Why a farming game about a village that is emptying out
I live in Slavonia, the flat part of Croatia between the Sava and the Drava. Oak forests, black earth, and villages built as one long street with the houses gable-on to the road. Most of them had a school, a shop, a football pitch and a church bell that rang for storms as much as for mass. A lot of them are emptying out now. Not gone, but quieter every year, with more houses shut than lived in.
Nobody has made a farming game about that, and nobody has used the folklore from around here as a bestiary. So I am.
The village in the game is invented. You play someone who inherits their grandmother's crumbling house in a village three people from empty. You farm, you fix the house, and you bring the place back one household at a time. The revival is literally visible on the walk to the shop: every lot starts abandoned and overgrown, and every person who arrives wakes one up.
The forest
Past the fields there is an old oak forest, and this is where the game stops being only a farming game.
I grew up on the stories grandmothers tell in villages on this side of the Balkans, the ones from Bosnia included. In those stories the things in the deep forest keep their distance from bells, fires, garlic on the doorpost and people on the street. As a village empties, that boundary thins. Boars in the fields first, then jackals howling at the edge, then a cry at night that is not a jackal. In the game, reviving the village pushes the forest back, and the forest pushing in is the pressure on you. They are one system seen from two sides.
The creatures are the ones from the stories, not slimes with a Balkan coat of paint. The drekavac you hear before you ever see. The psoglav and the vukodlak in the deep forest. The vile, who are not your enemies unless you make them so. And in the heart of it the bauk, which cannot be killed, only driven back with light and noise.
The grandmother in the game left a notebook. Recipes on one page, a creature on the next, in her handwriting, with the counter written in the margin. It is the cookbook, the bestiary and the story, all in her voice.
Real things
The crops are what grows here: onions, cabbage, potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, watermelons, corn, pumpkins. The festivals are the real ones, one a season: the spring bonfire, the harvest feast, the village fair, and the winter pig slaughter at a neighbour's, which is where the old forester finally tells you what he saw in the forest thirty years ago.
The game ends after two years, on the day of the fair. That is the day people who left come home to visit. So the ending is simply this: who comes.
Where it stands
I am building it alone, in the evenings, in Godot. There is a farm you can walk around, four seasons with a full calendar, and the eight crops, which I redrew by hand this week so that a cabbage looks like a cabbage. That is the strip on the front page.
The village street and the river are on the drawing board now. When they exist, that is when the first real screenshots go up. No release date. If you want to follow along, the feed link at the bottom is the way; every post lands there.
Robert