Hearthbound is a simulated world told to you in prose. The storyteller writes; the engine decides what is true. These past days most of the work went into the parts of the world that handle money, work and institutions, because a world where coins appear from nowhere is not a world you can live in.
Work that pays
- Guild job boards. Post a job or take one. A dangerous job warns you about what it is; it never bars you from trying.
- Guild halls are open all night, with a real night clerk who has a schedule of their own rather than a desk that is always conveniently staffed.
- Employment and wages. Employers keep treasuries; wages come out of them on payday. A joining fee is a fee, not pay, and the engine now knows the difference.
- One ledger for debt. Borrowing, lending and forgiving all go through the same authority, so nobody is owed twice.
- Caused supply. Shelves do not refill because you looked away. Something has to happen for stock to arrive.
The map is a place, not a picture
The player now stands on the road the map draws, and distance is measured along that road rather than as the crow flies. The map window pins your town and fills its frame, and the Notebook drags smoothly and is never cut off.
Death, then an heir
Permanent death has been in Hearthbound for a while. This week the full chain was tested in live play: the character dies, the body and the purse stay where they fell, and the story continues as the heir, in the same world, with the same clock and the same debts.
A World Editor you can talk to
The World Editor reached version 0.41. You can type to the World Builder at any time and create a world with the loaded models; drafts live in a list until you keep one, and creation keeps what you asked for. Organisations can be founded and ended, a member can give to one, a place can be held or released, and every change shows a report of what else it touches before you commit. The command hierarchy of an organisation is never flattened.
Smaller things
- Combat targeting fixes and a dialogue-reading fix (a spoken line is read as speech even when it is not in quotes).
- One storyteller model instead of three tiers, so testing happens on exactly what players will get.
- Hearthbound sits on the taskbar like any other program.
The progress bars on the Hearthbound page reflect all of this. If a bar is not at 100, the feature is not done, whatever the prose might tempt us to say.