Hey everyone, welcome to another Stonehearth Desktop Tuesday! This week, the team is taking a moment between A22 and A23 to work on a number of the long-term projects that have been going on in the background, like building and water. Other members of the team are tackling long outstanding bugs. We expect to begin work on A23 in the middle of August, when we gain a second designer who can help out Richard, whose focus is currently split between high level meta design questions, and detailed system design. This week, while waiting for some of this stuff to land so we can talk about it, let’s focus on the results from the recent Desktop Tuesday survey, which will inform how these DTs will progress in the future.
I want to do a longer piece about all the iterations on the building editor and all the thinking that’s been going into it, but if you can believe it, I think the one showed in there is actually TOO powerful. Like, in 10 clicks you can build a really awful looking castle that would take your hearthlings 6 million years to build. It would be cool to have all this functionality for power users, but the default experience should reward you for making something cozier. Also in the iteration you see, to figure out which mode the editor is in requires sitting and thinking; it can cause a lot of surprises, and is not yet intuitive. Lots more work required here!
Given the results of the survey, I like the decision to focus DTs on current work, and stick to a weekly schedule (other real-life factors permitting of course!), but spend less time on the DTs where there’s not much to show.
I reckon that all you need, bare minimum, is a video of ~5 minutes which details what was on the front-burner and back-burner this week (e.g. "this week, the team have kept working together on features X and Y, such-and-such has been powering away at their work on feature Z, and so-and-so has created some awesome concept art for an upcoming idea [and then quick teaser of said concept art]. That new idea is something we’ll play around with, and let you know more when it’s a bit further along!)
Then, when we see a significantly longer DT, we’ll know we’re about to find out about a feature we’ve all been waiting on, which adds a sprinkling of excitement into the build-up to new alphas. For a few weeks we get the short DTs, then a mix of longer and shorter, and then I’d suggest a kind of “round-up DT” which recaps the major additions for people who might have missed one.
It’s interesting to see how many of us own the game but don’t play often. I’m firmly in that category – I’ve explored most of the game’s current state, and I’m waiting for that next level of polishing and interactivity before I dive in and immerse myself in the game again. In the meantime, the DTs give me a very useful insight into how the dev work is progressing, and how the Stonehearth experience is changing.
You know that’s an interesting dynamic I’d never thought of from a dev perspective before. Things being simple enough, intuitive enough, but also not setting an inexperienced player up for failure.
. Applause to chris.