What it is
Hatchery Heights is a zoo builder on a construction grid. You paint one-cell paths, drag out land, aquatic, and magma habitats at whatever shape you like, and drop in incubators and trees.
Then you pick an egg from a carousel of twenty-four creatures, wait for it, and find it a home. Placement depends on habitat type and free space rather than a prescribed rectangle, so a long thin pool and a fat square one both work if the room is there. Guests generate income — but only for habitats their paths can reach.
Screenshots
Captured from the current build. Store screenshots will be taken from the release build.
Features
- Twenty-four creatures. Dinosaurs and dragons across land, aquatic, and magma habitats, each with its own space requirement.
- Habitats you shape yourself. Any footprint with enough capacity works. Small species share compact exhibits; a giant fills one on its own.
- Paths that actually matter. A habitat only draws guests when an entrance-connected path runs within a cell of it. Unreachable exhibits flag themselves.
- A zoo that moves. Every hatchling wanders its exhibit on its own walk cycle, and guests stroll the paths in layered four-phase animation.
- Expand, rearrange, refund. Buy more land, move creatures between compatible habitats, and sell structures back at half price.
How it got made
Hatchery Heights started on a sidewalk in Chicago. We were in town to see the Field Museum, and we had spent the afternoon with Sue, the museum's Tyrannosaurus. That evening we ordered pizza from Giordano's, and my nine-year-old and I walked over to pick it up.
The walk was a lot shorter than I had planned for, so we got there about twenty minutes early. To fill the time I asked him for a game idea. We worked through a couple of dinosaur ideas standing outside the restaurant, and by the time the pizza was ready we had a zoo.
Every feature in the game is something he suggested. The eggs and the incubators, the habitats you shape yourself, the dragons living alongside the dinosaurs, the guests who only turn up if they can reach the exhibit. My job was to build it well enough to be worth his idea.
How Hatchery Heights will be sold
No ads and no subscription. The free edition is a real, replayable game; a single non-consumable in-app purchase permanently unlocks the rest. The exact split between free and paid content is shown inside the game before you buy anything, and the purchase restores on every device signed in to the same store account.
Not on the stores yet
Coming to the App Store and Google Play. There is no download, beta, or web build linked from this site. If you want a note when it goes live, email support@lynchpin.games.