Dev Blog #2 - Playtest, Resilience and Roadmap

Devblog #2 – Playtest, Resilience and Roadmap

Hello adventurers, happy new year and I wish you all a happy and healthy 2026!

This is the second monthly Dev Blog for Distant Isles, and I wanted to focus on two things – firstly, the free Playtest that is now available over on Itch.io, and a core mechanic in Distant Isles, Resilience.

Playtest

We’ve released a Playtest for Distant Isles over on Itch.io, check out the link above! This will give you a good understanding of how the game works and its core mechanics.

We wanted to release a playtest early in development to gather player feedback and ensure the game is enjoyable and engaging.

Please remember that it’s early in development, it’s lacking content, and there will be bugs. However, any feedback would be very greatly appreciated, we need your help to make Distant Isles a better game!

Resilience

With that aside, I wanted to introduce the core resource for your party in the game, Resilience.

In a way it works similar to hunger or thirst, and if you’re familiar with Sanity in the game Curious Expedition, you would be familiar with resilience.

Resilience is used whenever the player moves a tile (both on an island and also when sailing at sea). It can also be lost during events that may occur (e.g. getting lost in a cave).

It is primarily regained when the player eats food throughout their journey, or through visiting locations (e.g. resting at a campfire, paying to rest at an inn in Towns).

When the party’s resilience reaches zero, bad events will occur approximately every three steps taken in the Island layer. These events include mutinies, party members leaving, or gaining injuries (e.g. an illness such as dysentery).

As such, the player needs to ensure they keep resilience above zero to keep the party alive

Roadmap

I also wanted to share our development roadmap with you:

As you can see, we’ve just reached our first major milestone, release of the public Playtest. This will stay open and receive periodic and ongoing updates to share new content.

We are targeting a demon on Steam in Q2 2027, and subsequent release into Early Access in late 2027.

Note that these timeframes are subject to change, depending on how development goes in the interim!

As always, stay tuned for further detail and please follow and join us on this journey through Steam!

Elliot