It has been a good week and here's the progress that we've made with Hearthlands:

All the animals and NPCs are pretty much done (yay!)

Top row: hauler, miner, aviarist, peddler, tax collector, emigrant, grower, hunter, immigrant, shepherd and woodcutter.
Bottom row: rabbit, turkey, boar, piglet, pig, large pig, chicken, rooster, goat, sheep and wooly sheep.

This is pretty much every mob we needed for the first release of the game (the only one missing is a fisherman).

Sound and music engine

The technical part of the thing is done, and now we just need to add all the required sounds to the game (which is quite a lot). We won't make voiceover for every character in the game just yet, but this is something we're looking for in the future.

Currently we have about 40% of the necessary sounds added to the game and we'll probably finish that next week.

Apparently rabbit sounds are quite difficult to find, although I'm sure that rabbits do make some. The sound library that we use doesn't have any, so I'll probably need to unleash the power of Google search for this.

We won't probably have a proper music theme in the first release of the game (that's always a tricky bit if you want original music in your game and can't make it yourself), but I've managed to find one of my old records which suits fine for now (unfortunately, it's quite short and I'm not a very good composer).

Sounds like a farm.

Technical stuff

I managed to launch the game on Mac and it seems to work just fine. Apparently, running a Java 7 program on Mac is kind of tricky, because for some reason OS automatically installs only Java 6 and you have to download, install, and setup 1.7 JRE manually.

I wanted it to be as simple as "download — double click — play", so I had to roll back to Java 6 and rewrite some Java 7 code (damn you, Apple!). On the other hand you can launch the game on Mac as a native application now (well, it looks like one) without any technical shizzle wizzle.

After some fiddling around I managed to make a Windows launcher for the game (in fact it is one line of C++ code), so now the game looks classy on both platforms (with icons and stuff).

Next step — Linux.

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There are lots of things still to do. More sprites, more sounds, more small improvements which fill up our To-Do list after every playtest. On the other hand, we've pretty mush done in terms of functionality for the first release, which is good news.

* * *

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