Developer Lowkey Gamedev Inc. Canada
Engine Unreal Engine 5
Steam Wishlist https://store.steampowered.com/app/4428980/Hearth_Bound/
Trailer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2kKV5evUz4g
Hearth Bound is a Coop cozy fantasy home building game.
Build and decorate a cozy fantasy home together.
Place furniture, discover new decor, and freely expand your shared hearth as you design rooms side-by-side with friends in a relaxing co-op building experience.
Features
- Cozy co-op home building for you and your friends
- Hundreds of fantasy-inspired furnishings and decorations
- Powerful placement tools: move, rotate, scale, snap, and Room Expansion!
- Build cozy cottages, tavern rooms, gardens, workshops, and more
- Share your home with cozy critters, pets and pests!
- Progression through discovery - place objects to unlock new furniture and categories
- More Catalog Management - Custom Named Collections and Multi-Prop Preset management
More Assets - Room Sets, Profession Sets, More Pets!
How it started
On the 27th February 2026 I played World of Warcraft Midnight and fell in love with the housing system - as an homage I live streamed the development of a similar system, based on my History in base building features:
- Starship Troopers Extermination Blueprint Technical Lead (Team of 30+)
- I created the base building system in that project, among many other features
- Lead Developer (alongside 2 designers for a team of 3)
- Fully blueprint coop game, including a Game Master camera with world editing
Catch the stream here: https://youtu.be/KFtWHzJsj5I?t=1
How its going
Since February 27th, I have spent my evenings and weekends working on the prototype, changing it to depart from the World of Warcraft homage, in particular I settled on the following features:
- Coop First, friend invites let you jump in together in seconds
- Free building with Voxel Cells, push and pull walls and ceilings freely
- Everything is free, you unlock items by exploring categories and placing items
- Pets! You must have pets for a cozy game, and you CAN pet them!
- More QOL features like duplicate, mass placement, custom presets and collections
It’s now March 22nd, give or take 23 days from prototype to Early Access, Demo, and Steam Announcement. I hope you enjoy the cozy little Hearth Building game, lots more to come!
What really lit a fire under my ass was the upcoming March 30th House & Home Fest.
Technical Overview
This project is a fully replicated co-op listen server experience, built primarily in Blueprints with minimal C++ for targeted engine exposure. The architecture is designed around data-driven systems, rapid iteration, and scalable content workflows.
Gameplay is centralized within a single modular HearthComponent, which drives all core systems. State and behavior are controlled using Gameplay Tags, enabling a flexible, mode-based architecture without hard dependencies between systems.
This approach allows new features and modes to be introduced quickly, with minimal refactoring, by extending tag-driven logic rather than rewriting systems.
The game uses Enhanced Input Mapping Contexts to define controls per gameplay mode. Each mode injects its own context, allowing clean separation of inputs and eliminating conflicts.
This makes adding new tools or build modes extremely fast, as input behavior is fully contextual and data-driven.
The world is driven by a PCG-based, voxel-like system that allows players to dynamically modify structures by pushing and pulling walls, floors, and ceilings.
Instead of traditional voxel storage, the system relies on replicated structural state + local procedural reconstruction, enabling large-scale changes while keeping runtime and network costs low.
HISM (hierarchical instanced static meshes) are utilized at an actor level, to ensure that all grass, walls, plates, pillars, posts, rugs, cupboards, mugs and chairs are instanced and optimized for large-scale player creativity.
Networking
All systems are built for replicated co-op (listen server) and the Steam Online Subsystem. Only essential gameplay data is synchronized, while visual and procedural results are resolved locally.
- The tagged mode you're in
- Which actor definition you're holding
- Where your current actor is
- Low bandwidth usage
- Deterministic world updates
- Scalable multiplayer performance
The UI is built using Common UI, providing consistent styling and automatic input binding.
All content is organized via multi-tagged Gameplay Tags, allowing assets to be dynamically categorized and filtered. Storage and inventory use virtualized list views, enabling smooth navigation of thousands of items with minimal performance impact.
Custom Editor Utility Widgets batch-process large volumes of source assets into game-ready Data Assets. These define placement rules, behavior, categorization, and UI representation.
This pipeline enables rapid conversion of external asset libraries into fully integrated gameplay content.
Automated Asset Rendering
A Scene Capture–based prop renderer automatically generates thumbnails using asset bounds for perfect framing. This removes manual setup and ensures consistent visual presentation across all UI elements. AI powered asset tagging for hierarchical catalog navigation.