01The arrival road
The road runs north through the woods to the wolf-head gate of the palisade.
An animal-folk MMO in development
Briarlands
A world worth taking your time in.
Every video on this page is captured from the game or its world tools.
The idea
The road is only the beginning.
Briarlands is an online world of animal peoples: wolves and foxes, cows and turtles, otters and hawks. Fifteen playable races in three factions share one continent. The first zone, Fernshade Vale, is where the look of the game is being set, first in the browser and now in Unity.
15Playable races
15Classes
3Factions
1Zone in Unity so far
Before and after
Same vale.
New engine.
Briarlands started as a browser game built on three.js. In September 2026 the client moved to Unity 6.3, with art made in Blender, while the game server and its rules stayed the same. Each view below appears first in the browser build, then in the Unity build, from the same camera position.
The Unity views are rendered at 18:30 in-game time, close to the browser build's evening light. The browser shots include the Wolf hero; the Unity build does not have its animal-folk heroes yet, so its shots show the place on its own.
Drag to compare
One place, three kinds of light
The same Unity cameras at different hours of the day.
Zone one
Fernshade Vale
A forest road, a Packlaw waystation behind a palisade, a river crossing and an old stone ring. All footage in this section is from the Unity build. Place names are working labels.
02The waystation
Inside the gate: lodges with lit windows, chimney smoke, the campfire and the smithy.
03The wheat field
East of the road, a fenced wheat field runs up to the windmill.
04The Shalewater
The river runs down the east side of the vale, crossed by a timber bridge on the east road.
05The Mossring
North of the court, an old stone ring with braziers. The Thornback Boar patrols it.
Timelapse
A day in the vale, from four fixed cameras. The caption shows the hours each shot covers.
From above
One unbroken flight over the vale: down the road, over the court, along the river and on to the Mossring.
There are no flying mounts in the game. This is a free camera.
Beyond the vale
One continent. Three nations.
The world explorer is the layout tool for the whole continent. It uses flat colors and simple shapes, but every region, road and building is in place, including Rootspire, a city grown into a single tree.
The continent
From the southern marshes north over the heartland to the Crown Mountains, in the layout view.
Rootspire
1,900 buildings in twelve districts on the roots, the trunk and eighteen boughs.
Both films are captured in the world explorer, a layout tool, not the game client.
Concept artThe Packlaw
Howlmark · Western forests
Predators bound by pursuit, pack loyalty, and the honor of the clean kill. Follow their roads beneath the pines, past thorn-walled settlements and fast, cold water.
Concept artThe Herdsworn
Highfold · Eastern grasslands
The herd nations build, defend, and endure together. Their traditions carry the weight of law, territory, and the conviction that someone must bear the burden.
Concept artThe Kindled Current
Kindlestone · River and southern coast
Forgefolk, stormriders, and marsh witches. The river-and-sky coalition adapts to everything, trades across borders, and answers to a current of its own.
The peoples
Fifteen races.
Three factions.
Each race has its own sculpt, fur, markings and way of moving on one shared body. Race and class are separate choices, and each race follows the classes of its culture.
One full turn of every race on the character select dais, each in one of its classes.
The Packlaw
Badger
Bat
Fox
Snake
Wolf
The Herdsworn
Chicken
Cow
Mountain Goat
Sheep
Turtle
The Kindled Current
Hawk
Lizard
Opossum
Otter
Toad
Painted portraits from the character select screen. The film shows the in-game models.
Walk and run at game speed
A Wolf, a Cow, a Chicken and a Turtle on the arrival road: a walk at 3.4 m/s, then a run at 7 m/s with its lean and flight phase. Each race has its own gait.
The 15 classes
- Bellwether
- Bindfang
- Cairn
- Cinderpaw
- Emberscale
- Gravewalker
- Kintsugi
- Miregut
- Pebblebrook
- Scapegoat
- Stormtalon
- Sweetgrass
- Trailhunter
- Vesper
- Warhowl
Abilities and combat
Read the fight.
Commit to the blow.
Tab targeting, class resources and deliberate choices. A swing has a wind-up, a snap under 0.2 seconds, a held hit frame and a recovery, and the damage lands on the frame the blow connects.
The Wolf action bar
In this fight: Brace blocks and parries the boar's gores, Heavy Chop and Rend strike, the draught fills the cast bar, Shield Bash staggers, Lunge dashes back in, and Howl and Hold the Line send out shockwaves.
1Heavy Chop
2Shield Bash
3Rend
4Lunge
5Brace
6Howl
7Hold the Line
8Mending Draught
Every weapon family
Nine families, each with its own stance, two attacks and a parry.
The Thornback Boar
The first authored creature: modelled, rigged and keyed by scripts in Blender.
Three more clips: defense, emotes and the gate
Defense and reactions
Dodge, the lunge dash, block, a hit flinch, the stun daze and death.
Emotes
Wave, bow, cheer, laugh, point, sit, kneel, talk and dance, each on a different race.
Through the gate, as a player
The zone title, the minimap and the quest tracker, with the interface on.
Where it stands
A world taking shape.
Playable in the browser
A multiplayer browser prototype with accounts, character creation, three connected homelands, combat, roaming mobs and proximity text chat. There is no public server yet.
Rebuilding in Unity
Fernshade Vale runs in Unity 6.3 with URP and can be walked with a placeholder hero. The game server stays the single authority, and the Unity client is being connected to it over the same protocol as the browser.
Heroes and combat in Unity
The animal-folk heroes, combat and the interface come to the Unity client next. The browser build stays playable until then.
How it is made
Briarlands is built by one person directing a team of AI agents. Textures, portraits and icons start as written prompts. Models and animation start as scripts that Blender runs, and every pass is reviewed against a written quality bar.