Harbourlight: a hand-painted adventure game

A town that empties every October

Harbourlight is a six-hour adventure game set in a fishing town on the last weekend before the fleet leaves for the season. You play the harbourmaster's daughter, home for the first time in nine years, trying to work out why nobody will talk about the boat that did not come back.

There is no combat and no inventory puzzles. What there is: forty-one characters who all know a version of the same story, a notebook that fills itself in as you contradict them, and a town that looks different in every one of the game's three days because we painted it three times.

Where the project stands

Two years of evenings and one year of full-time work have produced a game that is genuinely playable end to end. The story is written and recorded as a scratch track, the engine work is finished, and roughly a third of the final art exists. What remains is the expensive third: the rest of the paintings, the voice cast, and the music. This campaign funds exactly that.

• A 40-minute vertical slice has been playable since March and 900 people have finished it.
• All 41 characters are written; 14 are fully painted across the three days.
• Engine, save system and the notebook mechanic are complete and stable.
• Steam page is live, and the demo has an 11 per cent wishlist conversion, which is unusually good.

What the money pays for

We are three people who have already spent our savings on this. The campaign covers production costs and eleven months of not having to take other work.

• £26,000 — Backgrounds and character art About 380 remaining painted frames. Our illustrator works in gouache on A3 and each day-state of a location is a separate painting.
• £17,500 — Eleven months of studio wages Three people at well below what any of us earned in our last jobs, which is the trade we have chosen to make.
• £12,400 — Voice cast and recording Fourteen speaking parts, four days in a Brighton studio, plus a dialect coach because we would rather do this properly than badly.
• £8,600 — Original score and sound design A composer we have worked with twice before, writing for a small ensemble rather than samples.
• £5,200 — Localisation into five languages The script runs to 62,000 words, so this is a real cost and not a rounding error.
• £5,100 — Platform fees, ratings and contingency Age ratings for three territories, payment processing, and a small buffer.

We painted the harbour in fog, then in flat October sun, then at night with the fleet lit up. It is the same forty-one buildings and it is not the same place at all.

Who we are

Paper Lantern Games is Tomas Ferreira on design and writing, Sian on art, and Rob on code. We released two small games before this — one sold about 40,000 copies and paid for the second, which sold rather fewer and taught us more. Both shipped on the date we announced, which in this industry is the only credential worth quoting. We have no publisher and no external funding, which is why we are here.

Risks and challenges

The main risk is scope, and we know it, because our second game slipped four months for exactly that reason. This time the script is locked before the campaign rather than after, and every remaining painting is on a numbered list on the studio wall. The second risk is voice recording: booking fourteen actors around their availability is genuinely difficult and could push us past our eleven-month estimate by a month or two. If that happens we will say so in an update rather than going quiet, which is the thing backers actually hate. Nothing here threatens the game existing; the honest risk is that it exists slightly later than we would like.