We have a new beta build with the new animal system on the Tropical Island level. There are definitely things we plan to improve, but we wanted to get this in front of folks to look at over the holiday period.

Changes

- Animals for tropical island
- Remove territory penalty for non-ideal animals, and rebalance
- Boost animal territory size for harder difficulties by a bit to make them more doable
- QoL: when placing multiple buildings with shift, keep current rotation
- Fix some bugs with animals in zen mode
- Fixes for animal migration oscillations
- Better mouse selection of animals when there are multiple in vicinity
- Fix: clicking on animal group icons opens info panel
- Button for sorting animal groups in the dock
- Quick animations for animal dock
- Fix: don't hover over animals when game is won and launch button is pressed
- Add little arrow below animal need indicator
- Reduce time between animal spawning from 30s -> 20s
- Animals can have slightly worse initial happiness with higher difficulties
- Other minor tweaks and improvements

Let us know what you think over on the Free Lives Discord[discord.com]

As we find Terra Nil nominated in TWO categories at The Game Awards, we're overwhelmed with gratitude for each and every one of you who've supported us on this incredible journey.

We wanted to make a game that put the environment in the spotlight & since launch, with your help, we’ve donated over $100,000 to The Endangered Wildlife Trust [ewt.org.za]

We're also super proud to be nominated in 2 categories at The Game Awards :

Games For Impact [thegameawards.com]
Best Mobile Game[thegameawards.com]
Cast your votes here : The Game Awards[thegameawards.com]

Terra Nil has earned a nomination for a Unity Award in the "Best Social Impact Project" category.

Voting is officially underway! Now is your moment to show your appreciation for Unity-driven creators and projects in the 15th Unity Awards.

What is the Social Impact category?
Celebrating strong social impact experiences in any format that align concept and creativity with U.N. Sustainable Development Goals.

You can cast your vote at https://awards.unity.com/ until November 1st, 2023

Thanks to everyone that has voted thus far, the team appreciates the support.

We’re excited to put out the first post-release update for Terra Nil. This is a small update focusing on some performance improvements, polish, bug fixes, and the much awaited native macOS and Linux builds. We’re also working on some bigger, more exciting changes for upcoming updates that we’re looking forward to sharing with you — more news on that coming later.

Note: if you have trouble installing macOS/Linux builds, you may need to restart Steam. If you are having trouble with the native Linux build, you can try opting into using Proton as a temporary workaround.

• Combining meshes
  
• LODs
  
• Reduced draw calls for some materials
  
• Speed up loading times by precomputing hashes
  
• Improve tile highlighting
  
• Rework tile rules
  
• Precomputing texture atlases
  
• Remove a significant amount of cruft from gameplay tiles
  
• More water quad work and gameplay tile optimization

• Improve edge panning and capturing the cursor
  
• Use more exact number for whether seeds should get ticked in seed bank
  
• Fix sunflower radiation softlock
  
• Add screenshake toggle setting
  
• Off-screen recycling arrows are now on an ellipse, so not overlapping with UI
  
• Add hover tooltip text for zen mode
  
• Changing building tabs doesn’t count as hovering
  
• Show speed controls when first vehicle spawns, if before tier 3
  
• Click behind handbook to close it
  
• Clicking on background of seed bank closes it
  
• Fix bug where you can close handbook while it's opening
  
• Add monorail dirt transport vehicle for dredging
  
• Fix: bamboo nursery changes to skyscraper correctly on undo
  
• Fix a bug where water would show at the wrong height when excavating a cliff tile
  
• Fixed a bug where building can sometimes have ghosts

As we ramp up on Terra Nil work again, we’re setting up a beta branch on Steam where we’ll release patches and updates prior to them being officially approved and released publicly. Eventually these changes will make their way to the public build on Steam and other platforms, but if you’d like to see the latest things we’re working on before everyone else, you can opt-in to this branch right now!

Note: by opting in to this branch, you do so “at your own risk.” We test these builds internally, but not as thoroughly as the public builds, so there is a chance a game-breaking or save-corrupting bug sneaks in. We advise backing up your save games manually before using the branch.

You can opt-in by right clicking on the game in the Steam client, selecting “Properties…”, Betas, and then the “beta” branch. These builds will often only have English translations, with other languages coming later.

We always value feedback, but we’re especially keen to get feedback on the beta branch builds. We’d love it if you can join our Discord[discord.gg] and give us feedback on the beta in the #🐾-terra-nil-public-beta
channel. We’ll also post patch notes of the beta builds to Discord as we release new builds.

Right now there’s a slightly newer build on beta with some bug fixes and polish. We’ll be updating it more over the coming weeks as we have things to share :)

Hey all,

We're back! We appreciate your patience and understanding while we took some very necessary time off to recover. Burnout is a real issue, and taking care of the mental health of developers is not typically something the games industry does very well. We're trying to do that better at Free Lives.

Our team is ramping back up, and, to help us make Terra Nil even better, the amazing folks at Clockwork Acorn[clockworkacorn.com] are going to be joining the team.

To give you a rough idea of our current priorities, we're currently tackling bugs, optimization, and native Mac & Linux builds (we know you have all been waiting a long time).

Thereafter, we're going to start experimenting with some new ideas that didn't make it into 1.0 and start figuring out what new content the game is asking for.

Thank you all for coming along on this incredible journey with us, and we look forward to making Terra Nil even better together.

Take care,
Free Lives

Thanks to all of you who played Terra Nil, we've donated $95,000 to the Endangered Wildlife Trust[ewt.org.za]!

We travelled to see their conservation efforts firsthand and had this short film "The Nature of Gaming" produced to continue highlighting their work. It was a humbling experience. We wish more people could see these majestic creatures in their natural habitats but also see how human disruption puts them at risk.

The EWT do amazing work to combat that disruption by protecting local wildlife and their environment.

This is what you contributed to by playing Terra Nil.

We also attended Games for Change[www.gamesforchange.org] in New York! It was a genuine honour to be included among many developers who are making games for a real world impact.

And to not only be featured, but win the 'Most Innovative Game' award!

When all of this started as a pixel art prototype, we didn't imagine that it would go this far. Who would have thought that our little game would be recognized by our peers AND contribute to real environmental conservation?

Along the way, we're still working on adding more to Terra Nil. We will let you know when we have more to share!

Thank you for all of your support and we hope Terra Nil can provide a little bit of hope.

Hey everyone!

It's been a crazy week since launch. Terra Nil has had a wonderful response, much larger than we could have ever dreamed of! We're thrilled so many of you have enjoyed our unusual environmental game and are grateful for your feedback. We didn't anticipate that the game would resonate so deeply with so many people and are overwhelmed by the response.

We wanted to share a little bit about the future of the game. We love Terra Nil, and it is extremely encouraging to see that many of you do as well. There's much more that we'd like to do with it, and we want to let you know that we intend to keep developing Terra Nil in the future.

But first, we need to take a break. We are a really small team, and Terra Nil's team is just one of 3 different teams currently working under the Free Lives umbrella (the other two teams are working on Anger Foot and Stick It to the Stickman respectively). We pushed very hard to get to this point, and if we are honest we probably slightly overreached our capacity by targeting a simultaneous PC/mobile launch. The feedback provided by this community will be invaluable going forward, and will help us to focus on the features and content that will improve and expand the game. But we first need to take a break to get over the exhaustion of launch.

We'll be making an effort to address bugs and performance issues as our first priority, then we can start thinking about new content updates.

Thank you all for your engagement, feedback, and ideas. We're really excited to see where the future takes us!

Take care and thanks for playing,
Free Lives

Terra Nil is a game about transforming barren lifeless landscapes into thriving, vibrant ecosystems. Turn dead soil into fertile grassland, clean polluted oceans, plant sprawling forests, and create the ideal habitat for animals to call home. Then recycle your buildings and leave no trace that you were ever there.


From the very beginning of development, we've wanted Terra Nil to have a real-world impact. We will donate 8% of our profits from sales of Terra Nil on Steam to the Endangered Wildlife Trust[ewt.org.za] in support of their efforts to preserve and restore ecosystems.

We felt that the Endangered Wildlife Trust were the perfect organization to contribute to because they work in a plethora of conservation disciplines in our home of South Africa. We are working with them to produce a short film that will show how Terra Nil connects to real-world ecological efforts.


In celebration of Terra Nil’s launch on March 28, Devolver Digital and Free Lives have partnered with environmentally conscious Twitch streamers to create a unique streamer forest at Tree Nation[tree-nation.com] and help make the world a bit greener. Plant trees in participating streamers' chats using custom-made emotes and we’ll plant real trees in the world on their behalf as part of the Terra Nil Tree Warriors forest.

The streamer forest is at its budding stage right now and will grow over the course of the campaign as participating Terra Nil streams complete their community tree-planting goals. You can also contribute to the forest directly by making a personal donation.

Find more info and where to watch : HERE[www.devolverdigital.com]