It has been a good week and first of all I'd like to thank everyone who bought the game (if you want to be included in the credits section of the game as early supporters — please send your name/nickname and an e-mail you bought the game from).

Also, I'd like to thank everyone who voted for us on Steam Greenlight. There's a long road to the top and we'll get there eventually with your help.

I'd like to thank fellow youtubers (Christonian, TribalGaming, Dan Field and Myratax) who helped introduce Hearthlands to the world in three different languages (English, German and French).

We continue to work on Trade/Military update of Hearthlands and here is what has been done so far:

Marketplace window looks similar to storage yard window but has little icons indicating which resources are available for trade and which resources you are buying or selling. You can actually make a little bit of profit by re-selling the goods bought from one city to another with a higher price.

A very cool (in my opinion) merchant.

Economy overview window was overhauled due to addition of trade.

Statues and fountains now require stone to be built.

Found the first bug: peddler may get stuck in his tent and never come out if the tent is adjacent to a house. I've been thinking about rewriting peddler's behavior a little bit anyway, so the bug will also go.

New buildings: fletcher's shop, weaponsmith's shop and armorer's shop.

The general idea here is that military workshops do not produce anything until there is a demand for it. For example, you build an archer's barracks and your fletcher's shops and armorer's shops (if they have access to the barracks) automatically start to produce bows and leather armor accordingly until the barracks have enough equipment.

This is how squad icons will look like (the icon uses your shield colors):

(icons by game-icons.net)

In the next release there gonna be four types of units: axemen, spearmen, archers and horsemen.

As always we would like to get as much feedback as possible, so please comment and send your thoughts to info@hearthlands.com. If you become our watcher on Indie DB, that also helps a lot! Don't forget to subscribe to one of our social network pages or YouTube channel. Currently we no longer accept donations, so if you want to support the development — you can just purchase the game now.

And, please, do vote for us on Steam Greenlight!

Thank you,
Sergio

It has been a crazy week, so let's get to the news first:

First of all, we've released Hearthlands version 0.1.0. It is available for Windows, Mac and Linux via Humble Widget on our web-site. Download it here.

For Windows users: make sure you read installation instructions. Hearthlands requires Java, which may not be properly configured on your system. If you (re)install Java using links from installation instructions, everything works fine.

You can get Hearthlands via Humble Widget with a discount for 9.99. If you purchase the game now, you will get all of the updates as well as a Steam key when we get greenlit. There is not a lot of people who have heard about Hearthlands yet, so every purchase makes our day:)

Here's the quick tutorial video to get you started:

Also, we've got on Steam Greenlight (yay!).

I'm looking forward to writing an article called "How we got greenlit", which would probably be quite interesting, but for now, after 2.5 days on Greenlight it's mostly emotions and not enough actual information. Quite a lot of people liked the game and we didn't expect that much attention in the first couple of days. As we go down in "Recent submissions" list the number of votes we're getting drops though, so we're finding ways to promote the game to keep the pace. It's mostly up to you right now, so please vote for us! (Ask your friends, parents, children and pets to vote for us as well — we gonna need it!).

If you want to get a free copy of Hearthlands to showcase the game on your YouTube channel please contact us at info@hearthlands.com.

As for the development, we continue working on World Map and trade. Here's how the World Map looks at the moment:

Trade routes screen:

New building — Marketplace

Roadmap for the nearest future:
- Trade
- Military
- Monsters on the Local Map
- Better trade and Diplomacy

As always we would like to get as much feedback as possible, so please comment and send your thoughts to info@hearthlands.com. If you become our watcher on Indie DB, that also helps a lot! Don't forget to subscribe to one of our social network pages or YouTube channel. Currently we no longer accept donations, so if you want to support the development — you can just purchase the game now.

And, please, do vote for us on Steam Greenlight!

Thank you,
Sergio

Hearthlands is now on Steam Greenlight and we need your help to get votes.

In other news: World Map is starting to take shape:

Click to enlarge

Thank you in advance!

This week we were mostly preparing for the first public release, while adding some missing sprites and changing ones we weren't quite happy with.

Some pages on the web-site had to be rewritten as well, as a result of adding the download section (it is not live yet).

Despite the fact that it was 30 °C here all week and I feel like I'm melting, we managed to make some good progress:

Some balance changes and fixes (for example, fisherman used to get stuck if spawned on a tile with fish)

Lots of graphics stuff (rotten crops; new mines and masonry; new gold, iron and coal deposits; new saplings; new road etc.)

New decorative objects on the terrain

Graphics for building status icons

Construction menu now has proper icons

First test on Linux (success, but we'll need to do a full playtest)

Mac OS X build has a proper dmg package now

Started to think what the World map may look like:

Bonus: one huge screenshot (5760x3240).

* * *

At this stage of the development it is really important to get some feedback and understand that people are actually interested in the game. So, if you'd like us to keep being motivated and carry on with the progress, if you're interested in the game — please, let us know. You can do that by leaving a comment, becoming our watcher on Indie DB, or subscribing to one of our social network pages or YouTube channel. You can also write us an email (info@hearthlands.com) or if you're super cool — make a donation.

We'd very like to grow our community, so if you can tell your friends about Hearthlands — it will be awesome.

Thank you in advance,
Sergio

Another productive week as we working towards the first public release of Hearthlands. Here's what has been done:

As usual, lots of small improvements and fixes

Roadblocks removed; peddler and tax collector mechanics changed

After reading this post I realized that we actually don't need roadblocks and walkers (a concept you may be familiar with if you've played Zeus or Pharaoh).

Roadblocks/walkers is an interesting concept but 1) it is kind of outdated, 2) it works well only in city planning oriented games, 3) it is difficult to explain to non-experienced players, 4) we have only two characters which use this behavior (peddler and tax collector), 5) it makes the game look too much like Zeus or Pharaoh.

With this kind of behavior you need to fiddle around with your road system too much, which is ok for a game like Zeus, but in Hearthlands it may keep you distracted from other stuff, which we plan to add to the game later.

Peddlers and tax collectors now use the same mechanics as haulers - just target a specified building (where they are most needed at the moment) and go there using the shortest path. This is much more obvious and predictable for the player and makes building big cities less painful.

Fishing!

Different food resources in Hearthlands have different nutrition value and can be obtained using different mechanics. Unlike meat or grain fish is ready to eat, but is a little bit more difficult to get than apples or turnips (which also are ready to eat).

Before fisherman is able to catch fish it needs to build a boat out of 4 loads of planks, which means you will have to build a woodcutter's lodge to get logs and a sawmill to process logs into planks first. Fisherman catches from 1 to 6 loads of fish in one trip.

Different industries may now be turned off to stop production and free some workforce

Wild animals spawn and yield rebalanced (there were too many animals in general and they used to drop too many feathers and leather when killed by a hunter)

Graphics for tax office, storage yard, peddler's tent

There currently only two sources of money in the game: mints and tax collectors. Tax collectors use the same mechanics as peddlers.

Graphics for beautifications

Sounds have been finished (we're still thinking about adding some more, though), and yes, rabbits do make sound

* * *

It is probably safe to say that we're 1-2 weeks away from the first public release of Hearthlands. With the first four points from the feature list complete we need to focus on finishing graphics, playtesting and some technical stuff.

* * *

At this stage of the development it is really important to get some feedback and understand that people are actually interested in the game. So, if you'd like us to keep being motivated and carry on with the progress, if you're interested in the game — please, let us know. You can do that by leaving a comment, becoming our watcher on Indie DB, or subscribing to one of our social network pages or YouTube channel. You can also write us an email (info@hearthlands.com) or if you're super cool — make a donation.

We'd very like to grow our community, so if you can tell your friends about Hearthlands — it will be awesome.

Thank you in advance,
Sergio