THE WARM ROOM

They gave you the key at the town hall and did not ask for anything back.

A derelict public glasshouse at the edge of town, in the first week of winter. The glass is broken in places, the stove is cold, and the beds are bare. Ninety days until spring.

The heat in the room is made of the people in it

That is a mechanic before it is a sentiment. Every visitor standing inside is a heat source in a real simulation, so a full room is literally a warm room — and because the fire works to a thermostat, a busy afternoon means the stove damps down and your wood lasts.

Measured in the game's own simulation, on the third image on this page: the same building, the same stove, the same target temperature. With twelve people in it the fire runs at 68% instead of 100%, and the room is warmer anyway.

Three systems, and they are the same problem

HEAT. Every cell of the floor has its own temperature. It spreads between neighbours, leaks out through each individual pane according to how sound that pane is, comes in through the glass while the sun is up, and is banked by water barrels that soak up the afternoon and hand it back after dark. A stove in the middle of the room is worth more than the same stove in a corner, because heat thrown at a wall goes through the wall.

GROWTH. Crops have temperature bands, not timers. Below its minimum a plant stops growing and starts taking cold damage. Above its ideal it does not grow any faster, so "build more stoves" is never simply the answer. Corn salad and kale will take almost anything; winter tomatoes and a lemon tree are a bet on how warm you can hold one corner until March.

PEOPLE. Visitors come because it is warmer in here than it is out there, which is exactly why the middle of winter matters. A postman with five streets left. A night nurse who does not want to go home yet. Two small twins who have never seen a lemon growing. Each wants one small thing: to warm up, to sit down, something hot to hold, a bit of quiet. Meet it and they leave something in the tin and tell somebody. Come back often enough and a person takes a job. The glazier works along the glass mending a pane every other day, the forager brings wood in every morning, the cook turns produce into meals.

Nothing here can be lost

There is no death and no restart. If every plant dies you carry on in a colder room and build it back. It autosaves at the end of each day, in your browser only. No account, no server, no tracking, and no network calls of any kind once the page has loaded.

About half an hour, and then it is spring

Ninety days with named ones in them: the first hard frost, snow on the glass, a gale from the north-east finding every gap, and the longest night of the winter, which the whole first half is a preparation for. Nineteen fittings, eight crops, sixteen visitors, five jobs.

Every pixel in it is generated by two scripts

No stock art, no asset packs, no image models inside the game. Four tiling materials and 87 hand-authored sprites, produced by our own pixel engine, and all of the sound is synthesised as you play. The source ships raw and readable, because minifying a web game hides the one thing the medium already gives you.

Free, and it plays in your browser. Mouse only.

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Made by Core Systems Asset Factory. AI disclosure: code yes, graphics yes (the store cover; nothing inside the game is model generated — see CREDITS.txt), sounds no (procedural synthesis), text yes.