Hey everyone! We’ve talked a lot recently about making building easier, but a question you’ve been asking us for a while is yes, it’s fun to make buildings, but what in-world purpose do they serve? Well, we’ve touched on aesthetics–ie, making beautiful interiors to make your hearthlings happier–but the more fundamental answer is that in Hearth, as in Earth, people creates houses so that they don’t always have to be out in the elements. So this week, I’m really excited to share one of our upcoming features with you: weather.
Weather!!!!
Recap from the video:
When we next update our Steam Unstable branch, you’ll notice three new icons under the sun: a weather forecast showing the weather for today, tomorrow, and the day after. Weathers that occur often, like sunny and windy focus on creating a mood by subtly altering the visuals and audio around your town: the atmosphere, sky, sunrises and sunsets, and ambient sounds. As weather types become more rare, their effects increase accordingly: cloudy days trim down visibility. Rainy days do this, plus add particles, and the rain slightly affects plant growth. Snowy days do all of this, but also slow hearthlings down when they spend too long outdoors. In a bit of visual magic, snow also accumulates on flat, exposed surfaces, like the tops of trees, the roofs of houses, and the tops of logs in stockpiles.
We’ve included some dangerous weathers as well–weathers that encourage hearthlings and animals to build shelter and stay productive indoors: blizzards, for example, greatly reduce visibility and deal minor damage to exposed pasture animals. Thunderstorms destroy trees and lighting may even have a chance to hit exposed hearthlings, harming them and causing them to cower in fear.
If you embark the desert, on rare days, the the dread sandstorm dawns on a hot, muggy morning that causes everyone outside to drag their heels in the overwhelming heat. The shadows of the clouds tell you which direction the wind is blowing and soon enough, over that horizon, a horrifying cloud of dust appears, scouring everything in it’s path. Luckily, standing in the lee of rocky outcroppings, buildings, and trees can spare your hearthlings and animals from the brunt of the storm: time to pull out those safety banners!
That’s most of the feature–there are a few more weathers types, traits, and conversation interactions I’ll leave for you to discover the next time we update the unstable branch, hopefully later this week. We’re also looking for feedback: this weather feature was the brainchild of Engineer Max and Artist Malley, with lots of suport from Engineer Angelo, who did fog and tooling and atmospherics, and Designer Nikki, who made the icons. The team felt passionately that the feature would add quite a lot to the mood of the game and the sense that the world was alive. In addition, it would add importance and a sense of coziness to interior spaces and call out the passage of time by adding variability to each day. The feature also sets up a future implementation of seasons: though seasons aren’t yet implemented, it’s easy to see how grouping weather probability by time of year could create optimal growing and crafting times. We’re also still working through the gameplay effects–since you can’t really control how your hearthlings path, aside from making roads, we wanted the most weather effects to affect the game very gently, so you don’t feel unnecessarily penalized for having people run around in the rain or even the snow. However, we could still do more here; happy to take your suggestions!
Other Announcements
Stream should happen as usual on Thursday at 6:00pm PST. See you there!