Hiraeth - A story of valor
A downloadable game for Windows
“Hiraeth” is a 3D action adventure game set in a science fantasy world, where technology merges with nature. There, the young hero Key takes a stand against his enemies and starts his adventure to purify the lands of Astos - colourful forests, energy crystals pulsing with power and long lost ruins, where myths slumber.
Driven by his wish to banish the evil plaguing his world, Key sets out to bring back a long-gone legend. To do that he must combat his foes and show bravery in the most dire situations, never giving up the hope for a brighter future. Only then will the guardian see his pure soul and accept him as his pilot.
Explore the world of Hiraeth either as Key, the boy with a soul filled with hope and bravery, or pilot his legendary companion, the guardian of ancient times. And as fit for a legend, the guardian is capable of summoning the great power to defeat evil.
The game was made as a student project at games academy berlin with a team consisting of nine people.
Team
Production:
Jelena Potthoff - Producer - LinkedIn
Game Design:
Ashkan Naserian - Game Design - LinkedIn
Aline Drobek - Level Design, 2D Art - LinkedIn
Nikolas Kerner - Game Design - LinkedIn
Art:
Rafael-Luis Coskun - Concept/Charakter/UI Artist- LinkedIn
Filip Enache - FVX Artist - LinkedIn
Kevin Franke - Hard Surface Artist - LinkedIn
Sophie Capers - Environment Artist - LinkedIn
Tarik Yumak - Environment Artist - LinkedIn
Marco Rudijc - Animation Artist - LinkedIn
Programming:
Keanu Carlo - Programmer - LinkedIn
Mert Yonkuc - AI Programmer - LinkedIn
Music:
Jens J. Dewald - Sound Artist - LinkedIn
Installation
- Press the download button
- The game will download now
- Right-click on the downloaded .zip file and choose extract all
- Open the extracted folder and search for the .exe file
- After you double-click it, the game will start
Download
Comments
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Hey!
I streamed your game last night. Overall, the art direction is nice, but I think it's pretty clear this was developed by some students as there were a lot of bugs or poor design choices.
One of the very first things I noticed was the lack of keyboard prompts for the game. The controller prompts remained on screen at all times but didn't inform the player of what the keyboard controls are. Due to a lacking options menu that would allow me to invert the X-axis on the right control stick (I know I'm weird, but it's just how I am comfortable playing games) this lead to the awkward decision of having to either rough-it with a control scheme I didn't know, or rough-it with a control format that is difficult for me to control. For a student project, I wouldn't expect an extensive options menu, however, I do feel like teaching the student how to detect what input is being used and changing the on-screen prompts would not only be a good lesson for the students, but also make the game more accessible.
The combat was also frustrating to deal with. This mostly came down to the slow pace of the combat, the lack of a targeting system causing the player character to eventually finish their combo no where near the neighborhood of the enemy, and enemies still being able to attack the player even after they are dead. What made this worse is that clearly the game is checking whether the player has killed a certain number of enemies or not in order to progress to the next area, but due to the save system being borked, I wound up skipping a lot of combat which later seemed to break the game as the gate to the next area wouldn't open. I assume somewhere in some empty field 1 enemy remained, but with the really short stamina bar for sprinting, I just couldn't be bothered to search for him.
If you'd like to watch my experience with your game, I've linked the archive below. You can click the timestamps to jump to when I start playing your game.
https://youtu.be/vVNfi-2Jim0