The Battle Of Nine Lives Update: Available Now!

Hey everyone! I'm happy to announce that The Battle Of Nine Lives Update is out now! Call your friends and return to War Islands on this brand new update! Lots of new quests, items and puzzles to beat!

Key Features:

• New Main Quest! Meet Me Halfway: Continue the story of Jonathan, Almika and Sarsi by going to the Honey Cave in order to find a cure for Sarsi, fight the cats and meet Nekomata (the cat's leader)

• New Level! Morumotto Forest: This level will provide two new side quests and extra puzzles for the game, including a brand new weapon for Jonathan!

Check out the trailer if you haven't seen it yet!

If you already have a save game from past updates, don't worry, you can use it to continue playing the storyline just fine. As soon as you load your save game it'll automatically add the Honey Cave quest for you. Don't forget to also visit the Morumotto Forest for new undiscovered side-quests!

A few major bugs from past updates were also fixed, such as screen input indicators not showing for your friends, crash fixes and even some issues with restarting the game were fixed.

There's also lots of game balancing tweaks for Wookikota Forest, not only by tweaking enemy spawn frequency but also separating the Snail Maze puzzle into it's own separated area, If you beat the maze you'll get a cool new Snail Armor for Sarsi!

So what do you think about this update? I would love to hear your feedback, feel free to share your thoughts on the Steam Community Hub or directly on our Discord page!

Lucas

Get Ready! The Battle Of Nine Lives Update Arrives On May 11th

I'm happy to announce that the new The Battle Of Nine Lives Update got a release date: Thursday May 11th

Key Features:

• New Main Quest! Meet Me Halfway: Continue the story of Jonathan, Almika and Sarsi by going to the Honey Cave in order to find a cure for Sarsi, fight the cats and meet Nekomata (the cat's leader)

• New Level! Morumotto Forest: This level will provide two new side quests and extra puzzles for the game, including a brand new weapon for Jonathan!

This update will feature more game balance changes, including tweaks to enemy spawners in Wookikota Forest for a better gameplay experience, previous levels improvements and also fixes to lots of known bugs from previous versions. Such as loading screen crashes, game not restarting properly and others.

I hope you like this new update, see you on May 11th!

Lucas

Coming Soon: The Battle of Nine Lives Update

Hello folks! It's me again, this time with a fresh new trailer for you of the upcoming "The Battle Of Nine Lives" update which will include a brand new campaign quest and extra side quests for War Islands! You'll be able to visit the Honey Cave, explore the lands of Morumotto Forest and visit the underwater world of the Goonches.

The update will also feature new puzzle elements, items and weapons, new Dabiriu (guinea pig) colors and lots of game fixes.

If you wanna know more about the update be sure to follow our social media pages as I'll be posting lots of new content about it soon!

So what do you think about the trailer, do you like it? Let me know in the comments!

Lucas

Let's Talk #14 - Wookikota Forest Soundtrack on YouTube!

Hey everyone! For this Let’s Talk I wanted to show something a little different, me and Gabriel (our soundtrack composer) just published on YouTube one of Wookikota Forest’s soundtrack.

Currently we only got the (Part II) of the “Welcome To Wookikota Forest” soundtrack available, I’m interested to see how many people would enjoy this type of content, if you do please drop a like or a comment! It really help us out!

As for game updates, I’m still working on the Honey Cave update and will have much more details to share about it very soon! Hope everyone had a great new year!

Lucas

An Iceberg of Emotions - New Side Quest!

“Reerion has once again found a way to shapeshift into a werewolf! This time he's out for revenge troubling the woods of Wookikota.”

Happy Holidays everyone!

Today I’m super excited to release this brand new side quest for War Islands called “An Iceberg of Emotions”. A completely new cold environment with a very angry fella at the end :)

In it you’ll be able to acquire 3 new items for your wardrobe: A Crystal Armor for Sarsi, Boomerang for Jonathan and Staff for Almika!

To start the quest make sure you beat Reerion the first time then go to the location below! From there it’s a easy walk to the Crystal Cave where your adventure begins!

This update also features a brand new lighting, weather effects, game menu UI improvements and a awesome new LOD system for seeing areas from far away with more detail!

Lastly, the Christmas Special side quest is now back online, so if you haven’t played it already make sure you also stop by Dabiriu’s main base to beat it and get cool rewards!

As always, let me know what you think of this update! I’ve changed so many things under the hood that’s really hard to count, hope you have a great time playing it! If you do need any support you can always contact me through our community channels.

Cheers!

Lucas

Let's Talk #13 - It's Pumpkin time!

Hello there! You know the drill, another year, another chance of getting a permanently halloween pumpkin! Jump back in, beat the Halloween quest and it’s all yours.

If this is your first time and haven’t got your pumpkin hat already, be sure to visit the Dabiriu’s Fort beach area and look for a guinea pig with a pumpkin on his head, from there you can start the quest!

That’s great Lucas, but where’s the major update? I know I’ve been taking forever but trust me, it’s coming, a lot of unexpected things happened this year that slowed it down a bit. I’ll be sharing info about it soon :)

Happy Halloween everybody!

Let's Talk #12 - Underwater Improvements, Levels and More!

Have you ever wonder what it would be like to swim in War Islands? Today I would like to talk about a very interesting thing I’ve accidentally discovered while testing new features for the game: The ability to swim! (Yes, really).

I was actually just testing upgrades for the Sea Turtle when I got a bit frustrated by falling in the water every time, so I quite literally did a small test, the movement felt solid, added a short swim animation and with a bit of polishment I’m sure it’ll look great.

So that lead me down a rabbit hole of making sure the game looks good underwater, began by making a new underwater screen effect so you can see more clearly, then some lighting tweaks and finally added missing details to some lakes and rivers throughout the game.

Now I’m thinking on changing how shark attacks work entirely, potentially making them an actual npc in the game, reason being is because I noticed that sometimes it’s a bit annoying to instantly get killed by a shark without no time to quickly get out of the water.

All in all I’m definitely keen on adding that feature to my to do list. I’ll try to push it alongside the new level update but can’t guarantee since I’m aware that I’m taking way too long to release the next level.

Another cool little thing we did was improving Jonathan’s crossbow, the texture was a bit off so we now have a fancy new one for you.

Finally, we are also expanding our team so we already began development of future levels to avoid long delays between updates. The props above for example are for a new jungle level, I know I’ve been really silent lately but there’s really a lot of new content coming up for the game!

So, what are your thoughts on swimming in the game? Let’s talk!

Lucas

Let's Talk #11 - Upcoming Features, Dev Challenges and More

Long time, no see! I know It’s been quite a while since my last post but It’s been really tricky to manage time lately, I’ve got quite a lot of stuff in the works for War Islands.

Lately I’ve been working on some heavy changes to the Save System, one of the issues I was having is due to the amount of items increasing the game couldn’t load all items info at once (Due to how It was previously developed) so now the game only load item data on demand. How’s is that related to the Save System you might ask? Well, the game’s savedata was previously saving items based on their hard reference path and so forcing the game to always load all items (even if you’re not using them).

The new update will feature a brand new character panel that now shows all items your character currently has equipped. This is useful since we added weapons to the game and thus planning on possible adding stats bonus for them. (damage, health and other bonuses)

In previous posts I did mention the two new upcoming areas, Honey Cave and Morumotto Forest. For Morumotto the only thing left to do is a few tweaks and voice acting. Honey Cave however still needs some work such as some puzzle design, characters and it’s cinematic event.

Alongside all of that, lots of performance optimizations were done under the hood for the whole game. From things that I mistakenly left calculating without need in the background to overall noticeable visual effect differences.

I’ll return with more frequently posts sharing our development status soon, I can’t wait to get this update out for you all!

Lucas

Let's Talk #10 - Save The Christmas Tree!

Hey everyone, Lucas here! Today we’re pushing our Christmas special quest back online! This time with a new item for you. The peppermint stick!

I’ve been looking to get weapon items in the game for quite a while now, decided to give it a try on this Christmas quest. Beat the initial 5 waves and get the item permanently on your save game, the quest is replayable meaning, you can play more than 5 waves to beat me on the leaderboard if you’d like. :)

This update also includes a new rain effect and some overall game improvements, lately I’m focusing on Morumotto forest which is a upcoming completely new area featuring 2 new side quests. One of the key features of Morumotto will be a brand new Jonathan weapon: The Harpoon Gun!

I’ll be sharing more details on Morumotto soon, just need to get a few more things done. In the meantime feel free to enjoy some nice snow in War Islands!

So what do you think? Like the new Almika’s Peppermint Stick item? Let’s talk! :)

Lucas

Let's Talk #09 - Halloween Puzzle is back!

Hello everyone! Today we’re pushing a update to re-enable the Halloween puzzle. It’s your change to get a nice Halloween pumpkin!

Last year you visit it by talking to a Dabiriu near shore, this time in order to visit it you need to go by the interior part of the Fort! A brand new space for you to explore.

From there you talk to this nice fella, the one with a pumpkin on his head! Beat the puzzle and get your pumpkin! Hope you like it! Just make sure you got the skills needed to complete the puzzle!

Let's Talk #08 - What's next? Honey Cave and Morumotto Island

Hello everyone, Lucas here! I know it’s been a while since our last post. We got quite busy in the past few months. We’re now working on the next levels: Honey Cave and Morumotto Island.

I think we’re finally gonna be able to explain why the name “War Islands” since we’re gonna introduce our main villain, the cats:

You probably heard Dabirius (the guinea pigs) talk about them a few times during the game. That’s right , they’re at war with the cats for a very long time. Initially we actually thought of putting the cats in the beginning of the game but that would make them quite a easy enemy to defeat.

The next main quest will be located at the Honey Cave, this level will be more focused on the story itself since quite a few people reached out giving feedback about the lore itself. The map is still in it’s early stages but we’re already developing the bee character.

Now since the next main quest will be storyline focused, we decided to also develop a second extra island called Morumotto Island. A completely different biome with new side quests and puzzles!

So far we have a few areas of the Morumotto island created although there’s still some in design phase. Also the soundtrack is already being worked on as well. We will be talking more about it soon!

As for our latest update, Wookikota Forest. I noticed a few things that we could definitely improve and we will tackle those eventually down the line, right now we wanna push as much content as possible.

Feel free to give your feedback about it! Let’s Talk! :)

Lucas

Wookikota Forest Update Now Available!

Hey everyone! Lucas here. Today we’re happy to announce that our Wookikota Forest update is now available for download. Get the latest update from Steam and boot up the game!

This update drastically changes the game, starting with the fact that the game is now a open world game. A few weeks ago I mentioned in our latest “Let’s Talk” (#07) how we actually started trying some open world tests just for fun. Which ended up being way too cool to not implement it. That decision took me months to basically re-write a lot of code, split levels and adapt the game in general to this new style. Not to mention how the whole team had to do new content to fit in.

One thing ended up leading to another. I started noticing that the game needed more stuff to do in the environment so for that we decided to create a coin system so you can gather coins from crates, barrels and also enemies.

So you can use your Sea turtle to visit new islands to get not only coins but also items, frogs, etc. After finishing the second quest you’re free to go to any place you’d like (There’s still however a invisible wall to areas that are not yet developed).

We also added more skill tokens in the Lighthouse Cave and some in Wookikota to give more cool mechanics right away since we heavily refined combat over the past few months.

That and a lot more is already available in the latest update, we genuinely hope you have a great time playing it! Let us know if anything pops up; cool ideas, feedback, bugs etc. Thank you so much for the support! :)

Lucas, Lead Developer.

Let's Talk #07 - Open World, Coins and your own SeaTurtle!

Hey everyone, Lucas here! I know it’s been a while since our last post but we genuinely believe this one is worth the wait. Last month I’ve been playing the game with the team and we decided to “just for fun” try a open-world style gameplay, initially very buggy but enough for seeing if it was worth the shot. Turns out it’s extremely cool to “just go” to places without any loading screens.

However that was no easy task, converting the whole game to a open-world style is quite challenging. Basically everything broke and some stuff had to be heavily re-designed to fit this new style.

A few days ago I was finally able to get it properly implemented and tested. We really can’t wait to release this next update. We’re not only getting the next main quest done (“A New Hope”) which will feature a whole new area called Wookikota Forest. but also the open-world system including the ability for the player to get coins from enemies/crates, and the best of all: Your own SeaTurtle that allows you to go anywhere you like.

So to provide a great initial experience controlling the SeaTurtle we decided to add more islands to the game with extra content. We’re really focus on getting much more content ready for you soon.

The game will also no longer lock time of day (except for specific quests) meaning it’s fully dynamic, so we decided to develop a rain/weather system to randomly kick in from time to time. (I’m still tweaking the percentage of rain)

So, do you like what’s coming up? Let’s Talk! :)

Lucas, Lead Developer

Let's Talk #06 - New Side Quest: Luke's New Pet

It’s time to jump back in and play our latest quest “Luke’s New Pet”, help Luke protect his new baby spider. This quest rewards you with a Flashlight hat and features a global leaderboard since it has infinite waves of enemies.

Quests now show more information on the game menu. This one specifically shows that it’s replayable and contains rewards.

Since it’s a quest that relies on combat. After hearing your feedback we greatly improved combat on certain areas. Most noticeable the recoil and impact. Also dead npcs don’t highlight their bodies anymore helping you focus on the ones chasing you instead.

To further improve gameplay experience, objects that allows interaction now highlights when you hover your mouse over to avoid miss clicking. Not only that, we also improved controls on Dragonflies to help decelerate faster.

This update also improves the game menu with new map markers that provides much more information of your progress including markers of collected frogs and notes, wardrobes, undiscovered quests and more.

The wardrobe menu also got some visual improvements!

A lot of improvements have been made to the game in the past month and we really hope you have a great time playing War Islands!

So, what do you think about this update?

Let’s talk!

Let's Talk #05 - Christmas Special

Hello everyone! First of all apologies for posting this announcement a bit late. Today we just pushed a update featuring a Christmas special quest where you have to protect the Christmas tree from angry snowmans.

Your goal is simple: Beat Wave 5 to win a in-game permanent Christmas Hat! You’ll have 3 Dabirius (guinea-pigs) to help you during the fight.

The game now shows health bars of your buddies to make sure you keep track of how injured they are. So if they’re less than full health a bar will pop over their head.

So what are you waiting for? Get to the base and talk to this little fella to get the quest started!

Don’t forget to tell us how many waves you managed to beat, Let’s talk!

Let's Talk #04 - Discord server, Wookikota development and more

Hey everyone! We would like to officially announce our community Discord server. We’ve been using Discord for a little while but only as a internal team chat.

So if you’re looking for a place to find new people or just wanna have a nice chat with our team, jump in. You’re more than welcome there!

War Islands Discord Community Server

As for our next level development, the Wookikota Forest. We’ve been trying our best to finish it this month but unfortunately it’s not yet completed. We think it needs a bit more time in the oven as we don’t want to just rush things out. We’re deeply sorry for the delay but we really think you’re gonna love what’s coming up next.

We also have pushed a update yesterday that has significant improvements to Multiplayer sessions. A lot of network optimizations have been implemented for War Islands alongside new options in the Settings menu such as Mouse Sensitivity, Gamepad Axis, Brightness and more!

Keen to hear from you all over on Discord. Let’s Talk!

Let's Talk #03 - Halloween & Items!

Hey everyone!

It’s Halloween season! To celebrate we created a brand new quest that comes with a reward, a special Pumpkin Helmet item that will be yours to keep.

In order to start the quest, make sure you have the Dash and Rope Bridge skills active. You can find a Skill Token for Sarsi in the Lighthouse island.

You can now customize your characters by going to any wardrobe. Every item you collect can be equipped!

Make sure to re-visit the Lighthouse Cave since we put a few items there as well! :)

Not only that but we also added the ability to choose save slots. So you can have multiple save slots. Currently the third slot is the one used in Multiplayer sessions with your friends.

Also, thanks to your feedback we improved the Lighthouse Cave even further by tweaking Araknya’s (boss) hitbox and improving the fireplace arrow mechanic.

We hope you liked these new changes as we’re working hard to keep developing new content to the game.

That’s all for now, feel free to comment what do you think about these changes. Let’s talk! ;)

Let's Talk #02 - Coming Up for November

Hello everyone! We would like to share what we’ve been doing behind the scenes for the next upcoming level, the Wookikota forest!

A lot of major bug fixes have been already included in our latest update (Today) to make sure the game gets more polished for your next experience.

We’re planning to release the next update by the end of November. So stay tuned for that!

Our team is working on not only the level itself but the new enemies that our heroes will encounter. They include Werewolves during the night and also carnivorous plants!

The next level features a more open environment that will include both day and night events. The screenshot above is showing a WIP of the new puzzles; both mechanics and overall design. (Though not all assets are finished just yet)

We also got a concept art for the forest’s Werewolf boss. He’s your next big enemy. We haven’t started the modelling and animation phase for him just yet but shouldn’t take long. Right now we’re starting on the carnivorous plant model.

The plants will have a unique set of movement to make sure they get a new combat experience. Our goal is to give players new methods of defeating enemies such as environment objects not only as puzzle solving elements but also combat support.

That’s about it for now, feel free to comment what do you think about the next level. New ideas are always welcome! Let’s talk! ;)

Let's Talk #01 - New Tutorial!

Hey everyone! We pushed a new update to War Islands that makes the initial part of the game easier due to player feedback. There’s now a tutorial section to help new players to get around the main base.

Some players mentioned that it wasn't so easy to understand how the skill tokens work when you first jump in. So we added this tiny sequence that starts as soon as the initial dialogue finishes.

We decided to also do some small tweaks to the Game Menu. Some quests now show hints on the map + if the player has available skill points to spend, a tiny notification will show in the Skills tab button.

We genuinely encourage you all to keep sending feedback. We’re more than happy to implement new features!

So what are your thoughts about these changes? Let's talk!

Hope you have a great week :)

Welcome To War Islands!

It is time to call your friends!

War Islands is finally out and so is the Lighthouse Cave level! Your first step into the world of War Islands. Meet Jonathan, Almika and Sarsi, your new companions along the way.

Jump in either in Split Screen or Online play on your first quest to solve the mysteries of the Lighthouse Cave. Find out what's going on over there and report to the Fort captain.

So what you're waiting for? See you at War islands!

Thank you so much for your support