Monster Hollow

Monster Hollow is a gentle village game about a hollow full of happy monsters. You gather food, wood, and stone, hatch new monsters, and build them a home. Then you watch what they do with it.

I made Monster Hollow for my daughter. She loves watching the monsters head off on expeditions and come back with what they found, so the game is built around watching rather than winning: nothing complex, and nothing you can lose. Nothing punishes you for stepping away, and most of the fun is in watching the monsters live their lives.

Building the hollow

Monsters take on jobs: farming, chopping wood, gathering stone, and heading off on expeditions to find things. New buildings unlock one play day at a time, so there is always something new without a flood of menus.

Then there is the fun stuff:

• Play equipment. Slides, swing sets, seesaws, and tetherball, which monsters use on their own.
• Ponds. A fishing dock with a Fish Book to fill in, and a splash pad for the monsters to cool off in.
• Treats. Short shows you can start: a bubble machine with bubbles to pop, fireworks, a night-time lantern festival, and a dance party with four songs, each with its own dance.
• Decor. Lamp posts that light up at night, campfires that monsters gather around in the evening, and bird feeders that draw their own flock.
• A tree nursery. Pick one of six Ohio trees (sycamore, maple, oak, tulip tree, buckeye, or hemlock) and a monster carries the sapling out, digs, and waters it. Each species does something different: maples drop leaf piles to jump in, oaks draw squirrels and turkeys, and buckeyes can be tossed into the wishing well.

Seasons

The year turns on its own: trees leaf out in spring, change color one by one in fall, and snow and ice arrive in winter. A full year takes about seven hours of play. If you would rather visit a different season, the Change Season option jumps straight to it.

The Far Meadow

The village holds up to 50 monsters at a time. Instead of ever losing a monster, extra monsters move to the Far Meadow, where they stay safe, and they visit the village now and then. Any of them can come home when there is room.

How it is built

Monster Hollow is written in Rust with the wgpu graphics library. It runs on Windows and Android and in the browser through WebAssembly. Its music is synthesized in code. The simulation is deterministic, so a recorded play session can be replayed exactly, which makes bugs much easier to track down.

Status

In active development. Play the current build in your browser.