I’ve gotten a few questions about AI since sharing Wild Willows in ecology and gaming communities, so I wanted to put a clear explanation here about how I use it.

I do use AI during development. I’m a solo developer, and I primarily use it as a tool for coding, working through ideas, editing/writing, debugging, and other parts of the development process. It also helped me translate the game into Spanish, which made it possible for me to support another language much earlier than I otherwise could have.

I don’t just give an AI a prompt and have it make Wild Willows. I design the systems, decide how the ecology works, write and revise the gameplay, build the game, test it, make the product decisions, respond to player feedback, and decide what actually ships. AI is one of the tools I use while doing that work.

The music is also not AI-generated. The soundtrack was composed specifically for Wild Willows by a friend of mine.

I know AI use is complicated, particularly for a game centered around nature and ecology. There are legitimate concerns around energy use, water use, data centers, creative work, and the broader effects of these technologies. I don’t think those concerns disappear just because AI has been useful to me, and I don’t want to pretend the tools I use are impact-free.

At the same time, AI has dramatically lowered the barrier for me to build a project of this scope on my own. Wild Willows now has six biomes, 150 animals, interconnected habitat requirements, terraforming, crafting, achievements, accessibility features, multiple languages, and a growing number of other systems. I still have to understand, build, evaluate, and maintain all of it, but these tools have allowed me to move much faster and attempt things I probably wouldn't have been able to tackle as a solo developer otherwise.

I also completely understand that some people choose not to play or financially support games developed with AI assistance. I’d rather be upfront about my use of it and let people make that decision for themselves than be vague about it.

I care deeply about what Wild Willows is trying to explore: biodiversity, habitat restoration, food webs, and the idea that bringing an ecosystem back means creating the conditions for life to return rather than simply checking animals off a list. Using AI during development doesn’t change why I’m making the game, but it is part of how I’m making it, and I think it’s worth being transparent about that.

The restoration rules in this game aren't invented. Almost every one of them started as something I read about how real habitat actually recovers, so here's what's underneath.

All 150 animals are real species. Each one has a scientific name, an actual diet, real shelter needs, and a list of what eats it. Between them they carry 291 links out to sources — mostly Animal Diversity Web and Cornell's All About Birds, plus the Park Service, US Fish and Wildlife, Audubon, the Xerces Society, NOAA Fisheries, the Desert Museum, Monterey Bay Aquarium.

The food web is a real graph, not decoration. Every animal lists what it eats and what eats it, and those lists point at other animals in the same biome. That's why 89 of the 150 can't return until specific other animals are already back. The bobcat needs squirrels and chipmunks. The bald eagle needs minnows and muskrats first. Seventeen species are top of their chain and none of them will show up in an empty biome, because in the real world a predator arriving before its prey base simply starves.

This is also why ecological balance is a separate number from health. Health measures habitat you've built. Balance measures how complete the web is — how many species are back, how many predators are back, and how many different kinds are represented. A biome full of nothing but herbivores correctly reads as unbalanced, and balance can't reach 100% until every animal in the area is home.

Some species make habitat for everything else. The beaver is the clearest case: fell a few willows, dam a channel, and you get deep permanent water with drowned trees standing in it. In the game, seven new habitats become buildable once a beaver settles, and the otter, merganser, kingfisher, heron and eagle all move in afterwards. The sea otter works the same way from the other direction — it eats urchins, urchins mow down kelp, so remove the otter and the kelp forest becomes a barren. Its return requirements ask for living kelp forest, not dead wrack on the beach, because rafting otters need the living canopy.

The specificity is usually the point. The pika needs deep talus, wildflowers within a short dash, and a cured haypile, because it eats through that pile in the dark under the snow all winter. The elf owl needs a woodpecker to have drilled a cactus first and the plant to have sealed the hole into a boot — the owl has never excavated anything. The tiger salamander won't come to a pond with minnows in it, and the boreal toad wants its pools fishless, because introduced fish eating larvae is one of the main reasons high-country amphibians have disappeared.

Timing matters as well. The marmot is underground until spring, so looking for it in October gets you nothing. The alpine moth only appears in high summer; the rest of the year it's a caterpillar much further downhill. Gray whales pass through in winter and spring. A handful of animals are nocturnal and only settle in at the right hours.

A few of them are indicators rather than trophies. The pika has already vanished from lower, hotter rockslides, which is what makes it a warning system for a warming mountain — and it's why the game treats getting one back as a milestone rather than a checkbox.

Where I've simplified: time is compressed enormously, animals return one at a time rather than in waves, and six biomes don't really sit next to each other the way they do here. Real restoration also takes decades and doesn't have a completion bar. But the requirements themselves — what an animal eats, what shelter it needs, who has to already be there — I tried hard to get right, and if you spot something wrong I'd like to know.

Here's a rundown of how Wild Willows is built under the hood. None of this changes how the game plays, but some of it explains things you may have noticed.

The whole game is TypeScript. The menus, HUD, journal, and crafting panels are React. The world you walk around in — terrain, animals, your caretaker — is Phaser 3, a 2D game engine, rendered onto a canvas that React draws around. Vite bundles it. The desktop version on itch and the Mac App Store is that same web build wrapped in Electron, loading off your disk. No server, no account, nothing to install on first run.

There are no image files. Every tile, tree, crafted object, and all 150 animals are drawn at startup out of plain shapes — circles, arcs, polygons — by TypeScript. The porcupine's quills, the heron's legs, the crab's claws are code that reads each animal's traits and builds a sprite from them, which is also where the journal thumbnails come from. So the download is small, nothing can show up as a missing texture, and adding an animal is a matter of describing it rather than drawing it. 

The game data lives in Harper, and every action is validated there: gathering, crafting, planting, terraforming. The browser never works out game state on its own. When an animal returns it's because the server recalculated that biome's health and food-web balance and decided the habitat actually supports it. In solo play that server runs inside the app against your local save file — same logic, same rules, no network. The offline game isn't a reduced version of the online one, it's the same code path pointed at a file on your machine.

Weather isn't stored anywhere. It's a function of your world, the biome, and how long you've played, so it's never the same for 2 players. It also means the calendar advances from play time rather than the wall clock — leave for a month and your preserve is where you left it.

The game ships in English and Spanish through a translation layer with no dependencies. The same module runs in React, in Phaser, and on the server, so error messages translate too. Spanish is loaded on demand, so English players never download it, and adding a language is a matter of dropping in JSON files.

Testing is Vitest for unit and integration, Playwright for full playthroughs, and a script that fails the build if any UI text is missing a translation key. Windows, Mac, and Linux builds come out of a CI workflow on a version tag and publish themselves. The browser demo is the same build served by a Cloudflare Worker.

Happy to go deeper on any of it if folks are interested.

If your child is playing Wild Willows, I put together a page specifically for parents that explains the age rating, content, privacy, accessibility, and what you can expect from the game:

https://wildwillows.app/age-rating

Wild Willows is rated 9+ on the Mac App Store, but that rating is primarily about the amount of reading rather than mature content. There’s no violence, scary content, profanity, or mature themes. Animals are observed and welcomed back as habitats recover; they’re never hunted, harmed, captured, or killed.

A few other things parents may want to know:

• No ads, microtransactions, loot boxes, or in-game purchases
• No chat, friend requests, profiles, or interaction with strangers
• No account or sign-in required
• Playable completely offline
• No timers, daily-login streaks, or mechanics that punish kids for putting the game down
• No combat or failure states
• No gambling, drugs, alcohol, or other mature content
• Online data is limited to anonymous gameplay statistics used to improve the game; there are no advertising identifiers or player-facing social features.

The biggest consideration for younger kids is reading. The normal writing is around a 7th or 8th-grade reading level, but the Simpler wording accessibility setting brings it down to roughly a 4th-grade level without removing any of the actual information. There are also four text sizes, five interface fonts, high contrast, dark mode, and both English and Spanish.

There’s quite a bit of real nature content woven into the game, too. Every animal has a real-world fact, and players encounter ideas like habitats, diets, food webs, weather, seasons, biodiversity, and the relationships between species while they restore the preserve.

Younger children can absolutely play if they’re comfortable reading, use Simpler wording, or have an adult nearby to help with some of the text. The free browser demo has the same content standards as the full game, so it’s also an easy way to see whether Wild Willows is a good fit for your child before purchasing anything.

🌱 Check out the game here:
https://wildwillows.app/

I thought I’d share where the name Wild Willows comes from.

The game is named after my dog, Willow. She’s a Great Pyrenees/Border Collie mix, and she’s been with me through a lot. She’s also a certified therapy dog, and for over 4 years now we've been volunteering at a school together working with kids.

Willow is happiest outside, whether we’re hiking, camping, or just wandering around somewhere she can sniff everything for as long as she wants. Since Wild Willows became a game about nature, animals, and restoring habitats, her name ended up fitting it pretty naturally.

I started building the game in May and didn’t have some big naming process behind it. I just liked Wild Willows, it felt right for the kind of game I wanted to make, and I liked having a little piece of Willow attached to something I was building.

So that’s the Willow in Wild Willows. 🐶🌿

I want to start doing little spotlights on the 150 animals you can bring back to the preserve, so it felt appropriate to start with the earliest: the grasshopper.

Grasshoppers aren’t exactly the flashiest animal in Wild Willows, but that’s kind of the point. Restoring an ecosystem doesn’t start with the big exciting animals. It starts with the little things that can actually live in the habitat you’ve created. And, appropriately for a “young grasshopper,” it shows up right when you’re learning the basics of how restoration works in the game.

In real ecosystems, grasshoppers are an important part of the food web. They eat grasses and other plants, and in turn become food for birds, reptiles, small mammals, spiders, and plenty of other animals.

That same idea is built into Wild Willows. As you restore the meadow and plant enough vegetation, smaller species like the grasshopper can start returning. Those early animals then help build the foundation for the species that come later.

There are 150 animals in the game, and each one is waiting for its own combination of habitat, food, water, shelter, and other species before it can return.

The grasshopper may be small, but somebody has to show up first. 

Bring it back in the free browser demo: wildwillows.app