Stoneshard Update #34 – Settlements, Alpha & Beta Shift

The new Kickstarter update for Ink Stains Games’ roguelike RPG Stoneshard tells us a thing or two about the game’s settlement generation system and describes some of the buildings you’ll be able to find in these islands of civilization. The update also lists all the recently added and revamped features, and informs us that barring any additional delays, the game should be going into backer alpha in December 2018.

Check it out:

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: [list]

• 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!