Has it been weeks? Months? What is time? Well, quite a bit of it has passed since our last update! Like all of you, the ongoing pandemic has affected our daily lives and livelihood. Just like time blended together, so did our work, and it became harder to separate our regular responsibilities from Stone Story RPG. As a result, development cadence and routine were heavily disrupted. We still managed to get some work done on the game, but it took a bit of time to reevaluate our situation and change gears to get the project moving at a steady pace again. First, well start off with some tangible changes to the game. If youre interested in a deeper devlog, keep reading after!

What's New and Upcoming

• All the locations in Stone Story RPG have been reworked and rebalanced. Basic enemy and boss stats were adjusted to provide a spread of duration with loot quality proportional to the amount of time each location takes to clear.
• The choice of where to place enchantments on your weapons is now more fair.
• Treasure drop rates have been changed to better accommodate the difficulty balances and the inclusion of Offline Farming.
• A new Challenge Event approaches! The fearsome blade of the Fallen God, Pallas, the Skinless will make an appearance later this month. Master its terrible power and reign supreme over your foes with your martial prowess. Challenge Event III begins on October 10th.

Location Balance

Now that business is out of the way, wed like to talk with all of you about how weve been working on the game over these last several weeks. Much of our efforts over the past couple months have involved revisiting every location to tweak and adjust their difficulties. Through the lens of data-driven design, location balances priority was to hit the right feel for optimization of the core gameplay loop and, ultimately, resource gathering. (If youd like to get an idea of how we balanced values, you can take a look at this enemy data template we used here.) As we worked on balancing Stone Story, we tackled the effect that the treasure limit has on the core gameplay loop. As far as over a year ago before Early Access, players would consistently report that treasure limits were too low. They wanted to leave the game farming for longer periods of time and collect loot proportional to that time without having to intervene every few hours or hack the memory to allow more treasures. When your game is built around optimization and grinding, it's a continuous effort to figure out what the solutions are that go beyond simply raising a given limit. Granted, hoarding is an inherent part of progression/loot-based game but we were interested in giving that hoarding more dimensionality.
Offline Farming was a large part of the solution. When combined with this current balance rework on duration and loot tables, the solution for treasure limit takes its form. You can farm a larger location and collect higher quality 400 treasures, or farm a fast location for just a few hours and collect lower quality 400 treasures. The total quality gathered is proportional to the time invested. Instrumental to this process has been one of our community members, DarkLucifer69. Hes used his deep knowledge of the game as a longtime tester and collaborator to help achieve the right feel for weapon values, enemy stats, and the resulting clear times. The clear times are sure to be different per player, and so it's up to each person to figure out which location works best for them. Now there is more choice and that's always the goal.

Reprioritizing Work on the Quest System

Aside from balance changes, we took some time to reevaluate the development pipeline with the current circumstances and have come away with a solution that we feel works best. Up to now, we were engineering-focused, placing priority on further fleshing out Stonescript in order to better support incoming needs for the Quest System. Gene, who we hired to develop Stonescript and its systems, has done a great job of implementing a multitude of systems and mechanics. However, by placing that as our priority we ended up bottlenecking development on the narrative side of the Quest System. Henry, our resident Narrative Designer, had already laid down the foundations for the story arcs and general content flow, but the way the production pipeline was set up, we were waiting on systems to get fully situated before we tried to actually put the quests into the game.
The resulting state of limbo dragged things around until we realized that by putting the narrative content first, we could triage our systemic needs and work them in piece-by-piece as the story content came in quest-by-quest. Wed been gating development with Stonescript milestones when really it should have been more holistic, similar to our approach with the Challenge Events. Weve still got a long road ahead of us, but were confident in both our team and you, our players. Your feedback and support have been utterly crucial to the health and success of the project. Great games arent built in a vacuum, and were thankful that we get to share our work with all of you. If youve read this far: Thank you! As always, we invite anyone interested to join our community on Discord and be a part of the development with us. We hope to see you on October 10th for the next Challenge Event. After that? Well, youll find out soon enough. -SSRPG Team