Don’t miss a chance to try out our demo and share your thoughts about it! 🥰 During Steam Next Fest watch our developers play it and learn more about the magical and wholesome world of 🌲Fireside🌲 and its behind-the-scenes. In 🌲Fireside🌲 there is no violence and stress, only immersive sweet stories and good vibes!🤗 Enjoy the stream and the demo and don't forget to wishlist the game!
Greetings, our dear adventurers, travelers, and merchants!⛵️
We’re very happy to announce:
Next week Fireside will take part in Steam Next Fest! 🥳 To celebrate this wonderful occasion, we invite you to try out our DEMO early! 🎮🤩
The demo is NOW AVAILABLE, so pour some hot tea, grab your favorite blanket, sit back and relax - and dive into the wholesome world of Fireside. 😌 Explore the game and let us know what you think! 🤗
P.S. Be sure to wishlist the game, don’t hesitate to spread the word, and check the developer's livestream here on the page! 🥰 Also we recommend playing with headphones to fully enjoy the soundtrack. 🎶💗
Fireside—Devlog 3, Game World
Fireside’s focus is on sharing around the campfire and creating a sense of community. In 2020, when Fireside was first conceived, the primary plan was to focus on traditional RPG elements such as tending to your character’s hunger, thirst, and other requirements. However, the Emergo Entertainment team later decided to concentrate on the idea of coming together around the campfire.
Instead of a complicated and stressful combat system, they wanted to focus on the game’s cozy atmosphere. Fireside is a simple game that allows you to experience a journey to the fullest from the comfort of your couch. All you have to do is listen to other travelers’ tales, learn about their goals and needs, and figure out how you can help them. The game mechanics mostly involve talking to others, so dialogues are the main focus, but the game also features a cooking and trading system for non-violent gameplay.
Ilona was behind the game’s narrative design. She drew inspiration for the characters and their storylines from folklore and mythical creatures such as the mermaid. She was also influenced by movies like Up and cozy games like Animal Crossing. Her main concern was to evoke a sense of remoteness and untainted nature in her work. The world of Fireside is a peaceful environment that promotes positive coexistence, which also generates the game’s primary energy, soul energy.
Each traveler has a unique background and personality that is reflected in their looks, making Fireside’s art style an important aspect of the game. Linus, our artist, began by sketching out features of the game on paper. His sketches were then scanned, cut out, and painted on the computer.
He kept the paper aesthetic: for instance, he added some unpainted areas. The simple, charming art style was intended to be stylized rather than perfectly realistic, so the characters are more cute than lifelike, and some objects, such as food, are left to the player to interpret. Again, the focus is on coziness. Linus also took inspiration from comic series such as Rick and Morty and Gravity Falls.
Many characters and game world elements were created through pure experimentation. Linus and Ilona initially brainstormed to come up with important map features like rivers and bridges. They also collaborated on some of the character decisions to ensure that the characters’ appearance matched their behavior and role in the narrative. For example, Maren is a brave pirate who is supposed to both look and talk like a stereotypical pirate.
Fireside—Devlog 2, the Team
In 2020, the Emergo Entertainment team came up with the idea for Fireside during an online Game Jam amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. The team’s focus was to evoke positive feelings despite the negative atmosphere during those very challenging times. This led to the creation of Fireside, a game where you can sit alone in the comfort of your home and still experience the feeling of togetherness. The team members have known each other since well before Fireside was created, as they had collaborated in other Game Jams and studied together at the University of Bayreuth. Today, they share their personal experiences with all of you.
Paul, the project manager, programmer, and game designer, completed his master’s degree in conducting. This was a valuable experience that led him to create an interactive conducting application called Wagner VR. His mother served as a tester for this project. During his master’s studies, he also began searching for founding partners. Not long after, co-founder Carl-Philipp joined the team.
Carl-Philipp (or CP for short) is also a programmer and game designer of Fireside. While he has participated in many Game Jams, no project was as personally promising as Fireside. The game received positive feedback for its atmosphere. It was inspired by some other cozy games like A Short Hike, Spiritfarer, and Cozy Grove.
Matthias is responsible for the music and sound in Fireside. Soundtracks from games like Life is Strange were his main inspirations, but the music in Fireside is distinct. Like Carl-Philipp, Matthias had participated in other Game Jams before, leading to wonderful projects like Press W to Progress, where the only game mechanic was pressing the W key.
Linus is the artist, and has created several sketches for Fireside. Some of his inspirations come from titles like Robin Hood: The Legend of Sherwood and Moon Hunters, as well as his dachshund Buddy, who even made it into Fireside as Scout Gilbert’s sidekick! Linus always appreciated when Paul incorporated his talent for jazz during Game Jams.
Since 2021, the team has been supported by Ilona, who takes care of the narrative design and writes funny yet informative texts for it. Her creativity seems to have no limit, as her love for playing Pen and Paper is the source of her inspiration. She may at some point lead an evening where the others must survive a night at the campfire, as the team not only shares a passion for Game Jams, but for camping as well.
Camping can be quite challenging, as Matthias discovered the time it started raining and he realized the tent was not waterproof, or when Linus woke up with unfortunate back pain after a night in a tent. Paul once even had to navigate through a storm on a sailboat with 19 others to reach the safety of the harbor—not in a tent, but on a boat, like the nameless protagonist in Fireside. However, the five have also experienced wonderful moments like sitting with friends around the warmth of campfire, playing tunes on the guitar, singing songs, or simply savoring the moment without any smartphones while enjoying the tranquility of nature and witnessing spectacles like the Milky Way in the sky.
These are the moments Fireside seeks to convey: togetherness at the campfire and the breaks on a journey. No hustle and bustle of everyday life or battle chaos in adventure games. It’s simply about enjoying the coziness of the game and getting to know its diverse characters. And you can do it from the comfort of your sofa with a cup of warm tea or hot chocolate and your favorite Christmas cookies, without feeling the rain dripping through your tent.
Fireside Devlog #1
Greetings, travellers! Today we'll tell you a bit about how it all started:)
Fireside was born in March 2020. At the Stay Safe! Jam, Paul, CP, Matthias, and Linus joined forces. Having already completed over 50 game jams, this time they managed to impress the jury, which was particularly captivated by the game’s atmosphere and awarded them the Jury’s Special Prize. Since the theme of the jam was solidarity, the four came up with the idea of creating a game centered around sharing at a campfire.
Initially, the Fireside team consisted of four individuals: Paul, CP, Matthias, and Linus. Paul and CP are the two co-founders of Emergo Entertainment, the development studio behind Fireside. Paul is the project manager, programmer, and game designer. CP is also a programmer, but he contributed to the game design in some phases, particularly focusing on the dialog system. Matthias is the composer and sound designer, creating music and sounds intended for the game and subsequently integrating them into the game engine. He aimed to establish an intimate mood through his music, drawing inspiration from game soundtracks like that of Life is Strange. Linus already knew Paul and CP from other game jams. He is the artist responsible for everything from particle effects to UI and world design. Initially, he sketched everything related to Fireside in a sketchbook, drawing inspiration from references such as Robin Hood: The Legend of Sherwood and Moon Hunters.
Fireside revolves heavily around solidarity and a sense of community. Initially, the plan was to make it an RPG, where the player would have to pay attention to their hunger and stamina levels. Another idea behind Fireside was to develop a rogue-lite game without a combat system.
However, later on, the decision was made to focus on the action around the campfire. It aimed to showcase the experience of togetherness, listening to other travelers’ stories, and finding ways to help them, regardless of their appearance or identity—all from the comfort of one’s sofa. It’s designed to be a cozy game, not demanding or complicated, but zooming in on the breaks between the battles that are the typical focus of RPGs.
Fireside primarily focuses on dialog and narrative elements like speech bubbles, which were surprisingly difficult to implement. It requires a good quest and dialog system.
To provide robust and imaginative narration, Ilona joined the team in 2021 as a writer. She’s responsible for narrative design, aiming to strike a suitable balance between entertaining texts, character backstories, and relevant quest information.
While Fireside drew inspiration from various sources, it stands out due to its original execution, shifting focus away from the combat stress between rests as seen in other games and abstaining from resolving conflicts with violence. It offers a break from everyday life, a lot of humor, and a beautiful world full of diverse characters to explore with no threat of danger looming.
Turn-Based Fest, Gameplay Stream, and a Development Update!
Greetings Travelers!
We are back with an update on Fireside!
First of all, a short update on development: it is very active! Currently we are working on a cooking system that will play a central role in the main gameplay loop!
We're also planning on a new series of development logs to provide some more insight into the development progress and the systems that will play a pivotal part in the game! You can expect the first devlog to hit your news feed in about a month ;)
And now for the immediate news: we are SUPER excited to take part in the Turn-Based fest! To celebrate this occasion, we have also recorded a little gameplay session, in which you'll get to see the current state of the game, as well as learn some anecdotes on the development of the game, challenges we faced how we overcame them!
We hope to meet you in there! :)
-The Fireside Team
May 1st Update
- New "relief sculpture" art style for event and character select board backgrounds - Minor card tweaks to reduce the degree certain cards targeted individual classes
Contacting the Press
Greetings travelers,
After wrapping up the playtest feedback (last devlog) we revisited the strategy behind our marketing for fireside. We have lots of ideas for what we can do to promote the game, but we also have to balance everything with the time cost as we are just a tiny team of developers. Besides posting on TikTok, Twitter and Discord, one of the more efficient PR tools are press releases (or so we are told), that’s why we started creating and sending out a press release in addition to our previous efforts. So, let’s look at the why, how, and what behind this decision.
The Why
The most important thing for selling our game is that as many people as possible know about it. This sounds simple but is quite difficult with social media being flooded with content. So far, we had our Steam page and social media channels. During the last few months with the playtest and a finished prototype in our hands, we focused our efforts on TikTok to get the best results for the few hours we can invest into marketing each week. But after talking to some experts, we noticed that we missed one massive channel that can bring some visibility while not requiring constant effort: Press releases.
Press releases are short articles that you write about yourself as if somebody else had written them about you. Then you send them out to as many gaming journalists and influencers as possible and hope that they are interested and copy and paste your article, maybe add some spice and publish it on their website. This system has multiple benefits: The journalist doesn’t have to fully understand your game and research everything about you, making it easy for them to write an article about your game. Additionally, you are able to use their reach while (somewhat) controlling what gets published about you. Sounds great … but as always it isn’t that easy.
The How
There are many blog posts that explain how to write the best press release, but some of them have conflicting opinions about some details and overall, it is still hard to apply the generic tips to your own game. The basics are:
But after writing your press release one big question remains: who to send it to. You can either research all gaming news websites and influencers that fit your story and game and write them a personalized email explaining why your press release interests their community. The other option is to just personalize the recipient’s name in the email and hope for the best. We used a hybrid approach and personalized the emails where we really had something personal to say and everyone else got a standard email.
The only thing that remains is actually sending the e-mails. You should not send newsletter or press releases to hundreds of recipients from a normal email address, because you might land on some spam filter list and most of your emails disappear in the spam folders. Based on our research, and tips from other devs it is most effective to use a professional bulk email service. For our first attempt we used the tool “Sendy” in combination with Amazon’s Simple E-Mail Service (SES) to distribute our press release.
In Addition to sending out the bulk emails you can send it to gamespress.com or other platforms to maybe reach some journalists you have missed before.
So, what did we send?
We focused on the news that players can send their own travel stories to us, so that we can use them as inspiration to write new dialogs for Fireside, since we believe this is an interesting angle which works uniquely for Fireside. We also promoted the free playtest over on Steam and pitched the basic concept of Fireside.
We will see how our first press release performed in the coming days and what we can learn for the second attempt. If you have any tips or tricks, you can comment them here or join our discord community where you can reach us directly.
See you in the next devlog
- Your Fireside team
Results of the Fireside playtest
Greetings travellers,
the new year is here, we’ve evaluated the first Fireside semi-public playtest since Gamescom and would like to share the results! Generally, we’re very happy with how the playtest went. 458 of you played Fireside between December 27th and January 19th! In total, you played for 352 hours. That’s about 45 minutes of playtime per player and way more than we would have expected before the playtest. After all as Jesse Schell said, the 21st century is a war for attention, and getting 45 minutes of people’s valuable time is a great sign that you all enjoyed Fireside!
This is further supported by the positive qualitative feedback you sent us via the in-game feedback feature! Most commonly, you complimented us on the game’s sound, narration, art style, and relaxing atmosphere. Since these are the focus points of fireside we’re very happy that you enjoyed this! Also, the average rating you gave our game increased by a mind-blowing 10 points from 75,22 at Gamescom to 85,58 at the playtest. If this was our meta-score we’d be very happy (although you all were more lenient most likely since this version was communicated as a prototype!). All of this makes us confident that we’re heading in the right direction while developing Fireside.
So while all the positive feedback you sent makes us happy and motivated to continue developing Fireside, you also provided some great constructive feedback and found bugs we can work to fix! You found 55 unique bugs and issues some of which (such as the missing portraits for procedurally generated NPCs or items mysteriously vanishing in the game over screen) were more common than others (soul energy tokens not always being saved correctly or the game freezing when traveling to the island). We’re in the progress of fixing these bugs and will deploy a patch asap!
Additionally, you provided 102 unique points of feedback. Here – it needs to be said – we won’t be able to realize everything you wished for (e.g. subtitles for the developer commentary) but will do our best to consider your feedback in further development. Some points such as your request to add keyboard/controller support are straightforward to implement (although they still quite some effort) others such as improving the overall balancing of the trading system are on our agenda too.
With all that said: We’re still looking for a publisher willing to fund the further development of Fireside. Thanks to the gracious support of FFF Bayern, we’ve been able to develop the prototype you were able to playtest. However, finishing Fireside will not be able with that budget. That is why our main priority is using the currently available prototype and data we gathered to find a partner with whom we can complete development. Until then, the project will have to shift down a gear, but we’re confident that we can finish Fireside one way or the other, so let’s see where this journey takes us from here!
Playtest Fireside on December 27th!
The first larger-scale playtest for Fireside is happening on December 27th! After we already got some feedback at Gamescom we’re hoping to have a larger scale playtest for Fireside on December 27th right here on Steam!
Originally, we had planned to do this playtest in November. However, due to us searching for publishers, issues with the build of the game and other obligations we decided to postpone the playtest to the end of December. The version now is stable enough that we feel confident in sharing it with you! So what can you expect from this prototype?
Like in the GamesCom version you’ll be playing a slice from the middle of the game. This is so you can experience the game’s systems in action and aren’t held up with onboarding & tutorials. However, this also means the story will be lacking some context and it will be more challenging to get into the game’s mechanics. Expect about 1-2 hours of content and interact with seven unique characters as well as trading with our procedurally generated travelers. We’ve also integrated the upgrading system which is essential for the game’s progression. However, this system is not the final version. We had to adapt the progression curve since you start in the middle of the game. The goal is to provide a prototype that communicates the gameplay & general experience of playing fireside to see how engaging it is for our potential audience! So expect bugs and missing polish but hopefully none, which ruin the core experience.
What we’re hoping for is for you to register as a playtester and simply play our game. It’s free & a way for us to collect feedback. We’re using Unity analytics to gauge our player’s engagement as well as providing a feature where you can rate our game after you’ve finished playing. Of course, all the data we’re collecting is anonymous. Parameters we’re tracking include average play time, quest progress and number of runs.
We hope you’ll enjoy the prototype for Fireside an we’ll be able to gain some good insight from you playing! If you haven’t signed up yet, simply click the request access button under the playtest section. And if you’re interested in staying up to date with everything about Fireside, we’d encourage you to join our Discord server! See you December 27th!
Greetings travelers,
