KlonkWerk Devlog

🎉 The Steam Page Is Live! Time to Wishlist

Lukas — Thu, 29 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In the last devlog I said the next step was getting the Coming Soon page live. Well, here it is: Keep Harvesting has its own page on Steam! 🎉

👉 Keep Harvesting on Steam

Starting today, you can add the game to your wishlist. Steam will then let you know as soon as Keep Harvesting comes out. The release is planned for Q1 2027.

And if you’ve ever wondered why developers keep asking for wishlists: for a small solo project like mine, they matter a lot. Every wishlist tells Steam that people are interested in the game and helps Keep Harvesting get shown to more players at launch. So one click from you really does make a difference. 🙏

A little over a week ago, all I could share was a sneak peek from the developer backend. Now the page is public for everyone, and here’s what you’ll find there:

the first trailer for the game
14 screenshots
a detailed description of what Keep Harvesting is all about
13 languages, with full voice-over in English and German
full controller support, Steam achievements, Steam Cloud and leaderboards

It’s a pretty strange feeling to suddenly see my own game sitting in the Steam store between all the others. A good kind of strange. 😄

Don’t want to wait until 2027? There are already test builds on the Discord, and your feedback goes straight into the game.

Next up: more polishing. There’s still plenty to do before release, and I’ll keep sharing the journey here in the devlog.

Thanks to everyone who’s been reading and testing so far!

Go wishlist it. Keep Harvesting! 🌾

🎉 Finally a Steamworks Partner! (And Back to Three Monitors!)

Lukas — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

After almost four weeks of waiting, it finally happened: KlonkWerk is officially a Steamworks partner! 🎉

That means Keep Harvesting is now one big step closer to its Steam release!

Over the past few days, I’ve been busy integrating Steamworks directly into the game and configuring everything on Steam’s developer backend. Achievements, cloud saves, leaderboards, store assets, and a bunch of other things that aren’t exactly glamorous, but are pretty important.

And the exciting part? The Steam store page is finally taking shape!

I’ve been putting together the trailer, screenshots, descriptions, and all the visual assets. It’s not quite finished yet, and there are still things I want to polish, but I figured I’d share a little sneak peek at what the upcoming Steam page currently looks like! 👀

Oh, and a small but surprisingly exciting update on my setup: I’m finally back to three monitors!

After one of my monitors randomly died, I was stuck working with just a single screen for a while. Going from three monitors to one while developing a game is… an experience. 😅

But everything is back up and running now, and having all that screen space again makes working so much more efficient.

Next up: Finishing the Steam integration, polishing the store page, and hopefully getting that Coming Soon page live so you can finally wishlist Keep Harvesting!

It feels pretty surreal seeing my little solo project slowly turn into an actual Steam game.

One step closer. Keep Harvesting! 🌾

A faster sickle changes more than you would think 🌾

Lukas — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

While I am still waiting for Steamworks to approve my account, I am using the time to keep balancing Keep Harvesting. And the deeper I get into it, the clearer it becomes how much work it takes.

Even the basic stats are closely tied together: health, damage, attack speed, or rather how fast the sickles fly, how long resources take to grow back, healing per second and healing from harvested resources. On top of that come the farm’s rising decay rate and the question of how many seeds you should earn for the next step in the meta progression.

And that really is just the surface.

If the sickles harvest faster, for example, that also means more resources and so potentially more healing. The farm lasts longer, reaches later rounds and can bring in more seeds for permanent upgrades. A small change in one place can have effects that reach far beyond the original value.

Changing a single value takes seconds. Finding out what it sets off across the whole game takes a lot longer.

Then come the hundreds of skills: lightning, meteors, wildfire, harvest fires, dynamite, automatic farmers, beehives and much more. Each of them should be worth taking, have its own character and allow interesting combinations. Something that looks fairly unremarkable on its own can suddenly become incredibly strong alongside the right other abilities.

Layered over all of that are the seasons, more than 50 weather types and over 400 meta upgrades. They keep changing the conditions and the options. And even this list covers only a fraction of what comes together in a single run.

For me, this variety is a big part of what makes Keep Harvesting appealing. For balancing, though, it means new questions keep coming up: is a combination too strong in general, or does everything just happen to line up right now? Is the start too hard? How does the same stretch feel with more permanent upgrades? And next to a particularly strong build, is there still enough room for other ways to play?

My testers help me a lot with this. Even so, we can only cover part of the possible combinations and situations. As the developer, I naturally know the systems pretty well and make many decisions almost automatically. Someone playing for the first time may go about it completely differently. And that perspective is exactly what is valuable.

That is why I believe the biggest step forward in balancing is still to come, once the demo is out. More players mean more different approaches, unexpected combinations and feedback on where the game feels good and where it still catches.

My goal is for strong builds to be genuinely fun. A clever combination is allowed to make the harvest escalate properly. At the same time, different paths should pay off, and the challenge should still make sense even when a run fails.

Until then, I keep testing, adjusting values and looking at what follows from each change. It is a lot more work than turning a few numbers up or down. But I think Keep Harvesting is on a good path.

Thank you to everyone who is already testing and sending me their experiences. Every piece of feedback helps turn all these individual systems into a game that feels good as a whole.

Two languages, one monitor and a new update 🌾

Lukas — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Keep Harvesting is on the home stretch before its first release. While I am still waiting for my Steamworks registration to go through, “just a little more polish” has turned into a somewhat bigger update: the game now has German and English voice-over.

The new version is already available to the playtesters as a beta. The German voice-over is fully in place. In English, the tutorial is still missing its voice lines. Those are next.

I wanted to use the waiting time to give Keep Harvesting even more personality. The mix of a farm that starts out cosy and the harvesting chaos that follows leaves a lot of room for that. To me, a warm, relaxed voice fits it perfectly. Someone who keeps their calm even when sickles, abilities and harvest effects have long been fighting for attention out on the field.

With voice-over, a surprising amount of the work is in the small things. A sentence can read completely naturally and suddenly sound clumsy once it is spoken. Then it comes down to pronunciation, emphasis, pauses and how long a line actually takes. And all of it has to work in both languages.

What matters most to me is that the voice accompanies the game and gives it character. The lead role should still belong to your farm, including the increasingly questionable amounts of harvesting tools sweeping across it.

My work session yesterday came to around 16 hours in one go. After that, the new beta was out, and for me it was pretty clearly time for bed.

While the game got an upgrade, my desk sadly had to give one up: a few days ago my second monitor simply switched off for no apparent reason. It has stayed black ever since and seems to be broken.

So right now I am working with a single monitor. Anyone who normally uses two or three can probably imagine how well that is going.

Open the editor. Test the game. Find the audio file. Switch windows. Wrong window. Switch again.

My Alt-Tab skills are currently growing faster than any farm in Keep Harvesting. :D

Still, I am happy with the update. On the home stretch, what matters to me is that the individual pieces fit together better and better: the gameplay, the interface, the sound and now the voices too.

If you want to try the new beta: come to our Discord.

If you are trying the new beta: let me know how the voice-over feels to you. Does it fit the mood? Does something sound odd, or does a line come at the wrong moment? That is exactly the kind of feedback that helps with the final polish.

And then, hopefully, it really is just this one small upgrade before the Steam page goes live.

Lukas

Keep Harvesting: The first version is getting closer 🌾

Lukas — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

By now I would say that Keep Harvesting is at about 95% of a first version I am genuinely happy with. It is fun to watch the individual pieces fit together better and better, and to see the game look and feel more and more like what I had in mind.

That is why a lot of the work right now goes into polish. Most recently I took on the class selection screen. It is one of the first things you see before a run, and it should make you want to pick a class and get going right away.

So it is about time I introduced the classes here: for now, Keep Harvesting has twelve different classes. Three are available from the start, and you unlock the other nine through achievements.

Your choice of class sets a direction for your run before the first harvest. Every class brings its own strengths and drawbacks, and they shape which upgrades and strategies become especially interesting. On top of that, every class has a unique ability. I do not want to spoil those just yet, though.

A few example classes:

The Druid makes plants grow back faster and raises attack speed. In exchange, you have to make do with a more fragile farm and a smaller harvest radius.
The Warden relies on a sturdy farm and reduces the decay caused by the seasons. In return, plants grow back more slowly.
The Farmer starts with two extra farmers and faster plant growth. In exchange, upgrades get more expensive and the harvest radius is smaller.
The Necromancer heals the farm with every harvest and brings plenty of extra farm health. In exchange, plants take considerably longer to grow back.

Together with the skill tree, blessings and curses, this opens up different ways to build a run. That is exactly what I am after: that you try out new combinations and, bit by bit, find your own play style.

Things are moving on the road to Steam as well, although right now that involves some waiting. I have signed up for Steamworks and have been waiting about two weeks for the account to be approved.

Once that comes through, my next step is setting up the Steam store page. That is where Keep Harvesting will get its place, with screenshots, a trailer and more information. As soon as the page is public and you can add the game to your wishlist, you will of course hear about it here.

Until then, the polishing continues. I am already looking forward to showing you the next step!

Lukas

Devlog #2: Why every harvest counts in Keep Harvesting

Lukas — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In the first devlog I introduced KlonkWerk. Today I want to show you a little more closely what I am working on: what actually happens during a run of Keep Harvesting, and which decisions sit between the individual harvest rounds?

You start on a small field. Plants grow back, your sickles fly out to them and you collect resources. Out of that, your build takes shape piece by piece: the combination of abilities and upgrades that keeps you going for as long as possible.

Every harvest keeps the farm alive.

The state of your farm keeps getting worse. Harvesting restores farm health, and at the same time it hands you the resources you buy your next upgrades with. The further your run gets, the stronger the decay becomes. Your harvest has to keep up with it.

That ties a lot of things together: faster sickles bring in more yield and help you stabilise the farm. Extra healing per harvest can buy you air when the state turns critical. Farmers, dynamite, harvest fires, lightning and more take over part of the work on their own, which lets you partly automate the farm.

Between rounds, the skill tree opens. That is where you decide where your resources go. More sickles? Faster harvest helpers? A larger plot? Abilities that hit several plants or set off further harvest effects?

My goal is for you to feel those decisions out on the field. A new upgrade should change something: how fast you harvest, which effects work together, or how well you get through a difficult stretch. From a modest start, a build should grow step by step in which more and more pieces mesh.

The seasons shape the run as well. Among other things, they change which resources turn up more often and which seasonal bonuses apply, so an ability can be particularly useful at one point and less so at another. On top of that come over 40 weather events that reach straight into your gameplay.

After the run, your farm keeps developing.

When farm health drops to zero, your attempt ends. The seeds you earned can then be spent on booster packs in the meta shop. Opening one lets you pick a single permanent upgrade out of several, and it stays with you in future runs.

So there are two levels of progress: the decisions inside a run, and the upgrades that outlast it. On your next attempt you can build on what you have unlocked already, and on what you have learned about how your abilities play together.

Keep Harvesting is still in development. In the coming posts I want to show individual systems more closely and explain the thinking behind them.

If something in particular interests you, or you have questions about the idea behind the game, leave a comment under the current Reddit post or come to the Discord. Your feedback also helps me pick which glimpse to share next.

Lukas

Devlog #1: KlonkWerk is online

Lukas — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The website is up. Which means this small dream, the one I sketched out for myself back at university, now has its own place on the internet.

I am Lukas, 28 years old, and right now KlonkWerk is just me :D

My background is software development and IT security. During my studies the wish grew to build a game of my own, and maybe one day turn that into a small studio. These days I am working on my first game, Keep Harvesting, and trying to find out how far I can take it.

To do that, I just quit my well-paid job in IT security. Writing it down like that does feel a bit mad. But I want to give this project the time it needs and try it seriously.

Honestly, I have no idea whether this small dream ever turns into something I can live on. Or whether in a few years I will look back and say: it was an exciting time, but in the end it did not work out. Right now all of that is open. I have plenty of ideas, a fair bit to learn, and a lot of appetite for finding out what comes of it.

I am working flat out on Keep Harvesting at the moment. It is a 2D farming game with incremental and roguelite elements: harvest, put resources into upgrades, try out different combinations and carry your farm through the turning seasons. Bit by bit it should become the kind of game where you happily start one more run.

Here in the devlog I want to give you a look at development: what is taking shape, which decisions I make, and where I get stuck. Part of this attempt, for me, is sharing the work and hearing what other people think of it.

I have already set up a Discord server and the subreddit r/KeepHarvesting. Those are the first places to go if you want to follow the project, ask questions, give feedback or just chat about the game a bit. The whole thing is still at the very beginning, and I am glad about everyone who is already here.

For today I am simply happy that the website is online and that this first post is up. Now, back to Keep Harvesting.

Good to have you here.

Lukas