- The Dev Story Behind Heart of Muriet - 19 September 2026
The first Heart of Muriet demo was released in late 2020, so I want to give a bit of context why it was relaunched recently.I started my career as a gamedev in 1994 by releasing my first game Arya Vaiv. A 2D shooter written in x86 assembler. I founded my first studio in 1996 with like-minded people and worked on small and bigger indie, mobile, handheld and console games until 2015. As with most careers, at some point you are getting more responsibility and better paid positions like technical director, studio header, development director. What also happens is that you are sitting in meetings, eating cookies and rustling through documents and you actually stop developing games without even realizing it. So in late 2015, I quit my job, sold the tiny share I had left and set out to experience 1994 again. Though times have changed and I have grown older and actually lost most of my abilitie…
- Gamescom 2026 - 9 September 2026
I got to showcase Heart of Muriet at Gamescom this year and wow, the feedback I got from players was incredible.Many people had really kind things to say about this game and it was so fantastic for me to get to watch people play the new updates first-hand:It was also very, very cool to get to see so many amazing games and booths this year like this one for AMAZE:Of course, I immediately got sick after the conference and had to take a few days to rest. But next week I will be sharing more updates about the game! I try to do one update every day or as much as I possibly can. If you want to see the updates live, please join me in the Discord: https://discord.gg/bKvkYz7Thank you again and joining me on this journey
- Demo Patch - Version 081rev130d - 6 September 2026
About 1500 new people played the demo and unfortunately some of you did not have a great experience as I still missed some rare crashes and other annoying bugs like stuck formations etc.I would have loved to work on the fixes a lot earlier, but Gamescom and the unavoidable flu afterwards took it's toll. There were also some really hard to reproduce bugs and I have probably still missed a few. Here is the list of changes:AdditionsAdded Korean language to the game.Added Japanese language to the game.ImprovementsImproved: Formations do not check morale against other formations or defending troops anymore.Improved: Morale checks for formations now happen only once per cycle.Improved: Empire UI worker overview now also shows the worker tool, to identify the job of the worker.Improved: Empire UI squad overview now has a replenish button for each squad which has missing members.Improved: Rally…
- Demo Patch - Version v81rev126d - 27 August 2026
I am busy this week at Gamescom but I introduced a very nasty, new bug in rev124 earlier this week. Just patched the game:Fixed a crash when trying to spawn spell effect tooltips.Fixed a bug where sometimes workers did not get out of tents to build freshly placed buildings.Thank you for playing the demo! And thank you for checking out the game if you are joining from Splattercat's newest video. I will share more from Gamescom once I am back home.
- New Demo Now Available - 20 August 2026
I am really excited to relaunch the new demo of Heart of Muriet after more than three years.Everything has been completely overhauled, and it will be exciting to see how you and players at my booth at Gamescom will react to the new features and the increased complexity.I have a new trailer now too: Thank you so much for playing and I look forward to your feedback! Please consider joining the Discord to reach out to me directly: https://discord.gg/bKvkYz7Thank you again for reaching and for playing.
- Progress Update - The New Exploration System - 14 August 2026
The New Exploration SystemThe old system was very simple. Send squads of scouts (at this time, the only exploration unit) and sometimes they were detected and sometimes not. If 100% of a province was explored, it would reveal all of the information permanently,The new system has a perception and a stealth value for each unit and a perception value for buildings. There are a lot more units beside the scouts that are able to explore (like knights, archers or summons like spiders and hornets, etc.) Some units have better stealth, others have higher exploration speeds.Exploration Milestones25% Explored- Beauty/Terrain Type is revealed.50% Explored - Resource and Province Attributes are revealed.75% Explored - Buildings are revealed.100% Explored - Units are revealed - additional loot: research points.The exploration details are shown in the Province UI.There is a certain chance that some in…
- Progress Update - Cropfield Pests and Food Rations - 10 August 2026
This week, I wanted to give you an update on the food system changes within Heart of Muriet.To make food production a bit more interesting until seasons are introduced and also to have more options for spell influencing crops, I decided to add crop pests to the game.,Cropfield PestsEach province has a pest probability attribute which can be influenced with spells or other means from research.Depending on the terrain height pests can have a different probability.Crop fields can also have a pest probability modification, which can be influenced by spells, research or other events.Each time a cropfield section grows there is a chance the a pest gets applied.When a crop is fully grown and not harvested, there is also a chance the pest gets applied.The pest probability is calculated including the province, the crop field modifications and if the crop field already has the pest on a section o…
- Progress Update - Spell Effects - 31 July 2026
This week, I wanted to give you an update on how spells have changed within Heart of Muriet.The spell effect system in Heart of Muriet is similar to world enchantments/curses in Master of Magic: It makes the wizard gameplay a lot more interesting! While combat spells are important, permanent effects on buildings, provinces, players, or the entire map create more interesting strategic situations.Introduced new Spell Effect objects attachable to provinces, buildings, squads, players, or the entire map.Spell effects are created by spells as summon objects with temporary or permanent (upkeep) duration.Spell effects often create Auras at the target object. Auras can hold enchantments, curses, DoTs, raw damage or healing, change province attributes etc.Effects are primarily controlled via auras, with allowance for more complex exceptions.Effects can require resource upkeep like mana/power or…
- Heart Of Muriet in Games Composed in Germany - 21 July 2026
Heart of Muriet is proud to be featured in the Games Composed in Germany event hosted by IGN alongside other excellent games like Shapez, Wanderburg, Let Them Trade, PVKK, OddSparks, Dorfromantik, the Regreening, Bergfried, Imagine Earth, and many other titles.Speaking of Germany - if you are heading to Gamescom next month, please say hello! Heart of Muriet will be featured at Hall 10.2 in Booth D043g. Thanks for reading.
- Happy Next Fest - Join our Discord for a Playtest Key - 15 June 2026
Hey all,while the new Heart of Muriet Demo is still in development a playtest is already happening on the discord. Join our Discord now for a Playtest KeyThe current playtest has hours of fun and content to play with!As Heart Of Muriet already particpated at Next Fest, I want use the opportunity to give a shoutout to our indie friends. Please take a look at their awesome games!
- Progress update - Part 2 - enemy AI development - 14 March 2026
Sorry, part 2 took so long to get published. I am still a year behind in updates on Steam. If you want to get updates more frequently please join our discord.In this post, I will mainly focus on the enemy AI development for Heart of Muriet. TL;DR for people who aren't interested in details: Heart of Muriet is a single-player game; the AI is one of the most important features. I have put almost a full year of development, into making it better and easier to extend. It's playing well and is already a challenge for beginner and mediocre players. To make sure veteran 4X players also face a challenge development will continue througout the whole EA phase and beyond. Implemented a multi-threaded approach for building placement using a dozen different constraints, including clusters, border avoidance, influence radius considerations, and space requirements.Various building placement search fun…
- Progress update - Part 1 - UI and Game Improvements - 25 October 2025
Hey there,Sorry for the long silence. There have been massive improvements on the game since the last update. It would be too much content to fit them all into one post. This one will focus on UI and overall game improvements.Please note that I conducted internal playtests via our discord and decided to move an official playtest to a later date.The content editor has been expanded to cover all game data entry. This is helping to get new content into the game much faster.Improved Research, Building, Building Upgrade, Unit, Projectile, Spell and Weapon Data Editor.Added and refined Aura, Bags, Tool, Shield and Armour Data Editor.Added and refined Loot, Traps, Special Ability, Battle Stance, Spell Effect and Budget Data Editor.Added and refined AI Personality, Wizard Skills, Skill Trees, Traits and Events Data Editor. General Improved mini-map UI province selection. Resource tooltip now sh…
- New playtest coming soon. - 29 August 2024
Hey, More progress has been made in the last 4 months. The new playtest and demo are getting closer. Only units with exploration speed can now be sent to an unexplored province. For now, that is the scout squad. Once the scouts reach the new territory they go into stealth mode. Their walk speed is greatly reduced. A multi-threaded algorithm gets the best exploration points on the province which are currently not explored. Each squad in the scouting formation gets one of the exploration positions and starts sneaking towards it. Once a scout squad reaches its assigned exploration position, the exploration % increases. If no valid exploration points are found, the exploration is concluded and the province is fully revealed. The exploration can be more time-consuming with different terrain, a lot of forest etc. Sending more scouts will speed up the exploration but will make detection more l…
- Six month of progress - second edition! - 16 April 2024
Hey all! The new playtest should have gone live ages ago, unfortunately, I am a slow poke or I just blame that I am working solo on the project. ːsteammockingː It just takes a lot of effort to make a switch to a new design mid-development I guess. ːsteamsadː New Voxel Importer I implemented a new voxel importer, which can handle animations inside models. This was not possible before. All the animations of multiple units can now live in a single Vox file. Finally, the model names are now converted correctly from Magica Voxel to Unity, which is a great help. It was quite a big unplanned task, but in light of needing to add more units in the future, it was a decent decision to invest the time. Better dev console I wrote a better developer console, which has more flexibility. It eases debugging and improves the speed of testing the game. UI redesign, tooltips Improved the look of the UI. Re…
- Six month of progress! - 15 October 2023
Hey! Fiinally a big update. Sorry, this took so long. The plan was to release the new playtest in six weeks, but I realized that the game had many more flaws that needed fixing. After six months, I am still changing old systems, adding new features and polishing older ones. What happened since then? Changes The following changes happend in the last few month. There more features planned, but for now I am focussing on the completion of the new playtest. Hex grid The new hex grid opened up the game design and made a lot of interesting new systems possible. A lot more attack vectors when attacking an enemy on the map. Opened up the map for exploration features. NPC buildings and hex field themes are now possible. More resources make sense now. Army tents had to be reworked due to space issues. New and better building placement. More control over army movement. Loot system. Population syste…
- Major changes are on the way! - 31 March 2023
Hey all, after a fresh look into the game and talking to different developers and players, I have decided to redesign some significantly flawed game design systems in Heart of Muriet. 1. Why am I doing this so late in the development cycle? The game has grown big, and some game design elements have never got adjusted. There are some serious flaws which I want to point out here: The map is not utilized well. Most of it is a dead zone due to the current base design. The game lacks interesting decision-making other than: Do I have enough units and technology to conquer the enemy base. No exploration is possible with the current map. Troops can only stay in a few positions. Making tactical decisions is currently not possible. Pathing of troops cannot be influenced, which is a big problem, as there is only one vector of attack most of the time, which makes most battles an attrition war. Spec…
- Hotfix 7 for Demo Update 3 - 15 February 2023
Hey, all players saving while an architect constructed a build slot couldn't load their save games anymore. It's fixed now, and the save game will still work, though your resources will be gone, and the build slot will not get recovered. Fixed: a crash when loading a saved game while a build slot got constructed. Sorry for the inconvenience!
- Hotfix 6 for Demo Update 3 - 14 February 2023
Hey, after 14 days without getting a crash report, yesterday popped up a new one. Fortunately, it was easy to reproduce and fix. With the last patch, I introduced new build slot space requirements without actually adjusting the global space multiplier for bases, which rendered the architect building useless again. Sorry for this. It's now adjusted correctly. Fixed: a crash when loading a saved game in which a building collapsed during saving. Fixed: calculation of build slot space was too low for all bases. Upgraded to Unity Version 2021.3.18 which should fix some rare shader and particlesystem issues. Thank you for your playing, and a happy valentines day to all of you!
- Demo Update 3 Patch 1 - 10 February 2023
Hey, after getting the version as stable as possible with several hotfixes (Trello hasn't shown any crashes for ten days), I have shifted my focus to gameplay and graphics fixes and improvements Wizards will be a lot more powerful with this update, probably a little too powerful, but that is ok for now. Let me know what you think. Slowmo of the reworked push back effect: Let's get into the nitty-gritty details: Balancing: All projectile spells do more damage but have slightly increased cooldowns. Adjusted architect build slot in terms of construction space, resource cost and duration. Features: Added static buff aura behaviour that applies a configurable buff to squads in a radius. Guard towers: received a static buff area with a 15% physical resistance spell to all guarding units in the influence radius. Guard towers: permanent guard spots removed, as it does not fit anymore due to the…
- Hotfix 5 for Demo Update 3 - 1 February 2023
Hey, Trello is very quiet. Most of the common problems seem to be gone. Though today a few more rare crashes popped up and I could fix them right away. Fixed a crash in Alchemist conversion behaviour which could occur when a recurring conversion was active, and the mission would be reloaded, caused by a "zombie" listener. Fixed a bug in coroutine utilities. Passing a null reference object into a CancelWith function would throw an unnecessary exception instead of ending the coroutine. Reworked health bar code as it would not show the correct health/armour state the first time it appeared. Fixed a rare crash bug in squad state when the squad tried to enter a tent, which got already removed. Added missing info when loading a saved game. Thank you for your patience!
