An Event of Titanic Proportions [Beta]
With this unstable push comes an unveiling of something we’ve been working on in semi-secret for a little while – a Titan fight! The Elder God of Squidliness has undergone some changes since being teased so long ago in the kickstarter video, in order to better test your whole town rather than just seeing how much ankle-chopping your soldiers can do.
This release also has a bunch of bug and performance related fixes.
The unstable branches are like a “beta for the beta”, a way for players to test cutting-edge developments which will still have bugs and rough edges. Some players don’t mind that (and some do, but are prepared to put up with it in order to get playing with new features a bit sooner heheh), but many players prefer to stick to the stable releases. By having an opt-in beta branch, Team Stonehearth can have the benefit of both options – players who want to test cutting-edge builds can do so and give feedback much closer to real-time, while players who don’t want to risk as many bugs and broken saves can enjoy the stable releases.
It actually makes more sense to have the opt-in unstable branch during beta rather than alpha IMO – most games in their alpha phase wouldn’t even be available to the public, and when they are it’s expected that players will deal with such effects as a natural part of the development process. The beta period is when we expect more stability; but it’s also where changes start becoming more subtle so it takes more testing to really discern whether the game is shaping up properly. So there needs to be a mix of “solid” testing over a long time with long-running saves, and “snappy” testing for bleeding-edge changes to check they’re working and catch any new bugs quickly.
Maybe a satisfying way to make everyone happy would be that after the boss is defeated in the regular, event-driven battle, it comes by itself as a normal (huge) monster for one last terribly difficult session of ankle-chopping before it is actually defeated by your brave hearthlings!
I’ll talk about this more in a DT on Tuesday, but yes, we originally specced out a number of different tians, but they all had only 1 way to defeat each of them, which was terrible if you got a titan that was not suited to your town makeup. In the end, we rolled all the ideas together into one encounter you can defeat in multiple ways, depending on what kind of town you have.
now THAT is what I wanted to hear about the “big bad end-game boss”!
It’s the perfect way to culminate the combat-driven story arc of a multi-faceted game like Stonehearth – it’s not about being “overpowered” in one area (e.g. sheer combat power), but having a range of powers across multiple areas and combining them, with a touch of ingenuity, to overcome a boss which would overpower you in any individual area.
Not enough games do that to begin with, and sadly, the town-building/survival sandbox genre has the least examples of satisfying boss fights out of any genre IMO. Most of the time it really is just ankle chopping, or min/maxing a particular area that the boss is weak to.
So I’m excited to see how titans live up to the expectation of a “culminating boss”
Yes, in that sense I feel like what I mentioned about after “draining” the health bar having to actually fight the titan - it would be cool. There are ways that it could be made in a less ankle-chopping way… or even if it just is a final “burn”/ankle-chopping, there could be things done to make it cooler like all hearthlings fighting (as if on town banner mode) to feel more “desperate last stand”, and the “body” of the titan could somehow become a natural monument/statue on the world - the place where it was defeated.
Things like that
Not only to satisfy the ankle-chopping desires and see our mighty party fighting to the end but also to make it a bit more personal - the titan itself has come to personally crush you with their hands (tentacles) as a last measure since everything they threw at you failed.
For the first time in Stonehearth, i got a bit stressed. Really cool fight, but as i got through it, i began to understand that i could just kille mobs if i wanted? Before that, i was digging into the mountainsides, getting to the tentacles while runing around on the plains defending against enemy spawns.
When i figured out to turn all hauling jobs off, i had full control and the fight started to easy out, being just a matter of time.
It can surely be improved, but this is soo much better than the orc campaign. Oh and during the titanfight, there where still orcs comming to attack me, wich felt really in line with the story
All in all:
Goblin campaign 2/10
Orc campaign 4/10
Titan encounter 8/10
Maybe the engineer could craft a manned-ballista that can shot expensive and special crafted spear-sized bolts against the Titan. It can only be manned by a high level archer but it must be placed relatively close to the titan - and it would draw the attention of all the monsters, requiring the rest of the military to defend it.
The stream was the first time I saw the titan fight. I said this in the stream thread before I knew this one existed, so here goes:
Hi, First of all. It’s good that you spend time to make the game better for the titans back a few years ago, so it wouldn’t feel bolted on. Wow this titan fight feels EPIC! It was unlike anything I expected with it being off the map, hanging ominously over your city. And there is the music, the ghost effects, the weather, the camera swipe at the beginning and the broadness of ways in which you can attack it are all things I like about the TItan. Good Job! (Realises this sound overly hyped, hides shamefully in a corner )
Next, a small suggestion. The stream made me realise that stonehearth needs an ‘Abandon’ button. This is like a ‘clear items’ or ‘loot’ button, but it takes the item out of the AI’s knowledge until it is looted by the ‘Loot’ button. This is for the ‘sword in enemy camp’ situation angelo struggled within the stream. If only angelo could have said to his hearthlings: ‘Don’t even try to get that, it’s not worth it’, then maybe he’d be in a somewhat better place. We’ve had this situation for years, but with the Titan fight, it’s has become so much more urgent! also if there are any ‘I’ve got too many items out in the wildernis and my Hearthlings an’t handle it’-situation, you can just abandon the resources and have the lag go away.’
Template BUGS
I have issues with Templates like walls i made sometimes i cant put them next to eachother and have to turn around the template and resave it as for example wall1 as wall2 when flipped around to make them possible to put next to other templates so there is not like 4 blocks gaps between for example walls and tower and walls and a corner wall
Pretty severe bug with the new builder.
Will show it in my next video
Can see it on this video already at 40 sec in
Also
we really need a way to be able to combine to templates and save them as one template it would save a lot of time when building big things or making walls. I used to make small call and take 3 small walls and then combine them to be one big wall instead but not possible with the new builder
When creating a new mod in the latest beta it never adds a new mod like it did version before this one. trying to create for more templates. Same for a friend that tried before me also
When creating a new mod in the latest beta it never adds a new mod like it did version before this one. trying to create for more templates. Same for a friend that tried before me also
So after you hit the “Create” button, a new mod didn’t show up in your steam uploads list?
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