DesktopTuesday: UX Building Prototypes

[SirAstrix]

@Brackhar

For example, the current construction model treats all the portions of a building - wall, floor, second floors, roofs, etc - as different objects, which leads to all sorts of weird problems. For instance, internal wall construction is a nightmare, and good luck getting a roof on a building that has them unless you know the exact pattern of actions to take. It also commonly leads to buildings that will be forever incomplete.

This seems more like an AI issue in my opinion though, not a UX issue. When you 3D print something, it works one layer at a time. The AI could just be reworked to do the same, starting at the base and working one voxel up at a time (or couple at a time, regardless you get my drift). So that being said, combined with my previous statement about round and diagonal buildings, this UX rewrite seems…stupid to me. What’s the real advantage to being able to draw buildings like in The Sims 4, when we don’t have round assets like they do? How is changing the UX going to change how 'lings build buildings and still get stuck? OOOOH it’s flashier and more modern compared to other like titles, but it still would leave the underlying problem of pathfinding.

And if you told everyone here that you were rebuilding the pathfinding, I’m sure we’d all end up throwing a party. But instead we’re getting upgraded from The Sims 3 to the Sims 4.

@Brackhar

As Albert was looking into it he realized that the problem wasn’t a matter of just a random bug here and there, but a core issue with how the system was architected.

I appreciate the info on this, and it’d be nice to get more explanations like this. Because up until now, it’s sounded like it was just a couple bugs.

@Brackhar

in service of allowing the player to form attachment to their hearthlings as individuals, and not merely as automata that exist to do the next most important task (beep boop)

At the same time, what’s showing that they’re more than this? The conversations system is flat, and honestly doesn’t add more than direction of what to build…in a subtle way. Traits help in the sense of giving you the random direction of what to build. There are no friendships, no loves, no diplomacy, anything. And when asked about this, it’s another “How far we want to take it is a bit up in the air, to be honest.”. The idea of kids and families has been dismissed since the days of Tom (even though there are PG ways to do it), and what’s called complete after a decent amount of time is nothing more than the NPC’s of Skyrim that took an arrow to the knee.

@Brackhar

if you go back and look at the original kickstarter pitch, what with its references to D&D, RPG class systems, and other such things. Stephanie has told me before that she always imagined Stonehearth as a “community builder where you are constructing Kakariko Village” from Zelda.

I actually was going to bring up her quote before and forgot to. That being said, with the current systems, throw in the Song of Storms, and you could recreate a perfect replica of Kakariko Village, especially from the earlier versions. As far as D&D goes, Stonehearth doesn’t have the specifics like they did. I’ve got two examples of this:

• When I used to play in High School, I had a half-ling knight, that was predgudice against wizards, was hated by dwarves (took out half the country side to get out of a bar tab), and earned the nickname “Nut-High Knight”.
• One of the guys I ran with attempted (and I use that word strongly) to be a Drawven Theif. Now if you’ve ever played it, you would understand why this was hillarious and didn’t work.

Just those two examples would be impossible to make in Stonehearth, and unless y’all built the system to have experiences/quests/stories like this, the player doesn’t have much to get attached to. Sorry but my carniverous blacksmith in Stonehearth doesn’t make for as good of a story, nor does it make me feel very connected to them.

@Brackhar

When I joined the team, there was not a cohesive vision for what the game was or should be. We had a broad understanding of what the genre was, but in terms of the final vision we mostly just had a list of features that had previously been promised.

But when there’s so many unsures of where the future will go right now, how can it be said that it’s any better now than it was when you came in? And if y’all do have a mission statement, an end goal, then why is it so hard to share that with us, or to even share what we can look foward to long term, in more detail than the roadmap? You and @sdee keep saying that y’all had to sit down and re-examine everything, but from what little we get, it seems more like we’ve hopped from one person’s list of random features to anothers.