Hearthlight

About the game

Hearthlight is a pixel-art game about starting over somewhere kind. A letter from your grandmother leaves you her cottage by the cove, and you arrive on a wooden pier in Marigold Cove with a small purse, a cat and a very long list of neighbours to meet. You design your character (body, hair, outfit, a pet) and pick one of eight heroes: Knight, Mage, Ranger, Bard, Lamplighter, Gardener, Cook or Tinkerer. Each has its own way of fighting and helping, with a special move, a dodge and an ultimate (the Knight starts with a frying pan that slams the gloom).

Days pass on a clock, the villagers have routines and jokes, and the game mixes quiet chores with real adventure. Follow the lights out of the valley and a story in ten chapters takes you across two continents, through dungeons and bosses, among them a world boss called Grandmother Kraken that you fight from boats. The world is a streamed map of 1728 by 512 tiles drawn as low-resolution 3D with an oblique camera, crisp scaled pixels and a day and night cycle.

Everything you see and hear is made by code when the game loads: sprites, models, the pixel font, the music and the sound effects. There is not a single image or audio file in the game.

The authors call this a demo: it is playable from start to finish, but it was tested mostly by bots, so expect some rough edges. The repository also includes working notes for an AI coding assistant, so the game was written with that kind of help.

Playing it here

Click Play, then Play on the title screen. With no saved game it opens the character creator: type a name (click the name field first), choose your hero and look, and press "Begin your story". A saved game shows a Continue button instead. The game saves on its own and from the pause menu (Esc, then Save game), and keeps the save in this browser. Settings has volume, text speed, difficulty, language (English, French, Spanish, German and Italian) and "Saves & backups" to export or import a save file.

The multiplayer Party Mode, the phone as a controller and the online backup of the original need the author's server, so they are not part of this version: it is the single-player game, with keyboard, mouse or gamepad.

Controls

A gamepad is detected automatically; the Controls tab in Settings lists its buttons.

A few things worth knowing

Talk to everyone. The villagers are where the jokes and the first quests are. The first goal ("A New Leaf") sends you to Nana's cottage west of the plaza.

The water is not a wall. You can swim off the pier; walk back out of the water to get on land again.

Pick the hero you enjoy. Heroes differ in how they fight and support, and the adventure difficulty can be changed in Settings.

Credits and licence

Hearthlight was made by the Hearthlight authors (github.com/Hearthlight/hearthlight.github.io) and is released under the MIT licence. It draws with three.js (MIT) and includes the qrcode-generator library (MIT), whose licence texts are linked from this page. For this site the game was kept as the authors published it, with these changes: Party Mode, the phone controller and the online backup were removed, the page does not connect to any server, and the links to the project and to the author's other game were taken out.