Stoneshard: Prologue - Wayfinder


Hello everyone.

Despite of the astonishing success of our Kickstarter campaign, we haven’t even had a drop to drink, so we’re in a good shape and still working on adding actual Options to the game. But there were plenty of problems that needed to be dealt with, so here goes a patch with numerous important tweaks and fixes.

- Your SP are now set to 0 after entering the Archives. You can no longer have a free SP by abusing the possibility not to learn Pyromancy during the tutorial.
- Fixed crash associated with a death from a trap.
- Spell mana cost is now correctly calculated.
- Being stunned no longer interrupts the cutscene.
- Fixed exploit allowing to swap loadouts for free when hitting switch button too frequently.
- Chests should no longer spawn near the exits.
- Fixed numerous table spawn issues.
- Fixed crash associated with attacking enemies using keyboard controls.
- Fixed crash happening if the player died prior to the cutscene start.
- Fixed AP leveling exploit.
- Pain Resistance should work correctly now.
- Stuns should work correctly now.
- Bars should now correctly display the percentage of player’s current HP/MP
- Blood Lancet now cause Bleeding for 4 turns instead of 5.
- Leeches restore 10% HP per turn instead of 5%. Their duration was reduced to 7 turns instead of 10.
- Antitoxin now reduces Toxicity level by 2 instead of 1.
- Nerfed Vampires accuracy. Slightly increased their Fumble Chance.
- Vampire Noble’s (halbierd-wielding one’s) health and armor was slightly reduced.
- Buffed low level maces, axes and daggers.
- Nerfed Summoned Zombie’s health. Now they should die after spending two turns in Blood Pools – the way it was supposed to be.
- Nerfed Vampire Initiate’s and Fallen Warrior’s block chance. No more bumping each other for 0 damage for the eternity.
- Slightly nerfed armor of the Undead. Part of their Absorption was replaced by less reliable Defence.
- Now each level up gives 1 SP. More skills for the skills throne! (this change applies only to the Prologue)
- Numerous text tweaks (more to come).

Best wishes!

Stoneshard: Prologue - Wayfinder
Greetings!

This is a truly special moment — the last hour of our campaign has begun.

It's the last chance to support Stoneshard on Kickstarter! Let's make it $100.000!

We're truly glad that you've joined us on this amazing journey, and we can't wait to tell you more about what's yet to come.

Hooray!
Stoneshard: Prologue - Wayfinder


Hey everyone!

Our Kickstarter campaign is quickly approaching its end with only 24 hours left to support our game. If you've been thinking about backing Stoneshard, now's the time.

The closest stretch goal ($90.000) will unlock a new mode called Divine Trials — it will allow players to complete different challenges in procedurally-generated dungeons and earn favour of Pantheon. This is a classic 'randomly-generated-almost-endless' roguelike gameplay mode where you can spend time honing your skills to prove worthy.

And one more fun fact: if each and every one of you raises the pledge by just $10, we can instantly reach the next $120.000 stretch goal — it will add a whole new story expansion with new race, classes, weapons, biome and much more content!

And for those of you who're waiting to support the game via PayPal, we're enabling this option tomorrow by adding a Humble Widget to our site, it supports different payment options including PayPal. We'll tell you more about it in the next update.

Take care!
Stoneshard: Prologue - AntonGris
Greetings!

We've just reached 3000 backers, this is unbelievable! Huge thanks to all of you who've joined us on this incredible journey! The work on Stoneshard just keeps gaining momentum, and we will do our best to bring you a truly magnificent roguelike experience.

Today, we're publishing our first development roadmap:



When we first approached our planning for Stoneshard, we wanted to get the first build of Early Access version ready for Late 2018. Since then, your support has exceeded all our expectations, and, after a thoughtful discussion, our team decided to move the launch of Steam Early Access to February 2019. This decision ensures that we will be able to truly focus on quality of the first version of Early Access build and implement some of your feedback ideas that we've gathered during Kickstarter campaign.

Again, thank you all for the tremendous support, this is just a beginning!


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Stay tuned and don’t forget to:

Stoneshard: Prologue - Wayfinder


Hello everyone, we’ve got some huge news!

First of all, we’ve reached $75.000 Stretch Goals thanks to guys and gals who backed Stoneshard on Kickstarter! It means that Stoneshard will receive a big story expansion ‘Ancestors Forlorn’ available to all Kickstarter backers (Mercenary and above) for free! We will start working on the expansion after the game is fully released on PC & consoles in 2019.

We have 3 more days to go, so there’s still time to support the game!

Next, there’s Reddit AMA (AskMeAnything) we’ll be hosting tomorrow. We will be answering all community questions about Stoneshard for two hours and we will announce a winner of our Creative Contest. You can still submit your dungeon boss fight concept — maybe it’s your idea that will be implemented in the game with your name in credits!.

Tune in to r/pcgaming tomorrow at 10:00 am PDT.

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Stay tuned and don’t forget to:

Stoneshard: Prologue - Wayfinder


Hello!

In this unscheduled post we would like to address some problems found on the Prologue, and explain thoroughly their causes and possible solutions. Below I list the most frequent complaints we’ve received lately, and how we’re already working on improvements.

1. Settings are absent

Releasing the Prologue without an option menu was definitely not our best decision, to put it mildly, but we simply didn’t have enough time to implement it. This issue was already listed amongst the first in our To-do list; good news is we plan to roll out the “Settings Update” next week. Here’s a screenshot to show you we’re already working on it very hard.



2. Lack of fullscreen option and other resolutions support

When choosing the art style, we decided we wanted to make a 100% pixel perfect game. In brief, this means that every pixel of in-game sprites (including interfaces) must correspond to one pixel of the user’s display. This greatly complicates developing interfaces: different resolutions assume different amounts of free space, which makes the addition of each new resolution variant a rather complex and time-consuming task.

Since we are going to rework many core game-systems based on your feedback (which means inevitable UI change), working on other resolutions is simply pointless at the current moment: any minor edit will require us to manually edit dozens of other versions of this resolution. So we are forced to postpone it for the future – until we’ll have the final iteration of GUI. For now, if you don’t mind playing the Prologue pixel perfect just press Alt + Enter to enter the system’s fullscreen mode.

3. Clumsy controls and loot interaction

Current controls were designed by our beloved Ahruz

We won’t argue there: at the moment they’re plain clunky and counterintuitive – the natural result of not holding mass playtests and the game growing bigger and bigger than it was initially planned. When you play your own game for two years, you get used to even the most uncomfortable control scheme. However, mass feedback complaining about this issue showed us that the situation really needs to be changed, and we will do our best to improve the current controls scheme (starting with the introduction of customized settings - see point 1 above).

4. Lots of brutal RNG: game relies on luck and loot drops way too much.

Flip the coin to win.

Keep in mind that the Prologue is just a general taste of some basic game mechanics, an introduction to the lore and a general feel of what the game will be, but it’s not the final game. We plan to significantly revamp current system of attributes, making it more transparent to players and less random. We plan to do this shortly, right after the end of the crowdfunding campaign, and within a few months we will present you to the changes and improvements made on your constructive feedback. As game designer, I myself don’t really like the current RNG situation as well, so we will try to reduce the reliance on RNG to a more reasonable, yet interesting level.

Now to the “luck factor” problem: this issue is just a Prologue’s exclusive problem, and it’s caused by the story and tutorial exposition, since Verren begins to explore the dungeon without having anything at all. But in the main game, the gameplay cycle of the dungeon crawling will be completely different: aside character creation and customization your characters will also have an opportunity to prepare their inventory and skills in advance, amongst many other mechanics, which will significantly diminish the role of random loot drops.

5. No saves upon exiting the game. No checkpoints.

His ward magic disrupted our save system. Well, not really.

There’s a very good reason behind this. If you have read our Kickstarter, our Steam page, or some of our Devlogs, you probably remember that we are going to introduce a global open world into the game at some point. This means that the open world needs to be included to the core code of the save system as well. Right now, the global map is at a very early stage of development, so it is impossible for us to take into account all of its variables in advance, just for the Prologue. As soon as we finish working on the global map, we will immediately start implementing the save system.

We want our game to follow the spirit of classical roguelikes, and permadeath is an integral part of it. However, many people would like to have their progress saved at least while they’re just learning how to play the game, so we will introduce a checkpoints mode into the game in order to make it more accessible to the less hardcore players. Ironman permadeath mode will still persist, though – it's how our game is meant to be played.

6. “Weird” ranged combat, movement and bugs, dumb AI, etc.

Working hard just like Darrel.

The ranged combat is still at a very early stage of development – we implemented it not so long ago and have not yet improved it ever since. Many of its planned features are just absent at the moment in the Prologue: for example, there are no missile trajectories, no aiming, reloading mechanics, and many other planned features. In fact, ranged combat currently works like a melee attack with an increased range, but of course we will definitely change this when we finish working on more high-priority tasks.

The movement/turns/tiles grid-systems will also be completely reworked after the Kickstarter campaign, and we’re also updating our engine to a new version (GMS 2). This should probably solve most of the bugs and problems associated with these aspects of the game. Also, we plan to make environmental objects destructible, and teach mobs to interact with them. This will make situations with impassable rooms, mobs spawned “locked” between the furniture, etc. much less common.

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As always, we appreciate very much your support and constructive feedback: from the beginning we wanted to have you trying out the game as we build on your suggestions. And if you have not yet done so, we’d like to invite you to check out our social media pages and other useful links:


Thanks for your support, and stay tuned!

Best wishes,
Ink Stains Games
Stoneshard: Prologue - Wayfinder
Great news everyone!

Stoneshard: Prologue is now available on Linux. We've also fixed some issues with boss fight cutscenes and looting.

Stay tuned!
Stoneshard: Prologue - Wayfinder


Hey everyone!

Stoneshard’s story on Steam is off to a great start — more than 20000 players have experienced Stoneshard: Prologue in just two days! We’ve got into Popular New Releases section and received an overwhelmingly positive feedback from the community.

If you like what you’re seeing in Stoneshard: Prologue, please consider supporting Stoneshard on Kickstarter and add full version of the game to you Steam wishlist. Stoneshard is due to release on Steam Early Access in Late 2018.

We’re also hosting a Creative Contest on Reddit, where you can design your own boss fight for one of Stoneshard’s dungeons!

And don’t forget to:

Jun 7, 2018
Stoneshard: Prologue - Wayfinder

Hello everyone!

We received lots of feedback these days, and we continue working on improving the Prologue. This update is minor one, but it fixes some of the most notorious and frequently occuring bugs.

CHANGELOG

  • Fixed rubble not clearing after explosion during tutorial.
  • Fixed several boss-related crashes.
  • Several dungeon generation fixes (tables and chairs shouldn't block the way now)
  • Enemies now react correctly when being attacked with keyboard controls.
  • Several minor balance tweaks.

We're still working on adding more detailed settings menu and more language support.

Stay tuned!

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If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to contact us on our social media pages.

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  • Add Stoneshard to wishlist on Steam

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