Spry Fox Making Happiness

Hi Scouts! As most of you know, it’s been over a year since we first launched Cozy Grove. Since that time, we’ve released dozens of minor updates as well as four major updates, all of which were free, not including the recent New Neighbears DLC which we also released. It would take dozens of pages to summarize all the changes and improvements in those free updates, but here’s a brief summary of some of the bigger items:

• Ms Carouse and the Summer, Fall, Winter and Spring festivals!
• Critters and all related critter-catching activities
• Hugging the bears
• Lots more background music (more than double the tracks we launched with)
• Stone skipping activity
• Darla O’Hare and her clothing challenges, plus the ability to buy and use wigs
• The ability to name your animals
• Shell model collecting
• Ability to enter and decorate the inside of your tent
• Many performance and memory improvements
• QoL features like the “perpetual daylight” option, autosave frequency, etc
• Storage chests, one of the most frequently requested features by the community
• House cats and their unique system of acquisition (aka the cat box)
• Accordion harvesting tool
• Photography minigame
• Bunnies
• Storage UI filters and other major usability improvements
• Decoration, Crafting, and other major UI usability improvements
• Hundreds (thousands?) of balance tweaks in response to your feedback
• Complete the pattern minigames
• New quest types such as decoy quests
• The wishing well
• Tons of new clothing and decoration sets
• Decoration dyes

If you’re curious to read more, you can find the complete history of all our Cozy Grove updates and their changes here.

We look back on the past year of post-launch development of Cozy Grove, and we’re so grateful to have had that time to keep working on it. We feel that Cozy Grove is an incredibly good value in its current state, and we are very proud of the game it has become. We love this odd little universe that we’ve created, and we love telling stories inside it. We want to keep doing that.

One major challenge we face is that continuing to deliver updates has become increasingly difficult for us as tech debt builds up, despite our many attempts over the past year to tackle that. At the same time, most of the revenue and platform financial support that pays for all these free updates came to us over a year ago with the launch of the game. All of this combines to make it extremely difficult to deliver new content and features that our community is telling us it wants (like for example new locations to explore.) So we’ve concluded that the best thing for Cozy Grove and for all its fans is for us to commit to making a sequel!

A sequel to Cozy Grove will give us a chance to take the large amount of time that we need to address the remaining major technical issues that make expanding Cozy Grove too difficult, while also giving us a chance to do the work that will be necessary to delight all of you with new content and hopefully bring new people into our community as well.

So yeah, we’re going to make Cozy Grove 2! And it’s going to have a bunch more new ghost bears, in new environments. And Flamey. And Scoutmaster Blake. We hope you’ll choose to come along for the ride.

This won’t be a quick turnaround; it certainly won’t be finished in 2022. Hopefully we can have it done by the end of 2023, but we’re not ready to promise that yet. We want to do this right and to bring you more of the things you loved, plus completely new features that will delight you. You’ve all been so kind and supportive to us and we want Cozy Grove 2 to be worthy of you.

We invite you to join us in the Cozy Grove discord (if you’re not there already) to share your hopes and dreams for Cozy Grove 2, as well as to stay in touch and see our announcements about the sequel and our progress working on it. 

As always, we are so grateful for your support and we know that if we listen carefully to you and try to deliver the experience you deserve, we know things will work out, and hopefully we can bring a little extra happiness and empathy to the world along the way.

Love,

the Spry Foxes