What is Still House?

It's 1920s Ontario. Across the river, the United States has banned alcohol. On your side of the border, making it is still legal, and a lot of people are about to get rich.

You are not one of them yet. You have one sketchy still, a woodpile and an uncle who has been making moonshine for longer than he'll admit. He's going to teach you his tricks. Some of them are even good ones.

That's where Still House starts. Where it goes is up to you.

Distilling is a judgement call

Most games that touch alcohol treat it as a recipe: put in grain, wait, get whisky. Real distilling doesn't work like that, and neither does Still House.

When you run a still, the spirit coming off it changes minute by minute. First come the heads: sharp, solventy, the stuff you don't want in the bottle. Then the hearts, the good part. Then the tails, heavy and oily. Where you make your cuts decides what you end up with, and there's no number on a gauge that tells you when.

So Still House gives you what a real distiller has: the proof coming off the still, and your palate. You taste as you go, watch the numbers fall, and decide. Stoke the fire harder and the spirit changes, so the cut that worked last time might not work today.

Under the hood, the game is tracking the actual chemistry: the compounds that make spirit taste like fruit, like solvent, like butter or like burnt rubber, and how your still, your ingredients and your choices shift them. You don't see all of that at first. You learn to read it, the way a distiller does. (The next devlog is a deep dive into how that works.)

From one still to a house

The first chapter is about learning the craft with your uncle and selling to the people who carry it across the border. Then Prohibition's grey market gives way to something bigger: you lease real premises and go legit.

From there, Still House becomes a business game. You'll:

• save good runs as recipes and hire hands to repeat them;
• schedule fermenters and stills so nothing sits idle;
• decide what sells now as white spirit and what goes into barrels;
• manage a rickhouse, where every barrel ages a little differently and a few turn out special;
• chase customers who want different things, against rival houses who want them too.

It's a true story, mostly. Canadian distillers really did build empires during US Prohibition. The events are real history. The distilleries in the game are fictional.

Why a physics person is making a distilling game

I studied physics, and I love systems you can take apart. A still is a beautiful one: heat, vapour, equilibrium, and a skilled person making calls on incomplete information. That's a game.

It's also why the studio is called Hohmann Games. A Hohmann transfer is the most efficient way to get between two orbits. It's a nice idea to build a studio around: hard simulations, with the effort spent where it makes the game better.

What's next

Still House is in development and heading for Early Access on Steam. Next time: what's actually happening inside the still, and how we simulate it.