Hey friends. 🌾
We've got big news this month, and we'd rather just say it straight. Hearthfield has been rebuilt from the ground up in 3D.
If you read July's post, you saw a long list of things that were finished and playable. That list was real. But it was a 2D top-down game, and the further we got, the more we could feel where it stopped. That wasn't going to be our limit. It was going to be yours. The valley we kept describing to each other was never one you could look across, or walk down into, or stand inside.
So we started again, properly, in 3D.
We're not one person any more
The other half of the news: three people joined us. A graphics designer, a writer for the dialogue and story, and a 3D developer. Hearthfield has been a solo project its whole life. It isn't one now, and that's the thing that turned a rebuild this size from something we'd wish for into something we could actually take on.
What's already standing
More than we expected, honestly. One month in, the 3D build already has:
- A hand-sculpted terraced valley, with cliffs, banks, a coast, a river, waterfalls, and a working railway running through it
- A town that's one continuous place, and buildings you walk into. No loading screen, no separate interior map. The roof lifts as you step through the door
- Villagers on daily schedules who walk real paths to real places, keep shop hours, and live in the rooms above their own shops
- A day/night cycle and weather. Rain, storms and snow, rolled a day ahead as a forecast
- Farming, gathering, crafting, shops, skills and a quest board
- Online co-op for four. Join by code, or straight from your Steam friends list, with in-game chat
What's coming back
Fishing. Mining. Animals. Festivals. Romance. Cooking. Item quality tiers. The character creator. Controller support.
All of it was finished in the 2D build, and none of it is cancelled. The designs, the data and the rules all came with us. They're queued for the new foundation rather than starting from a blank page. The roadmap above shows roughly the order they're coming back in. Animals are first.
Some of what we've been making
It's early, and a lot of the game is still held together with placeholders. The villagers are faceless mannequins right now, which is exactly as unsettling as it sounds. So instead of screenshots we'd have to apologise for, here are a few things straight out of the engine, lit the same way they're lit in the valley.
The five tools you actually hold:
The trees the valley is planted with:
And a few of the pieces that go inside the houses, because "buildings you can walk into" only means something if there's something in them:
What's next
- Characters. Real models, real faces, real animation. The biggest job on the board by a distance
- Interiors. Every building furnished the way the manor and the inn just were
- Animals. Top of the rebuild queue
- Writing. A proper voice for the whole cast, now that there's someone on it full time
Announcing a rebuild to people who are already watching is a strange thing to do, and we did think about softening it. We'd rather just tell you. The version we're making now is the one that's worth your time. 🌻
See you in September.
Wishlist Hearthfield to catch the next update.