Lorehallow

Lorehallow

A small pixel-art MMO where the world is already busy when you arrive.

Pre-alpha. There's nothing to play yet: the server and this website are being built in the open, one checkbox at a time.

A pixel-art village at dusk: a knight, a ranger, a wizard and a lantern-carrying traveller on a dirt path between timber cottages, a great oak and a stone well.

The idea

A world that's already there

You log in, and other people are already around. Someone jogs past on the road. A group is fighting something at the edge of the woods. The town square is busy, and the lanterns are lit whether or not you're looking.

Lorehallow is a small online fantasy world in the spirit of early World of Warcraft: a persistent place with zones, quests and grouping, drawn in warm, readable pixel art. It stays small on purpose. One handcrafted town that feels alive is worth more than ten empty continents.

Design pillars

Five rules for every decision

  • The world is shared

    Every feature should make other players more visible, more useful or more present.

  • Small but alive

    One handcrafted zone that feels lived in beats ten empty ones. The world grows only once the core feels good.

  • Readable pixel art

    Clear silhouettes, one locked palette of 33 colors, and the same scale everywhere.

  • The server decides

    The server owns the truth. Your client says what you're trying to do and draws what the server reports back.

  • Playable every milestone

    Every phase of the plan ends with something you can launch, play and show someone.

Planned, not built yet

What you'll do

None of this exists yet. It's the shape of the game the plan is building toward, phase by phase.

  • Explore Planned

    Mossy forests, a lantern-lit town and old stone ruins, small enough to learn by heart.

  • Quest Planned

    Townsfolk with problems, a quest board, and a reason to wander a little farther each time.

  • Group up Planned

    Invite the stranger who's been fighting the same wolves as you. Some things go better in fives.

  • Fight Planned

    Real-time combat decided by the server, so what you see is what happened, for everyone.

Live from BUILD.md

Where the build is

Overall progress190 / 624 · 30%

Every step of the plan, from an empty repository to the 1.0 launch, is a checkbox in BUILD.md. This page reads it on every push.

See the quest map

You are here · Phase 1 lorehallow.com A fast, beautiful, self-hosted website at lorehallow.com that sells the dream, links to the public repositories, tracks BUILD.md automatically, hosts a devlog and has a downloads page ready for the first builds.
Phase 161 / 73 · 83%

Latest posts

From the devlog

The first post is still being written. Subscribe to the RSS feed and it'll find you.

The art

Drawn by hand, one pixel at a time

Five adventurers standing on grass at night: a knight with a shield, a green-hooded ranger with a bow, a wizard with a glowing staff, a bard with a lute and a traveller holding a lantern.
Five adventurers at the in-game scale of 32 by 48 pixels. Every sprite on this site is a text file in the repository, one character per pixel, turned into an image and checked by the build.
  • An oak tree
  • A lit lantern on a wooden post
  • The hero: a brown-haired traveller in a green cloak
  • A mossy rock
  • The corner of a timber cottage

More of the world

Source and plan

Built in the open

All of Lorehallow is public: the Go server, the Godot client, the pixel art, the plan and every decision behind it. The server is the part this project is proudest of. It's built from the ground up to be fast, reliable and secure, and the goal is hundreds to thousands of players at once. That's a target, not a claim: no player count goes on this site until it has been measured.

Every phase ends with a written walkthrough that explains the networking or backend idea behind it, so the project doubles as a course in building an online game.