Wildheart Sanctuary

For adults. This game is made for players aged 18 and over. This page is safe for work.

At a glance

What you do

Each day has four parts: morning, afternoon, evening and night. Every resident keeps her own schedule, so she is in the garden, the kitchen, the hot springs, the training grounds or the tavern depending on the hour, and you find her where she is.

You decide how each part of the day is spent: time with a resident, a job for the sanctuary, training, or an expedition. At the end of the day a morning report tells you what the jobs earned, who came back from the wilds and what they brought.

At the start you choose the Keeper’s background, one of five, and each changes how the game plays: Merchant, Beastspeaker, Charmer, Veteran or Scholar.

The residents

Version 0.1 has three residents, each with her own story.

• Pip, a slime. Cheerful and clingy, she was in the sanctuary long before you arrived. She says she was guarding it. She was napping in the well.
• Thessaly, a dryad. Soft-spoken guardian of the old grove, whose oak was scarred by poachers. She comes to the sanctuary to heal it and, slowly, herself.
• Aerin, a harpy. Loud, proud and faster than you. Exiled from her flock for showing off, she has decided the sanctuary is her new roost. You were not consulted.

Five more residents are designed and will be added after launch as episodes, free of charge. The devlog explains why the first release has three.

Trust and Desire

A bond with a resident has two sides that grow separately. Trust is emotional closeness. Desire is physical attraction. Each has five stages, and each stage opens a new story scene.

• Activities. Each resident has her own, such as stargazing with Pip or a flight lesson with Aerin.
• Conversations. Five topics per resident, with answers that go deeper as Trust grows. What she tells you is kept in a journal.
• Moods. Each resident wakes in a different mood, which changes what she says and what she wants to do that day.
• Gifts. Each has favourites.
• Favors. You can ask, and she can say no. A refusal costs nothing and tells you what she would need first.
• Choices. Some story scenes ask you to choose, and the residents remember what you chose.

Running the sanctuary

Residents who are not out on an expedition can take a job: tending the garden, cooking, working the tavern or training. Jobs bring in gifts, gold and experience. Gold pays for upgrades to the sanctuary, including more rooms, a guild hall for running several expeditions at once, the hot springs, the training grounds and the tavern.

Expeditions

You send parties of residents into seven regions, from the Mossy Meadow to the Moonlit Castle. Each region is weak to one element, and each resident has one, so who you send matters. You choose a safe, balanced or risky route, trading the chance of success against the reward.

Expeditions bring back gold, gifts and relics, of which there are ten to find and equip. Each resident also has a personal quest in three chapters that is told through expeditions.

What is in version 0.1

• Three residents, each with ten story scenes
• A three-chapter personal quest for each resident
• 23 sanctuary events with choices, including stories between the residents themselves
• Seven regions to explore and ten relics
• Jobs, upgrades, a wardrobe and a gallery
• Three save slots, autosave, and saves you can download and keep

Content information

Wildheart Sanctuary is a game for adults.

• Sexual content. The later Desire scenes and the nights with a resident contain sexual content between adults. These scenes are marked 18+ in the game.
• Consent. Every intimate scene is one the character has agreed to. The game contains no non-consensual scenes.
• All characters are adults.
• Content controls. Each adult scene opens with a card that lists what it contains and can be skipped. A safe-for-work mode removes the adult lines from the whole game.

Design principles

• The player can always ask. A character can always refuse. Refusal is never punished.
• The sanctuary is a management game first: the systems have to hold up on their own.
• Fewer characters, written in depth. An earlier build had eight residents and a single affection meter. It was rebuilt around three residents with ten scenes each and two separate bonds.

Development status

Version 0.1 is a working build and is being tested and balanced. It has not been released, and no art is shown here yet. Progress is reported in the Journal’s devlog section.