Hey everyone! Thank you all for the good discussion and most of all, thank you to everyone who went out of your way to really listen, communicate, and understand each other when you had a disagreement. It’s one of the reasons our community gives our team strength to keep going even when the bugs are everywhere and making the game gets difficult. 
Ok, so when a thread gets to a certain length before I’ve managed to take a look it gets difficult to respond to specific topics or use quotes, so I’m going to do my best to summarize the topics I’ve seen here, and either address them if I can, or describe how to unwedge us going forward:
Q: I’m worried this new building editor won’t allow me to make a cool structure I have in my mind, or that I was able to make in the old editor. Will it?
A: Nikki (@sweet) and Chris (@not_owen_wilson) have a goal with the new editor/infrastructure, and it is to allow you to build anything you want. They’ve gone to great lengths to preserve the flexibility of the tool to that end, and to the best of my knowledge, it should really be able to build anything. If you’re worried there’s a structure that you will NOT be able to build in the new building editor when it is complete, the best way to make sure we account for your style is to send Nikki or Chris a picture of what you have in mind, so they can consider it in their mental model. If you want to do this, start a new thread, because this one is super long and it’s easy for stuff to get lost, even if you call out someone explicitly.
That said, the prototype you see in the Desktop Tuesday is just part of the complete editor, and lots of things are still missing. So please don’t use the prototype to judge the whole experience–just the specific questions that this prototype is answering.
Q: I’m worried that the new building editor will make it harder (than the existing editor) to make the things I like. For example, the stuff I want to make may take more clicks. Will this be true?
This is a fair concern! The new building editor optimizes towards things that fall into SH’s visual aesthetic, like the templates you see Allie make, or the castle on the initial KS poster, or the basilica that Kythandra made that Chris uses for his performance test. If you really like building things that are outside this aesthetic, there’s a chance the new editor may make your thing harder to build. If you want us to consider your aesthetic, again send us a template of something you’d like us to vet the UX experience of the builder against, and again, we’ll see what we can do. However, there’s a chance we may still optimize away from your style, in favor of the style that belongs to the game. We think this is a better choice for SH overall, so that the game can continue to build its identity and help you feel like your work belongs in its world.
Q: I would like clarity from a team member about how they or your team work, but I haven’t yet gotten it. / I’m asking some question you’re not answering!
A: I encourage everyone on the team to check discourse, but our first priority is to make the game, and our second priority is to talk about it. If you’d like an answer and you haven’t gotten a response in a thread, do everything you can to make it easy for that person to respond: PM them directly, or start a new thread, or ping a second person. Also, it helps to be really positive, and not, say, call them out on their competence, even if you think it’s justified ;). If it’s emotionally exhausting to write a reply because it looks to them like you’re attacking them, it’s going to take longer to write that reply, and like I said, they have a game to make.
If you’ve tried everything and they haven’t gotten back to you, then it’s because they’re swamped with all the tasks they’ve signed up to do that day, or that week.
Q: This feature (fill in the blank–in this case, building) shows how SH has deviated from its original Kickstarter goals and I feel angry/betrayed/like I wasted my money.
A: This topic is too big for this thread. If you really want to discuss it, PM me or make a new thread! In the meantime, here’s a small answer: When we did the pivot last fall, and again when I made the January 2017 post and again when I updated the roadmap, I explained that the game we were originally making was not working out for us, and that following our original plan was leading us to a flat, uninteresting player experience. In order to do what we really wanted, which was to make a great game, we had to embrace a fundamental pivot, and honestly, a narrowing of scope. If you look at the Kickstarter, we trying to make a Sandbox City Building RPG and RTS in the vein of Dwarf Fortress. That’s… 5 genres! We weren’t succeeding because it probably isn’t possible to make a GOOD game that includes all of 5 different genres. So we had to pick. So we looked really hard at what we felt the spirit of SH was, and we decided that we would make a community building game: a game focused on a small group of people who must optimize their environment to survive. This means: something like Rimworld/Dwarf Fortress but with polished, deep systems built for engaging gameplay, not just storytelling, and infused with a tone of warmth, heroism and mystery. If this is not what you signed up for, I apologize. It isn’t what I signed up for either! But when you’re failing, you have to take a strong look at what you’re doing, and change, or you will just keep failing.
Does this mean that we’re not going to fulfill all our Kickstarter promises? We’re going to try! Almost everything that we promised, I believe, is still on the roadmap, and multiplayer is coming too. Even seasons and festivals are on there. But we pivoted from feature development to goal-driven development and so if it’s a feature that doesn’t get us closer to our goals, which is to make a great game, then yes, we will cut it. For example, async PVP raids? Nope. Isn’t core to Stonehearth, doesn’t make this more like what we want. Is there anything else we’re sure won’t make it? Well, pirates/ninjas/politicians are a bit off tone. I’m really fond of them–I made them up in the first place–but we’ll see if they, in the end, contribute to warmth/heroism/mystery, or if we need something better. If in the end, they do not, then we should remove them. But personally, I kind of hope they’ll still make it.
Q: But… I’ve always wanted really big cities!
A: If you’re a Kickstarter backer, do you remember how we had a pizza party right at the end of our Kickstarter? Way back then, we talked about how the max size for SH’s towns was going to be about 50. This is all Tony ever planned for when he was creating the AI system. This number hasn’t changed, and you can do this now via user settings. Maybe if we super optimize, and are really, really lucky, and computers get faster, we could do maybe 200, but I’d consider that a stretch goal that we’re not actively pursuing. If this doesn’t fit your vision for a city-builder, again, apologies, clearly somewhere we got crossed wires.
Q: I don’t know where this game is going! Please share your design vision!
A: Back at the beginning of the year, I stated our mission in the Desktop Tuesday from January 10th: DT: State of SH, 2017! – Stonehearth We’re updating it as we go which is why in the answer above, I specifically compare it to Rimworld/DwarfFortress. I’m not sure how to be more specific, since we’re very much discovering where we’re going together, but if you have a specific question, like will X be in the game, feel free to ask, and we’ll tell you what we know, even when that answer is “we haven’t thought much about it yet.”
Q: I feel like you’re withholding something from us.
A: Maybe I should clarify something! In February of 2016, I became Stonehearth’s Team Captain/Product Owner, in lieu of Tom, who had to move on to a higher-level role at the studio. In this role, is it my job not to dictate the details of what goes into the game, but to make sure that we have a clear vision, that the team has the resources and space and time needed to execute on that vision, to resolve any conflicts that appear, and let everyone know where we are and what we’re doing. I know more about Stonehearth’s high level vision right now than maybe anyone in the world, though all domain specific details–design, ux, engineering, modding–belong to their respective experts. I tell you pretty much everything I know. If there’s something I do not know, I tell you that too; there’s a lot of things I don’t know! The best I can do in that situation is point a bunch of brilliant and passionate people at the problem–including all of you, as our resourceful community–and unblock you all in any way I can.
It’s possible you might be more comfortable knowing the game had a known shape that could be described end to end by its vision holder. That may someday be true of our game, but through hard trial and error, we’ve discovered that we’re just not there yet. We are exploring an unknown territory together, and that requires courage and faith, as well as skill and determination. I have faith, for example, that you’re the best community ever to have graced a video game. You’re smart and thoughtful and you care deeply and our team respects that. So keep suggesting how to make the game better, and we will keep making that game for and with you.
I’m locking this thread because it’s gone all over the place and the discussion is getting hard to follow–not because I want to stop having this discussion. If I’ve missed a theme, or if you want to talk about a specific point, please make a new thread with a specific topic or PM me directly. All my days are now dense with meetings and my inbox is a train wreck, but I’ll do my best to get back to you when I can.
