Dev updates and wishlists

Official Steam screenshot

81monkeys runs its announcement feed the way small studios used to run dev blogs: regularly, in public, and without a marketing budget. Twelve posts between January and August 2026 took the game from founder history through technical features and trailer launches to a 150,000 wishlist milestone.

This page is the timeline, with dates. It is also the answer to "is this game alive" — a question worth asking of any unreleased title with a 2026 window.

The twelve announcements

That is a post roughly every three weeks, with the density rising around the trailer in late May and the wishlist milestones landing in pairs.

The Kickstarter, in numbers

The campaign page still carries the full result: CA$397,766 pledged against a CA$130,000 goal, from 5,957 backers, over a thirty-day funding period that ran from 24 August to 23 September 2022. It was a Kickstarter "Project We Love", and the campaign feed shows a last update dated 9 August 2026.

That is roughly three times the goal, which is where the official site's "Over 300% funded!" line comes from. The same page is the place to watch for backer demo news, since the demo guide explains that the demo is a backer deliverable rather than a public one.

The wishlist curve

Three numbers tell the story of the year: 80,000 on 29 May, 100,000 on 8 June, and 150,000 on 24 August. The first jump came with Trailer 2's premiere; the second came ten days later; the third arrived over the summer without a paid campaign.

The studio's own framing is worth quoting because it explains the cadence: "we're putting everything we have into this game, which leaves nothing for marketing at this time". A wishlist milestone is, for this team, the marketing.

If you are deciding whether the game has momentum, that curve is the evidence. If you are deciding whether it is close to release, the curve says nothing either way: the 9 August Fireside post explicitly put launch dates outside that session's agenda.

Developer Firesides and the tools

The Fireside sessions are the studio's explanation channel. The 43rd session, in August, was the first broadcast on YouTube after a long run on Discord, and its subject was design pillars and the tools the team built to make the game.

That is not a coincidence. Two of the twelve posts above are about tools rather than features: a height-map editor that gives flat 2D assets correct occlusion, and a palette-swapping pipeline that multiplies hand-animated art. The studio's argument is that most of the work on a pixel-art game at this scale is tooling, not content.

The party and gear guide covers what the palette system produces, and the water guide shows the same engineering mindset applied to shaders.

The Kickstarter, briefly

The campaign ended on 23 September 2022 with "Over 300% funded!", a figure the official site still displays above its pre-order button. The March 2026 palette post adds the detail that matters for timing: the team was finishing the Kickstarter Backer Demo at that point, which is a milestone that sits between the campaign and the public launch.

Backers therefore have a demo to look forward to before the rest of us, and the public has a 2026 window. The release date and platforms guide covers what the window does and does not promise.

Trailer 2 and the scene breakdown

The 26 May post announced a live YouTube premiere for 29 May at 11AM Pacific, with a live chat with the team during the viewing and a "scene breakdown" promised afterwards. The studio called it the biggest update shared since the game was announced.

The 8 June Fireside then discussed the response to that trailer and the Steam page updates. If you want to see the game in motion, that trailer is the primary source, and the frames used across this site come from the same video.

What the feed is good for

Read as a whole, the twelve posts answer a question a store page cannot: whether the studio is still building. Two tool posts, a water post, a palette post and an explosion post inside four months is a production rhythm, and the Fireside cadence runs to 43 sessions.

What they do not answer is when. No post in the feed carries a launch date, and the August Fireside said so in advance. That is the honest state of the game: visible work, open window.

Why the cadence matters

Twelve posts in eight months is the difference between a project with a pulse and a project with a store page.

How to follow it

Three channels carry the feed: Steam announcements, the Discord where Firesides happen, and the newsletter on the official site. Steam is the one that also notifies you on release day, which makes it the minimum.

If you want to read the primary sources rather than a summary, every post in the table above is on the game's Steam news feed, and the store page links to the official site for the pre-order and press kit.

Next

• Release date and platforms — what the 2026 window covers.
• What is World of Anterra? — the systems those posts describe.
• Water, fishing and sailing — the most detailed feature post, in full.

For anyone tracking the game, the practical advice is simple: subscribe to the Steam feed, and read the Fireside posts, because that is where the studio explains what it is building.