Stoneshard Prologue Details and Other News

The new development update for Ink Stains Games’ upcoming roguelike RPG Stoneshard tells us what to expect from the game’s prologue that will be a free, several hours long mini-campaign showcasing a number of Stoneshard’s mechanics. The prologue will be made available around the time the game’s Kickstarter campaign goes live and offer a taste of combat, procedural generation, dungeons, and character customization.

The update also informs us that Ink Stains Games has partnered with HypeTrain Digital as their publisher, which should simplify some things for the developers. Check it out:

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 1366×768. 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.