Before Heart and Soil had sprites, before the farming loop compiled, there was Lupa at Puso — the game design document. Twenty-five markdown files spread across six design domains: world, characters, systems, narrative, economy, and technical. The setting is Barangay Linaw on Panay Island, a fictional barrio built from the texture of actual provincial life.
The document covers crops native to the Philippines (palay, camote, saging, niyog, talong, sitaw, ampalaya, kamatis, okra, sili), each with a growth schedule, seasonal availability, and market price. NPCs with daily schedules, relationship points, dialogue trees, and romance subplots. The Bayanihan system — cooperative community projects that unlock shared upgrades. A reputation economy where trust replaces currency for certain transactions. A folklore layer with diwata encounters and seasonal rituals.
The combat system — I included one — is a turn-based encounter that triggers during night travel or quest events, drawing on Filipino folk creatures. The economy model works through fluctuating market prices tied to the in-game calendar and world events.
The 4-week MVP sprint plan breaks the build into weekly milestones: core loop and tilemap, barrio interactivity and NPCs, farming and economy systems, and content integration plus save/load. The document is written in a build-ready tone — every system description is specific enough to hand to Godot without reinterpretation.
I wrote the GDD before writing code because the farming sim space is crowded and I needed to know what made this one Filipino before I knew how to build it. Heart and Soil is the Godot implementation. Lupa at Puso is the blueprint that keeps the implementation from drifting into Stardew Valley clone territory.