Welcome to Wishbone

The 7.01.03 patch mostly fixes some conversation pathing bugs in the "Official Business" quest, a couple of which could lead to soft locks in the unpatched version of the game. Other than that, the main fixes are typos and small visual issues.

...Though, huh. Did Tobias always have a mustache?

This update fixes issues that caused the game to crash during rollover in Fall after a few days, and also fixes crashes in the Cheat! minigame, as well as a bug that blocked progress in Sam's "Den of Thieves" quest.

Thank you so much for the kind words, we really appreciate it! And we appreciate the bug reports, too!

Normally I'd have pushed out (another) patch by this point but being at a convention last week took up all my free time and brain power.

You can expect a patch this coming weekend, though! If anyone hasn't already downloaded the game, it might be a good idea to hold off until I get the big weekend patch out before taking a deep dive into it.

it's really hard learning to pixel from scratch, but it's been a lot of fun too! so tysm for everything!

Aw thank you so much! That's so cool to hear you've taken an interest in the medium! Pixel stuff is tricky to wrap your head around but one of the nice things about it is that it's a pretty forgiving medium... even very simple or stylistically rough pixel art has a lot of charm and personality.

I am pleased to announce that the Wishbone Fall Year 1 beta is now available for download for Windows PCs! Go to the Beta Download page to grab the latest patch.

Wishbone is a cowboy character drama with farming sim elements. Raise critters, farm crops, and get entangled in the eccentric townspeople's personal drama via quests, minigames, tons of dialog, and a story that gradually builds in intensity as the seasons pass.

Ah, thank you for the generous offer!

Truthfully though, my intention is to never even consider taking money for the game until it's 100% complete--I just wouldn't feel good taking payment for a slow-moving and highly personal project that I can only work on in my free time.

Hello everyone! It's been a while, hasn't it?

I've been kinda underwater with IRL stuff these last few months and was feeling frustrated making so many monthly updates that amounted to "still busy, working where I can, don't know when it'll change". So I took a little break to focus on the project more quietly.

And it's paid off! Fall Y1 is done and the private beta went out to testers yesterday. I'm going to spend the next few weeks working with them to get bugs fixed and finishing up some tertiary features (like the weekly town newspaper that reports on goings-on and the player's actions) to create something that's ready for public release.

It's a little hard to show many screenshots from Fall without going into spoiler territory because whoooa boy does the plot tempo ramp up this month. You get the chance to know the outlaw characters much more deeply and some of the existing Wishbone residents are revealed to be a little less law-abiding than they might initially appear. The cutscenes/events and quests are more involved and fancier, with more complex animations and sequences that build on what was developed for Spring and Summer. And, before the season is up, you'll see betrayal, explosions, grievous injury, and maybe even a little bit of named character death.

It's been a busy couple of months! I've lost a lot of work-weekends this summer to life stuff--work, social engagements, getting married--but work on Fall continues nonetheless. Most of the big quests and events have been implemented--two very large ones and a handful of smaller ones remain. But I think it's far enough along that I can show you some sneak peeks at what the next season of Wishbone will bring!

Hi everyone,

Sad news this month: Alan, the music composer for Wishbone's opening theme, passed away on June 16th, 2025. He was a kind, funny, interesting person and passionate musician who I wish I could have known better. We continued talking after he made the Wishbone theme and discussed the idea of him doing a second credits theme in his country music style with lyrics and everything. It never wound up happening, but I wish we'd gone ahead with the idea now.

An announcement by his brother can be found here. I'd also encourage you to check out his Bandcamp and listen to some of his other work. In particular, let's give the Wishbone theme a listen, for him.

Late on this one, oops! I've been... really really busy. Just totally slammed by work and life and stuff these last couple months, but sneaking in work on these very important cowboys where I can...

Currently working on implementing a bighuge quest starring Mayor North! Only the final (fairly long) scene remains.

April's Update is being posted very late, oops!

Again, not a whole lot to say about this stage of development--still plugging in Fall quests and events, gradually transforming my to-do document from the regular black text of incompleteness to the underlined, bold red text of being done!

These last couple months of development have been slower than I'd hoped because I've lost more than half of my weekend work days to other tasks. It's been an incredibly busy spring, and the rest of May is going to continue that trend. Not being able to work on Wishbone as much as I'd like has been a little maddening. But things are continuing to move along, and I'm happy with what I've gotten to implement so far. I'm also testing a lot more as I go so that we can avoid a repeat of the Summer Y1 beta lead up (where it was delayed significantly due to needing a lot of last-minute debugging).

Little late on this one (it's been a busy couple of weeks), but the Fall quests and events are being implemented now! Currently have several small and medium ones done and one big one that's mostly done (still troubleshooting the scene playing out, making sure characters don't get stuck and animate properly).