How we came up with the idea for The Hearth and Harbour
How did we go…
… from this…
… to this?
Hello sailors!
The Pale Beyond launched on 24th February 2023. For a while, everything after that is a little blurry. Pale, our first release as a studio, had taken four years of hard work to get over the finish line, and this was the first time we had a moment to pause and look around.
What followed are what we now refer to as The Soup Times. Somehow, through the haze of post-launch uncertainty, we had to figure out what to do next. A few of us took turns to take to burn-out breaks, and then we dabbled in some of our other game ideas from before Pale – an enduring favourite is a light-hearted Star Trek-inspired sci-fi RPG.
However, still The Pale Beyond called back to us. We’d fallen in love with the setting during development – we’d created an alternate-early-20th-century universe with its own cultures, technologies and characters, and then spent the whole game isolated from civilisation, stranded at the edge of the world. We wanted to explore somewhere else this time – somewhere with other people, maybe a building or two.
Around this time, The Bear TV show aired. As a group of people, we all really like food, many of us have worked in hospitality and customer service, and the idea of creating a video game version of The Bear was the first spark that would eventually lead to Hearth and Harbour. We always knew in our hearts another Pale universe game would be set in a city – as far away from the ice as we could get – and a city is a good place to start a restaurant – your Spoon.
The routine of life sims, applying it to cafe management, appealed to us – gathering ingredients, designing your place and your menu and serving customers. We took some inspiration from other games – Dave the Diver (gather ingredients > create menu > serve customers loop), The Persona series (balancing the serving-customers-gameplay with spending time with characters and developing relationships), Potionomics (the week-to-week being affected by external goings-on in the city, a changing economy), to name just a few.
Like with Pale, we knew the secret sauce would be the characters. They had to be charming, appealing and diverse. Every mechanic would have to have a face – everything you do in the game, you do through a character. Characters sell you goods at the market, attend your restaurant during the day, and socialise with you in the evening. Community would be important to the Spoon feeling like a home, so character relationships were a core pillar from the very start. You as the player are creating a warm hidey-hole for you and your neighbours in the middle of a city ravaged by industrialisation, living life under the shadowy threat of war (as was the style in the 1910s).
Our sound designer James stepped up as game director, and things started coming together. We received confirmation from our publisher, Fellow Traveller, that they would be interested in another game set in the same universe (provided the idea was good). So onto our next steps: pitch decks, and prototypes!
That’s a story for next time!
Love,
– Jess (Art Director)
Thanks so much for your support, from The Pale Beyond to The Hearth and Harbour, and hopefully, beyond.
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