The Heart of Africa — Modern Remake

A single-player 3D remake of the 1985 exploration classic The Heart of Africa — Ozark Softscape's follow-up to The Seven Cities of Gold (1984) — built as a web application. You start in Cairo in 1890 with $250 and a journal, and travel across a geographically authentic Africa in search of a lost tomb: trading in port cities and decoding direction hints given in the regions' own language system.

If you remember The Seven Cities of Gold, you know the DNA: the same design team, and the same loop of walking into an unmapped continent, watching the map fill itself in behind you, and getting along — or not — with the peoples who already live there. Where that game had the Americas, this one has Africa.

PoC playable directly in the browser at:
https://patrickvonmassow.github.io/Heart-of-Africa-Remake/poc/

Screenshots

Gameplay

• Two perspectives. A 3D bird's-eye view for the journey across the continent, and a first-person view inside walkable settlements; the game switches between them when entering or leaving a settlement.
• Living world. Ten port cities, 22 peoples, 17 rivers and real landmarks at their 1890 positions (sites shifted just clear of the widened rivers where needed), plus the fictional elephant graveyard; the map is trimmed to the walkable continent (the world ends at the African Red Sea coast). Settlements are densely built and inhabited: procedurally varied dwellings, street networks, and villagers who go about their routines, with full player/NPC collision. Ambient wildlife streams with the journey — grazing herds that raise calves, predator hunts with regional food webs, elephant herds, vultures and shore life.
• Trade and cultural contact. Buy equipment, provisions and gifts in port cities; a culturally correct gift to a village chief unlocks a hint. Bazaars pay regional prices for treasure finds (continent-wide arbitrage), travel agencies sell ferry passages, and discovery bounties arrive at the next port as telegraphic transfers.
• Language and direction system. Hints are given in the regional Nivera/koko/Katula system and must be decoded into bearings and positions.
• Survival. Provisions, a canteen with a draining water level, and a health pool worn down by starvation, fever, dehydration, sun blindness and wounds; medicine cures, fresh water and rest restore.
• An authentic 1890 climate and its people. Every place runs its own researched seasonal calendar — the Sahel's humid-period rains, the harmattan's dust pall, the October Nile flood and the Okavango's inverted July flood, snow only on the peaks that really carried it — and the inhabitants answer it as the period sources describe: six peoples put on a documented seasonal garment (rank-gated where the record says so), while for the rest the season shows in the fire, the market and who is away with the herds.
• Journal. A chronicle that grows automatically with events and stores decoded hints, language-neutrally, re-rendered in the selected language. Every English entry can be read aloud in-browser via the Kokoro TTS model, with emotional voice markup shaping the delivery.
• Saving. Automatic checkpoints on every port visit; after a death a successor can take over from the last one. The startup load overview is suspended in the PoC.
• The goal. A procedurally placed tomb triangulated from regional hints; digging at the right spot with the shovel wins the game.

Audio

Deliberately still open. The 1985 original's score is not used here in any form, and no placeholder music has been dropped in either — the sound design deserves to be decided rather than defaulted into. Ideas and collaborators welcome; see Contact.

Tech stack

• Vite + React 19 + TypeScript
• three.js via @react-three/fiber and drei
• WebGPU renderer with automatic WebGL 2 fallback — shaders are written in TSL (Three Shading Language) so one code path serves both backends
• zustand for game state
• kokoro-js for the in-browser journal read-aloud (lazy-loaded, synthesized in a Web Worker)
• oxlint for linting

Rendering features include real-DEM terrain with biome-based PBR texture splatting, hand-authored ~1890 hydrology vectors, a physically grounded scattering sky with IBL, cascaded shadows, SSAO, TRAA, bloom, filmic tone mapping, and water with a wave field, depth-dependent absorption and shore foam.

Getting started

Requires Node.js ≥ 20.

npm install
npm run dev        # dev server at http://localhost:5173

Other scripts:

npm run build      # type-check + production build (must pass clean)
npm run preview    # serve the production build locally
npm run lint       # oxlint (zero errors/warnings required)
npm audit          # zero known vulnerabilities required
npm run test:unit  # fast Vitest layer (jsdom): logic, store, HUD components
npm run test:small # everyday gate: Vitest + the core browser suites (no preview)
npm test           # full (LARGE) headless regression: every suite + preview

The game starts in English by default; German can be selected at runtime via the debug menu (F1). All player-facing text lives in src/i18n/ — adding a language means adding one file.

Code reviews across vendors

Changes to guards, gates and other load-bearing mechanisms get a second pair of eyes from a model of a different vendor — different training, less correlated blind spots. The main lane reviews cross-lane work; the cross lane reviews main-lane work through one command (lane models: scripts/model-lanes.mjs):

node scripts/cross-review.mjs --sha <sha> --brief "<what to judge>"

It uses the Codex CLI with a ChatGPT login and prints the result in the shape scripts/mechanism-review.mjs --record expects; if the model cannot be reached, it says so and hands the review back to the fallback model instead of inventing a verdict. The login lives in ~/.codex/auth.json inside the dev container and is therefore lost on a container rebuild — so save it once and restore it in one command afterwards:

node scripts/cross-review.mjs --save-login     # → local/ of the main checkout (git-ignored, 0600)
node scripts/cross-review.mjs --restore-login  # after a container rebuild
node scripts/cross-review.mjs --probe          # is the model id really honoured?

Geodata

The terrain uses real elevation data. The runtime assets in public/geodata/ are generated reproducibly (no npm dependencies) by the scripts in scripts/:

node scripts/build-geodata.mjs              # DEM from public Terrarium tiles
node scripts/generate-terrain-textures.mjs  # tileable terrain textures (bird's-eye)
node scripts/generate-surface-textures.mjs  # tileable settlement surfaces (first-person)

At load time the DEM is trimmed to the game world: only land connected to the game's own land masses is kept, so Sinai, Arabia, southern Europe, foreign islands and the unreachable Madagascar render as open sea (src/world/redSea.ts); dem.png itself stays untouched.

Project structure

design.md            authoritative design document (changes land with the code)
CLAUDE.md            POC scope, acceptance criteria, build rules
scripts/             geodata preprocessing + headless verification (scripts/verify/)
public/geodata/      generated DEM + terrain textures
verification/        acceptance-criteria screenshot evidence
src/
├── config/          central balance values (runtime-tunable via debug menu)
├── i18n/            language files (de, en) and localization runtime
├── journal/         journal sketches, voice markup, in-browser TTS read-aloud
├── render/          sky, water, materials, flora/fauna, post effects
├── scenes/travel/   bird's-eye view: terrain, climate, wildlife
├── scenes/place/    first-person view: settlements, inhabitants, collision
├── state/           game and UI state (zustand)
├── systems/         input, movement, events, economy, ambience
├── ui/              HUD, status bar, journal panel, map, dialogs, debug menu
└── world/           geography, geodata sampling, hydrology, terrain model

design.md is the authoritative design document; CLAUDE.md defines the POC scope, acceptance criteria and build rules.

Status

This repository contains the proof of concept: the core gameplay loop is not fully developed.

All 32 acceptance criteria of CLAUDE.md §7.1 are implemented, with the screenshot evidence in verification/; the simplifications and open items that remain are recorded in the code (// OPEN:), in TASKS.md and in docs/backlog.md.

The full headless regression runs with npm test — a fast Vitest (jsdom) layer plus 15 Playwright browser suites; the test strategy and coverage map live in scripts/verify/README.md.

Credits

The original game

The Heart of Africa (1985) was created by Ozark Softscape and published by Electronic Arts. It was the follow-up to The Seven Cities of Gold (1984).

• Danielle Bunten Berry (credited on the 1985 release as Dan Bunten) — design and programming
• David Warhol — music and sound effects
• Electronic Arts — publisher

This remake exists because that game was worth remembering. All credit for the concept, the design and the original score belongs to the people above.

This remake

Developed by Patrick von Massow. Source code, assets and text in this repository are original work unless noted otherwise.

Data and libraries

• Elevation data derived from public Terrarium terrain tiles
• Hydrology and place-name research from public-domain and openly licensed period sources
• See Tech stack for the open-source libraries this project depends on; each remains under its own license

Legal

This is a non-commercial fan project, made as a tribute. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Electronic Arts Inc., Ozark Softscape, or any rights holder of the original game.

• No code, graphics, audio, text or other assets from the 1985 original are used, extracted or redistributed here. Everything in this repository was built from scratch, apart from the third-party data and libraries named under Data and libraries.
• The Heart of Africa, The Seven Cities of Gold and all related names and marks are the property of their respective owners. They are used here only to identify the work this project pays tribute to — nominative use, no claim of ownership implied.
• Nothing here is sold, monetised, or offered in exchange for payment, donations or advertising revenue, and there is no intention to do so.
• Depictions of 1890s Africa, its peoples and the colonial-era framing of the original are treated as historical subject matter, researched from period and scholarly sources. Where the original's assumptions have not aged well, this project tries to do better rather than reproduce them.

If you hold rights to the original work and object to anything in this repository, open an issue or contact me and it will be addressed promptly.

Own code released under the MIT License. Note that this covers only the original work in this repository — it conveys no rights to the 1985 game. Anyone looking to commercialise a derivative would need to clear that with the rights holders of the original.

Contact

Questions, corrections, period sources, or an interest in the audio side: open an issue or write to [email protected].