While this was discussed by Tom and Tony in some of the discussions, I’m raising the idea that somebody might take the base game engine that is Stonehearth and turn it into a completely different game by making a nearly complete overhaul of all of the modable assets in the game.
For example: A space-based asteroid mining game and other heavy science fiction themed assets.
I realize that this is of course something that would take a whole lot of effort and not something lightly done. Never the less, I’ve seen other games that have had this level of detail including some Civilization mods that did really interesting things like creating a Star Trek-themed mod that completely redid the tech tree and had planets instead of cities with black-colored “ocean” tiles and starships. Minecraft has mods like Industrialcraft and Millénaire, both with huge fan communities of their own including separate wikis and even mods of mods in these cases.
Is anybody else considering such a grand overhaul of the game in this fashion? If so, what kinds of “alternative” gameplay ideas are you thinking about? Anybody thinking of doing Minecraft-in-Stonehearth?
Stonehearth: Kingdoms is my name for a much larger scale sort of game, where your main city is the capital of a yet larger kingdom. There is also talk of steam power, so a modernized version could be an order.
If they don’t implement a RTS style mode once true multiplayer hits the net, I’d jump on a team to create it. I really want to turn it into a D&D engine, so much stuff would have to be done to it though, would probably need to be a multi-man operation. I’ll only have one semester of school left when the game goes live so I’ll actually have time to take on such a project.
Perfect opportunity. In the next 24 hours I will have access to a $0.98 domain name .com registration and I was going to devote it to some kind of Stonehearth mod website.
I had in mind of recreating the NWN module CNR (Crafted Natural Resources) that I used a few years ago.
But like I said before it is a bit early to start modding. On the other hand recruiting graphic artists and Lua programmers would be good.
true… i think folks cutting their teeth with qubicle and some simple Lua scripts will go a long way in preparation for getting access to the modding tools, and hitting the ground running…
form what we’ve seen of the impressive talent so far though, i have really high expectations from this community…
i’ll happily toss my hat in the ring for lending some Lua scripts where necessary, and or providing some coding tips/best practices, or even code “reviews”…
those sorts of sessions inevitably end up with both sides learning from the other (there are always new ways to tackle a computing problem)…
There could be a great overhaul that comes out of it. I guess what it comes down to is if you do a high quality complete rewrite is it going to come out free? You are practically making a game of your own at that point. Let’s say you make spacehearth and replace animals with aliens, make new sentient species, add spaceships and vehicles, modify all the music and art assests to sci-fi, change all the game and craft systems, redo a bunch of code, lasers and various other new gears, new classes etc. Do you at that point charge like 10 bucks? Does some of that go back to stonehearth for usage of tools? Do you do it all completely free? Can you get enough modders all wanting the same overhaul? There could be a pretty big variety of amazing ones?
Total conversion mods tend to be free like most other mods, even with super extreme stuff like FfH2 for civ 4 which pretty much changed and extended everything in the game to the point where only the core engine was recognizable, that and when you include money everything starts to get a lot more complicated so I’d say probably free.
We don’t know how much moddability there is yet. I suspect that there may be difficulties in achieving entirely new games, and even greater difficulties in achieving games in different genres.
Making large changes to the game should be possible if you stay within the birds eye view city-builder genre stuff; beyond that, it’s somewhat unclear.
We already know from the Devs comments that "Almost everything in the game can be modded with very few exceptions"
These exceptions being the shaders, load/save routines, and some of the pathfinding. as stated in a thread I posted a couple of weeks ago.
Well given what we’ve seen I’d say you should at least be able to make it into an rpg more like FF or Diablo or whatever else catches your fancy. As long as it’s real time it should definitely be possible and I’m sure you could fake turn based, like turning it into straight RTS should be fairly easy really as it’s nearly there already. I reckon you could replicate a turn based system though using a system of connected action locks.
