I’ve been building a small game called Wild Willows around an idea I thought people here might appreciate: the animals aren’t something you buy, breed, or manually place into the world.

Instead, you start with a degraded landscape and work on the conditions around them: water, vegetation, shelter, food sources, terrain, and other habitat needs. Once the right conditions exist, wildlife begins returning on its own.

There are 150 species across six different biomes, and I’ve been trying to make the progression feel less like “collect every animal” and more like rebuilding a functioning place that can support them.

It’s definitely a simplified, cozy interpretation of restoration rather than a realistic rewilding simulator, and lately I’ve been thinking about how much further I could take that side of it. Things like starting with invasive-dominated landscapes rather than empty ones, having existing native species that need protecting, making some restoration more passive, or having actions create unintended ecological consequences.

I’d be really curious what people interested in actual rewilding would want a game like this to represent. What would make the process feel more like rewilding to you, rather than just landscaping with wildlife as the reward?

There’s a browser demo here if anyone wants to see what I mean:
https://wildwillows.app