u/CrookedStones

https://reddit.com/link/1tp9rej/video/2era2ws4cp3h1/player

You've inherited a cabin in a small valley village. Your grandmother left behind a field guide, a cat, and the quiet trust of ten neighbors who all knew her better than you did. They're watching to see who you turn out to be.

The woods around the cabin are the real point. Spring brings morels and St. George's mushrooms up through the meadow grass. Summer rolls in chanterelles, chickens-of-the-woods, indigo milky caps that bleed blue when you cut them. By fall there's lion's mane on old beeches, blewits in fallen leaves, fly agaric in the deep woods looking like a Halloween postcard. Thirty-plus real species in all, every one with its actual latin name, real habitat, real medicinal use, real ID notes, and some dangerous lookalikes you may find the hard way.

You learn the villagers slowly. Rowan the carpenter at his bench. Wren at her drying rack with forty years of botanicals labeled in her own hand. Aldric on the south field. Silas at the forge. Petra in the shop, Mayor Thorne at the lectern, Bram and Maren keeping the inn, Elara out at her telescope, Fern at the forager's stand. Each of them carries your grandmother a little differently. Gifts and dialogue, ten heart tiers, but no romance - just friends here!

The cabin gets restored as you go. The greenhouse fills up. Tinctures age in barrels in the cellar. Mother trees in each biome hum a little louder when you tend them.

It's solo-developed, currently Early Access, with daily-ish updates pushing through to a full release in November. The feedback button in the pause menu emails me directly with your save attached. I read every one.

Thanks for taking a look! 🍄

Demo (free, browser, no install): https://crookedstonestudios.itch.io/under-the-elm-free-demo

Wishlist on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1177217/

Hello Friends!

Game Title: Under the Elm

Playable Link: Itch

Platform: PC - Browser

Description: The game is called Under the Elm, and in a nutshell, you inherit your grandmother's cabin and apothecary, forage mushrooms and botanicals across increasingly spooky biomes, brew tinctures from her recipes, and tend the village she left behind. For my fellow collectors, there's even a field guide that fills in as you identify species with botanical illustrations that I'm particularly proud of!

Free to Play Status:

• [ ] Free to play
• [ X ] Demo/Key available
• [ ] Paid (Allowed only on Tuesdays with [TT] in the title)

Involvement: Everything is made by yours truly.

I'm guessing I'm not the only one with this issue, but how do y'all balance not spending too much on artwork for your first build and putting out something quality? I'm talking, I can't even spend $100 to commission a title screen poor at this point 😅

Do y'all use AI and suffer the backlash until you can make enough money to commission? I used itch packs for what I could, but I'm a bit at the limit for what I can find within my budget and need personalized pieces now....

I am NOT an artist by any stretch - I'm a writer, but I'm trying to find a little nook in the cozy genre and I feel like looks matter to get people to at least try.

EDIT: I just want to clarify that I used itch packs and free assets for almost everything, but I need a title screen and a very specific book component that fits with the assets I already have. I'm talking about maybe 3-4 sprites out of the thousands in the game that I literally cannot make, and I did reach out to actual artists but the quotes are in the multiple hundreds of dollars to replace these. My game style is pixel-art so pretty simple, and I have gotten comfortable editing my current assets to fit what I need - like I modified and created all of my mushroom sprites - but I need a model to work off or I'm lost. Hence the AI.