You did an amazing job, the music is great! (Well, except the looping combat music… that one gets on my nerves.)
I wonder if there are any plans on releasing the soundtracks as a separate download now that things are “finished”.
As for the 1.0 news…
I’m rather disappointed, but at the same time I can understand it… it’s been 5 years now and development can’t go on forever. Sad to see so much potential yet to be harnessed going down the drain like this.
Crowd funding and early access is always a gamble. Though I can’t say I lost this one because I spent countless hours on this game and enjoyed it for the most part. Still it leaves a sour taste in my mouth because I can’t really say I won either. The way “endgame” is handled, the direction TR took with that one just isn’t my cup of tea, but I can’t really blame them for this. In the end we’ve got a city builder that tells us to abandon ship over and over again. Now it is up to the modders to release a mod that unlocks all content in the same game (all banners, fountains, and hearths, and the corresponding recipes).
Stonehearth will remain in my heart(h) for long while. It was a project I adored and followed closely. I tried to add my voice to the soup of voices, to add my ideas and some of them even got heard. I like influencing things, even small things, so the time I’ve spent lurking around here managed to tickle my fancy in a good way. If only it didn’t have to end here…
Best of luck for the future to everyone in the team!
I might be disappointed but at least the project got this far. Had Riot not stepped in it probably would’ve been cancelled halfway though, so this is the best we can get.
Really sad that Dwarves aren’t coming but I agree that they wouldn’t exactly fit lorewise any more. Same for Magmasmithes. The cool thing about it is its name implying there would be, well, magma. I was envisioning elaborate magma pumps my dwarven engineers set up to flood a besieging ork army with the fires of hell but that might’ve been me dreaming a bit too much.
@sdee: I’m wondering about the landmarks Allie sketched on one of the streams: shrines, skeletons in the desert etc. Are those still coming? Any other content we can expect like windows, doors and decorations? Just curious.
Edit: I was just watching the latest stream and you actually adressed landmarks coming together with the Geomancer, so that’s that, I guess.
@Raj: You did a tremendous job. Even if not as many people as you were expecting are going to listen to your music, it’s still there. You made it real and it probably taught you a lot. Guess that’s what the whole Stonehearth project is about. Best wishes for the team. This is one of the nicest communities imaginable, you’re all great. Grouphug. Enough writing, I think I got something in my eye.
It could be because of one of those pesky onion-chopping ninjas is near… You might wanna look for them before it’s too late. I think there’s one under my bed right now…
Been here since kickstarter, this is rather a shock that so many promises were just ‘cut from the game’.
I had hoped for bigger worlds, maybe some seafaring, more races.
Anyway, I do enjoy the game and I hope everyone can follow other dreams.
but it does leave me with a pretty sore heart.
With ‘you’ you mean Riot yeah?
I’m glad Riot supported the game so far as they done. But this does feel like a quick ‘wrap’ up.
And I hope Radiant stays a own little part of riot beeing able to develop games and not just become ‘more LoL devs’.
Several mods with that, try looking at them. I’d really prefer Radiant to focus on performance in their limited timeframe - that’s something no one else can do.
@sdee On an engineering level: hope performance and stability get a massive boost, it’s really a bottleneck. Memory leaks still hurt, even if they hurt less than last year.
Also, killing support half a year after release… really sucks. Some may want to move on, but seeing as teams like Chucklefish or Re-Logic can continue support well into the after-release future, I was hoping you could do the same.
Although if you cease being a team after that, it would be really hard. Still… maybe give it some more thought? Or opensource the code (if it is even possible).
On a personal level, while it may sound too personal… is there any way to keep in touch with y’all? Will you be in touch with each other? It was nice to see you work together, and while I may understand the desire of “pursuing other professional goals” after wrapping up SH… I wish I could track your new projects and maybe see y’all together again sometime in the future. Can you tell us something about your new work, or give a link or two to track you?
(when I say “you” I mean Radiant members, not just Steph, although thanks to DTs you’ve became the “voice” of the team )
I can tell you after recreating said leak a few times since reporting, I can’t get to the point where it starts happening to me and save it without it crashing first. I have not gotten the errorcode on my last 3 crashes either for the UI or AI, just straight up blacks out.
Ps. However the idling still happens beforehand and the time of gameplay is still not close to eachother ( over 5 times it’s been 1h, 2h30, 12m, 4hsmth, 40m )
A previous savefile would also help, with some instructions on what happened since you loaded it until it crashed. And other info like was this SP or MP, game version, etc.
That’s fine too, it just means more testing.
Did you report this at Discourse? Which thread is it? We should continue this discussion there, I feel bad derailing the thread
no, i meant radiant, i’m getting the sense its more the team had always known they needed to do this eventually and couldn’t update indefinitely, and while yes riot did say they needed to be finishing up, they let the team get it to a point they could call it “complete”, rather than riot just killing the game (which they very easily could have done)
what you need to understand is that when i say “happily”, i don’t necessarily mean the team got everything they wanted, or that they got to their dream game, or anything like that. but that they were able to get the game to point where they could say “this is the best we can do with what we have available” rather than just letting it fizzle out or get cut off without a 1.0 update.
Since SH was always just something Riot supported because it was Radiant baggage and they want to be kind to Radiant’s customers (thank you so much for that, Riot!), I have a legitimate question:
If, after all of the payrolls supporting SH are gone and those folks have moved on to other projects/places, would Riot be willing to Open Source the game engine? (e.g. what ultimately happened with Glitch)
I ask because large efforts like engine refactoring, the Ember UI work, and so on, could be taken on by the community at-large, with proper access to the uncompiled code.
I just want to say that this game, even though some content was cut from the game, is everything and more I ever would have hoped for.
Honestly, ever I got sucked into Minecraft, I developed this love for building things. Buildings, castle, entire villages and cities even, though there was one thing that I always missed. Something to live inside those places.
Now, somewhere around the time of Alpha 19 or Alpha 20 that I got wind of this game through a previous friend of mine, showing off the game on his YT channel that I immediately bought it to play it. Even back in that state I fell in love with it. The charm of the hearthlings, the building, just everything was all I ever hoped for and was looking for.
Being a software developer myself (or rather, student software developer) I know how difficult it is to make the choice to cut a feature or anything from your software due to a lack of resources, or lack of inspiration, though reading back to why you do that, it seems very justified to say the least. Then again, we as the community, having some great modders out there, should be able to pick up these ideas and then mod them into the game at a later point, and much much more.
So, as a last point, I want to thank the Radiant team for building and delivering a game I have been dreaming of for years, and I hope that we as the community can make some amazing things. Whether that be mods to expand the game, amazing builds to show off, YouTube Let’s Plays and Let’s Builds, etc, I just hope we can keep this game alive and expand on what we already have for a long time left to come.
I must admit that the moment I saw the new outfit of the Blacksmith, I knew the Magmasmith was gone
It felt a lot like “Hey, we really like this stone arm but we’re not using it anymore so we’ll give it to the smith, ok?”
I didn’t see the stream yet, but these landmarks and the Geomancer, are they related? I think it would be interesting if the Geomancer could go out and explore and uncover things from the ground, like landmarks with some harvestable item, or some ruins that might have some random enemies to fight. If the Geomancer could go out and find a new random thing everytime, it would make more use of the map, because as is now, it seems I mostly stay to one small area building a town. You could also send out some military units with the Geomancer for protection, or send workers out to harvest something near the destination, so they are ready to also harvest whatever the Geomancer finds.
Thank you Raj for the lovely soundtrack you composed for Stonehearth. There is alot of variety now that the third faction, Northern Alliance, is available to play as. The sort of 8-bit sound effects in some music for Northern Alliance reminds me of wintery zones from older games.
To be honest, I’m not going to miss the magma smith, animal trainer or the PVP. I agree that those are things that do not fit or cannot be fitted to suit the game. On the other hand, I now understand how people who wanted those feel, because I now have my own tiny list of things I’m going to miss intensely. Fingers crossed some of those will somehow sneak at least into 1.1
I’ve seen this coming for some time now, but the announcement still takes me by surprise. It’s really bittersweet even though I’ve mostly been a lurker, I’ve still been around here for 5 years.
Feature wise I have thought Stonehearth were aproaching a decent level for some time now, but the quality has never really been there so I could play a game from start to finish without game breaking bugs.
Hopefully you can get it there in the time of that’s left.
Content wise pretty much all areas can use improvements but most of it is clearly impossible. For example combat lacks meaning since the attack’s are arbitrary and random.
So I understand your decision and wish you all the best. Even if all kickstarter boxes haven’t been fulfilled you came a long way on a path no one else dared attempt.
You also put in so much effort to keep developing the game after all Kickstarter founds were gone that I really just want to say thank you for the hard work.
You greatly exceeded my expectations and I wish you all the best with whatever you do in the future.
I do hope you let us know somehow. I would love a final desktop Tuesday half a year to a year from now pointing out what your doing.
)
