Elderheart
Ten minutes or a whole evening — the game doesn't mind which. A hero to build, ground to cover, and a world that remembers what you did in it.
What it is
Elderheart is a turn-based RPG that doesn't ask for a commitment up front. Nothing here is gated behind an hour of setup — you can pick it up for ten minutes and get somewhere real, and there's enough underneath to lose an evening to when you feel like it.
You pick a class, kit out a hero, and push into ground you haven't covered. You come back to a world that keeps track of what happened there, so returning isn't starting over.
Fights resolve quickly, which is what makes the short sittings work — but that's a property of the pacing, not the size of the thing. Progress saves to your browser, so closing the tab costs you nothing and neither does picking it up three weeks later.
The one design constraint: a first-time player should be doing something interesting inside thirty seconds. Most RPGs spend that on a cutscene. This one opens on a decision.
How to play
- Choose your action each turnTap / click
- Open inventory and gearMenu button
- Advance dialogueTap / Space
On a desktop, click instead of tapping. Nothing is behind a key.
Ten trades running alongside the fighting
Cooking, fishing, hunting, crafting, building, woodcutting, mining, blacksmithing, alchemy and fletching. Each levels on its own, none of them are side-content, and the tools that gate them cost 25 gold rather than an hour of grinding. Most browser RPGs are a combat loop with a shop attached. This one has a life running next to it.
Build Log
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Rewrote the opening. The Begin Adventure button was sitting below the fold on a phone and starting out disabled — measured at 1406px down a page with a 915px viewport. New players were landing on a screen with nothing to press. The empty save picker is gone too: a file dialog with no files in it isn't a choice, it's a wall.
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Moved saves onto their own storage keys. Worth writing down: renaming a storage key silently deletes every existing player's save, so the old keys are still read and migrated rather than dropped.
Credits and licences
Elderheart is built on three.js, used under the MIT licence, with the copyright notice retained in the shipped file. Typefaces are licensed under the SIL Open Font Licence. Cover art was composited from a base image created with Grok (xAI).
Elderheart is original work by Launchway Games. It began as a game on a family website and was rebuilt from the ground up for release here.