May 18, 2018

Stoneshard - Wayfinder

60% in three days, just wow! Thanks everyone! And you can still support our ongoing Kickstarter campaign.

By the way, Alpha 0.4.8 is released and you can download it here: https://ink-stains-games.itch.io/stoneshard

Changlelog

UI & ART

- Added animation for Nausea effect.
- Added animation for Search Surroundings skill.
- Vampire Priest sprite was changed to Vampire Priestess
- Fixed Treatise room table’s depth

BALANCE

- Greatswords damage was slightly nerfed. Also they have been given increased Fumble Chance, but their other secondary stats got buffed to somewhat compensate this.
- Added missing secondary stats for Flail, Flanged Mace and Morning Star.
- Oak Shield now provides 1 Absorption and 1 Defence instead of 2 Defence. This should increase an early game survivability.
- Vampires and Undead heath was generally slightly decreased.
- Added missing Fumble Chance to Undead.
- Undead Evasion chance was decreased. Why would skeletons want to evade? They’re already dead anyway.
- Undead Critical Chance was slightly increased.
- Several armored enemies now have Defence instead of Absorption (should generally increase damage dealt to them a little).
- Bat’s Evasion Chance was decreased.
- Increased damage dealt by Rats and Bats.
- Added Spell Power penalty for most Shields and heavy Gloves, Helms and Cuirasses
- Added new passive to Basic skills. This mechanic was in the game from the very start, but it wasn’t very clear, so we decided to explain it this way.
- Dual wielding penalty was slightly decreased, so it should be more viable to use dual weapons now. Dual weapons will function very differently in the main game, but we still want you to have some fun even with this iteration.
- Sacrificial Blood now correctly gives caster mana instead of health. It also gives 3 MP per 1 HP lost, instead of 1:1 ratio.
- Sleep now decreases Evasion to 0. Sabotage active skill should be more viable because of this.
- Altar Statues death ray damage scatter was a bit too random, so it was nerfed to deal more predictable amounts of damage.
- Lively Essence now correctly restores 30% HP instead of 25 HP.
- Search Surroundings formula was tweaked to find traps much faster.
- Bows have much decreased Accuracy now.
- Blood Golem explodes upon reaching 0% HP, not 50%.
- “Powershot” active skill was tweaked.
- “Arrow Recovery” passive now has a 10% chance not to consume an arrow upon shot (temporary iteration).

BUGFIXES and QOL IMPROVEMENTS

- Added notification for “Search Surroundings” being unlocked in the tutorial
- Fixed crash upon using sword’s AoE-skill on zombies and statue during the boss fight.
- Fixed traps spawning right under the containers.
- You can no longer interact with traps/door/loot/container when stunned.
- Now your mana level persists upon changing the dungeon floor.
- Fixed various equipment-related crashes.
- Fixed various modifier-related crashes.
- Mobs can no longer shoot or cast spells when stunned.
- “Midas Touch” modifier fixed to correctly give at least 1 coin every attack.
- Arrows stack limit increased to 30 from 20
- Fixed bug with crates and reinforced crates dropping nothing
- Added arrows to crates and reinforced crates drop list.
- Fixed occasional full inventory crash.
- Fixed occasional item generation crashes.
- Equipping bow and arrows no longer activates dual wielding penalty.
- Goldhoarder’s Curse hover fixed to display text correctly.
- “Consecutive Blows” active skill no longer explodes the barrel in 1 turn.
- Fixed mental debuffs not appearing in-game.
- Opening Modes menu no longer takes a turn.
- Fixed occasional Rest Mode crash.
- Modifiers’ “skull” and “cross” icons are no longer shown during the cutscenes.
- Fixed double SP exploit.
- Fixed numerous typos and grammatical mistakes in English translation.
- Fixed book formatting.
- Several hovers and descriptions were rewritten to provide more clear insight.
- Both “Emergency Repair” and “Repair Kit” restore 20% equipment durability now
- Fixed bench collision blocking 4 tiles sometimes.

May 8, 2018

Devlog: Prologue Details & Other News

Stoneshard - Wayfinder

Hey everyone!

It’s been a while since our last update, so let’s talk news.

TL;DR

Prologue is coming soon, it’s tied to the launch of our Kickstarter campaign. It is set before the game itself, introduces one of the main characters and contains some key mechanics, but by no means does it represent the final state of Stoneshard. Most of the features are missing, and there are bugs/crashes. That’s because we cannot afford to polish it and we focus on developing the full game. It’s a playable alpha for everyone who wants to support the game on Kickstarter, so they can understand our vision for Stoneshard.
We’ve teamed up with HypeTrain Digital indie publisher. We’ve already been working together on 12 Is Better Than 6, and they are cool guys. HypeTrain Digital will help us with Kickstarter campaign and full release, including porting Stoneshard on other platforms aside from PC.

Prologue

If you’ve been following our project, you probably know that we’re working on a free playable prologue that will be out when our Kickstarter campaign launches. Good news — everything’s almost ready, and these two things will happen soon. So we’d like to tell you about the prologue once more — just to make everything clear and let you know what it’s going to be like.

First of all, this will NOT be a demo of Stoneshard. It’s a distinct game, a playable alpha which will get you familiar with some of game’s core mechanics in their current state. While story-wise, it’s, well, a prologue, so it is set before Stoneshard and it will introduce one of game’s main characters — Verren. You’ll be able to explore several levels, including tutorial, and fight a boss. By our calculations, it’s several hours of gameplay.
What’s in prologue: combat system, health system, character progression, tutorial, procedural generation of dungeons. The prologue will NOT contain open world, Caravan and its followers, full character customization and creation, quests, trading, Pantheon and other key features that will be present in a full game.
There’re a lot of cool stuff missing from the prologue. We would love to make it as polished and big as possible, but eventually we decided that less is better, if it’s about quality. And, what’s more important, we’re a very small studio, and every day spent on prologue is a day not spent on developing Stoneshard itself. So our focus is on the full game. This is the same reason for why there are bugs and other issues with prologue.
Also, we don’t have time to fully test the game on different resolutions, so the prologue will be set to default at 1366x768. And some aspects of keyboard controls are missing (which means that, for example, you can move your character only by clicking on tiles).
Many mechanics and gameplay aspects of the prologue do not meet our quality standards and by no means represent the final state of the game. It’s not even a beta. Enemy AI is clunky, and there are plans for reworking the turn-based movement, potions, injuries, weapon wielding and other stuff. Remember — it’s a very-very little glimpse inside our idea of the game, made first and foremost for our Kickstarter campaign and potential backers. People would like to know what our vision is like (and that the game is actually already in development) before giving us money, and it’s only right.

Modes

And now to the devlog itself. In the past, we’ve talked about the positioning system (known as Attitudes). We’ve tested this mechanic and decided that we should rework it, because there are too many of them, and most of them are pretty much useless. We renamed this mechanic to Modes and got rid of 7 positions out of 9. Now there are two of them — stealth and rest. We’re working on this system and have some new ideas. For example, we are planning to let stealth-based characters see the viewing angles of enemies and zones of lighting.

New partnership

More good news. We are teaming up with HypeTrain Digital indie publisher. We’ve already been working together on 12 Is Better Than 6, and we were satisfied with the results, so eventually both parties decided that this collaboration should go on. HypeTrain Digital will help us with Kickstarter campaign, promotion and full release, including porting Stoneshard on other platforms aside from PC.

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That's all for today. Stay tuned!

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Also you can follow us on:

Apr 3, 2018

Devlog: Skill System

Stoneshard - Wayfinder

Greetings, travellers!

Stoneshard devteam is back online with a new devlog! Still working on the prologue, but we have good news: soon it’ll be ready. We’ve got through a lot of stuff for the past weeks, while some other things still need tinkering. Anyway,this log is not about our general progress, but about one of the most important changes we’ve made this year – skill system.

There could be only one!

We based our skill tree developing process on two immutable principles: it should be intuitive, so that new players could get on immediately, and it should give a huge experimenting field. Path of Exile skill system happened to be the best variant at first, but we declined it, because it broke the first principle, even though it looks impressive and stylish. We’ve developed a bunch of concepts before finding the right solution.

Final variant represents several dozens of skill branches separated in three categories:

Weaponry. These skills empower some weapon types. Active skills become available only with the right weapon equipped. They demand no resources, but have cooldowns.
Sorcery. All that spell stuff is here. Cast whatever you want until mana ends. In case you don’t want to find yourself mana-exhausted in the middle of the fight – sign up for mana management studies.
Utility. Everything that can’t be divided in previous categories. Dual Wielding, Survival, Sabotage etc. belong here.

Our in-game skills menu as it is (WIP).

Each branch has 8 skills: four actives and four passives. You need to activate active ones (surprisingly), and passive one provide some valuable enhancement (along with small obligatory stat bonus).They are separated in 4 tiers, with two skills per each tier. Upon reaching even levels your character will gain 1 SP (Skill Point) to unlock any tier available. And yes, this means you get two skills at once. By the way, you won't be able to get to the top tier skills right on level six: most high tier abilities need to be unlocked first. Find a certain mentor or read a treatise to do so.

Playing as tanky-lightning-enchanted-stunlocking-don't-come-at-me battlemage is already pretty fun.

At level 30 – the highest possible level – your character will be able to master 4 skill branches, or unlock half of the tiers for 8 branches, or any other combination. Just don’t forget that you’ll have only 16 SP. We plan about 30 skill branches in total, which means thousands of possible combinations. First tiers of 11 different branches will be available in the prologue, by the way.

It's worth mentioning that different classes start with different skills unlocked. Berserk can immediately start levelling his Dual Wielding along with Axes mastery, while Nomad can learn Survival and Bows right from the start. Just a reminder: there aren't any strict class requirements for different skills, so the starting branches just show which skills are the most suitable for this class from the developer's point of view. You still can choose your own way and master Psimancy as a Berserk, it’ll just take a little longer.

The dessert: fire-spewing sorcerer. Pretty good against the vampires. Also note the notorious blood golem.

That’s all for today. Stay online!

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Also you can follow us on:

Please note that the prologue isn't released yet. The release date will be announced in the future. Signing up guarantees you'll receive it when it's ready.

Apr 3, 2018

Devlog: Skill System

Stoneshard - Wayfinder

Greetings, travelers!

Stoneshard devteam is back online with a new devlog! Still working on the prologue, but we have good news: soon it’ll be ready. We’ve got through a lot of stuff for the past weeks, while some other things still need tinkering. Anyway,this log is not about our general progress, but about one of the most important changes we’ve made this year – skill system.

Weaponry. These skills empower some weapon types. Active skills become available only with the right weapon equipped. They demand no resources, but have cooldowns.
Sorcery. All that spell stuff is here. Cast whatever you want until mana ends. In case you don’t want to find yourself mana-exhausted in the middle of the fight – sign up for mana management studies.
Utility. Everything that can’t be divided in previous categories. Dual Wielding, Survival, Sabotage etc. belong here.

The dessert: fire-spewing sorcerer. Pretty good against the vampires. Also note the notorious blood golem.

That’s all for today. Stay online!

======

Also you can follow us on:

Please note that the prologue isn't released yet. The release date will be announced in the future. Signing up guarantees you'll receive it when it's ready.

Mar 4, 2018

Devlog: Status Update

Stoneshard - Wayfinder

Greetings!

Not fueling your interest for a while. But don’t worry, we had our reasons and it’s time to tell more about them. We pretended dead for the whole month to concentrate on the prologue. That forced us to keep the best stuff in secret in order not to spoil your future experience.

More about details. We’ve done a lot and this devlog’s goal is to systematize all the significant news of the last weeks. First comes the most interesting part: Prologue.

Prologue

Sneak peek at one of the dungeon's sublevels.

Story-wise it will take you back a few months before the main game starts. You’ll be playing as Verren, one of the main Stoneshard characters. More specifically, for those who wants to know, Prologue will include:

Tutorial level, teaching the basics of Stoneshard mechanics
A few randomly generated levels with enemies, traps and stuff. By the way, we made brand new dungeon type you’ve never seen before.
Several skill branches (though only the tier I skills will be available). The level hardcap will be around 5-7 levels, it’s still discussed.
Boss fight. Won’t be easy to find the right approach from the first attempt.
A “limited freeplay” stage, a part of the global map will be available (but no Caravan though).
Approximately an hour of gameplay, depends on how roguelikeish you are. Also you’ll see why it’s called Stoneshard.

We are still working on the prologue, a bunch of stuff needs fixing and balancing, but we like the results and are motivated with the pace of our work. If everything goes well, you’ll be able to see it and play really soon. A little more about our progress further.

Kickstarter

Meet Ahruz. Everytime is time to cook.

The Prologue will be released together with the crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter. Still no exact date, but for sure end of March – beginning of April. You’ll be able not only to try out our game’s demo, but also to become our early supporter. As a reward you’ll get the full game after release (that’s the way to preorder for those who asked), and a bunch of pleasant bonuses: extra digital materials, soundtrack and a possibility to make a cameo in the world of Stoneshard as well as a chance to participate in the development process.

Other news by now

Reworked visuals of pathfinding.

We haven’t added any new mechanics, but have polished the existing instead. Displaying context menus has been reworked for good, making it more user-friendly and easy to use. So was the pathfinding system, and now it is perceived much easier with tile selection made more visible. Other changes are numerous: you can change gear loadouts, light processing got better, many annoying bugs were exterminated... By the way, did we reveal the new Skills menu?

You'll get to try some of these during the Prologue.

Also we had a health mechanics overthought: thirst, hunger, pain and intoxication. Using the 0-100 scaling system proved complicated. Even though all the changes were mechanically determined and justified, from the player’s point of view it looked like jumps and twitches forced by RNG that couldn’t be prognosed or analysed.

Adding 4 phases system seems a better way to do it. Each phase activates specific debuff, thus all the shifts are instantly visible and controllable. This system is much easier to understand: if earlier you had to count arithmetically how to satiate 47 points of hunger, now you just have to identify the phase. For example, if you have the second phase, you have to eat a steak which satiates 2 hunger phases, or two apples which satiate 1 phase each. Simple as it goes.

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That’s all for now, folks. We will try to do much better with communication from now on without losing developing pace. Our silence didn’t mean that we forgot about Stoneshard even for a moment. See you soon!

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Also you can follow us on:

Please note that the prologue isn't released yet. The release date will be announced in the future. Signing up guarantees you'll receive it when it's ready.

Mar 4, 2018

Devlog: Status Update

Stoneshard - Wayfinder

Tutorial level, teaching the basics of Stoneshard mechanics
A few randomly generated levels with enemies, traps and stuff. By the way, we made brand new dungeon type you’ve never seen before.
Several skill branches (though only the tier I skills will be available). The level hardcap will be around 5-7 levels, it’s still discussed.
Boss fight. Won’t be easy to find the right approach from the first attempt.
A “limited freeplay” stage, a part of the global map will be available (but no Caravan though).
Approximately an hour of gameplay, depends on how roguelikeish you are. Also you’ll see why it’s called Stoneshard.

Please note that the prologue isn't released yet. The release date will be announced in the future. Signing up guarantees you'll receive it when it's ready.