Oct 20, 2018

Stoneshard - Wayfinder

Hello everyone!

Stoneshard team is back in action, and in this devlog we will talk about another aspect of the global map – biomes.

The global map (alongside with the tiles it's composed of) is generated procedurally. The map is also divided into several climatic zones, which will affect the biomes and the order in which they may be encountered. When moving to the north, the climate conditions will gradually become more harsh: the southern steppes will be replaced by fields and deciduous forests, then pinewoods will take their place, which will finally turn into the snow-covered expanses of taiga and tundra.

Almost every climate option will have a unique visual and some different gameplay features. For example, in fields with their lack of vegetation, it is easier to spot enemies from a distance - which is not true in forests, where trees and complex landscapes make exploration and movement much more difficult.

It's time to show how these biomes look like. While working on the design of the environment, we temporarily turned off the spawning of animals and emeies, so we could enjoy the beauties of Aldor nature in splendid isolation.

Field environments are rather laconic: green meadows, flowers, butterflies, small bushes, boulders, and very rarely – some saplings.

Most of the Forest sprites were completely redrawn to create a more holistic and dense forest feel. Small glades here alternate with areas of dense vegetation.

Pinewoods consist mainly of fir trees and centuries-old pines. The soil here is also different, more dark and stony. Due to the proximity of the mountains, boulders and rocky areas are more common here.

Well, finally the Taiga biome. The main difference from pinewoods is - yes, you’re right – snow. We also plan to introduce some unique gameplay mechanics to this biome, but they are still under discussion.

As you can see on the GIFs above, the weather and lighting will also dynamically change depending on the time of day and the biome. The day gives way to night, the rain got replaced by the fog, and in the northern regions of Aldor you can experience the snowfall.

Some biomes (like the Swamp or the Seashore) are not ready yet, so we will show them next time. That's all for today, see you soon!

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Oct 2, 2018

Devlog: Settlements. Alpha & Beta Shift.

Stoneshard - Wayfinder

Hello!

Long time no see, eh? But there was a good reason behind that: we’re busy developing a really cool and important feature, which we didn’t want to show ahead of time. As you could’ve guessed from the previous devlogs, it’s a

Settlement Generation

Initially, we wanted to develop a special complicated algorithm to procedurally generate all streets and buildings locations, so each settlement would look really unique. However, we quickly realized that this approach conflicted with our other goal: make settlements as much detailed and realistic as possible.

Making the algorithm capable of generating plausibly planned villages without weird bugs and illogical chunks turned out to be a daunting task. As a result, we decided that it would be better to make a certain amount of several village structure presets, which will be randomly selected for each individual settlement.

This approach combines the best of both variants: all settlements will look more wholesome due to the manual level design, and at the same time differ from each other. During one single campaign, the same template will not be re-used in any way, since each settlement will have many possible variations unique to it.

Now about the villages in general. Every settlement will have its own set of special buildings, with each offering some unique opportunities for your character. So, a few examples:

That’s it, a smithy. You guessed it – this is the place to quickly repair battered equipment or to purchase some quality weapons and armor.

Herbalist is a rural analogue to city healers. He (or she) will not only help you to treat ailments and wounds, but will also sell some alchemical ingredients from his/her stocks.

Stables is a place where your horses can take a break from the road, receiving a temporary bonus to the caravan movement speed.

Also it’d be possible to enter most of the buildings. The interior inside is also generated procedurally and is fully interactive. If you are a bad person (I hope you’re not), you could steal the last potato from some poor peasant’s family when nobody’s around. Aldor’s having hard time anyways.

So far, the settlement system isn’t anywhere near being finished: there’s still a lot to do to make them fitting our vision. Later we’ll add NPCs, special global map settlement mechanics and many other things, but the foundation was finally laid. So stay tuned, as there will be much more info on this topic in the future devlogs ;)

Alpha and Beta Date Shift

Now to the other news. After the Prologue’s release, we’ve received a huge amount of complaints, ideas and suggestions; since it’s extremely important for us to consider our playerbase opinion, we also conducted a mass survey of our Kickstarter backers, targeting key issues and problems of Stoneshard. As a result, we realized that almost all aspects of our game need to be corrected or even completely reworked – and that’s what we’ve spent the last three months on. During this period we’ve:

Changed the attribute system – many attributes have been tweaked, merged or removed to create a more optimized and intuitive experience.
Partially implemented perks system.
Smoothed some rough edges of our turn-based and collision systems to prevent “evading” AoEs, mob stucking, endless kiting and other similar problems in the future.
Changed the balance by stretching up the stats for better scaling of the percentage-based effects.
Made many changes to the combat system (e.g. replaced Mana with Energy, which is now required to use even non-magical skills).
Changed the hunger, thirst, pain and intoxication systems, replacing the random increases with more transparent and consistent scales.
Injury system was completely revamped. Now RNG doesn’t affect them at all, and you’ll be able to check the risks anytime (more on this in some future devlog).
Changed the hit algorithm, as well as resist/armor systems. Yes, piercing weapons are no longer effective against skeletons.
Speaking of resists: we’ve finally introduced a system of different damage types with their unique effects and properties.
Completely reworked and reconstructed many UI elements.
Made quite a few edits to improve the game’s usability. For example, fulfilled a popular demand to loot single items without opening a separate loot window.
And many, many other changes.

To make it possible we had to make changes to our initial development pipeline, devoting time reserved for main game’s development to all these reworks. Nevertheless, we believe that such measure were definitely necessary and worth it, and in the end will benefit both the game and our players. Therefore, we decided to shift the initial Alpha and Beta test dates by about a couple of months: the release of backers alpha should be expected in December 2018, with Beta and Early Access being postponed as well.

That's all. Our follow-up plans should not take as much time as the settlements did, so we will try to post devlog on a weekly basis just as before.

See you soon!

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Also you can follow us on:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/625960/Stoneshard/

Sep 1, 2018

Devlog: Art Rework

Stoneshard - Wayfinder

Hello!

Initially we planned to tell you more about settlement generation, but this system requires some more time to polish, so today’s update will be dedicated to the art rework.

When we first started developing Stoneshard, we planned it to be a small-scale coffeebreak roguelike, taking place in a fairytale fantasy world, kind of similar to Fable and Torchlight ones. Back then our lore was very vague, as we planned to finish the game in a year and move on to more "serious" projects.

However, with a course of time this initial barebones concept was reinforced with many fresh ideas and new mechanics. Then we began to understand that Stoneshard is already becoming that serious project we planned to work on later. So, both our vision and game setting have significantly changed and eventually became something you currently know: gloomy and quite realistic medieval world, torn apart by wars, epidemics and disasters.

Many enemies, items and objects that you may have encountered while playing the Prologue were created at the very beginning of the Stoneshard development back in 2016, when we were making literally a different game. The need to rework some of the art became a necessity, so when we started to revamp many core game systems after Kickstarter’s end, we felt like there’s no better time than now.

Let’s start with skeletons, which became much more gloomy and grim-looking. Previously, they looked like they weren’t wasting their time while being dead: their bones were perfectly white and armor looked new and shiny. Now they seem more dangerous, soulless and believable: we also removed the glowing effect from their eyes to give them more sinister and less magical look. An animated pile of faded bones looks much more threatening than a whitey glowing skeleton in sparkling armor, isn’t it?

These changes also affected the vampires. Previously, they did not look really frightening, and rather produced the impression of transformed people who were not particularly happy with their new vampire lives. Now their bestial origin has become more accentuated, so it will help to perceive them as something they are – dangerous monsters.

In addition, some weapon and armor sprites were also reworked, as their design became more realistic and detailed. We also finished working on the entire line of one-handed swords and moved on to the other weapon types.

Soon we plan to release an update, including fan localizations and many of the changes described above, so stay tuned and have fun!

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Also you can follow us on:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/625960/Stoneshard/

Aug 23, 2018

Devlog: Health System Changes

Stoneshard - Wayfinder

Hello everyone!

In today's devlog we’ll continue to explain different changes we’re making to current game system. This time we will go through the health system (except for the system of injuries, as it will be described in a separate devlog).

The health system is one of the core features of our game, so we especially attentively analyzed players’ feedback regarding it. Most often people complained about unfair randomness and some other flaws (such as the interaction of injuries and pain system).

The chance-based system of health was introduced by us at a rather late stage of Prologue development. At that time it seemed like a good idea to us, since we thought it will make the health system a lot more understandable and accessible. However, playtesting showed it was a dubious change: on the one hand it indeed made the system easier to understand. On the other hand, it often worked not as it was intended to.

For example, similar circumstances could result into your character getting agony in 2 turns – or in 10, if you’re lucky enough. Such dispersion seems unacceptable to us, so we decided to return to a strictly deterministic system, where each health scale will depend on the actions of your character in linear fashion.

If earlier hunger and thirst worked randomly (although there was a mandatory interval between the ticks), now they will grow gradually. Skipping the turn will accumulate less hunger and thirst than moving, and moving – less than the attacking someone.

The same applies to pain with toxicity mechanics. Pain will also become a scale, the accumulation rate of which now will depend on how much damage (and which type of damage) your character receives. Fire damage, for example, will be more painful damage than frost damage, etc. By the way, you’ll aslo be able to check the exact values of your hunger, thirst, pain and toxicity levels on a separate Health tab, which we plan to add to the character's menu.

We’ve also slightly simplified the system of health conditions, so it may fit better with the new system of attributes. Now there’s only 3 stages of each health scale, instead of 4 – light, medium and severe.

That's it. Since this devlog didn’t really need any illustrations, have a look at a teaser of our next devlog, which we’ll publish next week.

Could you guess what will we discuss in a week? It's really obvious.

Have fun!

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Also you can follow us on:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/625960/Stoneshard/

Aug 15, 2018

Devlog: Stats & Perks

Stoneshard - Wayfinder

Hello!

From now on we resume our regular devlogs. We successfully ported the game to GMS2, and while the rest of the team fixes some remaining problems, I decided to write about what changes of our attribute system should you expect in the full game. I emphasize that everything described below is so far mostly a concept and can change in the course of direct development.

So, what are the most important problems we have identified based on the feedback from the players?

The system of attributes was too cumbersome and overcomplicated. Some of the stats could have been combined or completely removed without decreasing the overall depth.
Imbalance (aka "level up Strength only"). Making an attribute that simultaneously boosts your health and damage was a mistake that will be corrected.
Many stats were too situational. For instance, if you play as a pure warrior (I speak of the full game, where you won’t have Firewave from the very start) in the current system you have literally no reasons to level Intellect or Willpower at all.

And now to the changes. First, let's see how the new system of attributes will look like:

Intellect and Willpower are combined into single "magical" primary stat, Willpower.
Intellect was replaced by Vitality – a new primary attribute showing your survival potential.
Mana was replaced by Energy (a temporary name very likely). Most "physical" skills will also cost Energy now, but less than magical spells. Due to this, most skills cooldowns will be decreased, thus making combat more dynamic and tactical at the same time. “Flee to reset your cooldowns” strat is no more!
A number of attributes have been merged. Old Vitality and Fortitude are grouped into one stat, the same fate befell Critical / Miracle Chance and Fumble / Fizzle Chance.
Finesse was removed. Instead Agility points will directly reduce Fumble Chance. Alertness was also cut out, so all attention checks will now be tied directly to Perception.
Added some new stats – for example, Block Power, necessary for the blocking system rework.
Some attributes will work differently. In short: Stealth and Health / Mana Restoration will no longer be chance-based, and are now strictly deterministic. I will tell more about their new mechanics some other time. Spell Power was renamed to Magic Power, since now it will affect any magical damage dealt by your character. Accuracy is called Hit Chance now, and it also became more transparent, since it shows your default to-hit chance.

Well, seems like everything was covered. Now let's move on to the main new feature – perks.

Perks are special traits and abilities that your character is guaranteed to receive after reaching a specific thresholds of the primary stats. They are intended to make levelling system more deep and variable, and also give players more meaningful choices regarding character development.

Many of these perks are not final (especially the numbers), and I even marked with asterisks those we are especially unsure about. Also, if you have carefully read all the descriptions, then for sure you will notice a lot of hints of unannounced new mechanics or changes to existing systems.

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Stay tuned, and also have this little pretty travelling merchant's tent as a bonus!

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Also you can follow us on:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/625960/Stoneshard/

Jul 26, 2018

Crowdfunding summary. Thanks everyone!

Stoneshard - Wayfinder

Hello!

Recently we finally closed our late backing service, so we’d like to sum things up in this post.

Firstly, many thanks to all who supported us in these two months! This campaign was a huge success for our team, and, frankly, we hardly hoped that we could ever achieve such results. Our Kickstarter backers have contributed $101,186, while late backers pledged for $12,695 – $113,881 in total. Thanks again!

Pitifully, we didn’t manage to achieve our next stretch goal at $120,000 – an add-on called "Of Wind and Sands", which was supposed to add new race, new locations and dungeons, new type of weapons and many other things. Right now we are not sure whether we will develop it in the future, but if it does happen, we will also make it free for all the backers as a token of our gratitude – since we were really close to reaching it.

So, crowdfunding stage is finally over, and this means we can wholly dedicate ourselves to development again. In a few days Prologue will receive a new update, which will add long-awaited options, tweaked boss fight and a variety of fixes, and after that we will concentrate entirely on working on the main game.

Stay tuned!

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Little teaser for all of you. Cheers!

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Jul 16, 2018