What is Heartlight?

Heartlight is meant to explore what it means for someone to create lasting and meaningful relationships through shared experiences and a sense of adventure in a charming and easy to pick up and play game. As the player explores the world they will go from town to town and will encounter new friends along the way who can join them along of the journey and maybe teach them new ways of looking and interacting with the world.

Thats cool and all but what does gameplay look like?

The gameplay loop is loosely routed around a day night cycle.... loosely.

During the day the player will take a friend with them to go out and fight and explore their way through the nearby environment, finding new weapons and materials, leveling up their skills and maybe if they are lucky stumbling upon a new campsite. Finding a campsite gives the party a chance to rest for the night. But be careful if you are out exploring at night without a campsite nearby; it becomes much harder to navigate and fight your way to safety. 

During the night the player can talk with their adventuring partner, give them gifts or accept or progress side quests that advance their storyline and deepen your bond. Camping is a great and safe way to get to know someone without the hustle and bustle of everyday life. As you becoming closer your companions will give you new skills and teach you how to better use their preferred weapon type. When you wake the next morning you will find yourself fully rested and ready to set off again from your campsite.

After a few days under the stars the duo will run out of camping supplies and need to backtrack to the last settlement they visited. From here the player can choose to buy some new supplies and ask someone new to venture out with them or stick with the same partner and try to push further.

But you said combat? Is it scary?

Yup , the primary way the user interacts with the world is through combat; its a scary world out there. It’s ok though you got this. The combat is meant to be easy to pick up and play to avoid stressful play sessions and to be accessible  to people of all levels are experience.  Each person you meet along the way will have their own unique set of weapons so as you grow your friendship so will your skills in battle. This large weapon pool will allow for the player to have large variety and weapons allowing them whatever playstyle they prefer and encourage replayability with new partners 

Wow thats a lot of stuff but I'm having trouble visualizing, have any gameplay inspiration 

Persona Series - Stop rolling your eyes. But few games do causal friendship and dating in such an approachable and endearing way. Can hardly talk about friendship in games without bringing up your favorite Persona game

Nier Automata - Theres more to this than what you are assuming! While its cinematic and over the top combat is not exactly what I am striving for there is something to be said about the way you can easily digest and manipulate a scene full of tons of enemies with so little effort.

Dark Souls Series - Weird, huh? A game known for its crushing difficulty as inspiration for a game inspiring to be easy to pick up and accessibly to a large audience? Well… I was always bad at Dark Souls, still am in fact, but I always loved the way you were able to what seemed like craft an entirely new play style out of the game just by changing the armor and weapon set. That is what inspires me.

Made In Abyss - Not a game at all…. actually I think It might be now? Irregardless if you haven’t given yourself the chance to watch this anime I highly encourage it. I haven’t seen much media that does such a fantastic job at showing people thrown into a crazy new world and just have to fumble their way through. Its a great example of a true emotionally grounded and chaotic journey.

Sounds pretty cool, but its not done yet? Whats does the future look like?

The intent is to release the game is a series of chapters. Each chapter containing more friend and a settlement or two and obviously the area to explore around and between them all. The overall story will be relatively simple and most of the storytelling will exist within the lives of characters, world and lore of the areas you explore and visit. Unfortunately there is not yet any real roadmap for these chapter releases.

But in the end the game itself is just intended as a way to establish lovable and charming characters, a world, and a setting but ultimately the lives of those characters are to be governed by the fans themselves.

To achieve this the game is built on a robust set of interal tooling allowing the entire game to be dynamic meaning given the right tools the players can share new stories and experiences they feel suit the characters and world. The goal is to enable and encourage players so there are always new adventures to experience with your friends :3

Wow, big plans you must have a whole team, right….RIGHT?

Hahaha…ha…no…sorry. Heartlight is currently only being developed by myself as a solo dev full time. While I continue to try and bring this world to life I appreciate your patience as I can only get to so many things at once. 

But my core beliefs is creating a product that is built right and built sustainably with the right tools even as a solo team, ill be able to move quickly and efficiently and create an awesome game!

But that being said I'm always interested in talking with new people and working together so feel free to reach out!