Farm the seasons
Six crops with planting windows, labor costs, and weather risk. Mistime a planting and the season ends before you reap.
Case Study - Senior Graduation Project, 2026
Ironacre
Build a profitable ranch on the 1870's frontier. Keep at least one member of your family alive while you do it.
01
The Game
Ironacre is a Wild West themed Action & Strategy game. You play as a family, a father, a mother, a daughter, and a son who sold everything they owned in Europe for a chance at a new life in the New World. What waited for them was a small plot of land, a weathered cabin, and a horizon full of promise and peril.
The objective is simple to say and hard to do: build a profitable ranch in your state, and keep at least one family member alive in the process.
Work the market
Prices move with seasons, shortages, and disasters. Watch it carefully and an ordinary harvest becomes prosperity.
Keep your workers
Hired hands track morale, hunger, wages, and loyalty. Miss two payments and they organize.
Survive the frontier
Rival ranches, raids, and unrest arrive without warning. Any of the three can end your family.
Play the politics
Build reputation, run for regional representative, and shape the Land Acts that decide who owns what.
Borrow at your peril
The town bank lends for land and livestock. Miss the repayments and the council can seize what you built.
02
Rating & Audience
Ironacre is designed for adults. Assessed against PEGI criteria it would likely land at 18 the frontier it depicts runs on violence, vice, and prejudice, and the game doesn't look away from any of it.
Self-assessed against PEGI criteria not an official rating.
03
The State of Amberfall
Amberfall is a fictional frontier state, opened for settlement in 1868 by the Amberfall Land Act: immigrant families are granted plots if they can cultivate them within five years. Five regions share one town, one railway, and not nearly enough law.
Each region is a different bet. The Flatlands are fertile but exposed. Dustwood Hills have timber, stone, and wildlife that doesn't welcome intruders. The Ironridge hides fortune and danger in abandoned mines. The Southern Frontier belongs to whoever's holding the gun. And Amberfall Town is the closest thing to civilization: trade, law, politics, and a saloon that knows everyone's secrets.
04
What’s Inside
Before Ironacre existed as software, it existed as a book 36 pages across five acts, moving from arrival to legacy, and from dawn to night in its scene pages. Every illustration and design note was made to build the world from the ground up. Not as a game yet. As a place.
- Act IEntry & ImmersionWelcome to Ironacre, and the state you’ve arrived in.
- Act IIWorldbuildingThe land, the government, and three threats with no warning.
- Act IIILife in IronacreFarming, labor, and the economy that decides who lasts.
- Act IVVisual ArchiveEvery figure, garment, and tool that shaped the frontier.
- Act VClosingWhat the family built - and who helped build it.
"A game can exist as a designed world even before it becomes a playable product." The project’s thesis
It’s here in full - read it.
- All 36 pages -
The Ironacre Artbook
Front cover to back cover, as facing spreads the way it was designed.
05
What's Next
The artbook is done and from here it stops being the destination and becomes the guide: the reference I build the actual game against, page by page.
Because that's what's next. I'm starting the build turning Amberfall from a designed world into a playable one, with a controller finally in your hand.
And the book won't be shelved. When the game ships, this artbook goes out as its first edition a thank to the people who backed the frontier before it was ever playable.
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