In Wandering Willows, the two most fun things to do are cooking and making clothes.

Let’s talk about cooking first. To make a dish, you need the recipe to tell you all the ingredients. Let’s look at the recipe for an apple tart:

• 1 apple
• 1 wheat
• 1 butter

Pick an apple off a tree, plant some wheat in your garden, buy butter at the store, and you’ll have everything you need! Once you have everything, cooking is just as easy as clicking a single button.

Making clothes works much the same way as cooking except the ingredients are a bit different. You’ll often be growing cotton in your garden or digging up dye in mounds of dirt. Sometimes, you’ll need to charm wild animals for their wool. The great thing about clothes is that you can wear them!

What’s the point of cooking and making clothes?

Cooked dishes or clothing are always worth more than the sum of their ingredients. That means that a cooked dish gives your pet more energy than if you were to feed him each ingredient separately. Giving characters clothing gives you more friendship than if you were to give them each ingredient separately. They’ll also wear the clothing, too!

A favorite pastime of mine has been dressing up the characters in the game. I’m always surprised by what outfits people come up with. Here are a few:

The game might be a little different from what everyone is used to but we hope you enjoy it. For those who didn’t get to try it, I’d like to describe it. Here’s the opening story:

You decide to take a break from stressful city life and sail a balloon around the world. A storm blows you off course and causes you to crash in the land of Wandering Willows. The inhabitants of Wandering Willows are a bunch of happy, go-lucky folk that are from all different time periods. You and your pet will be helping these folks out and getting into many adventures while exploring this strange and whimsical land!

The game is what we’re calling an Adventure Role Playing Game or Adventure RPG. You get to create your own avatar (you can see mine in my profile pic) and choose your gender, hair, eyes, etc. You’ll help people out with their daily tasks as they help you fix your balloon. With the help of your pet, you will garden, pick fruit off trees, dig up items, create new clothes, cook food, and collect new pets.

This game is at least twice as long as most casual games. Also, the world is about five times the size of what you explored in First Peek.

-This article copied from PlayFirst Blog,
by Dan, the developer behind Wandering Willows