Here's what's new in the last month.

🍲 New camp structure: the Cauldron

The Cauldron expands crafting. You can now find reagents throughout the world, and combined with the harvest from your garden, use them to brew potions and craft foods to take on your expeditions.

🗺️ 5 new regions

This is the one people have been patiently waiting for, so I made it the core focus these last few weeks. 5 new regions are live, bringing the total up to 7 regions and over 40 unique expeditions.

• Frostmere, a frozen coast of barrows and ice caverns
• Sunmarch, sunbaked dunes and forgotten tombs
• Bloomwilds, a beautiful and deadly overgrown jungle
• Ashpeaks, volcanic cinder slopes and calderas
• the Glassdark, the 7th and final region. Bizarre, unique, and you'll need a portal to get there.

🎲 3 new expedition events

New question-mark encounters on your expeditions. And for those of you who love to gamble, the Gambler's Stone now lets you bet more, risk more, and let it ride.

📦 New status effects, item affixes, legendary named weapons, and trophies

Big pass on combat and loot depth:

• Two new status effects: Shock and Bleed
• New affixes on jewelry that amplify your status effects
• New defensive stats on gear: damage reduction, HP regen, bonus healing received, status resist chance
• Legendary named weapons can drop from each capstone boss
• Every boss now drops a unique trophy that you can collect

🧭 Minor improvements

• New and expanded world map
• New chest types: reagent caches, material caches, and gold caches
• The wandering merchant now sells reagents and camp materials
• A ton of quality of life improvements and bug fixes based on incredible feedback from the community 🙏

💼 Growing organically

I've stopped all ad spend for now, and I've been really happy to see that people are still finding the game organically and starting to play. Really cool that the project can grow on its own a little.

If you've been telling your friends about Pathbound or sharing it around, thank you. It really does make a difference 🙏

👀 What's coming next

• Perks overhaul (perks 2.0)
• An update to the momentum system and rewards

What else would you want to see? Let me know in the comments.

Hope everyone is healthy and enjoying their running.

Cheers 🏃 - Otang

🔮 Thank you Pathwardens

Huge thanks to all of our Pathwardens, new and standing — your support makes this possible 🙏

Here's what shipped.

🎃 Region 2, "Murkmoor", is live

Region 2 is here. Murkmoor has a swampy, Halloweeny, spooky vibe, and it's home to the first enemies that have special attacks and can cause status effects on the player. New region, new threats, new loot. Hoping people enjoy exploring it.

We also added 2 new expeditions to region 1 — a new starter location and a new boss.

Have you tried the new region yet? Let me know your thoughts and also what biomes you'd like to see in the game!

🔨 Crafting! Workbench and Forge

We've added the beginning pieces of crafting. Two new camp structures:

• Workbench lets you salvage junk and unusable items down into their raw materials.
• Forge uses that salvage to upgrade your favorite items.

If you find a rare Pyreal Mote while salvaging, you can use it to upgrade the rarity of an item. So your hard-earned god roll can become an even more god roll.

In addition, we've added two new item rarities: Epic and Legendary.

Check out this staff!

🎯 Quests, completely redesigned

The quests system has been rebuilt to ensure you all can run for a long time and stay healthy. Injuries can be common with running and one of the best ways to prevent injury is to ensure you increase your volume thoughtfully.

So - weekly quests are now generated based on your ACWR (acute:chronic workload ratio) — basically, average your last 4 weeks of running and increase it a bit. The goal is to encourage healthy training but still give you something to push for.

And since life happens — busy weeks, low-motivation weeks, whatever — you can now adjust your weekly quest difficulty to make a week lighter or harder based on what you've got time for.

🧱 Minor improvements

• Lock items so you don't accidentally sell or salvage them — important now that you're sinking salvage into your favorites
• Larger world map with fog of war
• Battle screen UI improvements
• Performance improvements on both battle screen and map
• Camp structure grind balanced — the sturdy timber grind isn't as insanity-inducing
• Respec cooldown reduced from 5 days to 24 hours
• Assets moved to a CDN — the game has over 1,000 images now, and that number is going to keep growing

🔮 Thank you Pathwardens

Thank you all for your continued support!

Cheers and happy summer training - I hope you all are staying healthy 🌞

— Otang

I feel like the project has plateaued a bit over the past few months. We tried adding depth and a few experiments that didn't go that great tbh. There have been a lot of improvements to the game, but I feel like the player-facing improvements haven't been as awesome as I'd hoped. So for the near future I'm going to be focusing on the things you all have been asking and patiently waiting for, such as new regions, group content, and easier ways to get camp materials.

Here's what happened over the last ~month...

🗺️ Travel between locations — rolled back

The "run to travel" between locations systems had strong mixed feedback. I think we made a few mistakes with how it was rolled out - the biggest issue was that real world distance was required to be able to play the next expedition, so players could be in a state with nothing to do but run... no gameplay. I think we want to add more things for players to do when they're resting from their runs, not less, so this was the wrong direction.

I still think travel to move is a concept to explore but we need to be thoughtful how it's added so that it doesn't come at the cost of fun / gameplay.

Thanks to everyone who gave honest feedback!

📊 Boring-but-important: difficulty, XP, and gold

A lot of work was done simplifying and improving our difficulty, XP curve, and economy systems. This investment makes it much easier to monitor and tweak these systems as well as design new regions/content with some certainty for how it will feel.

As you can imagine, it's impossible for me to play a level one character over and over through all the content to test the difficulty, XP curve, accumulated gold, etc. There's just not enough time. So I spent some time building internal tools like our own bot to play the game thousands of times to see how it does, as well as dashboards to monitor how real players are performing, eg. which expeditions are the hardest, what floor are people making it to before dying, why does everyone have so much frickin' gold, etc.

🍀 Willpower → Luck

Willpower was the weakest attribute by your feedback, so it's been replaced with...

Luck: adds 0.5% per point to upgrade a dropped item's rarity by one tier, capped at 25%. Builds that lean into Luck will see noticeably better loot over time.

👥 Following / followers

You can now follow other players outside your guild. Honor to your friends' runs and see what they're up to, even if you're not running together.

🤖 Android navigation crashes fixed

The Android navigation crashes that have been haunting us for months are much improved. This required patching native libraries, which pushed our Android build time from 10 minutes to over an hour, but well worth it for stability.

🌲 What's coming next month

We have 2 new expeditions for region 1, and most of region 2 ready. This includes a lot of new enemies and adding enemy archetypes like "glass cannon" or "tank" to make them feel unique and novel.

I really wanted to ship region 2 before this update but we are waiting on some changes to the world map.

🔮 Thank you Pathwardens

A huge welcome to this month's new Pathwardens, and thanks to all of our standing supporters — you're the reason this project keeps moving 🙏

Cheers and happy training 🏃💪

-Otang

Top complaint by a landslide: trade-offs feel too punishing. 38 out of 41 respondents flagged it — almost triple any other issue. A bunch of people also wrote in saying they've got unused perk points sitting there because none of the options feel worth taking.

Message received. A proper perk revamp is on the roadmap — not scoped yet, so I can't commit to a timeline — but it's a priority. Thanks for being blunt in the feedback. That's exactly the kind of input that actually changes things 🙏

🗺️ Running will move you through the world

The map looks cool but hasn't really done anything — it's been a backdrop where you pick expeditions from a menu. That's changing.

Your real-life miles will soon translate to movement on the map. Instead of tapping an expedition to start it, you must travel to it first.

We plan on rolling out this change with the existing region and content first to test it, before continuing work on new zones. For all the level 60s who've been grinding Stillstone Vault - we salute you 🫡

🏃 New gnome trait: Little Engine

Based on your feedback Gnomes had the weakest racial trait, so... Gnomes now get "Little Engine" — the first 2km you run each day earns double stamina.

Idea's in the name — gnomes start fast. Good pick for newer runners, since a short workout still earns you solid stamina.

📊 Leaderboard & stats

Handful of lifestyle improvements:

• Your own position on the leaderboard shows up now, not just the top spots
• After each run you see how many positions you moved (this is one of my favourite parts of completing a run now)
• Last week's final leaderboard is viewable, so the weekly reset isn't a black hole
• Current month run stats on your profile

💍 35 new accessories

Rings, amulets, necklaces. Same procgen system from last update. Nothing flashy — just getting accessories out of placeholder status so the gear pool keeps filling in.

🏯 A bit of travel

I'm in Tokyo at the moment working remotely and visiting my brother and his family. A highlight of the trip was running together around the Imperial Palace! The city reminds me of video games from my childhood - great inspiration for Pathbound :)

🔮 Thank you Pathwardens

A huge welcome to this month's new Pathwardens, and thanks to all of our standing supporters — you're the reason this project keeps moving 🙏

➡️ Not in the playtest yet? It's live on iOS and Android for any supporter tier

Cheers and happy training 🏃 - Otang

Procedural items are live 🎲

This is the one I've been most excited about. Weapons and armor in Pathbound are now procedurally generated - meaning no two players are finding the same gear.

Here's the scale of it: we now have 168 base items that produce over 25 million unique item variations. Tiers 1 and 2 are accessible now, with the rest becoming accessible when we expand the world map (our next focus).

What that means in practice: the bow you found from Tuesday's 5km is almost certainly different from the one your guild mate got on the same run. Different material, different modifiers, different stats.

Android bugs from hell 🐛

Less glamorous but important: we've made major progress on a brutal Android crash buried deep in an underlying framework.

Reproducing it required literal monkey testing — setting up bots to randomly hammer inputs on the screen until we could reproduce it. The good news: crashes are way down. We're not fully across the finish line yet, but the worst of it is behind us and we're chipping away at the remaining cases.

Here's a graph of our Android crash count over time:

Workout sync & stability 🔄

We did a lot of hardening on the health data sync side this update:

• Improved handling of edge cases where sync state could get stuck or confused
• Better in-app guidance when sync issues occur so you're not left wondering what happened
• Tested 10km runs with an iPhone in one pocket and an Android in the other, stopping every kilometer to swap tracking apps — all to figure out which ones actually write to Health Connect reliably

Cheat detection 🚨

We've implemented cheat detection. If you're manipulating run data to farm loot, we'll know. Accounts found cheating will be actioned without warning.

For the 99.9% of you running honestly — nothing changes. This is just us making sure the grind (training) is fair.

🔮 We just hit 1,000 supporters

When I started this, I never even knew if anyone would want to play a game like this, let alone 1,000 people! Thank you, genuinely 🙏🥹

A special shoutout to our Pathwardens — our highest tier of supporters. Thank you 🙏

Not playing yet?

The closed playtest is live on iOS and Android. If you're a Patreon supporter at the Dashing, Pacer, or Pathwarden tier, you're in.

Cheers and happy running 🏃-Otang

Here's what's new in Pathbound over the past couple of weeks.

New class: Mage 🧙

The Mage is here! That brings us to three playable classes, each now with their own unique abilities:

• Mage: Wield ancient arcane forces. Why hit things when you can disintegrate them?
• Ranger: Master of the wild. Deadly with a bow and even deadlier with three arrows.
• Barbarian: All muscle, no subtlety. The solution to every problem is hitting it harder.

Perks are wired up!

We've added status effects to battles (think Poison, Burn, etc.) and perks are now functional. Here's a sneak peek of a few:

Walking & hiking now earn partial stamina 🚶

This one was community-driven - we ran a poll and the feedback was mixed, so here's where we landed:

Walking and hiking now earn stamina at roughly 1/3rd the rate of running. Pathbound is still a game for runners at its core, but walking is great for rest days and recovery. We're also hoping this helps get more people into running by letting them start with walking and work their way up. Walks are still significantly slower for progression, so lacing up and hitting a run will always be the move.

Note: This tracks recorded walks/hikes from your workout app - not step counting.

Other updates

• Activity Feed & Honor: See your guildmates' runs and honor them to show some love. Get competitive, get supportive, get both.
• Respec character: Made a questionable build? You can now reset and reallocate your attributes and perks.
• Attribute balance changes: Willpower now boosts Mana Regen instead of XP. Endurance gives 4 HP per point (down from 5). Agility gives 0.6% crit/dodge per point (up from 0.4%).

Playtest update 🎮

All Patreon supporter tiers can now play the closed playtest! If you're a Pathwarden, Pacer, or Dashling - you're in.

A heads up on pricing: We're planning to increase Patreon tier prices in about 2 weeks. If you're already subscribed, you'll be grandfathered into your current price. So if you've been on the fence, now's a good time to lock in.

Not playing yet?

Join up on Patreon and start your adventure 👉 https://www.patreon.com/Pathbound/membership

The closed playtest is live on iOS (TestFlight) and Android (Google Play testing). Check our "How to Play" post for download links, and hop in the Discord if you need help getting set up.

Cheers and happy running 🏃- Otang

Supporters of any paid tier get access to the game.

Not a supporter yet? Join to get access:👉 https://www.patreon.com/Pathbound/membership

New race: Orc

Zug zug.

Racial traits are live

Each race now has an active trait - these are a work in progress.

Night Elf: Lunar Resonance Night runs earn 10% more stamina.

Gnome: Lucky Critical failures on dice checks are automatically re-rolled.

Human: Perpetual Vigor 10% faster passive stamina regeneration.

Orc: Relentless Once per week, activate to earn double stamina on your next run.

Title System

To start we have 35 titles you can unlock through real world running achievements based on distance, speed, weekly streaks, total time spent running, and leaderboard placement (solo or guild).

Roadmap voting

If you want to steer what gets built next, you can suggest and vote on ideas here:https://pathbound.featurebase.app/

What’s next

New Class: 🧙

Differentiating class combat styles.

Perks are in progress - here's a sneak peak:

Cheers and hope all your training is going well! 🏃-Otang

You can now join and play instantly.

Over the last few weeks I’ve been focused almost entirely on Android stability. It’s not perfect, but it’s finally in a place where letting more people in makes sense. iOS supporters (any tier) and Android supporters (Pacer / Pathwarden tiers) can now play.

Guilds

Guilds are live.

For 1,000 gold, you can create a guild, invite up to 10 friends, design a custom emblem, and compete on weekly leaderboards — either against each other or against other guilds.

Some of you wasted no time. There are already a few very serious guilds running around.

What else is new

D20 dice rolls now drive certain expedition events.

You can switch between kilometers and miles 🇺🇸 in settings.

• You can now compare merchant items to your equipped items during an expedition.
• Currency is simplified to just gold (sorry WoW fans).
• More haptic feedback, eg. opening chests, critical strikes, etc.

What’s next

Android was more work than expected... there was a lot to learn. Now that Guilds are live I'm very excited for what's next: Traits.

This is where your long-term running progression and achievements start unlocking in-game character customization.

More soon.

As always, thanks to everyone supporting Pathbound. This doesn’t exist without you.

If you do want to jump in early and support development, you can see the supporter tiers here: https://www.patreon.com/Pathbound/membership

-Otang

🤖 Android playtest update

We've released the first Android build to a handful of our 🔮 Pathwardens! So far, it's running well. Android has more device variance, but syncing has been stable so far.

We are currently waiting for the Google reviewers to approve us for closed testing so that we can start inviting more players. (Sadly we got rejected a few days ago because our Privacy policy wasn't up to par - that’s now been corrected and resubmitted 🤞).

I'm hoping we can invite the next wave before end of January.

What's new

We’ve been focusing on bug fixes, Android improvements, and some spring cleaning to prepare for a productive year ahead.

Onboarding Improvements

Manually inviting the iOS play testers was becoming a pain, and there are a lot more Android users on the waitlist. So we’ve set up an instant self-onboarding flow. I also put together a small wiki for connecting your device to various fitness trackers and troubleshooting.

As part of this you can now link your Pathbound and Patreon accounts to get a bit of flair on the leaderboards.

🔐 Auth / Login

We've switched to OTP (one-time passwords) as the primary login method. No more passwords to save or remember :)

🔔 Notifications

The foundation for notifications is in place. We haven't enabled any yet... but the hard part is done.

What's next

Guilds (naming still TBD), Traits, and Dice 🎲

2025 Review

Pathbound was born in 2025. It started as an idea because I loved how running made me feel, but I wanted something that made me excited to get out the door. In less than 6 months we now have iOS and Android playtests (that people seem to like!), and an amazing community of hundreds of runners/gamers logging real runs. I'm really looking forward to seeing how much we can improve the game this year!

2026 Goals

Pathbound - Reach a point where I can bring on one part-time contributor

Personal - Run 1,000 km this year (without getting hurt)

Thank y'all for supporting the project, it wouldn't exist without you 🙏

What shipped recently

Milestones Reaching a level, running 50km, or building your camp now unlocks tangible rewards, like additional equipment slots or more powerful flasks.

Abilities & mana The first two placeholder abilities are in: Sweeping Attack and Power Strike. Battles now require mana management and choices instead of just a single basic attack.

Elites Expeditions now include elite battles, marked with a 💀 icon. They’re optional, harder, and meant to reward players who feel prepared to take a risk.

Over-the-air updates During the playtest, it became obvious that waiting 48+ hours for Apple to approve every build wasn’t sustainable. I spent the last couple of weeks setting up over-the-air updates so fixes and balance changes can ship immediately without reinstalls or full resubmissions.This removes a major bottleneck going into 2026 and makes faster iteration possible.

iOS closed playtest The iOS playtest is live. About 50 testers have synced nearly 1,000 runs so far, which has already surfaced a lot of useful feedback. The testers have been putting up impressive mileage and it's been fun to watch you all progress through the game. "xxclaymanxx" already made it past level 20!

Playtest feedback

20 testers responded to the survey. The feedback confirmed that the core loop is working and highlighted clear priorities for 2026 - especially around clarity, pacing, and class abilities. I appreciate how thoughtful the responses were, and they’re already shaping what comes next.

Personal update – New running shoes!

A few folks in Discord recommended the book Born to Run, which nudged me into experimenting with more minimal footwear. I picked these up as an early Christmas present to myself and plan to take them out in the rain to see what breaks 😆

What’s next

• Rum and eggnog
• Review and prioritize playtest feedback
• Prepare Android for the first batch of testers
• Focus on the next core system, likely race/class abilities

Thanks to everyone testing on iOS and waiting patiently for Android 🙏

After many late nights, too much coffee, and some frantic last-minute rebalancing… the first Pathbound iOS playtest is officially live for Patreon supporters (more info at the bottom of this post).

If you’re already a subscriber: you can start playing right now.If you’re not yet: this post is public so you know what’s happening - and you can join in anytime.

What’s in the iOS Playtest

This build is still early, still scrappy, and still wearing some placeholder pants - but it works, and it’s finally time to let the community run with it.

We expect this playtest to run around 2-6 weeks depending on how the feedback goes.

Inside this first test

• The core run -> progress loop
• A world map with a few places of interest
• A camp you can upgrade
• Some basic quests
• Foes to battle and treasure to discover
• Community leaderboards

What I need from you

• First impressions
• Bug reports
• Anything confusing or clunky
• Later: a short survey to help decide what to focus on in 2026

Android Progress

Quick update for Android adventurers:

We’ve officially applied for our Google Play developer account - step one of many. We’re holding off on launching the Android playtest until we get one or two rounds of feedback from the iOS group. This helps us move faster early on, since adding Android will increase the amount of time spent debugging device differences.

The good news: earlier this week, I officially synced my first run to my Android test phone!

What’s Coming Next

Stay tuned for another feature and development update toward the end of the month.

Thank You

This project only exists because a handful of runner-gamers decided to support the idea and help build something fun.

If you’d like to join the playtest, consider becoming a Patreon member to unlock it.

World Map

The world map is now in and functioning the way I’ve been imagining it for a while. It has its own look, and the first region has a handful of locations placed, each tying into different expeditions or points of interest. There’s still plenty to build out, but having the structure in the game already helps everything else make more sense.

The map basically acts as a hub where you choose expeditions, check locations you’ve unlocked, and see what’s coming up next. Here’s a sneak peak of the first region so you can get a feel for it - the dark area is "fog of war" ;)

Slay the Spire–inspired Expeditions

Expeditions now follow a branching node layout inspired by games like Slay the Spire. You’ll come across merchant stops, treasure spots, boss encounters, and small events. Some nodes are simple interactions and others have more going on. The base flow is working, and now I can start focusing on making each type feel distinct.

Attributes are back

Attributes are back, and now instead of leveling up automatically, you can spend attribute credits however you want to shape your character into the kind of hero you want to play. Strength, Endurance, Willpower, and Agility each impact your character’s ability to battle and survive. I also added new combat stats for critical strikes and evasion. This helps give a little more personality to different builds and item setups.

Stamina and Momentum

I added a Stamina and Momentum system to help balance pacing and give you more control over when you take on expeditions.

Stamina is the resource you use to interact with the world of Pathbound, like starting expeditions or taking on battles for XP and loot. It’s limited, and once it hits zero you’ll need to wait for it to replenish slowly or... GO FOR A RUN to restore it. When you earn more stamina than you can use, the extra rolls into Momentum points which can be redeemed weekly for additional loot and rewards.

What’s Next

Next up are quests, finishing building out the first region of the world, and adding a bit more challenging content!

Thank you supporters!

Big shoutout to our 🔮 Pathwardens for making all of this possible.

Thank you to all Patreon supporters and those hanging out in Discord. Y'all are keeping me going as I put in the long hours. Who knew making a game would be this hard 😅😆

Stay warm - Otang

Every hero needs a place to rest. After a long run, the path leads home - to camp.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been building Pathbound’s Camp system - a personal home base for your adventurer between runs. It’s where your journey pauses, where recovery matters, and where the work you’ve done out on the road turns into cozy progress.

🪓 What Is the Camp?

Your camp is made up of upgradeable structures like the Shelter, Well, and Garden.Each can be improved using materials you gather from your runs or discover as loot. These upgrades provide perks to aid you in future journeys.

• Shelter - a place to rest; provides XP bonuses
• Well - enhances your ability to heal yourself during battle
• Garden - grows herbs and produce that you can harvest to brew helpful mixtures for your next journey.

Each addition gives you a reason to keep running - and a reason to come back.

⚔️ Updated Battles: Strategy and Survival

We’ve also overhauled the battle system UX this month. The goal: make fights more interesting and tactical.

Here’s what’s new:

• Healing in battle - you can now use your flask to restore HP mid-fight; careful, flasks have limited charges.
• Multi-monster encounters - more than one enemy can challenge you at once, forcing tougher choices about who to strike first.

🌿 Rested XP: The Power of Taking Breaks

One of the new Camp structures, the Shelter, unlocks something I’ve wanted to try for a while: the Rested XP State.

If you take time off between runs - whether that’s a day, a weekend - your next run earns bonus XP.

It’s a gentle reminder that rest is part of progress, both in-game and out in the real world.

Run hard, rest well, and your next journey will reward you for it.

🗺️ Behind the Scenes: Experiments

We also spent part of October experimenting with a some 2D isomorphic ways to make the Camp feel more like a physical space you could navigate, including sort of a world-building mode where you could place camp elements wherever you wanted.

It looked meh... and slowed down what should be a quick, satisfying loop between runs. So for now, the Camp will stay menu-based - simple and fast, until we can get some feedback. Here's what the prototype looked like - what do you think of this direction?

💬 What’s Next

The World Map - it's not ready to share yet. We’ll be focusing on it more through November.

Thank you supporters!

Just wanted to say how much I've appreciated the Patreon subscribers, the members in Discord, and everyone leaving positive comments and feedback. It's been really amazing to have your support, and it's keeping me motivated to continue sprinting towards the next update and our first Beta test!

Until next time- Otang

⚔️ Battles & Encounters

After each run, you’ll have the opportunity to battle foes you met along the trail.It’s the first time the real-world run and the in-game world properly connect.

Right now, the encounters are simple, but the loop works end to end:run → battle → loot and level up → repeat.

But don’t be too greedy — win your fight, keep your loot. Lose, and it’s gone.

💎 XP and Loot

We changed how progression works. XP and loot now come from monsters (and soon quests), not from the run itself. It fits the theme better and gives a reason to actually engage with quests and battles instead of just logging distance.

🧪 First Small Test

We ran a small friends-and-family iOS test build to start catching bugs and see if the app actually works in the real world with real runners. It mostly does!

Here’s the current leaderboard:

🪆Paper Doll

Didn’t make much headway on the paper doll system sadly. It's being put on the back burner so we can focus on the core gameplay.

🏃 What’s Next

We’re building the world map and quest system next.

If you’ve got an idea for what kind of quests would actually make you want to go for a run, drop it in the comments.

💬 Community + Supporters

It's been great catching up with everyone in Discord lately; thanks for sharing your runs and ideas.

A huge thank you to all of our supporters — Pathwardens, Pacers, and Dashlings 🙏

Until next time- Otang

🧙 Core Character Progression

The heart of Pathbound is now beating: character leveling and skills. Every step you take earns you experience and levels. Here's an example of experience gained from a 5km run:

Core stats: Endurance, Willpower, Swiftness, and DevotionEach of these stats is tied to an attribute of your run! Distance -> Endurance. Can you guess the others?We thought about adding Strength, tied to elevation gain, but since not every runner has access to a device that accurately measures elevation (or lives near hills!), we're postponing it for now.

Crafting & gathering skills:Think things like alchemy, cooking, mining, fishing - ways to turn your miles into materials and your materials into useful items. These are still early, but they’re forming the backbone of Pathbound's economy. More to come on this soon!

🛠 Backend Upgrade

Real-time sync was giving us reliability headaches, so we switched backend providers. Not glamorous work, but these fixes keep things stable now so development won’t grind to a halt later.

🔮 A Peek Ahead

Here’s what I’ll be exploring next:

• Dynamic paper doll character – we're experimenting with your avatar actually wearing the armor and clothes you equip. Here's a scuffed version just for laughs:
• Active skill progression – level up your gathering and crafting skills by doing them, eg. going fishing should fill your inventory with trout and increase your fishing skill.

Thank You

Big thanks to everyone supporting and following along this early.

A huge thank you to all of our Pathwardens, Pacers, and Dashlings 🙏

Until next time, keep running strong.

— Otang

It's been a month since Pathbound's inception as an idea. Since then I've been spending ALL my free time on it... but it's not enough! So, I decided to go full-time on it. Friday will be my last day at my "regular" job 🫣

I figure I owe you all an update, so I'll aim to do these at a minimum of once a month.

Disclaimer

Everything you see below is so early it's not even considered Alpha. It's more of a prototype. It will all change. This is just a sneak peak into the development process.

What’s been happening

The last few weeks have been a lot of foundational work - the kind of things that don’t look flashy now, but are critical and set us up to move faster later. Still, there are some concrete wins:

Tech stack/foundation 🤓: Compared Flutter, React Native, Godot and Love2d - decided to go with React Native to leverage my background in web development. Setup offline access/syncing so parts of the game will be playable with no internet connection.

• Real run data: Real runs are now syncing via Apple HealthKit! This gives me an excuse to run more to test the game!
• Signup and basic character creation: A core first step for any testing. For now an account can have multiple characters, but this may change.
• Items, inventory, and gear: The first version is up! It’s barebones for now, but we have items that can be equipped in various slots. Importantly - one slot for each foot.
• Expedition log: Every run you do in the real world creates an in-game expedition. Now there’s a working log that records them. Expeditions can be opened to see the gold/xp/loot rewards.

A peek ahead

Next up, I’ll be continuing to build the core systems, starting with Skills. That’s where your miles translate into XP and growth.

Thank you

To our first patrons - your support means more than I can say. You’re literally fueling the early steps of this adventure. Huge thanks to:

A huge thank you to our first Pathwardens, Pacers, and Dashlings 🙏

Thanks again for being here from the start. Bigger things are on the horizon!- Otang

I'm Otang, the dev behind Pathbound - a running RPG built for gamers who want a little more story, challenge, and motivation in their workouts.

I started this project because I love running, but I’ve always wished it felt more like an adventure and less like a chore. So I’m building the kind of game I’d want to play - something that turns your runs into progress, lets you explore a world, and rewards consistency like a good RPG should.

🎮 What is Pathbound?

Pathbound is a fantasy-themed running RPG coming to iOS and Android. It’s designed to motivate and reward your real-world runs - whether you're training for a race or just getting back into movement.

💥 What makes it different?

• Monetized fairly - no ads or pay-to-win
• Not GPS-based
• Built specifically for runners

🤝 Why Patreon?

Patreon lets me stay focused on making the best possible experience for runners who game (or gamers who run).

By supporting here, you’ll:

• Get behind-the-scenes updates
• See early builds and WIP art
• Help shape the direction of the game
• Be part of a community building something different

Thanks for being here early. Let’s run this thing together.

— Otang