A wise man once told me even if i find no pleasure in showing off the things i make, good or bad. I still should put them somewhere since others may.
I love this game. There’s nothing more satisfying than designing a building and watching it slowly get built.
I haven’t played the game for about a year and felt saddened there’s barely been any updates since then. Excluding the recent new weather update which inspired me to create a new save.
Now i’m writing this because it seems my save has reached the end of its life and it’s a pain to continue playing.
I’m going to make some comparisons ahead to dwarf fortress, note that i’m not saying “hurr do what DF did” I’m comparing the games as separate entities with examples. If i wanted DF i could just play DF.
Anyway, I’ve played a lot of dwarf fortress in my day and what you learn to do as a seasoned player is taking many precautions to avoid fps death of the fort and increase it’s lifespan. Healthy design of your fort or disabling game features etc.
Stonehearth i’m sorry to say has god awful performance. After a day of playing the save becomes almost unplayable. In perspective to DF my pc can handle maybe 200 dwarves without any major performance sinks, and each dwarf is near infinitely more complex than a hearthling. My current save has just 22 hearthlings, which is pathetic.
I don’t know what the major culprit of the drops in stonehearth are, but i find that it’s necessary to play a mini game of clean up the map using the debug tools removing anything unnecessary when i have the time and it feels like it helps.
My point is basically imho that performance is the single most important aspect that needs improving. A year or so ago i remember seeing how you wanted and wasted time to introduce multiplayer to a game that can barely handle single player. It made me lose all faith in you and your development process. A year later i don’t seem to have been wrong.
I also remember watching the 300? dev stream where the dev team was introduced there was like 2 programmers and 3 concept artists and many others with made up fancy job titles. A big section of the stream was just one dev going on a long tirade to explain how you wanted the game to be perceived emotionally discussing a bunch of pointless features. I tuned out quickly but i think it was garbage like walking through grass and butterflies popping out. Which gives a DF player lag PTSD.
The beauty of voxel games are that the player can use their own imagination, our minds are hardwired to connect the dots in patterns we see. If you look at the screenshots of my save you’ll notice how the walls are decorated with simple lines of blocks, but one might look at it and imagine it could be baroque, gothic or fantasy architecture. It’s whatever you want it to be unless i reveal what i imagined it is, which i won’t.
I feel in the absence of any actual art needing to be done you’re instead trying to push the game into a more emotional game like the sims where you could justify bloating the game with your own art.
And i have no desire to play a poor man’s DF mixed with the sims 1.
If you wan’t a highly moddable game you should create a clean slate, a blank piece of paper if you will, which the player has absolute freedom. In that sense you should focus on the fundamentals such as performance. Give people the tools to create rather than create for them. Even if you have a set direction of what you want the game to be and how to be played you should still encourage and give the opportunity to do whatever they desire.
Ask yourself, what’s the point of creating content that modders will inevitably mod out? Forcing them to do excess work.
I’m quite shocked that i have never seen anyone talk about this game ever. I only know about it because i accidentally found it.
The reason games like minecraft got so popular is that people could easily show off their work. It marketed itself exponentially. You made something, took a screenshot and showed people and they wanted to play too, etc.
I feel this game has lots of potential in the same manner with screenshots and sharing templates. Let’s say someone wants let’s say a lighthouse so they look in an in-game online directory of templates people shared and get one the like.
Also stonehearth is hearthstone with the words reversed. Can’t that potentially have legal issues?
