The Animals of Wandering Willows

Get the inside scoop on the animals of Wandering Willows, straight from Dan Chao, the game designer.

This week, I'd like to cover the animals in Wandering Willows. There are over 40 animals in the game. Each and every one of those animals can be your pet.

What does your pet do?

Your pet does 3 things:

• Climbing
• Digging
• Charming

Pets climb trees to knock down fruit. Pets can also dig up items from little mounds of dirt like copper, ginger, etc. Finally, pets can charm other wild animals. If you click on a wild animal, your pet will send out a charming call to that animal. After a series of calls, the wild pet will become charmed. Charmed animals will then leave a little gift for the player. They can leave gems, wool, or eggs! You can take eggs back to your stable to incubate. When they are done incubating, they will hatch into a new pet!

How are pets different?
Well, some pets are faster at climbing, some are faster at digging, and some are better charmers than others. Each pet also has a special perk. These perks range from digging up rare metals more often to receiving eggs from charming more often. There are quite a few different perks, so I won't list them all here. In addition, you can outfit your pets with special collars which enhance them. That's a whole other topic though…

Also, I'd like to answer some questions that came up in the comments from the last blog:

Psycology99 asks, "When will it be released?"
I'm not sure how specific I can be about the release date but it won't be this month. It could be soon after that…

Ender asks, "How does one go about making a game so clearly awesome? Also, where can I procure a torpex?"
Thanks for the compliment Ender! It was a lot of hard work by a handful of people here. For all who don't know, a torpex is an explosive (I had to look it up myself). There is a point in the game where you make an explosive and you acquire the raw materials by digging them up.

Drbronty asks, "Are you going to have additional beta tests before releasing it?"
Unfortunately, there will be no more beta tests but the game is almost done! So, that should be even better.

-Dan