Heartwood Game
Heartwood Game
Heartwood Game
Heartwood Game
Heartwood Game
A Mystery Visual Novel
A Mystery Visual Novel
A Mystery Visual Novel
A Mystery Visual Novel
This campaign is closed
Heartwood Game
A Mystery Visual Novel
A Mystery Visual Novel
A Mystery Visual Novel
A Mystery Visual Novel
A Mystery Visual Novel
Heartwood is an episodic visual novel that will satisfy your thirst for mystery, sass, and secret mutual pining. Meet our cast of characters and help them overcome the illusory island of Heartwood. Explore their relationships; gender will never impact nor define any potential pairing between two characters. Choose wisely. Each episode will either set you back or bring you closer to solving the mystery.
Play the free prologue now:
The mobile version is still in beta. To improve your playing experience, we are working hard to turn this game into a mobile app. Help us make it happen
Mrs. Bloom is dead. She lies, seemingly unharmed, deep in the Heartwood National Park. The Ranger, Leon, is the first on the scene. While all signs point to a natural death, something quite unnatural starts happening to Leon–he begins to hear the voice of the dead woman…and she insists she has been murdered.
She urges him to contact her children–Eli, a brilliant diagnostician who never misses a detail, and Esther, the intrepid archaeologist able to tell entire stories from the most simple objects. The three are joined by Almond, a runaway scam artist cryptically interested in the outcome of the case.
The skills of the twins and Almond are powerful assets, but is Leon leading everyone into his mad delusion, or is there more to reality than meets the eye?
Guest Art by Meowlayn
Meowlayn is a French freelance illustrator with a love for dark fantasy and tender art. She specializes in portraits of hot 2D men with a whimsical touch. She is so small that sometimes automatic doors won't open in front of her.
Get just Meowlayn's SFW and NSFW download pack here
Over the past few months, we have invested our free time and personal resources to produce backgrounds, character sprites, and concept art for future assets. Our first two seasons are already fully outlined, and we have plenty of ideas for more to come. We are running this campaign to pay for the time and work of our fantastic art team and to keep our writer fed.
Funding at this stage is necessary to continue paying for art and assets, start paying for the work of the team members who have been doing this on their own time, turn the game into an app to be distributed via App Store and Google Play, and get people talking about it.
The more time and resources we can afford to spend on the game, the faster we will be able to produce new content. $10K is the bare minimum we need to get started; the rest of the money will be raised through in-game currency and premium content. We plan on releasing one episode each month, starting with 12 episodes. Any amount we raise past the initial $10K will help guarantee more episodes.
By decidedly unusual individuals.
We are currently a four-person team branching across three countries. We came together online thanks to mutual interests and turned our individual skills into something greater than the sum of their parts. Our areas of expertise fit this project seamlessly: screenwriting, digital art, communication, marketing, and criminology. We are all experienced working remotely and internationally, which allows us to operate across time zones and without an office.
Tosha Yezyukov (Drakonishe)
Mostly self-taught artist since the age of 14, Tosha has given up on their career as a reverse tooth fairy (dental technician) to pursue art instead. They became fluent in English thanks to their studies and online fandom spaces, where they have been making a living as a commission artist for the past two years. Heartwood is Tosha’s second experience working on a game development team. Their hobbies include crafting, gaming, and overthinking social interactions.
Elizabeth Friedman
Elizabeth is a formally educated medical illustrator, who chose to come and draw anatomically correct hearts for us instead of designing cutting-edge prosthetics for fancy research institutes. We liked her so much we decided to keep her. When she’s not busy trying to interpret our creative director’s vision, you can find her at her local high school, shaping the minds of the next generations. A thankless job for which she is both underpaid and overqualified. Help us raise enough money to take her on full-time.
Nathan Mandel
Nate wanted to be a space cowboy, but the guidance counselor said that there weren’t any job openings in that field. He decided that writing was the next best thing. Born as a farm boy, educated as a criminologist and a screenwriter, Nate is a dual national living in a third place altogether with his hot spouse and two food driven cats. He’s the guy who always carries a notebook with him, jotting down notes every time something absurd happens around him.
Despite this being our first visual novel, our team members have extensive experience in their field of work and are used to high-stakes projects in hectic work environments. We are aware that delays in this field are often beyond our control, and with some of the team still unable to work full time on the game, we know our main challenge will be time management. We plan on maintaining frequent communication with our backers with transparency as our top priority when faced with any delay or setback.
Whether you are able to donate or not, here are 100% free ways to support our project:
- Our Instagram @heartwoodgame is the main channel we use to share news and updates
- Share this campaign
- Play the game