Stoneshard News

Hello!

In this devlog we will continue to discuss Stoneshard’s psyche system . In the Prologue the psyche system was limited only to positive effects such as Optimism, Heroism, Second Wind and Prudence. You can read more about their mechanic in this devlog. However, these are only the tip of the iceberg – a reward for keeping one's mind in good shape. The rest of the mental states arent’t that nice, and this devdiary will be dedicated to them.

I repeat: these are NOT political coordinates.

I think it’s worth to recall how psyche works in our game in general. Your character has two scales: Sanity and Morale. Sanity is responsible for how adequately your character perceives the world around. Morale show the willingness to perceive the world as it is. The psyche of the character in Stoneshard is based on the interconnection of these two scales, which determine the general pool of possible moods and states, and the various triggers that activate these states.





This combination gives states that are generally harmful, but can be useful and even powerful in some situations. They simulate various conditions in which a person loses control, letting outside his inner beast.



This state increases the survivability of the character in battle, but severely cripples your recovery speed when not in combat.

Trigger: the activation chance can be increased with damaging and killing enemies.

• Critical Chance + 15%
  
• Critical Damage + 30%
  
• Lifesteal + 25%
  
• Energysteal + 25%
  
• Health Restoration -35%
  
• Energy Restoration -35%
  

This state allows the character to draw strength from his own suffering – but it lowers his survivability.

Trigger: the activation chance increases depending on how low your health is, and how high your pain level is.

• Damage Received + 33%
  
• Pain Limit +25
  
• Pain Resistance + 30%
  
• The higher the pain, the more energy is recovered at the end of the turn.
  
• Each point of pain slightly lowers Abilities Energy Cost.
  

Your character throws a tantrum. It causes him to destroy everything in its path, paying very little attention to any resistance he may face.

Trigger: requires active Sadism / Masochism / Megalomania. High pain level, as well as taking and dealing damage, increases the activation chance.

• Decreases Sanity, but increases Morale.
  
• You lose control of your character for 10 turns.
  
• Your character have a chance to apply “Consecutive Blows” skill instead of an ordinary melee hit (even if it isn’t learnt)
  
• Damage Received -50%
  
• Pain Resistance + 90%
  
• Weapon Damage + 33%
  
• Critical Damage + 75%
  

At low Sanity your character tends to pay way too much attention to his own successes. Sometimes it takes morbid forms.

Trigger: the activation chance increases due to successful hits (especially critical ones), killings of multiple enemies and leveling up. Misses and fumbled attacks reduce the chance.

• All player attributes are falsely increased when displayed. The narcissistic character considers himself flawless and therefore is inclined to overstate his real abilities.
  
• Physical, mental and magical debuffs (except for injuries and psyche states) become hidden. Such flaws are way too insignificant to be concerned about.
  
• Bonus Experience: -75%
  

Now we can turn to the next set of states, caused by a combination of low Morale and high Reason. This is reflected by the mood cycle: the longer your character stays depressed, the more disheartened he becomes.



The beginning of a long journey right into the abyss. The character loses the motivation to move on.

Trigger: skipping turns, Rest Mode overuse, no challenges (like enemies in sight) increase the activation chance. The fastest way to shake a character a bit is continuous fights. Don’t let your character to be idle!

• Willpower -10%
  
• Vision -1
  
• Fumble Chance +7%
  
• Fortitude -10%
  
• Sanity Change -0.05 every turn
  
• Bonus Experience -25%
  

Anxiety

Anxiety is reinforced where apathy has taken root.

Trigger: requires Apathy. The lower your health and the lower your morality - the more worrying your character is and the higher the activation chance of this state.

• Willpower -20%
  
• Vision -2
  
• Fumble Chance + 15%
  
• Fortitude -20%
  
• Sanity Change -0.1 every turn
  
• Psionic Resistance -25%
  

A character who has succumbed to despair no longer believes in his own success and just wishes to bring the inevitable end even closer.

Trigger: requires Anxiety. The activation chance depends both on the health and morale levels, as well as hunger, pain, thirst and toxicity levels. The worse your character feels in general, the faster he will fall into despair.

• Willpower -30%
  
• Vision -3
  
• Fumble Chance + 25%
  
• Fortitude -30%
  
• Sanity Change -0.2 every turn
  
• Damage Received +20%
  

Hypochondria is an obsession with one’s own health. When hypochondriac receives even the slightest reason to worry, he starts to think he got gravely sick with every possible disease ever. With the exception of prenatal fever maybe.

Trigger: every untreated disease and every undiagnosed symptom increase the activation chance.

• Willpower -10%
  
• Fortitude -30%
  
• Health Threshold -10%
  
• Pain Resistance -25%
  
• Sanity Change -0.05 for each active undiagnosed symptom
  
• Every turn there is a chance to discover a false symptom. Or maybe a true one? Or maybe a false one though?
  

The effects of the most terrible combination, low Sanity and low Morale, shall remain a secret so far - because of their complexity, they still require some more work and polish. In the meantime, you can turn on your imagination and try to guess how they will work in our game by their names.

See you soon. Until the next devlog!

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Hello!

Yup, it's new devlog time. Currently our team is working on some big features that we aren’t yet ready to showcase, so therefore in today's development diary we will discuss several small improvements and fixes we’ve accumulated. Most of the targeted aspects are probably well known to you because of the Prologue, so I guess today's blog will be pretty interesting.



You don’t have to fix the impassable objects being generated if you can make them destructible.

Firstly, we’ve added the ability to destroy most of the dungeon environment objects. Yes, all those beds, bedside tables and chairs, which previously were purely decorative, now can be properly broken, burnt or blown up. This small innovation introduces a significant variety to tactics, making you to take a different look at the use of the environment in battle. In addition, each environmental object is made of a certain material that sets the level of its resistances to different damage types. For example, wooden furniture can be easily crushed by slashing and blunt weapons, but, let’s say, iron maidens are way tougher.



Verren gets he's probably screwed, but prefers to remain optimistic.

Mysterious vampires doorphobia has long been a target of our community’s mockery. In the public version of the Prologue, timely escaping behind a closed door was an unbeatable strategy: it gave you unlimited time to heal.

Of course, it was an obvious exploit, not intended by us. So recently we’ve told the mobs that doors don’t present any threat to them and can be actually interacted with. However, the type of door interaction depends on enemy’s type.

Small-sized beasts like bats will need looots of time to break the door, however.

For example, vampires have no problems simply opening unlocked doors, while the undead or beasts will try to break them – which means you won’t have that much time to take a breath anymore. By the way, the same goes for any environment objects that prevent mobs from getting to your character.

All this was made possible by changing the door system as well. Now, like the rest of the environment, they have a durability pool, which can be depleted by attacking or using spells. Which means that now you can get injured only when trying to break the door down with your bare hands.



Some pretty angry skeleton.

Another feature added to counter The Most Popular Tactic #2, the scourge of many turn-based roguelikes – endless kiting (referred to as “tactical retreat” by some people). If a player is sure the back areas are secure, he can start to run away – and, because of the turn-based system and the “1 move = 1 action” rule, his enemy will chase him potentially endlessly, unless he has some long-range skills. Usually it was used to reset cooldowns on powerful skills or to lure an opponent to the right spot – for example, closer to the ashfire barrel or spike trap.

Therefore, we’ve added the so-called attacks of opportunity: whenever you try to retreat, the enemies surrounding you may receive a chance to deal a bonus hit. In addition, thanks to the change of the movement system, now enemies will no longer wait for one turn before taking the tile of the retreating player, but will do this instantly. In sum, this makes kiting a disadvantageous strategy, forcing you to rely more on movement/knockback skills if you want to escape some sticky situation. Or, alternatively, level up Agility: high Agility unlocks the perk allowing you to avoid attacks of opportunity.



And finally: some changes were made to the durability system. Previously, durability penalties were calculated dynamically depending on the percentage of lost durability, so your equipment started to get debuffs from the very beginning, which was pretty annoying, honestly.

Now the penalties are divided in tiers: when at > 50% durability, your items won’t receive any penalties; at >25%
That's all for today. See you soon, until the next devlog!

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Hello everyone!

Stoneshard team is back in action, and in this devlog we will talk about another aspect of the global map – biomes.

The global map (alongside with the tiles it's composed of) is generated procedurally. The map is also divided into several climatic zones, which will affect the biomes and the order in which they may be encountered. When moving to the north, the climate conditions will gradually become more harsh: the southern steppes will be replaced by fields and deciduous forests, then pinewoods will take their place, which will finally turn into the snow-covered expanses of taiga and tundra.

Almost every climate option will have a unique visual and some different gameplay features. For example, in fields with their lack of vegetation, it is easier to spot enemies from a distance - which is not true in forests, where trees and complex landscapes make exploration and movement much more difficult.

It's time to show how these biomes look like. While working on the design of the environment, we temporarily turned off the spawning of animals and emeies, so we could enjoy the beauties of Aldor nature in splendid isolation.



Field environments are rather laconic: green meadows, flowers, butterflies, small bushes, boulders, and very rarely – some saplings.



Most of the Forest sprites were completely redrawn to create a more holistic and dense forest feel. Small glades here alternate with areas of dense vegetation.



Pinewoods consist mainly of fir trees and centuries-old pines. The soil here is also different, more dark and stony. Due to the proximity of the mountains, boulders and rocky areas are more common here.



Well, finally the Taiga biome. The main difference from pinewoods is - yes, you’re right – snow. We also plan to introduce some unique gameplay mechanics to this biome, but they are still under discussion.

As you can see on the GIFs above, the weather and lighting will also dynamically change depending on the time of day and the biome. The day gives way to night, the rain got replaced by the fog, and in the northern regions of Aldor you can experience the snowfall.

Some biomes (like the Swamp or the Seashore) are not ready yet, so we will show them next time. That's all for today, see you soon!

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Hello!

Long time no see, eh? But there was a good reason behind that: we’re busy developing a really cool and important feature, which we didn’t want to show ahead of time. As you could’ve guessed from the previous devlogs, it’s a





Initially, we wanted to develop a special complicated algorithm to procedurally generate all streets and buildings locations, so each settlement would look really unique. However, we quickly realized that this approach conflicted with our other goal: make settlements as much detailed and realistic as possible.

Making the algorithm capable of generating plausibly planned villages without weird bugs and illogical chunks turned out to be a daunting task. As a result, we decided that it would be better to make a certain amount of several village structure presets, which will be randomly selected for each individual settlement.

This approach combines the best of both variants: all settlements will look more wholesome due to the manual level design, and at the same time differ from each other. During one single campaign, the same template will not be re-used in any way, since each settlement will have many possible variations unique to it.

Now about the villages in general. Every settlement will have its own set of special buildings, with each offering some unique opportunities for your character. So, a few examples:



That’s it, a smithy. You guessed it – this is the place to quickly repair battered equipment or to purchase some quality weapons and armor.



Herbalist is a rural analogue to city healers. He (or she) will not only help you to treat ailments and wounds, but will also sell some alchemical ingredients from his/her stocks.



Stables is a place where your horses can take a break from the road, receiving a temporary bonus to the caravan movement speed.



Also it’d be possible to enter most of the buildings. The interior inside is also generated procedurally and is fully interactive. If you are a bad person (I hope you’re not), you could steal the last potato from some poor peasant’s family when nobody’s around. Aldor’s having hard time anyways.

So far, the settlement system isn’t anywhere near being finished: there’s still a lot to do to make them fitting our vision. Later we’ll add NPCs, special global map settlement mechanics and many other things, but the foundation was finally laid. So stay tuned, as there will be much more info on this topic in the future devlogs ;)



Now to the other news. After the Prologue’s release, we’ve received a huge amount of complaints, ideas and suggestions; since it’s extremely important for us to consider our playerbase opinion, we also conducted a mass survey of our Kickstarter backers, targeting key issues and problems of Stoneshard. As a result, we realized that almost all aspects of our game need to be corrected or even completely reworked – and that’s what we’ve spent the last three months on. During this period we’ve:

• Changed the attribute system – many attributes have been tweaked, merged or removed to create a more optimized and intuitive experience.
  
  
• Partially implemented perks system.
  
  
• Smoothed some rough edges of our turn-based and collision systems to prevent “evading” AoEs, mob stucking, endless kiting and other similar problems in the future.
  
  
• Changed the balance by stretching up the stats for better scaling of the percentage-based effects.
  
  
• Made many changes to the combat system (e.g. replaced Mana with Energy, which is now required to use even non-magical skills).
  
  
• Changed the hunger, thirst, pain and intoxication systems, replacing the random increases with more transparent and consistent scales.
  
  
• Injury system was completely revamped. Now RNG doesn’t affect them at all, and you’ll be able to check the risks anytime (more on this in some future devlog).
  
  
• Changed the hit algorithm, as well as resist/armor systems. Yes, piercing weapons are no longer effective against skeletons.
  
  
• Speaking of resists: we’ve finally introduced a system of different damage types with their unique effects and properties.
  
  
• Completely reworked and reconstructed many UI elements.
  
  
• Made quite a few edits to improve the game’s usability. For example, fulfilled a popular demand to loot single items without opening a separate loot window.
  
  
• And many, many other changes.

To make it possible we had to make changes to our initial development pipeline, devoting time reserved for main game’s development to all these reworks. Nevertheless, we believe that such measure were definitely necessary and worth it, and in the end will benefit both the game and our players. Therefore, we decided to shift the initial Alpha and Beta test dates by about a couple of months: the release of backers alpha should be expected in December 2018, with Beta and Early Access being postponed as well.

That's all. Our follow-up plans should not take as much time as the settlements did, so we will try to post devlog on a weekly basis just as before.

See you soon!

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Hello!

Initially we planned to tell you more about settlement generation, but this system requires some more time to polish, so today’s update will be dedicated to the art rework.

When we first started developing Stoneshard, we planned it to be a small-scale coffeebreak roguelike, taking place in a fairytale fantasy world, kind of similar to Fable and Torchlight ones. Back then our lore was very vague, as we planned to finish the game in a year and move on to more "serious" projects.

However, with a course of time this initial barebones concept was reinforced with many fresh ideas and new mechanics. Then we began to understand that Stoneshard is already becoming that serious project we planned to work on later. So, both our vision and game setting have significantly changed and eventually became something you currently know: gloomy and quite realistic medieval world, torn apart by wars, epidemics and disasters.

Many enemies, items and objects that you may have encountered while playing the Prologue were created at the very beginning of the Stoneshard development back in 2016, when we were making literally a different game. The need to rework some of the art became a necessity, so when we started to revamp many core game systems after Kickstarter’s end, we felt like there’s no better time than now.



Let’s start with skeletons, which became much more gloomy and grim-looking. Previously, they looked like they weren’t wasting their time while being dead: their bones were perfectly white and armor looked new and shiny. Now they seem more dangerous, soulless and believable: we also removed the glowing effect from their eyes to give them more sinister and less magical look. An animated pile of faded bones looks much more threatening than a whitey glowing skeleton in sparkling armor, isn’t it?



These changes also affected the vampires. Previously, they did not look really frightening, and rather produced the impression of transformed people who were not particularly happy with their new vampire lives. Now their bestial origin has become more accentuated, so it will help to perceive them as something they are – dangerous monsters.



In addition, some weapon and armor sprites were also reworked, as their design became more realistic and detailed. We also finished working on the entire line of one-handed swords and moved on to the other weapon types.

Soon we plan to release an update, including fan localizations and many of the changes described above, so stay tuned and have fun!

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