Digital Arts
Hearthbound, 2020
Presenter(s): Jack Irvine, Noah Cody, Joshua Anderson, Abby Tan, Wyatt Hall, Luke Burger
Advisor(s): Chris Boyd
The gaming and entertainment industry are rising to their peak as more technology emerges and becomes a part of our daily lives. With our project, we aim to join this field by publishing our own product on multiple digital distribution services such as Itch.io, Steam, and EPIC’s Game Store. Our product, Hearthbound, is a single player game made in the Unreal Game Engine. Hearthbound a third-person adventure game where players will experience the story of a wayward adventurer by taking their place and living out the journey themselves. The game is set in a dark, atmospheric world where the players will reclaim their homeland by defeating monsters, interacting with peculiar objects and solving puzzles. We’ve created an immersive experience for players to spend endless time exploring caves and tunnels that are overrun with monsters and fiends. As the player goes through the storyline, they will learn what calamity happened to their home and free their home from evil. Upon completion with this project, we have started our own indie game studio where this product will be the first of many. We have created a space for ourselves that’s allowed us to build and develop products to the extent of our imaginations, and it’s allowed us to gain new skills that will set us up for success in our future careers. In the course of making this game, we have experienced the full process of developing a game with a team, from ideation and conceptualization to development and publication.