Is This It For Stonehearth's Features?

Development
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About the entire criticsm thing, I have mixed feelings myself. I am 18 years old, so I’ve done some groing up in the past few years. And being a little behind in the social skills both made me experience the use of criticism (I learned a tonne from it that I value greatly.) and how it can fall really bad with the other when you are (or are percieved to be) really harsh. (Yea, it’s about things I said, obviously.)

I since decided the difference in good faith and bad faith lies in the opinion, because …. If someone takes the time to logically lay out (in text, or words or whatever) reasonable arguments to back up their criticisms, then it must be in good faith. Note the “taking the time”, the “logically” and the “reasonable” parts of that definition.

@SirAstrix And I guess a part of where @Logo is tring to come from is that sometimes the tone is really important to how it is percieved. And YES, that sucks, (oh, all the rants I had when I was so much less skilled in the social stuff in the past. Don’t get me started on this.), but it is true that this is sometimes necessary.

But I also acknowledge the value you bring with your criticism. After all, I learned a lot of stuff from criticism that I greatly value.

(Did I screw up by bringing this back up? I hope not. Sorry.)

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No point posting here any more

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Psst Don’t feed the troll.

Edit: That wasn’t aimed at anyone currently here, there was an actual troll here (removed). Didn’t wanna delete my post and leave @Yangzhoui hanging.

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If you feed troll, troll will grow and make a mess of all the nice things. :skull:

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No point posting here any more

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Dangit @oldmacman you were doing so well, but that one was funny :rofl:

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This thread has meandered over a few different areas over the course, so getting back to the core question of game features structure here are my two biggest questions/desires regarding the finished game at this point -

Will we see enemies/combat capable of destroying structures and thus giving meaning to building walls and castles and such?

and

The game was originally once billed as “build up a town as you’d find in the old RPG games” So will the game ever feature visiting NPCs that the player needs to satisfy or accommodate?

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51

Probably not. We’ve done some experimentation with this and without significant additional investment (ie, partial destruction and remodeling of buildings) it can feel really gross, especially if you have one single super large building–the whole thing would go down at once.

Yes, if the tier progression peeps like Harold, Adie, and Marak count. They do visit in person and party with you! No, if you mean “protecting NPCs as they travel across the map to ensure they arrive safely.” Basically, we’re not confident we can solve the wonkiness with combat without writing an RTS on top of our existing game, so we’re not leaning into things like escort quests.

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I was more getting at NPCs visiting your town to visit shops, sleep in an inn etc. Even if they just poofed into existence at your town limits to come into your town, as opposed to the map limits where the might have to walk past enemies, that’d be neat.

A shame to hear about the building combat - Were you including doors and gates in that statement? Or will we be able to fight against a siege of big bads who path to your wall gate and try to batter their way in there, for example.

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We’re looking into this, but even if we don’t do it, this one is very easy to mod in.

Monsters already attack doors.

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Have y’all considered alternate ways that monster may get over/around walls? Ways for enemies to invade your town when surrounded by walls

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Honestly, the big dudes should just be tossing orcs and kobolds into your base like artillery. No one is safe!

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56

Dwarf Fortress is an anomaly. It’s two brothers living from donations. The amount of people willing to donate needed to sustain funding for more than one of Stonhearth’ devs is far higher, yet the game is much much less know. Plus committing your whole life to one game exclusively might not be the way most devs are willing to go in the first place and that’s quite understandable.

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@SachielMF Lot’s of good points. Lots of good points.

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Destruction probably not coming is a big letdown. Probably because SH is a voxel game and thus seemingly predestined for some proper destruction. See: Minecraft and Creepers. I mean if we can cut holes into structures later, which looks like is still planned, couldn’t enemies just do that as well?

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Preface: I started getting a headache reading through the litany of replies, so I did stop doing so a bit early on and possibly prematurely for what I’m about to say.

But for all this back and forth about what’s been said regarding the fact that “they’re pretty much done”…
…wasn’t what they said that the engine was pretty much done and stable, thus meaning no big changes that will keeping messing with modders?
How that does necessarily equate to meaning some of those features won’t be included? Such an equation seems to require the presumption that the current/final engine can’t produce those things, and I personally don’t see hard evidence for nor against that concept.

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60

On the fly voxel removal with maybe a cube emitter dustcloud/pieces?

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There’s one thing in general I feel is forgotten when “Is this it for Stonehearth” is discussed. And I’m guilty of it as well.

That is that this game could have been finished years ago. And with that I mean done, development over, with some quickly thrown together support for promised Kickstarter features. It would have been a buggy mess, but it would have been done.

Thank you for not doing that. For sticking around, way after the Kickstarter founds for development were gone, and venture capital was raised instead. For finding Riot, that has founded development for years now, despite sales probably being slow.

Stoneheath is a game that inspires, and it’s easy to see its potential. I remember playing alpha 1 and thinking, not much here, but this will be a great game. To me, starting Stonehearth still gives that impression. Sure there’s much more here, but there’s infinite room for expansion.

That, along with the core system taking long to get in shape (building, performance, multiplayer, mac support, the list seems endless), is what I think is fueling the disappointment present in so many steam reviews. Because the game can be so much, any change is trivial compared to the possibilities. And with so many possibilities, someone always wants something else than what’s currently being developed. Especially when you have been fixing things that worked, but need improvement.

So with that I want to say: Thank you Team Radiant. Thank you for developing this game, with a larger than ever team, 5 years after a Kickstarter that brought founding for a small team for a year or two.

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^ I do appreciate the sentiment, and I generally end up staying pretty positive here. I don’t care too much about a lot of the original promises that fell out of Stonehearth’s scope - it seemed pretty reasonable at the time - and I knew building destruction would likely be extremely hard to implement.

But I must say, I’m a little disappointed about it.

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Me too. It’s one of few things that bug me, if just for how easy it is to throw up walls and not have to deal with intruders. But that’s neither here nor there

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