Jun 5, 2018

Stoneshard: Prologue is now available on Steam!

Stoneshard - Wayfinder

Hello everyone!

Great news - Stoneshard: Prologue is now available for download on Steam as a stand-alone game! This is a great occasion to try our demo for one more time - or just try it, if you hadn't played it yet! So, what’s new?

10 Steam achievements to obtain
Fixed memory leaks.
Several new SFX-effects.
Several collision and depth issues hotfixes.
Stuns should correctly spend turns now.
Several new keyboard shotkeys (Alt + LMB to quickloot selected item, Space for skipping dialogue lines)
LOTS of balance tweaks:
Increased traps damage and debuff duration.
Decreased Verren’s base HP and other stats.
Increased Fumble Chance for greatswords.
Increased damage for Altar death rays.
Generally decreased consumables drop rates.
Almost all enemies were buffed compared to 0.4.8.16, which turned out to be way too easy.

Make sure to download it and try to defeat Vampire Archon one more time! Also, we'd very grateful if you will help us by spreading the word about Stoneshard to your Steam friends and any other people that may find our game fun to play.

Stay tuned!

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Remember that if you have any questions, you can always ask us in the comments or on our social media pages:

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Jun 3, 2018

Latest News & Alpha 0.4.8.16 Update!

Stoneshard - Wayfinder

Hello everyone!

There's many news you may have missed. First of all, our crowdfunding campaign is still going on. Stoneshard is 171% funded and still counting, so if you wanted to support us - make sure to pledge and help us reach our awesome stretch goals. For those wondering, PayPal support will be added during the last days of the campaign, and will be available for a limited time even after its end.

Also, there were plenty of different Kickstarter updates regarding many game aspects. So, if you're interested, go ahead and read more about caravan and maladies mechanics.

And, finally, we've recently updated Stoneshard: Prologue to 0.4.1.16. If you haven't played it yet, or want to give it a second go, download it here! By the way, Prologue's Steam version is going to be released really soon, so stay tuned!

And not to the changelog:

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FIXES and IMPROVEMENTS
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- First iteration of keyboard controls (not final, will be improved with next updates). Expect customizable hotkeys in the nearest future.
- Dungeon floors can no longer be re-rolled.
- Fixed frequent floor transition crash.
- Intro can now be skipped using LMB.
- Fixed blinking AoE-zone when skill hotkey is being pressed frequently.
- Fixed several crashes.
- Fixed a bug that prevented equipping of a weapon to the free slot through the context menu, if the second slot was occupied by a cursed item.
- Fixed several typos.
- Chest name is now correctly displayed.
- Fixed notes’ sound.
- Fixed "Inspect surroundings" skill.
- Fixed some problems with removing abilities from hotbar slots.
- Dungeon transitions are now generated in rooms only.
- Fixed collisions of some environment objects.
- Fixed a bug with braziers not providing light.
- Added remains for Blood Golems.
- Fixed animations playing over open menus.
- Fumble Chance enchantments are displayed correctly now.
- Attributes now change immediately after the level up (it was needed to spend one turn for them to take effect before)
- Fixed Modes Menu displaying during cutscenes.
- Fixed a bug with damage numbers displayed in fog of war areas.
- Fixes tables generation.
- Fixed when transitions to another floors sometimes obstructed by environment objects.
- Modifiers’ icons are now displayed in two rows.
- Reading books and notes no longer spends turns.
- You can now correctly switch weapon loadouts while dragging another weapon with your mouse.
- Fixed Repair Kit exploit.
- Added new sounds.
- The skill learning confirmation window now correctly blocks other interactions.
- You can now close the skill learning confirmation window with ESC.
- Verren's companions now actually leave the church after approaching the exit.
- Fixed Blindness.
- Low durability penalties to the enchantment attributes are now displayed correctly.
- Fixed health regeneration numbers.
- Fixed context menu not disappearing after closing inventory.
- Added missing outlines for Antidote and Antitoxin.
- Using dual wielding active skill with bow as a second weapon is no longer possible.
- Fixed issue with not being able to identify an item at all
- Fixed turns being spent when using “Take all” button with full inventory
- Fixed Modes bug during floor transitions.
- Fixed some containers not being lootable.
- Fixed “Emergency Repair” going on cooldown after being used on a full durability item.
- Fixed “Close” button sometimes disappearing.
- Fixed chests still having outlines after being looted.
- Fixed particles depth issues.
- Numerous dungeon generation bugfixes.

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BALANCE
============

- Decreased Altar Statues’ HP by 15%
- Altar Statues’ rays now have a miss chance.
- Fixed item generation system. Uncommon and rare items are now truly uncommon and rare. Also fixed enchantment bonuses (no more +10 Strength items at level 3).
- Low-level swords were buffed (including the tutorial one).
- Slightly buffed low-level greatswords.
- Mobs were slightly weakened due to the item generation fixes.
- Fixed enormous drop rates from crates.
- Rest Mode was greatly buffed. It was made to save your time since we can’t implement fast autoskipping now.
- Increased manacost for Lightning Enchantment, Firewave, Lifeleech, Vampiric Rune. Decreased manacost for Blood Vow.

May 18, 2018

60% funded! Also, Prologue Update

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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