When we started building RVX-007, we had a plan.
We built a city, a beautiful residential area, and a story-driven experience with progression, objectives, and a gameplay loop that carried you from beginning to end. We put a tremendous amount of work into that world and the story we wanted to tell inside it.
Then we changed direction.
The work is still there. The lore still matters. But somewhere along the way, the parts we kept coming back to were the things happening between our plans.
We wanted to stay a little longer. Build something else. See what was on the next island. Go fishing when we really should have been doing something useful.
We wanted a world we could make a life in.
A place where an evening could mean building a home, tending crops, surviving the infected, or loading a raft with everything we needed and setting off without knowing exactly where we would end up.
I worried about that change. We had invested so much in the original direction. Were we setting aside the thing that would make our game worth playing?
Then Timber stole my bow.
I was AFK, sitting on my sleeping bag, when that sneaky bastard crept up and took it. What followed was a feud that has lasted multiple play sessions and far more hours than either of us should probably admit.
We had spent all that time designing a story, and here we were, completely invested in one that started with an unattended bow.
That settled it for me.
We regularly sit down intending to test for an hour or two. Several hours later, we’re still playing. We’ve built something we’re proud of, caught something ridiculous, or become distracted by a plan that absolutely cannot end well.
There are still bugs. We’re making an alpha, and it reminds us of that regularly. But sometimes we have to remind ourselves to stop playing long enough to write them down.
That feeling is what we’re building around.
Barely Civilized is an open-world survival sandbox about making a place for yourself in a world that carries on around you.
You can settle in and turn a rough shelter into a home. Work your way toward better tools, grow your own food, explore the islands, and learn what it takes to survive. There’s satisfaction in doing that on your own: every improvement is yours, and the next adventure can wait until you’re ready.
Bring friends, and you also get whatever questionable judgment they bring with them.
The lore will remain part of the world—something to discover as you explore. We want to give you places worth visiting, dangers worth preparing for, and enough freedom to come away with stories we could never have written for you.
We’re building this because it’s the game we want to play. We hope you’ll find as much joy in it as we have.
Maybe you’ll build a quiet home by the water.
Maybe you’ll finally get your raft ready and head for the horizon.
Or maybe you’ll capture a rabbit and ride it into the sunset, only to discover that your teammate has stolen the raft and left you stranded on a tiny island.
Then your peaceful evening becomes several hours of rebuilding, plotting, and preparing to hunt them down.
Because that bastard stole your raft.
Good luck out there, survivors.
— ArTchie & Timber
P.S. DON’T TRUST THE SHEEP!
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