Croakwood

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Latest news

• Announcements·10 Aug 2026Official

  Devlog #12 - A Tale Of Optimization

  We've recently started working on Mac support for Croakwood. While there's still some work left to do it's generally working now, but the performance initially wasn't quite as good as we were hoping. So we investigated what's going on and here's the story of what we found :)When rendering a game, the CPU needs to tell the GPU what it's supposed to draw, so it needs to send a long list of instructions to the graphics card that say which material you want to use for drawing and what mesh you want to draw. So it's something roughly like this: "I want to draw something that looks like stone; I want to draw the round_stone mesh; I want to draw something that looks like stone; I want to draw another round_stone mesh somewhere else; I want to draw something that looks like stone; I want to draw the angular_stone mesh; I want to draw something that looks like wood; etc".Having to do this for every single object would be quite a long list. Putting together this list, submitting it to the GPU and having the GPU work through it takes some time. As an optimization Unity has something called "instancing". With this, instead of submitting every object you want to draw individually, it submits a list of positions for each mesh you want to draw. This allows to shorten the instruction list to "I want to draw something that looks like stone; I want to draw the round_stone mesh in the following locations: A, B, C; I want to draw something that looks like stone; I want to draw the angular_stone mesh in the following locations: D, E, F; I want to draw something that looks like wood; ...".This is quite a bit faster than submitting each object individually, but if you want to draw many different meshes it's still adds up to quite a lot. Creating and submitting all these render instructions was one of the biggest performance costs for Parkitect, so speeding this up was a big priority for us for Croakwood.On "modern" systems (pretty much anything produced in the last ~10 years or ~5 years f...
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• Announcements·6 Jun 2026Official

  Early Access Release Window & Gameplay Trailer

  We're on track to release Croakwood into Early Access this winter!Check out our new trailer that's giving a look at lots of new things:What is Early Access?Early Access means the game is available to buy and play while it's still being actively developed. The game regularly receives free updates with the newest completed features and content.Why Early Access?We think that we are able to make a better game by working together with our community. We experienced this with Parkitect, where the feedback we received has been incredibly helpful to make a bigger and better game than we would have been able to do on our own. While Croakwood has the benefit of so many of the lessons that were gained through that process, it is a very different game that both leans on our strengths and pushes into new territory for our small, but mighty team.We have been developing this game for many years according to our own ideas, and now we are excited to see what people enjoy and what might need to be improved or expanded.Early Access allows players to share their experiences and ideas about what the game should be, and gives us an opportunity to incorporate that feedback and adapt our plans accordingly with more flexibility than may be possible past full release. Approximately how long will this game be in Early Access?We expect it's going to take about 1-2 years to add the content and features that we have planned for the full release but we'll adjust our plans based on the feedback we receive and what the game needs, so this may change.How is the full version planned to differ from the Early Access version?We plan to add more content and features: more decoration and furniture sets, resources, workshops with new resource production chains, world biomes, activities for the villagers, characters you can meet, tasks for you to do and additional depth for the town management gameplay.What will be the state of the Early Access version?You will be able to construct and run a nice little town...
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• Announcements·1 Jun 2026Official

  Devlog #11 - World Design

  Hey! Don't forget to check out Wholesome Direct this Saturday :)This month we made a lot of progress in how our game world is put together and designed. The way our game world works is a bit like a puzzle. We have individual pieces that we design by hand, and then the game automatically pieces them together to create the world. We can rotate pieces, randomize where the connection points are and add some random content into the pieces for some additional variety. This way we can create a unique world for every player while still having a lot of manual control over the design of the pieces to make them look beautiful and interesting.Here's what our editor for these pieces looks like:We can add terrain to a piece, define where the playable area and possible connections to other pieces are and add decorations. This isn't a tool that's intended for players currently, but eventually it would be really cool to make it available for everyone and to allow sharing player-created map pieces.For gameplay, the idea is that players don't have access to the entire world from the start. You start in a certain location and then gradually get access to additional areas.When we initially worked on this system a few years ago we thought it would be the best idea to pre-generate the entire world when you start a new save file and then mark everything outside the starting area "unexplored" - so it exists, you just can't access it yet. We thought generating the whole world at once would make things a bit easier for us, like controlling how the game progresses (like for example putting more advanced resource types further away from your starting area). Here's a screenshot from a tool we used to prototype this. The colored boxes show which parts of the terrain come from the same puzzle piece, the light grey background shows the playable area and the darker grey shows the border around the playable area where we generate the forest. Short green lines mark the connections between pieces and t...
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• Announcements·5 May 2026Official

  Devlog #10 - How villagers interact with the world

  Hey, it's been some time! If you want to know what we've been up to, make sure to check out Wholesome Direct on June 6th :)In one of the previous posts I described how the villagers navigate around the world and in this one I want to talk a bit about how they decide where to go and what to do. Let's take this woodcutter hut for example:There's a tool rack containing an axe, a few trees around the hut and a place where logs can be stored. It's quite obvious what needs to happen here in order to produce logs, but how do we put this into program code? An easy solution would be having some code that says "if you're a woodcutter, here's step by step what you need to do: get the axe, chop a tree, carry the log to storage and put away the axe". This could be done quite easily with a state machine or if you want something a bit more powerful with a behaviour tree.That's how we implemented it initially and what we also did for the guests in Parkitect. However, there's a few problems:What if the woodcutter gets interrupted after chopping the tree? For example the player might have built a wall that prevents the woodcutter from returning to the workshop. The woodcutter is still holding the axe, and now there's logs on the floor that need to be transported away. Suddenly our clear list of instructions for what to do doesn't work anymore. We could provide multiple lists of instructions for different situations or make the instructions a bit more flexible (the first instruction in the example could say "get the axe if you are not already carrying it")... but that means we need to think of every possible combination of things that could possibly happen.This doesn't create very natural looking behaviors. What if the woodcutter decides to chop two trees in a row? They would put away the axe after chopping the first tree, just to immediately pick up the axe again for the second tree. Maybe we could remove the "put away axe" instruction and allow them to keep carrying the axe, but whe...
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• Announcements·8 Dec 2025Official

  Devlog #9 - Object Placement Tools

  In preparation for Game Garden and in the time afterwards we've spent some time on polishing how placing objects works.Placing objects is one of the main things you do in this game of course, so it needs to feel good and be intuitively understandable. There's a few considerations we have to make for these tools. There are some restrictions we need to make simply due to how the game works, but generally we want to give players a lot of freedom so they can design their town however they want. At the same time we want everything to feel playful and easy to understand, and not like you're using some sort of 3D modeling software. How fast you're able to get to a good looking result is also a very important consideration. We want players to be able to design a full house within a few minutes.One basic tool that helps with this allows you to quickly duplicate any existing object:Oftentimes this makes it unnecessary to search through the menus for the object that you're looking for, so this already speeds up building a lot.Sometimes you just want to move an object. You could use the duplication tool to create a new object, then delete the old one... but simply picking up the object and moving it feels much nicer and better :)And of course sometimes you just want to be able to go back a few steps, so there's undo.Undo is one of the most-requested features for Parkitect. Unfortunately it's not something that can be added easily into a game that wasn't designed with undo in mind. For Croakwood we knew that people would really want to have this, so we made sure to add support for this very early on.We differentiate between two different types of objects, decorations and furniture. Decorations are objects like plants, vases or crates and we allow players to place them very freely. They aren't locked to any grid and don't have any collision, so you can use them in a lot of creative ways. Decorations can be rotated quite freely.Furniture are objects that the villagers need to inte...
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