AN IMPORTANT NOTE FROM THE TEAM
First off, thank you for your patience, support, and continued enthusiasm for Hawthorn. We’ve been deep in the work over the last few months, and we wanted to share a bit more about what we’ve been building toward and where things stand.
You may have noticed we’ve been quieter than usual. That wasn’t by accident and it definitely wasn’t from a lack of momentum. With a very small team (5 full time devs), we’ve been juggling a lot at once: actively building the game, planning and executing a bootstrapped go-to-market strategy (with results that rival an entire publishing team), recruiting, business development, and having careful, ongoing conversations with potential funding partners. Balancing all of that while also keeping up a steady community and social presence is a real challenge, and at times we’ve made the deliberate choice to put our heads down and focus on laying a strong foundation for Hawthorn’s future.
The good news is that we’re making great progress, and we’re coming up on a moment where some big, exciting decisions are taking shape. One thing we want to reassure you is that we have a plan to release Hawthorn with or without a publisher or major investor. The path forward doesn’t hinge on any single deal. The game is moving ahead regardless.
At the same time, we’ve spent the past several months having thoughtful, intentional conversations with potential partners. We’ve taken this process seriously (and slowly) because we’ve heard too many cautionary stories from other studio founders who jumped into partnerships that ultimately meant they lost creative control and had to compromised the vision, layoff and exhaust their teams, or, in the worst cases they had to end their projects, sign over the intellectual property, or close their studios altogether. That’s not a risk we’re willing to take.
If we do decide to work with a publisher, it will only be with a partner who truly understands Hawthorn, respects our autonomy, and aligns with our long-term vision for the game and its community. Any partner we choose will have earned our confidence. Our north star hasn’t changed: Build Hawthorn’s foundation the way we believe it should be built and protect the heart, tone, and values of the game and team. In fact, we have already turned down a verbal offer to acquire our studio because it doesn’t align with that north star.
Our plan is to release something sustainable, so that we can continue to grow the game over time alongside this community. There’s a very likely possibility where we may need to launch into Early Access with a smaller version of the game than the grand vision we outlined in the Kickstarter campaign. With this community’s help, we are confident that we can continue to add new features and content over the course of Early Access that will expand the experience and get it closer to full vision. This is a passion project that we want to keep expanding and supporting for decades, if possible.
We’ll share more information on this as details solidify, but for now we wanted to reconnect, be transparent, and let you know that momentum is strong even if it’s been happening a bit more quietly behind the scenes. Thank you for being here with us. Your support gives us the freedom to be patient, thoughtful, and principled as we shape the future of Hawthorn and NEARstudios.
NEW FEATURES AND CONTENT
We are also thrilled to share an update on development with the community and show some work-in-progress images to tease a bit of the exciting stuff our team has been working on. Late last year we branched the code off from the Proof-of-Concept demo that we previously showed the community through trailers, screenshots, and content creator playthroughs.
The Proof-of-Concept demo was meant to get people excited about the world of Hawthorn and the high-level vision for the game. Quickly after that, we needed to move past demo mode, which is essentially a gated experience that simulates for the player what it would be like to play this game approximately 15-20 hours into the full game. From there, it was time to start expanding into the player start experience and the long-term progression experience for the full game.
We have now started building in the expandable map that will ship with the game. We have also built the new and improved dialogue system, quest system, storyteller system and other procedural tools that are scalable and will work better for Hawthorn’s sandbox gameplay. Those systems are complicated and take time to build and we needed to share the vision for the game with the community and publishers faster than we could build those systems in full, hence the reason for the proof-of-concept demo. We aren’t ready to show everything together in the new map quite yet, but we promise it’s worth the wait!
Without further ado, here’s a high-level list of the work that has gone into the game over the winter months:
We are well into building the actual game map for Hawthorn. It is already bigger than shown in the proof of concept with plenty of room to expand exploration as we add to the game. We have also implemented most of the resources (pickups) which look more natural and are more engaging to interact with. We spent time setting procedural systems up for these so that they can be integrated into gameplay systems and we can have fine-tuned control over where these resources appear dynamically based on events in the world. Significant effort was made to keep this performant.
We’ve added crops, furniture, crafting stations, recipes, and food items for foundational version of Hawthorn, however not all of these items have art yet.
Crops now need to be watered to grow, and if you want NPC farmers will happily do this job.
You can now assign NPCs jobs instead of jobs being hard-coded, but not every NPC will enjoy doing every job!
NPCs now care about the furniture and decor in their home and are happier if they have what they want.
NPCs now have leisure activities to unwind with after work.
NPC banter (when they chatter with each other, not in actual dialogue with the player) is now much more convincing and can speak to nearly any situation (e.g. they can talk about rain when it’s raining).
Owl flying is much improved with more realistic bird motion, better ability to control direction and elevation, and the ability to dive and jump while on the ground!
New and improved animations for all the characters!
Improved dragging of resources with the rope
Expanded pet taming system where you can feed them and they can build affinity towards you.
The game now begins with its proper story introduction and each of the villagers have their own introductory stories.
We implemented new story and dialogue tools to better suit the needs of the foundational game.
Villager NPCs now have three village stats:
Happiness: reflects how content they are with their current day
Morale: tracks how content they are with the village as a whole and is accumulated through happiness over time
Affinity: how much a particular NPC has been befriended by a particular player, which will unlock dialogue and friendship events
A journal in your menu will track all the conversations you’ve had with NPCs
Housing has been improved where you can now see inside the homes from the outside and you can be inside and see everything that is happening outside (imagine sitting inside drinking tea and watching the snow or rain outside). Previously, we had interiors as separately loaded spaces where the windows looking outside were faked and it felt too claustrophobic.
You can now hang items on walls through the building system. Here’s a quick sketch of our goals with decorating!
We’ve added controller support for gameplay and are working to support controllers in all UIs.
Co-op/multiplayer is now set up as private sessions where you can invite your friends on Steam to join you.
New and improved world and character save system
Thank you to our backers for allowing this passion project to continue via your support through Kickstarter, Paypal and Ko-Fi. This wouldn’t be possible without you, and we can’t wait to get this game into your hands for feedback when the time comes! If you'd like to become a backer and a part of our village council, head to the playhawthorn.com website and head to the "Subscribe" section for details.
We are planning to go into deeper dives into some of this work, so please let us know in the comments which of these bullet points you would like us to highlight and head over to the Hawthorn Discord to join the conversation!
Sincerely,
The Hawthorn Team