Cheery Chimp

Hollow Farm: a quiet farm with something underneath

Hollow Farm started with a simple wish: a calm, unhurried incremental game about growing mushrooms. Planting, picking and selling more and more mushrooms is the part of a game like this that writes itself, though. What made it worth building was what lies beneath the farm.

An abandoned farm

You don't start from nothing. You take over an old farm that someone else left behind, overgrown and quiet, with an old farmhand who stayed on and a notebook full of half-finished thoughts. Some beds grow faster than others for no obvious reason. Pale white threads show up in the soil when you clear the brambles. They aren't roots. Somebody was here before you, growing something more than mushrooms.

Those threads are mycelium, the living network fungi spread through the ground, and following them is the heart of the game. Open the old cellar and you can look below the farm, wake the threads the last farmer left, and grow new ones. Beds on living thread grow faster. Where threads meet, knots form and feed the beds around them. Once the whole network is awake, it starts harvesting for you.

Peaceful on purpose

Nothing in Hollow Farm is lost and nothing can fail. There's no pause button, because there's nothing to pause for: the farm keeps growing while you're away, then rests once there's nothing left to do, until you come back. You can play in short visits, have several farms going at once, and pick up where you left off on another device.

The game rewards curiosity more than speed. Wild mushrooms appear at the roots of the old trees once your threads reach them. An old stump grows a fairy ring. A pond slowly clears as the network reaches it. Clearing the brambles sometimes turns something up. And now and then something visits: a hedgehog in the hedge, a heron at the water, an owl in the old trees after dark. Tap one and it goes in the notebook.

New ground

When the farm has grown far enough, the spore circle at its heart wakes up. Release the spores and the network drifts off on the wind to start again somewhere new. You choose where: a river bend where the ground is always wet, a breezy birch-covered hill, or an old village with cottage gardens and a duck pond. Each place has its own old trees and wild mushrooms. The spores you carry buy lasting strengths. Your notebook, sightings and any old trees you grew come along too.

How it's made

Under the hood the farm is a small simulation that knows nothing about the screen. Every hour you're away is worked out exactly, so a farm left for an afternoon ends up just as if you'd watched it the whole time. That made it possible to tune the game's pace with a simulated player who plays for hours in seconds, and to check that a new farm doesn't open with too much waiting.

The art grew alongside it. Everything began as simple shapes drawn in code, and each piece was swapped for a hand-made sprite as it was ready: the beds of mushrooms, the trees, the cows in their pasture, the woodpecker on the old oak. The music is made on the fly as well: a soft generative soundtrack with birds by day and crickets at night.

Take your time

Hollow Farm is meant to be the kind of game you check on with your morning coffee and again in the evening. Plant some oysters, clear a few brambles, and see what the old farmer left behind.