Press kit

Everything on this page may be reproduced for coverage of WESTWARD! or Hardtack Games. For anything not here — a build, an interview, a specific scene — write to hello@hardtackgames.com.

Fact sheet

Description

One line

A frontier survival sim where every traveler is a person, not a health bar.

One paragraph

WESTWARD! is a historical survival simulation about taking five people and one wagon two thousand miles west in 1848 — the year the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ended the Mexican-American War, signed nine days after gold was found at Sutter's Mill and months before the news reached the east. The goal is to arrive in Oregon with everyone alive, and ideally intact. Every traveler rolls their own attributes, trade, personal interest, temper and growth aptitude, so no two companies behave alike. Underneath sits a genuine simulation — dietary variety drives a continuous fitness curve that moves every stat daily, weight and oxen determine whether you move at all, exhaustion feeds mental breaks, and illness leaves permanent scars. Above it sits a Storyteller that shapes each run's dramatic arc rather than rolling dice at you. It keeps the shape of the trail games you remember and puts something considerably more honest underneath.

Key features

• Five people, fully simulated. Attributes, backgrounds, interests, tempers, per-run growth aptitudes, relationships, grief that scales with those relationships, and permanent attribute scars.
• A Storyteller, not a random table. Six personas built from sliders — frequency, severity, mercy, pacing, randomness, brutality — that shape a run's whole arc.
• Food is a system. Quantity and dietary variety feed a continuous fitness level that modifies every traveler's effective attributes, every day. Meals are composed from what is actually in the wagon.
• Weather with teeth. Historical monthly climate tables, regional temperature bands, heat waves that ignite wildfires, blizzards, low-country fog, and a true 29.53-day lunar cycle that governs how far you can see and travel after dark.
• Minds break. Exhaustion and grief accumulate into duress; breaks play out according to each traveler's temper.
• Hunting as a real decision. A full playable hunt: read the ground for sign, choose who goes, lead your shots, and weigh every hour afield against the miles the wagon isn't making.
• A wagon that obeys physics. Load versus oxen pull, room as a second limit on what you can carry, wheels that wear out and lose their iron, stranding on an empty plain, and rescue that may or may not be charitable.
• Choice-driven encounters and optional permadeath ironman.

History

Began as a single-file simulation with the explicit goal of testing whether the classic trail-game structure could carry a genuinely deep systems layer. The simulation was balanced across thousands of automated runs — swept over multiple storytellers, difficulty tiers and seeds — before any rendering work started. In August 2026 the project forked: the original build remains the balance laboratory, and a purpose-built front-end became the shipping game, with both runtimes reading the same content files so there is exactly one source of truth for game content. Every iteration is recorded in a development log.

Selected details

• The simulation predates the graphics. Balance was validated in a headless model first; the renderer was built to display an already-working game.
• Two runtimes, one content truth. The balance lab and the shipped game load identical data files, and a parity harness compares every shared rule between them — hundreds of named constants and thousands of sampled curve points — after each change.
• Byte-identical save resume. Saves carry the random stream; an uninterrupted run and a save-and-restore run were proven to match exactly, state and stream both.
• The moon is real. A true 29.53-day synodic cycle drives the night sky, the lighting, and a three-fold swing in how far the party can see after dark — which in turn determines what pushing the pace at night costs your oxen.
• The dog earns its keep. Adopt the stray and he smells the rattlesnake before your team walks into it. The cat keeps rats out of the stores. Both are real mechanical immunities, not flavor text.
• The empty hunt is a designed outcome. Roughly a third of hunting grounds are genuinely barren. The narrator tells you honestly — bleached bones, tracks washed shapeless — and then it's your call whether to pay an hour's walk for better ground.
• The books are real. Eleven titles that were actually on the road in the 1840s ride at their true weight and do nothing until somebody literate reads one aloud. One of the guidebooks lies, and a second honest guide is how you catch it.

Screenshots

Actual gameplay from the current build, captured at an integer scale of the game's own pixels. Click for the full-size PNG.

Work in progress: Screenshots are from an in-development build and not representative of the final product.

Logos and icons

Store description

WESTWARD! is a historically-authentic frontier survival simulation that puts you in charge of a pioneer's wagon train on its journey two thousand miles west in 1848 along the Oregon Trail. Easy, Medium (historically-authentic) or Hard modes & six unique storytellers offer players a highly varied experience. Attributes, personal interests, temper and growth aptitude are all tracked before the trail leaves its mark; each trial bringing you one step closer to the end of the line. Choose from ten professions — each with their own unique bonuses to aid you in your journey. Localized topography maps and weather data recreate the details necessary for an immersive environment sim. Systems for tracking members' morale, fatigue and relations enrich the storyline, giving depth and meaning to every decision. Exhaustion feeds mental breaks and illness/injuries leave permanent scars which a 'grit' system tracks and accounts for. A disorganized and worn down wagon train risk desertion… or worse. Can you make it to Oregon City with your team intact?

Boilerplate

Hardtack Games is a one-man operation based in Portland, OR building deep systems for games with an emphasis on education. Its first game, WESTWARD!, is a frontier survival simulation set on the emigrant road west in 1848.

Naming

The game's title is set in capitals with the exclamation mark: WESTWARD!. The studio is two words, Hardtack Games. We describe the game as a frontier survival sim.

Contact

Hardtack Games — hello@hardtackgames.com — hardtackgames.com — hardtackgames.itch.io — discord.gg/7mmmq9BY3d