Skillwood v0.23.0 - Playable NPC skins

Hi everyone. It's been a while.

Quick personal context first, since I owe you one. The game getting little attention even though it was free took a hit on my motivation in late 2024 - I knew Skillwood was a niche concept, but the gap between "people who play it seem to enjoy it" and "almost nobody finds it" was harder to sit with than I expected. Then my daughter was born in February 2025 and gamedev time mostly evaporated for the year that followed. She's a bit older now and I have some room again. Sorry for going quiet. I read every thread that was posted in the gap - thanks to everyone who kept reporting bugs and asking if the game was still alive. It was always going to come back, just took longer than I wanted.

v0.23.0 changelog

Playable skins

The character monuments in the prestige world have been there since v0.22.0, but until now they only let you swap between the two default characters. From this version, every trader NPC in the game has its own playable skin, unlockable by maxing out your trade relationship with them. So instead of two skins you've got ten, and a reason to actually max out the NPCs beyond just trading. Steam post image

Skin swapping still happens at the monuments in the prestige world. The two default characters are still available from the start as before - the new ones come from the NPCs. Steam post image

This is the feature I was halfway through when I went on pause, so it feels good to finally finish it.

Steam Cloud saves

Skillwood now uses Steam Cloud, so reinstalling the game or switching machines won't lose your progress anymore. I also rewrote the save system to do atomic writes, so a crash mid-save shouldn't be able to leave you with a corrupted file.

If you've been playing on the same machine the whole time, your save will keep working as before. The cloud version takes over from your existing local save on first launch.

Back navigation in character select

Several people accidentally lost progress by pressing "New Game" from the main menu and walking through character selection without realizing it would overwrite their save. Now Escape and a back button return you to the main menu from character select.

On v1.0.0

While I'm here I want to be honest about where Skillwood is going.

Going early access was a mistake. I thought calling the game "not finished yet" would lower expectations, but it actually raised them and I wasn't able to meet them. The most honest thing I can do now is push the game to whatever state I can reach in the next few updates and call that v1.0.0 - the full version, without promising more.

Even at this stage Skillwood found its players, even though not many for a free game. Doing a little more definitely won't hurt. But it won't be twice as big. Most likely no new areas. Maybe a mining companion if I figure out the sprite and the movement script. There might be other smaller things - more polish, more bug fixes. But no big new mechanics or major content.

I know this will disappoint some people, and I'm sorry. The game is what it is. I'd rather close the chapter honestly than keep it in a "coming soon" state forever.

Thanks for sticking around.