[Dev Blog] Stonehearth Music Update

agreed … adds to the tension, as i can see a skirmish that impacts more than one section of your town/the map… death stingers will certainly ramp it up a bit! :smile:

it’s a date, sister… :wink:

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Maybe the civilians can break the fourth wall and react whenever said death stinger is played… :smile:

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hmm, I still haven’t touched on all the various questions from the blog… but as I’m currently stuck on my phone, I’ll hold off until later this evening …

thanks again for the blog @Doug, has sparked some great conversations, and gotten the inner musician in each of us intrigued… :smile:

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Wow, what a lot of fantastic feedback! Thank you guys so much for the kind words and encouragement! I’m relieved to hear you guys like the direction we’re going! :smile:

So many cool ideas, especially with using music as a gameplay tool i.e. stingers to warn players of not only attacks but the death of a citizen. Or the idea of having transitional pieces to kind of ‘curtain in/out’ the different seasons. Or even panic music for a fire?? @Geoffers747 you’re thinking from all of the angles :wink: Very very cool and just what I’d expect from all the creative and passionate fans here!

(And don’t believe Doug for a second when he says he’s just taking a backseat role. He’s got just as much a backseat role in Stonehearth’s soundtrack as Spielberg had in making Jurassic Park. Which leads me to my next point: who’s working on the Jurassic Park mod?)

For everyone catching the ‘In The Hall of the Mountain King’ tribute, kudos and well caught! I know there are some heads tilted at the idea of using this as a dungeon track but we’re looking at a wide array of atmospheres for the dungeons. Mystical and reverent? Calm and deliberate? Dark and dank? Creepy and quirky? Millitant and…that’s the end of my vocabulary :pensive:

The idea with this track was to give a sense of the Goblins that have been hinted at in the promotional work. They are my favourite race by far. They look the type to constantly be fighting with each other, falling asleep on the job, wearing mismatched helmets, clumsily licking and smelling things while their captain bonks them on the head…comical, cute and ridiculous…but very dangerous. Imagine creeping into one of their rickety caves, tip-toeing over wooden planks and angry torches, stopping at every shadow that bounces across the wall. A snore here, a grumble there…there’s treasure here, you know there is!..but how to get to it without them raising the alarm and bringing everyone down on you in a clattering pile of misshapen swords and hammers and…wait, is that one holding a chicken tied to a stick? Wh…can someone explain why that one has a chicken tied to a stick?

Did it work? Do you see it? That was the idea at least; dark, plucky and thievish :smile:

There is another tribute hidden here too for the careful eyed and trivia minded…maybe it has something to do with the name of that spring track… :wink:

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@Raj… just going to echo my comments from the blog… you are an extremely talented musician, and I couldn’t be more thrilled for you, @Doug and all of Team Radiant… kudos my friend… :+1:

and who knew you were as adept at painting pictures with words as you are with music?? I could picture every moment in the dungeon crawls you were describing… if they sound half as good as you’ve described, I’ll name @Geoffers747’s firstborn in your honor… :wink:

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Taken from the Disqus on the main Website.

This is fantastic :slight_smile:
also i love the In The Hall of the Mountain King part.

Hm… would you prefer manual zooming in, and zooming out to maybe something like a blow to a villager = trumpet alarm, and the alarm would increase in sound as you get closer, so you could tell if you were closer/ father away from the attack?

That’s not a bad idea Swift. The only thing that worries me about that is having this alarm sound playing for too long, and too loud. It would work well for one person dying, but I imagine if you were in a large battle, and villagers were dying all over the place, these alarms stacked on one another might become irritating.

@sdee and I were talking about this yesterday, and she had a great suggestion where in any villagers death could show up in the event manager saying something like “Abi Berall has been slain!”. If you click on that text, it would snap the camera position to where she has fallen. This may or may not work, but we both agreed that having some type of visual indicator along with the audio/musical cue is ideal.

Like the ghostly figure of your fallen settler walking off beyond the horizon.

weeps silently

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Maybe instead (or also) an icon could appear above the death point, maybe a skull, either like the icon above a tree you’ve set to chop, or maybe a 3D rotating model, so then the user can move manually?

Personally, I’d rather an icon appearing as the text might be a little too un-noticeable. Also the rotating model idea is better than a flat icon as it’d grab more attention from the player.

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Those are good ideas. What about if your villager dies across the world though? If its a positional icon only, you wouldn’t see it when it happens, so you’d still have to do some searching to find the icon. We’ll probably need some UI solution to give a visual cue no matter where you are.

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Maybe when there’s fighting, a little window could appear showing how many of your units are fighting, then when one dies, a skull appears next to the number of units when it decreases?

Not a bad idea :slight_smile:

It’s situations like this that slowly creep out of the audio world, where I find myself lost, and cold in a design world. Luckily we have people like Tom and Stephanie here to make more elegant visual gameplay decisions than myself.

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I imagine just some death symbol popping up somewhere on your screen, maybe above the “Town management” button on the UI would be sufficient? Clicking it would then take you to the event?

Or something like Crusader Kings/ Europa Universalis, where the icons appear along the top when important events that require your attention happen?

The game is rather complicated and the UI has a lot going on, but the orbs at the top middle appear during important events,

nice and simple. I honestly think something like that will be perfect.

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I made a mock up of what it could look like… :smile:

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yup, i like this as well… :+1:

at least, it works well when we have a relatively small number of units dying at any one time… :smile:

this same concern might apply to an icon(s)… unless its only one icon, regardless of how many units have died? and clicking the icon reveals all perished units, with an option to jump to them, as was suggested…

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That’s (morbidly) beautiful. :skull:

Good point @SteveAdamo

Clicking on the one icon to then reveal a list of perished units sounds nice though.

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