WAZZAMOUSE

Neighbors Who Know You, Moving Water & Swimming Beaches

Town life got warmer this week. Now and then someone in town is hurt or knocked out, and any player can help with a bandage or a medical bag. Characters remember how well they know you and greet you to match, and every character's lines were rewritten in the voice of their own species. New sound effects went in too: footsteps, gathering, rain, owls, foxes and more.

The island's water was remade. Painted shallows deepen into darker water, a foam rim edges the shore, waves wash up the sand and rivers flow. The starting zones gained swimming beaches, with buoy lines marking safe water, a lifeguard tower, towels on the sand and a keeper with a lesson for newcomers. Moving between zones is now a walk along a trail or over a bridge instead of a step through a portal, and the invisible walls are gone: what you bump into now matches its art.

Missions point the way now. A ring marks the spot on the ground, an arrow at the edge of the screen points toward it, and pickups nearby get a pin. Some steps count only at night or while you wear the right thing, and you can abandon a mission from the mission log. Heat and cold now cost stamina, with warming and cooling drinks and the Doctor's remedies to see you through, and the map names each place you discover. Knuckle weapons arrived with abilities of their own, ranged attacks show an aim line, shots stop at walls, practice dummies stand by every weapons teacher, and creatures sometimes turn and run.

Burrow furniture got its painted art, wall pieces hang on walls, and furniture turns to sit square against any wall. The barn and smithy were painted inside and out, expansions make their rooms bigger, and a building kit carries a building to another zone. Auction House purchases wait in a Collect tab before they go to your mailbox. Item icons and items on the ground were painted in 3D, and the day and night dial became a painted sky with a sun and a moon.

On Steam, Wavertree Mountain is now listed for Windows, macOS and Linux, including SteamOS, and players on all three play together. It plays fully on Xbox and PlayStation controllers. Peaceful Mode is now a Play Style you pick at character creation, more missions gained a peaceful way through, and each faction starts in its own home zone. Achievements got their icons, secret ones stay hidden as "???", and progress pops up along the way. Under the hood, server data is now backed up regularly, and stability fixes landed all week.

Peaceful Missions, Town Events & a Lived-In Island

Wavertree Mountain entered closed beta this week, and the game moved to v1.0.5-beta. Peaceful players got a mission line of their own. In Peaceful Mode, a blue "!" now marks every mission you can finish without a fight, and The Long Post sends you across the whole island as a runner for the chipmunk post, carrying letters that never arrived. Hundreds of new missions arrived across the middle and late game, most with a peaceful way in, and every zone gained smaller stories from its quieter characters.

A new weekly town event gives each server a shared goal. Each week one town hosts Post Day, Field Observations, a Caravan Run, or a Market Day. Everyone pitches in with a round a day, the notice board shows who helped, and at the end of the week the host mails every helper a thank-you gift. Every specialization can now learn its basics in its own starting zone, and experience got a full balancing pass.

The island got a fresh coat of paint. Trees, rocks, ruins, and resource nodes were remade in painted 3D. Towns got winding roads, worn paths, and brick plazas, zone borders became forests, rocks, and dunes, and new scenery arrived in town: lamps that light at dusk, banners and washing lines that sway in the breeze, market stalls, fences, crates, hearths, workshops, and gardens. Every dungeon now has an atmosphere of its own. Light rain and low ground fog roll in, shared by everyone in a zone, and dawn now breaks slowly through a soft first light. The world map was redrawn as hand-tinted old parchment. Foxes, owls, and scorpions joined the animated creatures, and the owls perch in the trees and fly between them.

Robes and hoods arrived, sewn at the new Sewing Machine and dyed at the Dye Tub, alongside casual clothes. Each specialization now has a branching skill tree. Every melee attack is animated in every direction, and every weapon and ability has effects of its own. Digging out your burrow now animates, with a pickaxe on rock and paws in the dirt, and fishing got fairer.

The game now plays fully on a controller, with button icons in every prompt and settings tuned for the Steam Deck. Under the hood, Steam features like achievements and joining a friend's game were wired in, every connection to the servers is now encrypted, the server list shows which servers are peaceful, groundwork went in for other languages, and stability and item fixes landed all week.

Peaceful Mode, Reputation & Abilities for Every Species

The biggest week of development yet. All six playable species now move on the new animation system, and what you wear shows on your character, from hats and shirts to cloaks, shields, and bows. Character creation gained fur colors and body styles, and spiders, beetles, snakes, and crabs got rigged animations of their own. Fishing had a full overhaul, with a new rod, new casting and catching animations, sounds, and smoother play online. Banks, barracks, a tavern, and more now have interiors you can walk into, and the game can now be played with a controller. Burrows got cozier: you can sleep in yours, rearrange the furniture, and enjoy fresh walls and floors. Gear now wears down and can be repaired, the economy and specializations had their first balance passes, a revive kit lets you help any downed player back up, and the game moved to v0.3.1-alpha.

Then the big systems landed. Peaceful Mode can be chosen when you create your character or switched on later from your burrow: the island's creatures won't start fights with you, you stay out of player-vs-player battles, and peaceful mission chains run through every stage of the game. A new reputation system tracks your standing with both factions, with each species' kin, and with the towns whose notice boards you work, all the way from Hostile to Revered. Merchants price by it, story choices shift it, and the characters you meet notice it. Each rank of faction reputation unlocks a faction ability, from tunnel travel between Compact towns to a League raid call, and every species now has a passive and an active ability of its own, like the mouse's Scurry, the chipmunk's Burrow Dash, and the lizard's Tail Drop.

The social side of the MMORPG arrived all at once: whispers, emotes, and speech bubbles; achievements, titles, and leaderboards; a looking-for-group board and mentors for new players; raids of up to 24; agreed duels, faction battles in the contested zones, and guild vs guild battles; island-wide events with a calendar; and guild halls that each guild builds from the ground up. Moderation tools, chat filters, and block and report options came with it. Under the hood, the server now has the final say over everything you build and own, saves survive crashes, sign-ins and chat are better protected, and big crowds run much more smoothly as work continues on servers built for hundreds of players.

A Fresh Coat for Every Menu & a Full Combat Pass

A packed week. Every menu and panel in the game was rebuilt in one consistent style, from the inventory, map, and mission log to shops, the auction house, mail, crafting stations, and character creation, and the groundwork is in for translating the game into other languages. A minimap joined the HUD, a first round of sound effects arrived for combat, gathering, and menus, and campfires and lanterns now flicker and glow. Rock Point and the Peninsula finished their starting stories, complete with specialisation and combat missions and a starter dungeon each, and the Peninsula's town got its layout and services. Across the island, coastlines, rivers, and lakes were smoothed out, a pack of enemies received their new artwork, the chipmunk's new art arrived in game, and a big batch of scenery, from faction banners to coastal gear, now dresses the world. Combat had a full pass: enemies now come in tiers, weapons and armor were tiered to match, and damage and armor were rebalanced across the board. Crafting got the same treatment, with new dishes to cook and new ways to upgrade your stations. A rare new ore turned up as well, with missions of its own, and groundwork began on dungeons planned for after launch. The week wrapped up on v0.2.3-alpha.

A Proper Welcome & Rat Gets Rigged

New players now get a real welcome. Each starting area has its own guided set of missions that teaches you the ropes, and you can pick where your story begins when you create your character. Rock Point and the Peninsula got new missions and resources too. Some new trouble is roaming the world: rogue and rerouted critter units, plus shady League agents. A big batch of new art landed, with more than forty new props and quest items placed around the world, and rat is the third species to get fully rigged movement animations, after mouse and squirrel. Mission text also speaks to your character directly now, and shows the keys you've actually bound.

Back to Work: Building the World's Story

Settling back into the burrow, and straight into worldbuilding. Every character in the world now has their own backstory, and settlements, landmarks, and points of interest were added across all the zones. Lore objects are scattered around for curious players to find and read. Water got more interesting, with tides that rise and fall. A new dungeon opened up, the Flooded Laboratory, with its own lineup of bosses, and new enemies now patrol the overworld. Old test areas were cleared out, and a bug that broke ability swapping was fixed.

Easing Back In: Testing & Art Coordination

The first stretch back was spent playing the game rather than building it. That meant running through zones, missions, and multiplayer to see where things stood and noting what needed attention. The rest of the time went to the artwork overhaul: reviewing the art that arrived during the break and working with the art team on the next round of character rigging and animation.

A Short Pause

A medical issue stopped development for the last two weeks of August. The art side kept moving the whole time, though: asset deliveries for the artwork overhaul stayed in flight, so a stack of new artwork was waiting when work picked back up.

A Village Rises in the Southern Forest

The Southern Forest now has a village. It comes with brand-new artwork for its inn, bank, auction house, general store, smithy, greenhouse, barn, medical tent, mailbox, and a fountain at its center. The ironwood tree also got its finished artwork, replacing another piece of placeholder art.

One Economy, One World

Mail, the bank, and the auction house all went world-wide this week. Post a listing while you're out in the wasteland and a player halfway across the map sees it and buys it, no matter which server is actually running their zone. Same for letters and bank deposits: one account, one shared economy, everywhere. The rest of the week went into making the whole thing bulletproof, with the server now watching over itself, recovering cleanly from crashes, and a couple of extra layers of security added on top. A last bug that could leave your character stuck loading after a reconnect was hunted down and squashed.

Friends, Guilds & Groups Without Borders

The social side caught up to the new server setup. Your friends list and guild roster now show who's actually online no matter where in the world they are, guild and group chat reach everyone they should, and you can invite someone to your party even if they're off in a completely different biome. Two long-standing annoyances also got fixed along the way: those random disconnects that would hit for no obvious reason, and a rare hiccup that could drop you in the wrong spot after moving between zones.

Smoother Online Play & Room to Grow

The big one: rubber-banding and stuttering in multiplayer are gone. Weeks of quiet optimization work finally shipped, and moving around with other players now feels the way it should. That cleanup opened the door to a much larger change: the server was rebuilt so it can spread the world across multiple processes instead of cramming everything into one, which means far more players online at once without things bogging down. Some housekeeping happened too: a handful of old test zones left over from early development were retired, and the placeholder beach was swapped out for the real thing.

Squirrel Joins the Cast

A short but exciting week that shows the new animation pipeline paying off. Squirrel is the first non-mouse critter to get a full animation pass on the new Spine2D rig, joining the playable species lineup with proper movement and idle animation. Behind the scenes, the art team is continuing to work through the redesigned character roster, and each new species animated is one more proof point that the overhaul is on track. Expect gerbil, lizard, and rat to follow the same pipeline in the coming weeks.

Spine2D Rigging Goes Live & Item Destruction

A milestone week for the artwork overhaul. The Spine2D Godot extension landed, giving the project proper skeletal animation tooling for the first time. Within hours, the first set of Spine2D animations for the mouse character were built and integrated, replacing placeholder movement with genuine rigged animation. This is the foundation the rest of the character and enemy animation work will be built on over the coming months. On the gameplay side, players gained a long-requested quality-of-life feature: a proper way to destroy their own items, complete with confirmation dialogs to prevent accidental losses.

Loot Drop Cleanup & Multiplayer Guard Pass

A quieter, stability-focused week on the code side. An old loot drop bug that let items spawn incorrectly in the world was tracked down and fixed, and a round of multiplayer guards was added to tighten up server-authoritative behavior. With code work light this week, the art team used the time to push further into rigging tests on the new Spine2D skeleton, laying groundwork for the animation work that would ship the following week.

Shop Fixes & Multiplayer Spawn Stability

Two consecutive version bumps landed as the multiplayer spawn system got a stability fix and the shop UI received a round of bug fixes. Small, steady progress on the code side while the art team continued blocking out redesigned biome tilesets and environment pieces as part of the ongoing visual overhaul. None of it was commit-ready yet, but the groundwork is visibly taking shape.

Dev Tools, Portals & NPC Position Fixes

A tooling-focused stretch following the huge contested zone push in early June. The dbuilder dev tool received a round of updates, portal placements got another pass, and a handful of NPCs that had ended up in unreachable positions across the map were relocated. Meanwhile, concept work officially kicked off on the redesigned mouse and enemy sprites that will anchor the visual overhaul, and the first sketches of the new look are starting to take shape off in the art pipeline.

Contested Zones, Outposts & World Terrain Polish

The biggest systems week in months: the contested zone mechanic shipped across 13 phases of implementation, establishing the core PvP territory loop. Players can now contest and capture outpost zones, with a full scoreboard, tock-based bonus scoring for contestation, and a debug HUD to monitor the system in action. The outpost itself received a full pass: workbench and interactive objects were fixed, menus cleaned up, and performance improved. On the content side, progression plan items, recipes, and resource nodes were distributed across world zones, and preliminary enemy spawns were added to the remaining overworld areas. World terrain saw meaningful polish this week: new ground textures landed for the beach and wasteland biomes, a placeholder ground tile was added for the charred forest, and the northern forest terrain map was updated. Collision chamfering, which smooths out corner-catching and stuck edges, was applied first to the northern forest, then rolled out across all world zones in one sweeping pass. Portal destination positions were tightened across the board so return portals feel snappy and consistent. The debug menu also received several updates throughout the week to support testing the new zone systems.

Mission Refactor, NPC Placements & Lore Expansion

The biggest content week in the project's history. A sweeping mission system refactor shipped across eight phases, rearchitecting how missions are defined, tracked, and advanced to support the volume of content the game now needs to carry. NPC positions were finalized across all mapped zones, a missing portal between the beach and peninsula was added, and old test-area portals were cleared out. Cressida's NPC sprite was corrected. On the content side, over 200 missions were written and wired in: spec chains, world missions, and story-driven NPC questlines spanning every zone. The lore bibles for Wavertree Mountain received major expansions: full NPC backstories, faction motivations, zone secrets, and the deeper narrative threads that tie the island's mysteries together were all fleshed out in detail. The game's mission and story foundation is now substantially complete. Combat received parallel attention: the ability bar HUD was extended, weapon swapping was improved, and keybindings were overhauled to support the expanded ability set, with a follow-up fix ensuring special keybinds don't fire while the player is typing in chat.

Burrow Rooms, NPC Missions & Combat Polish

A wide-ranging week with big burrow upgrades, world polish, and combat feedback improvements. The burrow received its most substantial update yet: tileable walls, door building via the walls tab, a room analyzer that classifies room types based on contents, and a full attribute scoring system rating rooms for comfort, size, and beauty. On the world side, the forest start beach got a polish pass and a new mossy hollow entrance image landed alongside a dbuilder update for entrance placeholders. NPC mission dialogs were fully wired up and a player mailbox was placed in the world. The dbuilder tool also gained a ground shader selector and collision support for placed resource nodes, plus a new pscenery tool for phasing scenery placement. Combat got two passes of feedback polish: hit flashes were added to both player and enemy, then fixed to work correctly in multiplayer. A debug tool for single-player mode was added for testing. On the multiplayer side, clouds now sync from server to clients, and a low health screen overlay adds clearer in-game feedback. The week closed by bumping the version to v0.1.2-alpha.

Combat Abilities, Mission Chains & Multiplayer Polish

A deep combat and content week capped with the first stable alpha build. Special attacks landed on the Q keybind, followed by a block ability, crippling shot, and shield bash, rounding out a proper combat ability toolkit. Enemies gained knockback attributes and spawn animations, and the Mossy Hollow dungeon got a boss with updated loot. Four full NPC mission chains were finished out: Warrior, Cook, Doctor (including a health stabilizer and new recipes), and Smith (with weapon hardening and new items). On the world side, secret gated resource node visibility was fixed, the player mailbox was placed, and boss nameplates with health bars now display on damage. Multiplayer saw a concentrated round of fixes: enemy visibility in the dungeon, invisible enemies from range spawn issues, player positions syncing correctly to greenhouse/barn/burrow/smithy instances, and light-carrying state syncing across clients. The week closed with graceful shutdown messaging and a server ping/pong connectivity check, marking the project's first tagged stable build: v0.1.1-alpha.

Guilds, Banks, Knockout & Combat Depth

The biggest social and combat week yet. A full guild system landed with administration features. Players can now be knocked out, call for help, and respawn, complete with a dizzy star shader and a claw animation when no weapon is equipped. A buff/debuff system was implemented, including a stamina-based "tired" debuff and a stealth hide ability with a reveal counter-debuff. The Bank feature shipped with stack splitting. Anticheat coverage expanded for crafting and combat. On the infrastructure side, dedicated server RPC gaps were closed, dungeon loading fixed for dedicated servers, and session variable contamination was resolved. Map improvements included group player position indicators and enhancements across the board. The week closed with a title screen update bearing the Wavertree Mountain mark.

Visual Polish, Social Systems & Economy

A big visual week: water and grass shaders landed, player shadows added, and the fishing system got a proper upgrade with a bobber and tackle case. Four new playable character sprites were added (gerbil, lizard, rat, squirrel). On the social side, friend requests and a social menu went in, along with a dedicated group chat channel. The economy layer began taking shape with the Auction Manager and Mail Manager features both shipping.

Groups, Specializations & Class Systems

The largest single week of systems work so far. Full multiplayer groups went live, with XP splitting, loot round-robin, group map markers, and health sync all working. Specialization skill trees were implemented with XP generation per class, and each class got its starting skills and items (Angler, Engineer, Cook). The smithy, metal ores, triage tent, and ranching system were added, plus a reworked tool gameplay loop with HUD updates. Day/night now shows on the HUD.

Dungeons, New NPCs & Map Discovery

The first full dungeon, Mossy Hollow, was implemented across six build phases. New mouse artwork shipped and was integrated into character creation. Three new NPCs were added: Gruff, Marta, and Yanna (who hands out potion missions). A POI database now drives map discovery, and a map icon was added to the game UI. A soft lock bug in the burrow placement mission was also squashed.

Fishing Missions, Chester NPC & Bug Fixes

Fishing missions were added to the game, alongside a new mission for skill selection and updates to Chester's dialogue to guide players to the mission log. On the MP side, looted corpses now despawn client-side correctly. Burrow exit scene bugs and shop mission setup were also resolved.

Fishing System & Burrow Fixes

Core fishing functionality landed, with rod, bait, and beetle meat added as items. Burrow placement was fixed for loaded saves, the stone sword got its animation, and ingot rewards were balanced. A solid stabilization week after the previous large system pushes.

World Staging, Tutorial & Multiplayer Auth

The Forest Start zone got its enemy and terrain placements finalized. Chester NPC and the tutorial mission chain were added, and players can now place their own burrow in the overworld. The multiplayer authentication system, character creation screens, and account/character name display above players all shipped this week. A debug overlay (F12) and map display were added for development tooling.

Multiplayer Phases 1–5 & Enemy AI Fixes

Five phases of multiplayer work completed in one week. Switched to a dedicated headless server model. Enemy AI bugs were resolved across the board (lizard dashing, scorpion ranged attacks, spider patrol radius), and loot drops were fixed for single player, host, and dedicated server. Mission objective completion bugs and multiplayer client progression prevention were addressed, with fog of war split into its own save file.

Wasteland Biome, Burrow Gameplay & Save System

The wasteland biome was added with spawn and resource fixes. The NPC class and system were built from the ground up. Burrow dig gameplay went in, so players can now actually dig out rooms. The crafting, storage, and mission systems got a wave of bug fixes and QoL updates, along with a world seed implementation for procedural resource clustering. The server/client save system was scaffolded this week.

Tutorial, Story Sequence & Tool System

The tutorial area and mission chain were built, connecting progression through to burrow placement. The new game story sequence and title screen placeholder assets were created. Tool tiers and tool slots were implemented with a proper selection system. Autosaves were added, along with inventory and UI bug fixes.

Foundation: Combat, Burrow, Crafting & World

The foundational systems week. Melee and ranged combat were implemented alongside enemy AI. The burrow system launched, with digging, wall placement, furniture, and stations. Building placement and persistence went in. The crafting system with recipes, the inventory system, skill tree initial work, and a sound manager were all built. Weather, day/night cycles, background music, and the first biome expansion were added. This week laid the core of everything that followed.