Home Barn Hockey

Home Barn Hockey

Pre-alpha · Build 1.0.1

Eight teams. One cup.

Home Barn Hockey is a hockey game for PC: eight Canadian clubs, one cup to chase, played from overhead. It's being built in the open. A human director explains hockey, and an AI writes the code, builds the players and takes everything very literally.

Watch the trailer Follow the build

Now showing

The build 1.0.1 trailer

A human director spent one Saturday explaining hockey to an AI. This is the epic trailer for what came out, with an original 8-bit score. It admits everything.

Trailer title card: the Home Barn Hockey badge over the rink, with the line Conceived and directed by a human, built by an AI.

Sound on. Captions are in the player's menu.

The arena jumbotron during intermission: Stat of the night, shots on goal, 105, with an error that says not enough digits.

Also showing

Intermission

Please remain in your seats. The jumbotron shows how build 1.0.1 is really going: 105 shots a game, a coach whose system is a dice roll, and three stars that include the ice resurfacer.

Pre-alpha

Build 1.0.1, by the numbers

The first build is a game you watch: the computer plays both teams, with real rules (offside, icing, overtime), line changes on the fly, body checks, dekes and saves.

Home Barn · Build 1.0.1Final · Sat Oct 10 2026
  • 6Body types
  • 23Animations
  • 8Directions
  • 5,500Lines of code, about
  • 24MPH, fastest skater
  • 8Clubs
Build 1.0.1 from overhead: skaters in navy and teal battle skaters in cream and orange near a faceoff circle.
Build 1.0.1 in motion. The camera looks straight down, and the rink runs up and down the screen. Top speeds are tuned to real pro skating.

Known issues

In the box

  • Every player on every team shoots left.
  • Skaters can't glide, skate backward or stop like real players yet.
  • About 105 shots per team per game. Real pro games see 28 to 31.
  • There's no real faceoff model yet: the puck goes back and to the right every time.

Coming next

Build 1.0.2

  • Gliding, crossovers and hockey stops.
  • Backward skating and pivots.
  • Left-handed and right-handed shooters.
  • A real faceoff model.

The league

The Canadian Cup

Eight fictional clubs from five provinces, in two divisions of four. Crests are still on the drawing board, so for now each club wears its colours.

West Division

  • Vancouver · BC

    Breakers

  • Victoria · BC

    Ravens

  • Calgary · AB

    Ironhorses

  • Edmonton · AB

    Aurora

The Canadian Cup

East Division

  • Saskatoon · SK

    Stags

  • Winnipeg · MB

    Frost

  • Toronto · ON

    Voltage

  • Ottawa · ON

    Sentinels

Cup Season, as planned: 36 games per club. The top three in each division make the playoffs, and division winners skip the opening round. The opening round is best of five; the division finals and the Cup Final are best of seven.

A win is worth two points. No ties and no shootouts: overtime is sudden death, starting 4-on-4, then 3-on-3 until someone scores.

Made in the open

The journey so far

  1. The look

    Rink green, aged cream and vintage red, with collegiate letters and paired rink stripes: a well-loved Canadian arena program, turned into a game.

  2. Build 1.0.1 (pre-alpha)

    The first playable build, in one day: a game brain written in C#, an AI that runs plays from a coaching playbook, sprite players rendered from a 3D model built by script in Blender, and a watch mode in the Godot engine.

  3. The trailer and the Intermission

    Two videos, made the same day: an epic-trailer parody with an original 8-bit score, and a jumbotron intermission with the night's real stats. Every number in them was counted.

  4. Next

    Build 1.0.2

    Skating gets real: gliding, crossovers, stops, backward skating and pivots. Plus left-handed shooters and real faceoffs.

  5. The plan

    YouTube, Kickstarter, Steam

    Every build documented on YouTube, then a Kickstarter, then a release on Steam.

Follow the build

New builds, new videos and the Kickstarter launch, by email. Unsubscribe any time.

Watch it get built

Every build gets a video: what's new, what's hilariously broken, and how close we're getting to an actual hockey game.

YouTube channel coming soon