Oh no! Yang is gone?! We will miss you!
Now they’ll actually have to hire an actor to be Doug 
Part of the thrill of following Stonehearth’s development for me has been watching the team grow. It hasn’t been all rainbows and sunshine, of course, with Tom and Tony practically disappearing into all the hidden stuff after Radiant got more programmers and designers, an artist, and an animator. But for the most part the team’s just been growing. So it’s not just sad to see Yang and Doug go, but it feels ALL WRONG! 
Well, good luck to them, and to the rest of the team.
First up, big thanks to Doug and Yang; and best wishes for the new projects they’ve moved on to.
The implementation of hearthling personal space is a brilliant way to handle that age-old gimmick of “3 walls + door + bed - all floorspace = personal room”, which I’m sure will be familiar to many players coming in from DF, Gnomoria, Towns, even the Sims and such games where you can design the characters’ personal rooms. Many games have simply gone off the question “how many characters sleep in this room?”, or the even simpler solution of “you build a personal room and 1 character can occupy it”… but those systems don’t care whether the personal space is a grand ballroom or a broom closet LOL!
This alternative is so much cooler, since it’s about more than just where they sleep. I love the fact that working in cramped conditions all day will slowly annoy the hearthlings, that gives so much more incentive to build cool open-air workspaces and large workshops.
I’d love to see a future expansion to this system where the hearthlings get a slight happiness boost from being near light sources – not enough to make up for sleeping on the ground or working in a cramped tunnel; but enough to make a lit bedroom or tunnel have no negative happiness effect even if it’s a little smaller than the hearthlings’ personal space.
I’d also love to see one of the hearthlings’ different stats (spirit?) effect how quickly they lose happiness to things like being in cramped quarters – a hearthling with a low spirit might get upset easily, whereas a more happy-go-lucky hearthling would be ok with working in the tunnel a bit longer.
This is a really interesting addition from a mechanics and gameplay perspective, and I’m keen to see where it goes. It’s features like this, which make use of the voxel nature of the game, which really set Stonehearth apart from anything else in the genre at the moment.
I’ve got some serious reservations about the default templates automatically being totally great for hearthling morale. The idea of building a town exclusively from the provided templates and having no room for further optimization feels like a mistake, as it discourages a fairly significant part of the game: player-designed environments.
Of course, it’s important that a new player be able to jump in and have a degree of success with just the default templates, but maintaining something reasonable, like a ~6/10, with the default templates, seems like a much more sensible place to start. As a result, if hearthings can still perform acceptably but not perfectly in the provided housing, there is no meaningful drawback to using it, but there will always be hearthling happiness out of reach if players fail to break outside of the boundaries of stock templates.
I know I’m going to be hated by saying this, but I want to say it.
I’m actually kind of disappointed with this DT Tuesday. We have so many other things that feel incomplete, as well as other features that were talked about a long time ago that haven’t been mentioned hardly since.
Like, what’s going on with water? It was added a while ago, and was just abandoned while still being half way broken. There have been multiple talks about how it would be used and things that want to be done with it, but that’s all it’s been, past talks, for a while now.
What about many of the level perks that still say “not implemented”?
My list can go on, and I’ll just sound that much more of a jackass for it, to which I apologize in advance, as that’s not my intent. I just strongly feel that many other things could be looked at and/or completed rather than worrying about “personal space”.
I’m also going to ask a question I have no rights to, but what’s going on with this game anymore? Tony and Tom seem to have disappeared, development doesn’t seem to have a clear direction like it use to in the beginning, and now Yang and Doug are gone, loosing their major strengths. Is this the downfall many of us saw when Riot came in?
I digress with an apology for any that I have offended with this, I just needed to get my thoughts out there.
I don’t think you’re totally off target, plus your delivery was polite. I would feel more concerned if more people weren’t also being brought on board to offset the loss (1-2 people were hired recently iirc, no Yang + Doug, but better than just losing bodies).
I also raised my eyebrow when they started with happiness as the focus, but I guess one way to look at it is that bigger features that dramatically impact the game take time to see, not just a couple weeks of desktop Tuesdays?
Oooo… This is going to be quite an interesting retuning or is that retrofitting… Good to hear space and infinity and beyond is being worked on; well space anyway. 
Sad to see a couple great people go, but I do hope & bid them well in what ever they are aiming for. 
Good Luck Yang and Doug. Thanks for the amazing game you have helped build.
In the video it shows that (currently at least) the polygons are diminished significantly within the default buildings, turning yellow or even red. I suspect that the adjustments will make sure that the very small rooms which cause a “cramped” feel will be removed, but the templates won’t have the full positive bonus.
The placement of furniture within the rooms is also going to be a key thing, since having the beds or chairs up against a wall will automatically reduce the polygon on that side… solutions like building a window over the bed or desk will allow players to have full comfort while maintaining aesthetics, but I doubt those will be fully optimised in the starting templates… it’ll be up to the player to come up with more space-efficient comfortable housing, while the templates focus on the end comfort value rather than how efficiently those comfortable rooms are packed into the area (in other words, comfortable templates will be large and players will have to design their own very comfortable, very efficient inns and boarding houses)
I totally agree that the T1 templates should be adequate but not super effective; and I imagine that the T2’s will be comfortable but very inefficient/expensive; the player will be able to learn from them or improve upon them to great effect though.
No, you are right but what we see is only a part of their actual work.
Back to topic, pets should increase happiness while those are around or if a hearthling has one personally.
wow its actually sad news to hear both Doug and Yang have left 
Two really great talented people, at least they’ve left there mark on Stonehearth and won’t be forgotten for there amazing work with Stonehearth.
On the post topic though, I love this new idea, it finally gives you a good reason to decorate buildings and make them look epic, I’m looking forward to seeing more of it 
I know that this is just the start, but I think there are some issues with the new personal space system. I think that the personal space satisfaction should really depend on the context. If you are in a house, rooms can be smaller and even with windows it’s quite possible that the room negatively effects your hearthlings mood. But then I have to question: Would it be better for me to be in a small room with nice walls, a plant and a warm bed or outside, where I have all the space I want? I think reduced space in a room inside of a house should therefore have a less negative effect. For example: Even if your personal space inside a building is reduced by 50%, it should still satisfy your hearthling. But when it is reduced by 50% in a tunnel or more, it should effect the hearthlings mood negatively. Even better: If you have things like plants, toys etc. inside of a room, the small space has even less of a negative effect on the hearthlings mood, because it is more luxury.
Thank you Doug and Yang for all your hard work. The game wouldn’t be what it is without you’re awesome contribution. Best of luck moving forward.
It is quite sad to see Yang and Doug leave, and really, to be brutally honest, we don’t have much control over what Riot does with TR and StoneHearth, are they messing things up? We can’t really tell, it is true that not much content was made by either Tony or Tom in the recent months if at all
But if we really want Riot to not mess up StomeHearth and Team Radiant, what we can do is spread StoneHearth, to more people and a bigger audience
I’m no expert or anything, but my best bet is that making StomeHearth a more popular and succesfull game will get us a better chance on Riot not giving up or abandoning it (assuming they have control over that), and that is something we can do, spreading the word is something we can actually do, and for what it’s worth(StoneHearth, that is), a shot worth taking if you’re worried out this
Regardless, we can’t tell if Yang and Doug leaving was Riot’s doing or not at-all, and really, i don’t think that’s something TR will be okay with, as far as i can tell, they will be the ones to stick up for each other, someone leaving a team seems to be more common than i expected, with some Youtuber teams having artist leave and come from time to time(happended in Extra Credits, and they’re fine)
So i don’t have much to… well, ‘complain’? All i can do is cross my fingers and hope things will be okay with StoneHearth, and really, i do hope the best luck for bolth Yang and Doug, and perhaps we’ll be able to see them again? Who knows, things happen right?
Without wanting to offend anyone, but those newly hired ones have completely different tasks, backgrounds and expertise than Yang or Doug. For example, if you’re owning a sailing ship and you fire two sailors but instead hire a painter and a cartographer, then technically your headcount is still the same; you’re going to have some trouble on sea however, because neither a painter nor a cartographer can help you man the sails.
For all that it’s worth, it’s two losses and two gains, but it’s not a equivalent exchange and therefore, technically a loss. Plus in some departments, but a loss in others; you can decide yourself whether the new professions make up what hole for example Yang is now leaving in the company.
I wish I had as much optimism to even start believing that a single individual, or maybe half a dozen, could make a company with a thousand employees and billions in revenue, owned by another company with ten thousands of employees and tens of billions in revenue, even remotely care.
I suppose it’ll be a miracle if a dozen people can make a game stand out enough for a large company to care about,(again, if it were to be required) but i guess that’s the thing? Maybe 0.00001 is enough to hold on to, maybe that’s a miracle the fact that we care enough to try
And again, things might not be as bad as it may or maynot seem
And for me, that’s the thing, if things go bad and there seems to be no hope, we can still try, and maybe it’s miniscule, irrelevant or powerless, at-least we can say we tried, a word, a mention may be all we can do, but if a miracle is ever to happen, it’s gonna happen where someone tried to make it happen
Sad to see folks go.
Otherwise I think this kind of granularity and detail and complexity is exactly what this game’s missing right now. Good work, good focus, keep adding more things like this.
I was hoping for some update to the late game hearthling AI issues. When you get 35+ the efficiency of building is way, way worse than when you have 20. It’s almost like they all fight to do the same thing and it slows the process down immensely. I don’t get any stuttering, just a noticeable decrease in building speed even though there’s twice as many people working on the building. I’ve got a very strong CPU, it’s one of the newer I7s, got 32gb of ram also.
I’ve seen them trickle these in with minor performance fixes and I’ve been able to tell a difference each time. Just like to see better updates I guess on where the game may be headed.
when the team adds dwarves, would it be a good idea to have less personal space for them? like living in the mountain would be more comfy for them than living on the surface out in the open.