the idea of a hand drawn map just to give you a vague idea of the landmarks? that would work too and go with the storybook theme
3 Likes
I like this development! Exploration through fog of war would be a great addition to the game.
My suggestion is that we tie exploration to community building so that when the town has a certain value and food stocks then new hearthlings are found through exploration, rather than by wandering in to town.
Great work, thank you!
6 Likes
I like the idea that exploration would be necessary to find new Hearthlings 
My ideal fog of war would be:
- nothing shown until discovered (other than maybe general description)
- areas around building and Hearthlings are discovered and are kept fully updated
- areas that have been discovered, but are not being updated stay the same until they are refreshed by a Hearthling passing by
My reasoning is that once an area has been discovered, it canât be undiscovered, just updated.
Enemies will only be visible within the line of sight of Hearthlings or buildings.
5 Likes
Buildings clearing fog of war and having line of sight would definitely give more reason to build them. I like it!
8 Likes
A tower with someone in it should have the clearing Fog of War perhaps with a bigger radius due to elevation but a tower in itself without someone in it, i think thats just strange. Trip-wire alarm for the Engineer to create that will set off a sound for us to react too incase of an attack could work and set the heartlings to run to a safelocation (Grey Flagpole) and also alert the Guards to run towards the area.
4 Likes
I like the fog of war idea. I would like the field of view to be bigger unless all hearthlings are near-sighted. Iâd put a vote in for a Scout class that can move quicker and see far.
For the job talismans being scattered around the map, I would vote No. The concept doesnât make sense. The hearthlings can build houses but not a wooden hoe or mallet? Why not have an adventurer class that can go out and find unique dungeons, monoliths and items? You have the RPG elements in the game that would fit well with an adventurer class.
Also, carpenters seem to be the back-bone of any settlement.
3 Likes
Whoever had the talisman-lost-in-the-wild idea should be fired immediately put some more thought into designing game mechanics next time. Have you guys lost your minds? Iâll back up all the code from A22.5 as soon as Iâm back so I can remove this ridiculous thing with a mod if it becomes part of SH (apparently it wonât, what a relief).
Fog of war - yes, but this? One of the biggest advantages of SH was the fact starting offensively was not necessary like in other games. Wanna make Footmen the heroes? Make the monsters attack from the darkness more often, add some more elaborate quests (The Goblins have imprisoned a Hearthling, fight them to get the new citizen!) but donât force people to focus on them as it makes starting phase more repetitive.
3 Likes
read before you post.
11 Likes
It is not abut the talisman but the idea as a whole. It comes down to a basic problem in game desing: neccesity of obtaining an item. If an item is important it should be removed from the game or made easily available.
There are two possible ways of acquiring an item in not-fully-revealed game world: random spawn (item is spawned in random place, time and/or quantity) and item pool (an item is guaranteed to appear if certain conditions are met, i.e. whole map is explored). Both of them suck if an item is too important, because the former is luck-dependent and the latter allows to develop algorithms for item grinding, so does mixing them together (e.g. a quest appearing randomly which provides OP item when completed).
Quick conclusion is: if one wants to add exploration-only items they should be beneficial but not necessary, so they are simply worth the extra risk and effort but do not stop the player if they are not obtained. Making the exploration component more RPG-ish is actually the best suggestion. Quest givers, unique crafters, traders and resource nodes would definitely be tempting enough to get into these woods (or sand dunes). It is way easier to balance additional ways of obtaining an item than balancing a whole new item.
2 Likes
Again, I think youâre missing the point of whatâs being tested here.
When everything is easy to acquire after the first one, thereâs very little sense of achievement. The first time you reach a level 5 blacksmith and can now make awesome armour and weapons, for example, itâs very important and satisfying. As soon as youâve done that, though, it becomes trivial to mass-produce those armours and weapons â the challenge evaporates.
What this experiment tested was how much more satisfying the game became when players have to work harder to unlock their hearthlingsâ potential. There are no plans at all to make the game revolve around finding everything you need in the FoW, or making everything reliant on RNG or fetchquests. The experiment was only to see whether the added challenge makes the game more fun, or less fun.
The conclusion from the experiment was that having to work harder to unlock things makes the player more invested in the game, so they care more about what happens to their town and their individual hearthlings. So, we can expect for future versions to have more ways to obtain important/high-level items, and less of the âonce youâve made one you can make as many more as you like with very little effortâ feeling.
Think of it like how you make the windchimes from the Ogo and Mountain storyline. Making one isnât particularly difficult, and you only need one in order to take that path of the story. However, if you like the idea of decorating your town with windchimes (something I do all the time), then you have to go and find a new flute for each one you want to make, so the windchimes become a rarer and more valuable item. Itâs the same with the fine red carpets and furniture which you can only buy from traders now (it used to be the model for fine items your carpenter could craft, but got replaced with versions which more closely match the Ascendancy style) â those red carpets and benches and lights become much more valuable because you canât simply mass-produce them, theyâre not actually that hard to get and if you want to work at it you can get a lot of them by building a ton of basic furniture to trade for them, but itâs much more satisfying to do that than to decorate your town with items you can easily make at any time. And of course thereâs a fountains used in Tier 2 questlines â one is made entirely from items you can craft within the town (requiring some high-level crafter items), one is made from items you loot after combat, and the third requires trading and using âadvancedâ classes. Which of the three is more satisfying to complete? Personally, I find the master craftsman ones the least satisfying, and the most satisfying are the ones which require rare items won from combat â the combat one requires more than just combat, it touches on crafting too as well as using my herbalist to buff the soldiers to make sure they win the more difficult fights.
So, we wouldnât see that extra difficulty being applied to everything, and certainly not to core items like the basic class trinkets. It may be certain top-tier class trinkets (e.g. the geomancer or magma smithâs trinkets when they come out) which have to be found/looted/won via a quest/etc., but those trinkets arenât essential to a thriving town, theyâre more like an end-game achievement. Some of the basic trinkets may be made slightly more difficult to obtain, but it wouldnât be anything obnoxious like it was in this test; the devs would make sure that the path to obtaining them still fit into the early-game difficulty curve and was still fun.
9 Likes
Lol exploration does not work for team Radiant because theyâre all too fearless, even the internet doesnât scare them. 
Another reason I think other development teams are afraid of prototyping discussion is because they donât have as clear goals as you guys do. 
2 Likes
Personally, I donât think I can decide whether something is more, less or no noticeable difference fun by looking at a video of someone else using the feature.
Whatâs not fun is watching team StoneHearth threshing around some five years after the KickStarter still apparently looking for the game that they pitched. Iâm beginning to wonder if this will ever make it out of development, or just end with a shrug of the shoulders and the devs moving on.
4 Likes
Such a danger does exist, but I really hope it wonât come to this.
1 Like
Welcome to game development.
This process is entirely normal. Games get pitched with a rough idea of how to get from the pitch to the finished product, but halfway through that process it turns out that the path is way more complicated and forked than was previously imagined, so the developers have to experiment with different concepts that werenât part of the original pitch, and spend time re-creating existing chunks of the game to make them work differently/better.
The only difference in this case is that we get to see it all happening, where traditionally it all happened behind the closed doors of a studio. How do you think we kept getting games which turned out so different to the pre-release advertising? Itâs a subject Iâve done a lot of digging into out of sheer curiosity, and the answer kept turning out to be the same thing â âwe had an idea, it was working pretty well so we started advertising and getting ready for a big release, then something didnât quit click into place and to fix it we needed to change everything⌠and by the end, we were at our release window with a different game to what we started with.â
Ironically enough, Early Access was supposed to prevent that situation; but instead itâs promoting it. With how many titles are coming out in this space now, the push is on to secure support (not just funding but mostly publicity and feedback) before a gameâs alpha is even nailed down. What most people donât seem to realise is that games donât just get built following a formula, they evolve â or at least, the really successful ones do.
The fact that the dev team are trying out new ideas and experimenting using rough-and-ready prototypes doesnât mean theyâre stumbling around blindly. Actually, theyâre going back to what they know â letting the game show them what works best, rather than trying to guess beforehand and then implement things based on those assumptions.
This isnât just me going all âwhite knightâ or âdefendingâ the dev team â they donât need that, they donât want that, and I know it wouldnât work anyway. What Iâm trying to explain here is that no matter how dissatisfied this course of action makes players, itâs not going to change because nothing else will work. The devs are taking this road because they know it leads to a functional, fun game. If there was a faster, more straightfoward, or prettier road to the same goal then theyâd be taking that road instead, you can bet your house on it. Unfortunately, this is the only road which goes anywhere worth going for Stonehearth. All other roads lead to a bland, formulaic and derivative game which might have released a year ago, sure⌠but it wouldnât be fun or unique, and it wouldnât live up to the intentions of the Kickstarter.
Early Access is a waiting game, with the game you actually want at the end of it. The reason so many games âfailâ and donât turn out like theyâre meant to is that nobody seems prepared to play the waiting game; and eventually the developers give in to pressure and start taking shortcuts. Team Stonehearth are one of only a handful of teams at the moment who are working on something major and novel in a publicly visible Early Access, so Stonehearth is a unique opportunity for a lot of us to get not only a cool and novel game, but to see it unfold and to even be part of that process. Itâs a long process, and it will be boring at times, it will be frustrating at times, there are times where it looks like itâs all going to hell in a handbasket. This is all completely normal, and itâs what the dev team signed up for at the beginning. Itâs also what we signed on for â or at the very least, I knew what I was signing on for and a lot of other players understood the same thing. If you didnât understand that⌠well, Iâm sorry to hear that, but thereâs very little to be done about it now.
Thereâs some good news though: you donât need to do anything. If youâre not interested in this stage of the journey, you can skip it, and come back when something more fun is happening 
Thereâs absolutely no harm in doing that, Stonehearth isnât going anywhere and, with all due respect, we donât need every single supporter to take on a supervisor/director role for every step of the journey. When something is taking longer than it should to bear fruit, the first people to know about it are the dev team; donât think for a second that theyâre not aware of the difference between where the game âshouldâ be according to the kickstarter goals compared to where it actually is right now.
The only possible outcome to be had from ramping up the pressure is to encourage the dev team to take shortcuts, and that never ends well. Iâve ridden that rodeo more times than I like to count. If you think that itâs horrible to watch a dev team conducting these rough-and-ready experiments in their internal testing, believe me when I say that you donât want to see the alternative â because the alternative is that the rough-and-ready work goes straight to the public in an attempt to appease them, and everything starts melting down. THAT is when games fall apart and the devs shrug their shoulders and move on; and it always happens the same way â not the devs running out of ideas or losing the plot, but them making a choice to give players exactly what theyâre asking for (âMoar updates! Moar content! Less delays! Make the game the way I say it should be made!â) and realising, too late, that thereâs no coherency in that method.
The unfortunate and bitter truth here is that if any of us want to see the game that was pitched in the Kickstarter, weâre going to have to wait for it to grow up on its own schedule. Nothing we can do will speed that up; the best case scenario is that we waste a lot of effort trying to hurry it along, and the worst-case scenario is that we could destroy a really cool game by trying to rush it out the door. In the meantime, all we can do is play the game we have and enjoy what we can from that, or spend some effort in trying to improve/polish/expand upon the game in progress by adding to it so that itâs more enjoyable when we finally get the full release â and itâs worth remembering that every addition to the game also adds to the time it takes to mature.
9 Likes
I ask this respectfully, as Iâve asked it before and not gotten an answer. But since the redesign of Stonehearth, what inputs from the community have actually been taken into respect? Youâre correct that we get to see this game unfold as itâs being written, and trust me when I say that I wouldnât want it any other way, but Iâve yet to see anything that someone said nay to actually change its direction.
As an example, the talisman idea that many dislike in this post was talked about and discussed shortly after Dev Stream 281. Myself and a couple others at that time voiced the same opinions we have now, and yet 2 months later, weâre seeing what was voiced against. So 2 questions on that:
- If the talismans really are just a placeholder, then why in 2 months wasnât something better thought up?
- Being concerns were voiced against this ideal, why would they then prototype it if we already voiced against it, especially if we actually have respected input for the game?
Again, I will agree that weâre lucky to see this in the development stages, and Iâm glad and thankful that we are. But to say that weâre a part of that process, I think is a little far.
As for everything else you said @YetiChow, I support 98%. Rushing a game does nothing but destroy it and force devs to take shortcuts. Minecraft, Towns, and a half dozen other games come to mind when I think of this.
That being said, I do think that it wouldnât hurt to get a content bone thrown here or there. I suggested this a while ago and understand partially why they donât want to do this, at the same time, dry spells hurt not only the playersâ interest but the image of the game as well. And letâs face it, 2017 has been one hell of a dry spell.
Hereâs the last 1% I donât support:
This game will never be what the Kickstarter promised us in full, to which this argument has been fought and made. It may come semi-close, but wonât ever be what we originally thought it to be. That being said, weâve yet to see what it will become, even the developers donât know what it will become, and it may be far better than the original idea; as it already is in some aspects.
3 Likes
The way I see it, everything being worked on now is attempting to give players what weâve asked for â itâs just not taking the direct route which gives us âX feature and nothing elseâ, the devs are trying to ensure that the new content gels seamlessly with whatâs already on the to-do list.
A case in point: we asked for the hearthlings to feel more alive. Not everyone was super invested in that idea, but everyone supports it at the most basic level, and a few of us get really really excited by the prospect of hearthlings who feel alive/become active protagonists in their own stories. To make that happen, weâve seen the conversation system and the traits system being implemented; which leads us back to another well-flogged horse. So, thatâs a perfect example of how the recent developments actually do tie into a promise from the kickstarter â because the idea that the hearthlings were individuals, that theyâd create new stories rather than passively following orders like robots, and that there would be pirates, ninjas and politicians (another well-trodden conversation topic)⌠the work on traits and conversations touches directly on all those ideas and promises.
Another case in point would be the water re-work. The mechanics/bedrock has been laid down, weâre yet to see any actual gameplay (e.g. irrigation, thirst or water mechanisms) because the other parts of gameplay arenât there to support it, but the foundational systems have been built up in a way that should support whatever the devs want to do in the future to tie water into the wider game.
As far as this test of the âhiddenâ talismans, again, itâs an internal experiment. This is one of the things that happens all the time, its just that normally it would happen behind closed doors and weâd never hear about it. Every time players suggest âhey, you should totally never do _____â, you can pretty much bet that someone on the dev team will have a go at it just to see why itâs so bad for the game. That doesnât mean theyâre planning to include it in the live release, itâs just data-gathering; if players are totally against an idea then developers want to see it in action so they can test out whether itâs really as bad as people assume it will be. The fact that players donât want it to be in the core game doesnât negate the ideaâs merits as an experiment. Itâs the same as when people protest against testing medicines on animals â the fact that people donât like it doesnât invalidate the data gleaned from the experiment.
And as far as your last argument⌠please, would you care to share the full-release version of Stonehearth youâre using to confirm that hypothesis? Because Iâm sure a lot of us â the devs especially â would love to get their hands on it! The truth is we donât know, and we canât know until the day of release dawns, whether Stonehearth will tick off every box on the Kickstater to-do list.
4 Likes
For determining where your settlement starts while having Fog of War active could be as simple as the center of the section of map you start on, but could be problematic if you want a body of water in the center. If the map was larger or grew larger, then instead of seeing the lit up square that your game takes place in on the map youâd just have the selection cursor and wherever you select would be your settlement location.
I like the idea of taking control of a Hearthling, Timber and Stone did that as well and I used it a lot for combat early on, since otherwise my melee fighters would just die. Luckily Stonehearthâs combat isnât as brutal and your fighters will usually panic and run when low on health, before heading straight back into battle.
Well Iâm glad to hear that if you give any game enough time itâs bound to be great.
Shame that Godus evolved from a bad game into a not quite so bad game. Clearly it just wasnât given enough time.
Star Citizen seems to be trying a similar method. Keep refactoring, keep adding new ideas, keep telling backers itâs going to be the greatest game ever and surely with enough time, effort and money it will be.
And if anyone questions your methods, just tell them they donât understand game development.
1 Like
I myself probably couldnât say it better.
One more point YetiChow didnât touch directly was that seeing an Early Access game grow is in many senses like watching a cinema adaptation of your favourite book.
âI imagined it differentlyâ.
So the purpose of the devs is not to fit every single personal vision of the future game (they canât do that anyway) but fulfill the promises on the basic level while providing a, for lack of a better word, believable game. TVTropes describes it as âSuspension of Disbeliefâ - while we on a logical level know what happens isnât very realistic (read: doesnât fit our own vision precisely), we feel so enthralled by the game (movie, book) that we ignore these minor inconsistencies. In case of a failed book/movie/game, it fails to create this illusion. Thatâs when the complete picture starts to fall apart on fragments, thatâs when we begin to realize the holes in the plot, etc.
When the overall impression of the game is good, it doesnât matter that much it is not exactly as we envisioned it.
That being said, making the game deliver that âoverall impressionâ is not an easy task, especially when there is no âcomplete gameâ, as in Early Access. That requires the ability to see the âwhole pictureâ, and not every dev, not to say player, can do that. In the end, to a certain degree itâs always a gamble - devs take a risk of doing without knowing if they succeed, we put our trust in the devs without knowing if they succeed. So, as funny as it is for a logic-oriented person like me, at the end of the day it all comes to faith.
âŚOf course that doesnât mean we should not voice our concerns and criticize the hell out of it. Itâs just, as Sdee said, âtake an experiment for what it isâ. An experiment. A hastily bolted together crude temporary model aimed to confirm (or disprove) some basic hypothesis.
6 Likes
The fog of war and settlement starting problem can be, more or less, solved.
But the question is, is it a real problem?
Think about how you start a game now.
Do you remember everything on the map?
Or did you only focus on the small area where yoiu want to start?
As for me, I am very focused on my starting location and even with âknowingâ the map I have to look around.
Now some ideas to solve the âproblemâ.
The map you see on the starting location screen could be even made more abstract than it is right now.
Or everything looks like a drawing but only a small part where your mouse cursor is over will be shown as detailed as it is right now. (Can you put the whole map together with only small areas which you have to put together in your head?)
Or you have to tell the game that you want:
a smal/hughe/big lake
mountains
a loot of wood/herbs/flowers/wildlife
next to your starting position and the game will create something that you did describe.
2 Likes