Pinewater

The idea

Your Aunt Bev's lakeside lodge owes $3,000 in back taxes. You have three weeks, until the Founders' Day regatta, to raise it, or the lodge goes to auction and Lena Voss buys it. Pinewater is a summer at the lake: work shifts, fix up the lodge, train, get to know the town, and fall for someone.

What it is

• A free-roam dating sim: six romance routes and nine endings, each route with nine story beats, a date and a "one year later" epilogue
• Seven jobs, from diner shifts and the boatyard to lifeguarding and trail crew, with fishing, lunch-rush, swimming and canoe minigames. A better score pays more
• Strength, Charm and Smarts to train, and lodge repairs that raise its nightly income, so money makes money
• Side quests: sailing lessons and the canoe race, a legendary pike, a 1923 deed, and relighting the lighthouse
• A summer calendar with fireworks night, a storm that can wreck the dock, the fishing derby, talent night and a bonfire on the eve of the regatta
• A phone with quests, texts and people, and painted characters and backgrounds for every place at four times of day
• For adults: every character is 24 or older. Intimate scenes fade to black by default, with a toned-down option and an opt-in explicit level

Built with

• Ren'Py 8.5.3, on an engine shared with Second Floor, Under Inkwell and The Lantern House
• The story is written as data in a JavaScript browser prototype and exported to Ren'Py, and a validator plays thousands of simulated summers to check that every scene, choice and ending can be reached
• Written and built with Claude Code
• Art painted locally with Stable Diffusion through SwarmUI, over the game's own drawn sprites

Status

In development. Version 1.3 adds the regatta-eve bonfire and new scenes for the routes. Not released yet.