I like this line of thinking, and it gives a nice excuse to make the flower more bell-shaped (i.e. a small lip/rim around the top, and a tapering base.)
I’d like to see a couple of smaller (and thus more blocky by necessity) bells around the main one, but keep a large and obvious bell as the “primary” or mature flower – hinting that each bell is short-lived before another will take its place.
The glowing? It attracts bugs too! possibly even the newly rigged bugs so you have to fight them off to get your sugar fix for Bellflower cake!
I know you guys are suckers for lore 
Um, I don’t know about you, but this alien-esnes might be mysterious but not as warm and cute. There is most coziness and happiness in a sense of familiarity.
Maybe the reason why a lot of people averted from the plants comes again with the familiarity aspect. I mean, when did Rayman come out? Creatures made from floating body parts have been with us for some decades now, that’s probably the reason why it gets a pass. Disconnected flowers not as much.
To be completely honest, I’m a plant lover and collector irl, but with these… I’m kinda having a tough time swallowing those.
PS I never noticed that the foxlily floats!
I always thought it is a bug and even provided a fixed model in A22 version of Plant Lore…
So I get that the plant either is not super rot-resistive (bacteria love to feast on sugar), or after a while the sugar goes bad due to whatever gets into it.
Kinda makes sense, they are insects, so they might like it, and they are big enough not to be trapped by the plants.
Thanks everybody for sharing feedback and suggestions! I think there’s a lot of good stuff here. Some particular bits that stuck out for me -
Colorful cacti and waxplants feeling out of place in the desert - I actually half agree, because the green doesn’t quite match the rest of the environment. The colorful plants were originally just supposed to be potted decorations your Hearthling’s could put out on their porches and walkways. In the wild, they’ll stick out like sore thumbs until we’re prepared to do a more widespread palette pass, so for the short term it makes sense to cool off that lime. The flowers may also need to pull off the saturation a hair.
Waxplant - Actually, the name was just supposed to be cute. I had cute succulents growing up and always thought they were called waxplants, so… might have to rename : D;;;
Floating flowers - At the current ratio flowers are modeled at, stems come out huge and I personally found them distracting. The idea was to borrow the logic from our characters, but I think there’s one other thing besides movement that’s hurting the read - size. The gap where there’s no stem is much more obvious than the gap where there’s no limb on a hearthling, partially because they’re holding still, partially because it takes up a lot of the model. I also think this is why the foxlily got away with it more or less. I’ll fiddle with some solutions on the smaller flowers and see if we can’t find a happy medium.
Radioactive magic flowers - Guuuuuys I’m so excited about glowing flowers. But It sounds like we could workshop them a bit to tip them more toward mysterious, and less toward alien.
Sugarbells are pitcherplants - Oh no… I kind of love this idea at least for the lore of the plant. I also love carnivorous plants. I will hold it in my heart at least.
Anyway thanks again. Feedback like this helps us close the gap between intent and read. Even we don’t always agree on what we’re gonna do, it helps me enormously as an artist to hear how our art decisions make you feel about the game. And ultimately, it helps us make better stuff : 3
By any chance… are you talking about these little guys?
It’s the echeveria agavoides which commonly goes by the name “Wax Agave.”
There’s an actual thing called “Wax Plant” which looks like this:
This is the hoya carnosa. It is also called “porcelain flower,” because it sort of looks porcelainish. Other “hoya” plants tend to share certain characteristics which makes them look and feel waxish or porcelainish, and many of them tend to be called wax plants because of that, but when you ask Google, the hoya carnosa is the most common result.
Plus, the wax plant is often kept in those lovely hanging pots, which I always wanted to see in game. (and that might be pretty much the sole reason I tell you about the wax plant right now.)
Yeah yeah! They were these adorable little colorful clusters like that. But yeah bingo, the name might cause some confusion. Lesson learned: do a google just in case!
Lovely hanging pots would be so cute. Actually just the other day we saw some wall mounted planters that were also very nice, they had excellent RC aesthetic.
Big discussions about tiny flowers… is this what gaming has come to?! 
Jokes aside, I haven’t tried the unstable alpha so thanks for the images. 
To add my opinion to the discussion, I’m not totally against the “floating” (when it’s because of bad resolution) but I get that people have a problem with it in this case. I think most of the problem lies with the green square however and that there is not even a hint of connection between that and the flowers.
I would suggest making it just a little bit more organic, removing a voxel to make a dent in the side and letting a dark green voxel dent the side of the light green square (not necessarily in the same place) or something like that.
More importantly I would add the lower halves of the stems, to show that there is a connection, even if you can’t see all of it.
About the glow, I love the thought of glowing flowers and have been looking forward to seeing it in the game. However, I don’t know if it’s technically possible yet but if you can then I think you should turn the glow off in daylight. Bioluminescence should not be strong enough to be noticeable in daylight. At least not if you go by the standard in movies and games. Take Avatar as an example. “Normal” jungle at day. Total rave at night.
You could even add to the contrast by making it rather dull during the day. Either by having a dark color on the flower or by letting the flower close completely, making the “flower cube” smaller and green.
Leaving the looks, I think it would make a cute scene if the flower could only be harvested at night so your hearthlings had to stay up late, walk around with lanterns, wade though fields of glowing flowers and get a late breakfast the next day.
This thread should be a perfect example on how community feedback should be handled!
My advice, let @Allie handle it when it has something to do with the artstyle and @malley take the lead on animations…
Lol… that went well, dont you think?
As a sidenote, i love the focus on more plants and variety in this “fantasy” world of hearth…
Thanks.
Sounds like @Allie had agreed on the design so no need to blame @malley for it. And either way, one model isn’t really representative of anyone’s work. They took the simplistic design a bit further on this one than some people appreciated. Try again. No big deal. Simplistic design often turn into a chicken race since the sweet spot is one step away from unreadable.
My goodness, so much discussion over some magical flowers!
I suppose the pre-existing player cultural-reference expectations is that something looking special like that would be quite important, so I can see good argument for making them more mundane/plantlike if it’s going to fulfil a mundane role. Typically motion and light are usually reserved in games to draw a players attention to something with good reason, a rare object or something that needs immediate investigation. The idea of a dull nighttime glow, bio-luminescence, is appealing. Currently wilderness out of your town is simply dark and dull at night.
I quite like the look of their design in general, and I’m very happy to see more and more fantasy in Stonehearth. Rimworld is a tad disappointing in that there’s mostly earth animals and plants so I’m glad to see more “original” designs starting to appear in Stonehearth. Even the simple act of naming poyos poyos helps build the world!
Malleys post concerning flying creatures being difficult to implement is very concerning, it will be a huge blow to the look and feel of the environments without at-the-very-least having a few little birds flitting around the place… Even if they were entirely decorative and non-interactive.
“Building the world” is not the phrase I would use here. I don’t know why people hate the reality so much (do they all have real life complexes?) but I will keep stating that magic and fantastic plants and creatures are good for children. Nonsense is not fun, it is nonsense (every time I look at democratic election results I feel very lonely in that opinion, though). Good fiction is a convincing fiction and one of its important characteristics is an ability to predict things, what is hardly possible if the world has little parallels with the real one. You can have a lot of fun adapting the reality and what I liked in SH design so far were the funny ways the devs took shortcuts when simply porting the reality into the game would result in overly complicated designs (quite frankly I think this is the best part of SH design: a ton of grotesque humour behind it all).
The fantasy part of SH I was looking forward to were the fantastic societies and what the devs did so far is very promising: what is it like to worship the Monkey God? Who carved these bunny statues? Why do some Goblins attack the Lings but there’s a mysterious one trying to help? I hoped this game will be a community builder, not a fantasy world builder.
The sad conclusion I come to is while it is a common view in Europe, the Americans do not seem to understand the whole connection with the existing thing at all. It is hard to blame them though, because their culture is just 300 years old while we have at least 3000 years of history as a context. The result is the Americans prefer mental freelancing while in Europe we tend to build upon and expand existing ideas and we find the freelancing approach rather silly.
I’m going to disagree with you on this one. When almost the entire community is saying they don’t like something, and all @malley can say about it is “deal with it, as that’s how it’s supposed to be, and if you don’t like it, imagine it as something else”, that’s not really saying that they’re taking our feedback into consideration.
On the other hand, what @Allie said is a GREAT example of how community feedback should work, acknowledging there’s a problem and saying they’re going to work on it.
So Skyrim is good for children too? I’m not sure if you’re a backer or came in later, but from the beginning, this game has advertised fantasy and magical parts to it. I mean, if you can science the Geomancer, then by all means, I’d love to hear how. Otherwise, she’s been a loading screen for how many alphas, right next to bunny people. And what of the clerics?
My point is, this game has always had magic and fantasy in it and has never tried to say otherwise. If you see those parts though as something else, I’d be interested in hearing how you see them.
As a 'Merican, it is my duty to be offended by everything you said. I will now proceed to eat my feelings by popping a few Tide Pods. This is a joke for anyone who think’s I’m serious.
On the flip side of that, we didn’t have a “Conquer the World” phase either. So give us some time to mature. For those that don’t know what I’m talking about, here’s a map of the countries in the world the UK HAS NOT invaded:
Exactly what i meant with my reply… haha how i sometimes wonder, if it is my english or just the way i formulate my words, that seem to go wrong?..
So let me try with a bit more effort (that might be the thing…) When Malley took the steeringwheel and answered, it was with an attitude of “the devs vs. the community” ( I even see it as lazyness sometimes… but that might be on me 
) And then Allie came into the thread and handled the situation with perfection, acknowleding the feedback and critisism from the community and on the same time describing why she decided what she did in the creative proccess…
Well at least that is how i percieve it, i am pretty sure at least some people see it in another light… 
Phew… have a great day.
The only problem I see here is people trying to shut down an idea instead of trying to make it better.
Let’s try to refrain from insulting the devs or each other in an effort to help better the conversation.
Or I swear to Rayya i’ll call @Geoffers747 in here and there’ll be hell to pay!
I didn’t know of SH soon enough to be a backer 
The thing is I am fully aware some of the mechanics have to be fictional and even games advertising themselves as simulators often allow themselves to do them in a more or less superficial manner (terraforming is a very good example). I’m not against that and look forward to the Geomancer. Radiating plants in an otherwise sane environment are too much though. I should have thought about it earlier but I would totally buy them if there was a somewhat alien biome with all fantasy stuff but radiating alien eggs do not belong to oak forests. I’m not against them per se but rather against them in the current biomes’ context.
This. Exactly my thoughts.
Sugar? OK. From a plant? OK. Am I shutting down an idea if I say I don’t think it should come from radiating alien eggs (at least not in a quasi-realistic biome)?
Saying 100% ugly and proceeding to keep mocking it with “alien eggs” will help nothing and sounds like forcing that view. Say what you desire to change and why, no need to be rude making fun of it.
For me, the necessary changes were: rounding the base, maybe making the center a little higher. Give a different shape to it that is not just a block. Tone down the glow color. That’s it. Besides, brightbells were probably going to be glowing too, and it looked beautiful in the sketches so more glowing plants would help with the consistency of glowing. YouTube
Well…
“deal with it, as that’s how I perceive it to be, and if you don’t like it, imagine I wrote something else”
Just kidding. I was just too lazy to describe the very same problem with Sugarbells I have every time I mention them.
Is there a way to get a trait on SH Discourse? Because I’d like to have the Opinionated trait icon and description displayed next to my avatar to warn some people. The art of lie and hiding the truth is called diplomacy and I am not playing that game when I don’t have to. This means all the harsh stuff gets out of my head quite quickly…
