfinding & Tasking
Improving Guardian pathing has been at the top of our priority list. Whether they are helping with tasks around your base or fighting alongside you in battle, we know how important it is that your Guardians move and behave reliably.
Throughout the demo, we continued pushing updates to improve the Guardian pathing system, and that work is still ongoing. This means fewer awkward moments like Guardians falling from the skies or jumping into unnecessary fall damage as they move around your base and the world.
Character Animation & Posing Improvements
We’ve taken another pass on the female character following community feedback. You can see the adjustments in the before and after poses below.
We’ve added a new set of idle animations for both male and female characters, bringing a bit more personality to those well earned moments of rest.
We’re continuing to refine our character models, including their clothing and overall look. Expect even more polish as development progresses!
More Improvements & New Content
There’s a lot more we are working on in addition to the highlights above. Some of the areas we intend to expand upon are:
Economy & merchant balancing: Update merchant prices, rewards and quests to create a more meaningful and consistent progression across vendors.
Breeding system depth: Expanding breeding mechanics with new Guardian traits and combination outcomes, creating a deeper system that allows even more powerful Guardians.
Fishing system improvements: Improved mechanics, more depth and more rewarding catches to make fishing a deeper, yet relaxing activity.
Farming system refinements: Update & balance crop yields, improve overall usability to better support long-term harvests.
Performance & stability: Ongoing optimization and bug fixes to deliver a smoother, more stable experience, alongside continued improvements across a range of minimum and recommended system specs.
End-game content: Expanding and refining late-game systems to provide more meaningful challenges, rewards and long-term goals for players.
Next Steps
We will be sharing more development updates soon that outlines some of the features and improvements we’re planning through EA, launch and beyond. We have a busy road ahead of us and we will have a lot more exciting news to share with you. We couldn’t ask for a better community.
Thank you all again for playing the demo and until next time, see you in the skies.
Please feel free to follow our socials or our Discord community, we appreciate all of you. Thank you.
