Pocket Wilds™
Progress report
Playable beta
Images, audio, music, voice, and other content.
- Testing / demo ETA
- Q1–Q2 2027
- Full release ETA
- Q3–Q4 2027
Estimates may change; content remaining is not overall game completion.
GBC-Style Action RPG • Pixel Art • Single Player
The crown is shattered. The wilds remember.
Forge a hero, cross five biomes, beat five bosses, claim the crown, reach an ending — all of it is in and playable, start to finish.
Trailer
Overview
First steps in the wilds
Create a hero, head into the overworld, and learn the rhythm of real-time exploration. At a boss encounter, the fight switches to tactical dice decisions. Your first goal is to get comfortable with both sides of the adventure.
See the controls →In a kingdom long fallen, five beasts devoured the fragments of the royal crown and buried them deep in the wilds. You are a dreamer who followed the fragments into this overgrown, dangerous land.
Pocket Wilds is a complete GBC-style action RPG you can play from beginning to end. Explore a living pixel world that grows crueler the farther you roam. Earn each biome’s Lair Key through its horde, beast and camp trials, then descend into a boss fight that is not a menu but a dice pool — throw your class’s fistful, hold and reroll, and spend every die on striking, guarding or recovering while the boss telegraphs its next move through a visible stance. Forge your weapon stronger, bank a fortune in the Vault, and chase the shattered crown to one of several endings.
Features
Real-time Exploration
Classic top-down action across an endless procedural world of five concentric biomes — Meadowlands, Verdant Wilds, Howling Fringe, Ashen Reaches and the Forgotten Expanse. Smooth movement, dodge, block, knockback, i-frames and hitstop.
The Dice Battle System
Boss fights become tactical dice duels. Each class rolls a different pool; hold and reroll dice, then spend them on striking, guarding or focusing as you read the boss and decide how hard to gamble.
Creatures and Legends
Hunt 16 monster species with distinct movement and attack patterns, including tougher elite and champion variants. Farther out, four legendary wanderers and five named quarries offer unique fights and rewards.
Build Your Hero
Choose the Knight, Lancer, Mystic or unlockable Shade, each with a distinct weapon, special ability and dice pool. Grow to level 100 through attributes, class abilities and milestone boon cards.
Grand Delves
Twelve-room dungeons with locked boss vaults, jailers, levers, cracked walls, tablets and a great chest. Trapped chests and ancient shrines call for graded d20 checks against your own attributes.
The Homestead & the Vault
You wake at home and walk out through your own gate, past a forge, a workbench and decorations you bought and placed. Bank gold and gems into a clickable, jingling hoard that survives death and new games.
Weapon Forging & Gear
Collect shards to upgrade your sword, spear or wand up to level 6 — forge level grants a bonus die all the way to a d20. Helms, armor, legwear and charms come in quality tiers, and your best piece grants a die of its own.
Achievements, Codex & Daily Wilds
40+ achievements, a living bestiary, a treasure catalog, a trophy hall, ten lore stones, a new seeded run every day, and a global leaderboard.
Cinematic Storytelling
46 painted story panels carry the boss reveals, the key ceremonies and every ending. Backed by 18 music tracks, 107 sound effects and 128 voice lines.
Gallery
Controls
or Arrow Keys
toward cursor (or J key)
Shield, Dash, Blink, or Veil
Mobile players can use the built-in on-screen joystick and touch controls.
Latest Development
Build 21-AUG-EJ — August 2026
Pocket Wilds is content-complete. You can forge a hero, cross all five biomes, clear every trial, beat all five lair bosses, claim the crown and reach an ending — without hitting a placeholder that stops you.
Everything still on the to-do list is art replacing a working fallback, not missing functionality: painted hero sprite sheets, creature stance portraits, and scenery for the outer four biomes. Any art that has not landed yet quietly falls back to the built-in figure or tile, so the game plays exactly the same either way.
View Full Update LogDevelopment details & complete feature inventory
What’s Built & What’s Left
The game is finished and playable end to end. Everything in the right-hand column has a working fallback in the build today — none of it stops you finishing the game.
Built and playable
All of it is in the live build right now.
The core loop
- Endless procedural world across five concentric biomes, chunk-cached and seeded
- Real-time overworld combat: three weapons at levels 1–6, a class special on cooldown, dodge, block, knockback, i-frames, hitstop, screen shake
- 16 monster species, each with its own movement personality, plus elite and champion variants
- Four legendary wanderers and five named quarries found through beast-tracking
- Levelling to 100 with six attributes, point-buy creation and milestone card draws
- 53 boons and 6 class abilities per class, every one with painted card art
The dice battle system
- Per-class dice pools, with every pip a fixed slice of weapon power
- Bonus dice from forge level, best gear, relics and your first three boon dice — each labelled by source
- Cracked dice on natural 1s, with thresholds that scale with pool size
- Hold and reroll once, by mouse, touch or keyboard
- Allocation across STRIKE, GUARD and FOCUS, with momentum and UNLEASH
- Five boss stances that telegraph the next move, plus SHATTER knocking your biggest die out of the fight
- The Dice Bag: every die named and sourced, your range and average, a working shake, and nine stones to cut them from
- Graded d20 exploration checks on trapped delve chests and ancient shrines
World and progression
- The homestead: vault, forge, workbench, signpost, how-to board and placeable decorations
- The Vault — a clickable, jingling hoard that survives death and new games, with wealth tiers and gem trophies
- Treasure economy, a peddler who buys and sells, and fast travel between camps
- Camps as fireside scenes where the folk speak first and unprompted
- Horde, beast and camp trials gating each biome’s lair key — and the key can no longer be lost
- Grand Delves: 12-room dungeons with locked boss vaults, jailers, levers, cracked walls and a great chest
- The greed arc, the Hollow Crown’s offer, and multiple endings
- Daily Wilds, free roam, leaderboard, 40+ achievements, codex, trophy hall, bestiary and ten lore stones
Presentation
- Crystal-clear text on a native-resolution overlay, over a world that keeps its pixel scale
- Painted art pipeline: hand-drawn heroes, per-species monster figures, painted boss portraits with per-stance swaps, and y-sorted world scenery
- Ground tile variation — any tile accepts up to six looks, scattered tile by tile
- 18 music tracks, 107 sound effects, 128 voice lines, 51 NPC lines, 60 vault lines, three-channel volume
- 46 painted cutscene panels for boss reveals, key ceremonies and endings
- Full mobile support down to 667×375, with touch joystick and a rotate gate
- Save and continue, pause menu, fullscreen, display scaling, CRT filter, autosave
Still to come
Ordered by how much each one changes what you actually see. Every item below currently falls back to something that works.
The art pass
- Painted hero sprite packs — 2 of 24 sheets. Eight heroes (four classes, male and female) × three sequences each. Any hero without a pack quietly uses the baked pixel figure.
- Block animations — the third sequence, plus the small engine change to load it. Until then, blocking shows the painted idle and a ward shimmer.
- Creature stance art — 7 of 14 creatures. Three named quarries and all four legendary wanderers still fall back to their base portrait, so battles read fine, the creatures just don’t act their stances.
- World art — 1 of 5 biomes painted. Only the Meadowlands has its own trees, rocks, bushes, flowers and wonders. The outer four still use the built-in vector scenery, and need their own ground colours: dark forest floor, moor heath, black ash, packed snow.
- Camp folk — 2 of 10. Brand and Old Maren stand at the Meadowlands fire; eight more to draw, two poses each.
- Homestead yard art — the yard is still pixel placeholders. The Vault art is already done.
Sound
- More ambient tracks — there is only one today, and each biome deserves its own air
Nice to have
- Optional per-creature hit and attack battle variants — supported by the engine, not yet drawn
Beyond the art pass
- More legendary wanderers
- New biomes and content updates
- A desktop / downloadable version
- A possible Steam or itch.io release
Community & Feedback
Get Pocket Wilds updates, beta notes, and new build announcements by email — or follow along on X.