Hi!

Were delighted to take part in the Steam Game Festival (June 16 - June 22), which is already live now! Throughout the event we've brought demos for each of the 8 games we are currently working on.



All of them are in different genres, settings and styles. You will surely find something that piques your interest! All the content available for Steam Summer Festival is free, some demos are long, some allow infinite play. Here is a little sneak peek of every title available.

Voidtrain



Voidtrain is a first-person action/survival game where you become a crew member of an interdimensional express. Build your own train, upgrade it, craft weapons and travel across different mysterious worlds full of outlandish creatures, Nazis and other dangers.

https://youtu.be/o0bIODWSX5Y

Voidtrains demo features a base loop of the game, where youll be able to travel between biomes on your train, gather resources to upgrade it and stop by interdimensional train depots filled with Nazis ought to be defeated.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1159690/Voidtrain/

Tunche



Tunche is a charming, hand-drawn beat'em up hack and slash game with roguelike elements, co-op and a pinch of shaman witchcraft. Visit the amazonian jungle alone or together with your friends, choose one of the 5 unique characters and hack through hordes of enemies!

And if you like A Hat in Time, we got a big surprise for you Hat Kid will be the 5th Playable Character in the game. Moreover, youll be able to test her in the demo!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/887450/Tunche/

Linked Mask



Do you miss the golden era of Game Boy? Linked Mask is a 2D platformer that will make you reminiscent of the good old days, where a player has to overcome six towers, collect six masks containing elemental powers and ultimately conquer the Castle of the Primals. And theres a chillingly cool soundtrack that will make your head bop as you traverse the deadly Towers!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1111590/Linked_Mask/

Jack Move



Plunge into a VHS-era cyberpunk world of Jack Move, an RPG featuring japanese style turn based battles and gorgeous Hi-Bit pixel art. Take on the role of Noa, a vigilante hacker who is thrust into a world of murder, kidnapping and dark research after her father goes missing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yOLVvhsJFw

Theres a brand new demo of Jack Move available that features a new slums area, a new dungeon and a whole bunch of new enemies for you to tangle with.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1099640/Jack_Move/

Black Book



Black Book is a dark RPG Adventure based on Slavic mythology and featuring card-based combat. You will take on the role of Vasilisa, a young sorceress on a quest to revive her beloved one. In order to do so, she has to uncover all the 7 seals of Black Book a demonic artefact, said to be powerful enough to grant any wish.

The demo features an essential part of the story the First Day of Vasilisa becoming a witch. Youll be able to test test the core game mechanics, battle regular demons and even test your strength in a fight against a boss.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1138660/Black_Book/

There Is No Light



There Is No Light is a pixel-art action adventure in a dark post-apocalyptic setting, which tells a story of a protagonist fighting against a fallen underground civilization and its appalling religious rituals.

In this demo youll be able to explore a small part of the game world. Visit a village, the existence of which remained unknown for a long time. Find out how people live in the underground world ruled by the Church of the Great Hand. Find your own playstyle by combining 3 available weapon types, so that eventually you can fight a giant boss Behemoth that gets in your way to freedom.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1132980/There_Is_No_Light/

Tower Princess



Tower Princess is a 3D roguelike action platformer where you'll have to beat a dungeon, defeat a dragon, rescue a princess/prince and manage a perfect date with them! Theres a wide variety of royalty members you can hit on youll be able to find someone you like even if youre not into humans.

The demo is a linear and brief sample of a run in one of the Castle's areas. It shows the visuals and the core gameplay of Tower Princess, but it's focused on the princess aid in combat, as without her help, you wouldn't stand a chance against the Evil Dragon. Are you ready to test yourself as a knight in shining armour?

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1138650/Tower_Princess/

SuchArt!



SuchArt is a painting sim game featuring you being such an amazing artist. Really you rock, your latest DNA test is very positive about it. Now please paint, sell and expose your art from your new studio aboard the Space City. And dont forget the only limit is the size of your brush (or a flamethrower).

SuchArt demo features a separate room (a virtual studio instead of a real one youll get in the full game) with a limited amount of tools and an introductory part of the story. However, youll be able to test the core game mechanics and take a couple of commissions from virtual clients, which is already fun!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1293180/SuchArt/

Greetings!

We'd like to thank all those who've been supporting us all this time. Our game is about to enter into the next stage, and we hope we can see it through together.
You can purchase the game here:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/625960/Stoneshard/

You can learn about the development plan and see answers to the most frequently asked questions in the previous news post.

[h3]PROLOGUE UPDATE[/h3]
In short, its now required to complete the Prologue before playing in Adventure Mode, since its an important part of the story, serving as a tutorial to basic game mechanics. Because of that weve decided to make the Prologues difficulty curve less steep to better ease new players into the game and allow them to delve into the open world as soon as possible. The changes mostly affect the boss fight and some secondary mechanics. Other than that, the Prologue remains a formidable challenge to your tactical ability.

The Prologue can be completed as part of the main game as well as separately. If you completed the Prologue after the December update and before you purchased the main game, you will be able to skip it and start playing in Adventure Mode right away.
[h3]CHANGELIST[/h3]

• New localizations: Simplified Chinese, German, and Polish
  
• Added a checkpoint before the boss fight
  
• Increased food drop rates
  
• Hunger and thirst gains are reduced
  
• New jewelry and helmets!
  
• Rebalanced geomancy
  
• Boss fight: the statues are now less resistant to slashing and piercing types of damage
  
• Boss fight: Reborn Archons health, damage, and life drain are reduced by 10-20%
  
• Various small fixes and improvements!
  

Hello everyone!

As a reminder, its just 3 days until the Early Access release! Thats why wed like to answer some of the most frequently asked questions as well as tell you about the current status of the game, what will happen during the EA, and our plans for the future.

Early Access is just the beginning of the long way, which we are yet to walk with your support. There are still lots of mechanics and content to be added. Well need approximately 2 years to implement everything weve planned.

Lets start with the most important part - the current content. Right now the basic gameplay cycle is pretty much in place. Combat, dungeon crawling, health system, character development, and economy are all functional.

To fully explore all the content with one character, youll need around 7-10 hours, which is roughly translated into gaining 8-10 experience levels.

Currently in-game content includes:

• Two settlements - Osbrook and Mannshire
  
• Two types of dungeons
  
• Three enemy factions: brigands, the undead, proselytes
  
• 16 types of contracts
  
• 200+ items and 100+ abilities
  
• Hunting
  
• Health system
  
• Economy
  

• Supporter pack. It will be available on release for $10 and will include OST along with two unique starting items (they dont offer major gameplay advantage). In the future the pack will be expanded with, among other things, a digital manual and an artbook. These items are granted automatically to every purchaser of the Supporter pack, there will be no need to buy them separately.
  
• The Prologue. It will be included in the main game, so you wont have to download and play the Prologue as a separate game. It also doesnt matter how you complete it or what items, experience, character build, etc. you acquire there -- these things are part of the story of a separate character. If youve already finished the Prologue, youll be able to start playing in an open world right away.
  
• Permadeath. Even though the game is balanced around permadeath mechanic, enabling it is purely optional, and youll be able to turn it off when starting a new game. If you play without permadeath, you can resume your game from the latest save.
  
• Save system. Its only possible to save the game in taverns. To save your progress, you need to find a tavern, rent a room, and sleep for any amount of time. Unfortunately the games engine doesnt allow saving anywhere and anytime when the game is this expansive.
  
• Progress wipes. Large updates which add new mechanics will likely lead to save file incompatibility. However, if you want to continue playing as a character from a previous version, you can rollback to the previous version of the game via Steam game options.
  
• Languages. English, Russian, Chinese, German and semi-official fanmade Polish will be available on release. We also plan to add the following languages soon: Spanish, French, Italian, and Brazilian Portuguese. The work on them will begin soon after the EA release. In the future we also plan to add Korean and Japanese localizations.
  
• Multiplayer and co-op. They are not planned, the game is an exclusively single-player experience.
  
• Achievements and trading cards. They are planned, but not for the nearest future.
  
• The main story is not yet available. For now there is only a sandbox mode, where you can travel between the settlements, fulfill contracts, and explore dungeons. We want to finish the game mechanics and content first before we add the main story as a single large expansion, which will arrive right before the game leaves the Early Access.
  
• Full keyboard and gamepad support. At the moment the controls are designed for the mouse, but we plan to improve keyboard controls in the future and add gamepad support.
  
• Mac and Linux. The game will be available for Linux on release. Mac OS support will be added later, the date is TBA.
  
• GOG release. Its planned, but not for the first few months.
  

Hello everyone!

Were here to remind you only 7 days left until Stoneshard launches in Early Access on the 6th of February! For those of you still wondering, the price tag will be $15 for the US / 15 for the EU.

To celebrate this, weve just released our launch trailer. Check it out!

[previewyoutube=QSkQ9jwvLe4;full][/previewyoutube]

In the coming week prepare for more news and updates, including our Early Access FAQ, development roadmap and other interesting things.

Cheers!

Hello everyone!

This devlog is dedicated to a variety of small tweaks and improvements, which have accumulated over the last few weeks.

[h3]Cooking[/h3]

Casual cooking is the best way to ease your mind after slaughtering the whole bunch of bandits.

Ever since the old Prologue, many players have been complaining that there are no uses for raw meat. In fact, we do have a fairly complex cooking and ingredient system planned, but implementing it is a very complex task, so it wont be coming any time soon. Nevertheless, there is already a need for some option to cook meat acquired from hunting - thats why weve added a small placeholder system, which will allow roasting it. To do it, you will need to find a campfire or an oven, start a fire, and cook raw meat through the context menu. Simple, fast, filling.

[h3]Expanded Map and More Dungeons[/h3]


With the addition of a new village (well tell you more about it in the next devlog), the necessity of expanding the map became rather apparent. As a result, the map is now almost twice as large. Every village is also surrounded with its own dungeons, which are repopulated with enemies after a certain amount of time.

[h3]New Items[/h3]



The amount of available equipment has been increased with the addition of new, regular gear, as well as some special, unique items. Unique items can only be acquired in a single copy and are often gained in a very specific way - during certain encounters or as a rare drop after killing an appropriate miniboss. These are not legendary items, so they dont have any unique properties, but they are generally better than the alternatives of the same level. All preset characters also start the game with two unique items, unobtainable in any other way.

[h3]Purses & Bags[/h3]



During the closed beta, many players complained that inventory space is too limited and is too fast to get cluttered with gold. Weve fixed this problem with the addition of purses - special containers, which can only hold crowns. A purse only takes up two inventory spaces, while being able to hold up to 2000 coins, saving lots of space.

Backpacks are equipped in the cloak slot, adding 12 extra spaces, which increases your inventory capacity by almost 25%. Why just 12 spaces? Because thats the exact amount of space taken up by a backpack if you put it in your inventory. We wanted to avoid the situations when players fill their inventories with many backpacks to maximize their inventory capacity. In our game the small inventory size is vital for balance and is an important tactical element, meant to encourage players to plan and optimize their equipment.

We dont plan to add item stacks, as they interfere with the sense of size for each individual item. However, we plan to add more bag types for different items, such as tubes for storing scrolls, alchemy pouches for potions and ingredients and so on.

[h3]Geomancy Tweaks[/h3]

Geomancy is the most unique magic school in the game at the moment. However, it had many problems: it was fairly independent from gear, and it could become an absolute weapon from level one if used correctly.

Our task was to fix it without affecting other well-loved abilities. As a result, Runic Boulder, the cornerstone of the skill tree, was the only ability which got significantly rebalanced. Its problems included overly strong bonuses, lack of cooldowns, and no adverse effects of using the spell. These factors resulted in preventive boulder spam before each battle instead of placing boulders tactically.



To fix this, weve rebalanced the effect of Runic Empowerment, making it less versatile. Weve also added a small 2 turns cooldown between raising boulders, as well as introduced energy cost for maintaining them. Each boulder now drains 2 energy points per turn. If your characters energy runs out, the summoned boulders crumble. On top of this, boulders crumble if the caster loses sight of them, so its no longer possible to lure enemies into rooms with pre-casted boulders.


Little QoL-improvement. Now you don't need to re-cast boulders to get rid of them.

Some other geomancy spells also had their numbers tweaked: for instance, stone spikes and stone armor durations have been reduced. To compensate for that, energy costs for all geomancy spells are lower as well - its now possible to create more complicated spell combinations without running out of energy. Thanks to these combined changes, geomancy now feels way more tactical, while still being very powerful in skilled hands, remaining just as fun to use as before.

Thats all for now. Until next time!

====================

Also you can follow us on:

• Our Steam Creator page
  
• Discord
  
• Twitter
  
• Facebook
  

Hello everyone!

In todays devlog, wed like to share some details about the character selection system.
As some of you may not know, Verren isnt the main character of our game. He only comes under your control in the Prologue. In the main game, however, he is an employer and a mentor figure to your character.



We plan to introduce an option to create your own mercenary, but at the moment the game lacks systems necessary for implementing a fully working character generator. Instead, we added an option to choose from four preset characters. Each of them has their own appearance, portrait, starting inventory, starting attributes, some special dialogue options and also a unique perk, unavailable to other characters.

An important thing about preset characters is that they have affinities, governing which skills are initially unlocked. For instance, Jorgrim is good with melee weapons and can start leveling swords, axes and maces from the get go. But to learn starting skills of the pyromancy and geomancy trees, hell have to find a corresponding treatise first.

We intend to expand this system at the same time as working on the character generator. According to our plans, some heroes will have access to unique content, which cant be discovered when playing as other characters. For now this type of content is represented with unique starting equipment. For example, Arna starts the game with a family cuirass and sword, which cant be obtained in any other way. We also plan to expand the character selection as we add more skill trees.

Some may ask: but what about classes? How do they fit into this system? Yes, at first we did consider adding classes, but as the development went on, it became quite clear that it would be completely redundant. Class abilities came in conflict with our vision for character development, and they werent really working with all possible archetypes, forcing you to play in a very specific manner. We wanted to avoid that. Class abilities also turned out to be fairly generic and boring when compared to common skill trees. As a result it was decided to transfer the best ideas into the existing skill trees and get rid of the rest.

Now let us present you with the backstories and affinities for each character:

[h3]Jorgrim, the Reaver[/h3]



Affinity: Axes, Swords, Maces, Shields
Unique trait: Berserker Frenzy (increased Weapon Damage and Crit Efficiency for 10 turns after every kill)

Bio:

Not so long ago people of Aldor would shake in their boots the moment someone mentioned Tyr the One-eyed, a legendary leader of Fjall brigands. Tyr's band was infamous for their audacious raids on the northern border - even well armed troops of the local lords suffered defeat after defeat from these ferocious dwarfs. Jorgrim was one of them, the best warrior in the band, he hadn't lost a single battle in his life.

Yet as time went by, the One-eyed's brutality towards captured settlements became too unsettling even for his own underlings. Jorgrim was the one who despised unnecessary cruelty the most: he always held a belief that violence against the weak and defenseless is unworthy of a true warrior.

It's unknown when Tyr crossed the final line, but eventually Jorgrim's patience ran short and the brigand leader's scalp found its place in the dwarf's long list of trophies. Left without guidance, the band fell apart: some dwarfs returned to Fjall, while others, including Jorgrim, decided to go south and try their luck as mercenaries.

[h3]Arna, the Maiden Knight[/h3]



Affinity: Swords, Maces, Shields, Greatswords
Unique trait: Vow of the Feat (every enemy within your vision range decreases Cooldowns Duration and Abilities Energy Cost)

Bio:

Few noble houses of Aldor can boast history as impressive as of the House of der Vyrne. By law, the title of a knight can only be passed down to a man, so it's not hard to imagine the chagrin of Arna's father, when after years of fruitless attempts his long awaited heir turned out to be a girl.

To save his house, Arna's father decided to invoke an ancient custom of the northern foothills: Arna was to be raised as a boy. Her entire childhood and youth were dedicated to rigorous training and serving as a page to one of the noble families. When she reached adulthood, Arna was knighted. Over multiple tournaments, she managed to earn herself a reputation as a skilled warrior.

Unfortunately Arna never had a knack for the most important skill to an aldorian noble - scheming. Soon after her father's death, Arna lost her fief, her title and her inheritance - the House of der Vyrne ceased to exist. Shaken by these events, Arna gave an oath to redeem herself by a heroic deed and embarked on an endless journey into the lands of Aldor.

[h3]Dirwin, the Woodward[/h3]



Affinity: Ranged Combat, Axes, Maces, Daggers
Unique trait: Sharp Eye (every tile between you and your enemy increases Crit Chance)
Bio:

Dirwin spent most of his life in loyal service to the late king, relentlessly patrolling the hunting grounds of his Majesty. He had great aim, knew the forest as the back of his hand and very few poachers, orcs and monsters survived their encounter with the royal ranger. Over his years of service, Dirwin eradicated countless dangers lurking in the woods, making one notch after another on his bow.

After King Etbert's death, the Royal Rangers disobeyed the Council's orders and refused to participate in the fratricidal war. As a punishment, the unit was disbanded, so Dirwin took his weapons and headed back into the woods.

During the war he continued to do what he always did: fulfill contracts and bounties, hunt dangerous monsters and help peasants. Common folks rightfully consider him their stalwart protector.

[h3]Jonna, the Runaway Sorceress[/h3]



Affinity: Staves, Daggers, Geomancy, Pyromancy
Unique trait: Arcane Lore (each learned spell increases Magic Power)
Bio:

Since ancient times there is a strong belief in Aldor, that women and magic don't go well together and can only bode ill. Lectors of the Academy fully shared this prejudice, rarely eager to accept women for magic training. However, Jonna's talent for magic was so great, that they decided to make an exception.

After completing her training with flying colors, Jonna became a court sorceress to one of the aldorian nobles. Unfortunately her lord had a rather foul temper, something Jonna wouldn't put up with. One morning servants discovered their master's body burned to a crisp. The sorceress' sudden escape didn't leave much room for interpretation.

If it wasn't for the war breaking out, Jonna would have likely been caught and burned at the stake, but in the chaos of the Strife she managed to elude the chase by joining a mercenary band.

------------

Just Jonna picking some field herbs.

Thats all for now. Until next time!

Also you can follow us on:

• Our Steam Creator page
  
• Discord
  
• Twitter
  
• Facebook
  

Hello!

We're glad to inform that Stoneshard: Prologue is now available on Linux. Recommended OC is Ubuntu 18.04 LTS 64bit. Other distributives may work as well, but they weren't tested.

It is important to note that depending on your version of Ubuntu additional dependencies may need to be installed to play the game. These dependencies are:

libcurl4
libopenal1

You may need to install these packages otherwise the game won't run.

Also, we hotfixed being able to move and fight during cutscenes and possibility to kill Archon with bow during the first phase.

Take care!

Hello!

We are glad to present you our last patch both this year and before the release of the main game. There is not much time left before Early Access launch, therefore we again return to the development of the main game. Right now most frequent bugs and major grievances seem to be fixed, so enjoy the updated version and Happy New Year!

[h2]Bugfixes & Stability[/h2]

• Fixed Waterskin not decreasing Intoxication when used.
  
• Fixed Torture Tools dropping herbs when searched.
  
• Fixed Deadly Trick not exchanging places when Blood Golem if its killed with this skill.
  
• Fixed arrows visually stucking in the doorways.
  
• Rapid Restoration potion buff now also restores a set amount of health each turn, thus becoming actually usable in battles.
  
• Fixed environmental objects not displaying their names in the events log.
  
• Fixed Keeping Distance skill not always triggering an attack.
  
• Fixed extensive weapon buff stacking.
  
• Fixed a possibility to overlap exploding Blood Golem with some other object.
  
• Fixed Archon not using his Backwards Dash skill.
  
• Lots of typos, misspellings and mistakes fixed.
  
• Fixed weapon crit effects and damage special effects not considering corresponding resistances.
  
• Outcast no longer speaks lines. He is an unintelligent monster after all.
  

• New visual effect for completing actives tasks.
  
• Various minor visual fixes.

• Abilities now automatically unlock when you load. No need to read treatises every new try.
  
• Mobs no longer spawn near floor transitions.
  
• Some skills and stat hovers were edited for better readability.
  

• Tweaked item drops formula to provide more gradual and just loot distribution. Youre more likely to find better items on the second floor now.
  
• Items rarity was rebalanced so you may encounter some new items during your runs right now.
  
• Rebalanced Maces and Greatswords damage.
  
• Containers had their HP rebalanced. Barrels and Crates have less health, while large containers have more.
  
• Destroyed non-searched containers now properly drop loot as well.
  
• Food drops a bit rarer now, as previous drops were way too abundant.
  
• Randomized loot on the mercenarys corpse a little. Increased pool of his possible weapons.
  
• Decreased Archons Life Drain and Energy Drain attributes (33% > 13%).
  
• Decreased duration of Curses applied by Unholy Damage special effect.
  
• Increased duration of Confusion applied by Psionic Damage special effect.
  
• Staves: Hail of Blows strikes now deal -60% damage instead of -50% damage
  
• Shields: Reduced default Block Chance (60% > 50%) and duration (3 > 2) of the Raise Shield skill. Tweaked Shield Bash and Breakthrough damage formulas.

[h3]Hotfix #3[/h3]

• Fixed scrolls causing crashes when opening chests
  
• Fixed Keeping Distance skill causing character to attack doors if used in a doorway
  
• Fixed Potion of Purification removing injuries
  
• Increased Bad Trip chance for Stardust
  
• Increased starting weapons damage by 1 point
  
• Many minor visual fixes
  
• Fixed Fortitude increased by Vitality and not Willpower
  
• Nerfed Proselyte Outcast a little
  
• Fixed Sponge causing Sleep for 15 turns instead of 10
  
• Decreased noise caused by most characters actions
  
• Added missing Piercing Resistance for doors
  
• Several text improvements

• Fixed heavy helmets Vision penalty causing Archon to "disappear" during the boss fight
  
• Fixed dual weapons strikes reducing skill cooldowns
  
• Fixed permanent inability to use skills after switching floors while being silenced
  
• Fixed Phantom Bats skill not working properly
  
  

• Fixed Melting Ray-related crash
  
• Re-adjusted spawnrates in Abbey's Cellars. They should be less swarmed now.
  
• Slightly increased food droprate from crates and barrels.
  
• Proselyte Outcast's Blood Craze skill not longer gives stackable Crit Chance
  
• Decreased Ascended Archon's Backward Dash cooldown by 1 turn.
  
• Buffed damage done by all Greatswords
  
• Slightly decreased Vision penalty from heavy helmets
  
• Fixed several typoes
  

This is mostly an effort to fix most frequent bugs and bring difficulty curve in line, as second floor and boss fight turned out to be particularly easy.

Stability & Fixes

• Various crashes and bugs fixed
  
• Several text typos and mistakes fixes
  

• Decreased spawn rates in the Old Catacombs. Increased spawn rates in the Abbey's Cellars.
  
• Increased Proselytes health and damage by roughly 7-15%, depending on type
  
• Increased Body Part Healing of Salves (10% > 12%)
  
• Added missing description for Proselyte Harbinger

• Feint Strike damage penalty decreased (30% > 25%)
  
• Riposte effects increased (Block Chance 12.5% > 15%, Block Power 10% > 15%)
  

• Statues HP increased by 13%
  
• Summoned Zombies deal 70% more damage and have 25% more health.
  

• Damage increased (18 > 26)
  
• Curse duration reduced (15t > 13t)
  

• Damage increased (6 > 8)
  

• Healing increased (25% > 50%)
  
• Damage Buff duration fix (3t > permanent, as was intended)
  

Hello everyone!

Ink Stains Games here! Wed like to wish all of you Happy Holidays and to present you the long awaited update for the Prologue as a Christmas gift.

The original Prologue was published in May 2018. At the time it was more of a proof of concept, designed to demonstrate Kickstarter backers our vision of the future game. A lot of time has passed since then, most systems of the game have changed beyond recognition. And at some point the Prologue grew so outdated that updating it became a priority.

Now the Prologue is mechanically equal to the main game and we hope it will make it easier to wait for the February release :)

The list of changes is too expansive to be presented in detail after all, this update includes a year and a half of hard work. The Prologues structure remains the same, but if we are to list the most important changes, here is what you should expect from this update:

• An improved tutorial with detailed advice on main game mechanics.
  
• Vampires were swapped with Proselytes a new group of enemies with their own set of abilities.
  
• A reworked boss fight, which now consists of two consecutive phases instead of two parallel outcomes.
  
• A reworked health, injury and needs system. The old Prologue had it functioning based on RNG. Now its a transparent, deterministic process which you can assess at any time.
  
• More weapons, equipment and all kinds of items.
  
• Abilities from the closed beta are now available in the Prologue.
  
• Destructible environment. Press CTRL to attack environmental objects!
  
• Reworked Dual Wielding system.
  
• Lots of QoL improvements: better controls, more hotkeys, item comparison, inventory auto-sorting, pop-up hints and more. Though keep in mind that the game is designed primarily for mouse controls.
  
• Most of the game art was reworked.
  
• Dialogues and lore notes were rewritten to better clarify the opening events of the story. New voice-overs for the characters.
  
• Lots of changed and added mechanics (reworked Attributes, for instance).
  
• A reworked UI.
  
• Fullscreen support for 1366768, 1440900, 1600900, 16801050, 19201080 and 19201200 resolutions.
  
• Added an event log.
  
• Last Hope and At What Cost? achievements were replaced by The Bitter Beginning and Eternal Hunger achievements. The rest of the achievements were updated to fit with the content changes.
  
• Enemies learned how to open doors.
  

Hello everyone!

In this devlog well tell you what to expect from the updated Prologue which we plan to release this year.

Since the release of the Prologue in May 2018 almost every aspect of the game has changed so much, that the current Prologue will rather confuse newcomers than introduce them to the game. Therefore we decided to put an effort into updating its systems and mechanics so that theyll better reflect the state of the main game.

Its worth mentioning that the Prologue will remain free and will also be included in the main game, where it will serve as a tutorial and an introduction to the story. It means that you can complete it both as a standalone version as well as a part of the main game. Your actions in the Prologue will not have any effect on your main game so dont worry about transferring progress. The only thing to keep in mind is that if you finish the Prologue beforehand, youll be able to skip it in the main game and go straight to creating your character.



The Prologues structure will remain almost exactly the same. Youll still find yourself in a dungeon, escape, complete a tutorial floor and then fight your way through two procedurally generated floors to challenge the final boss. Weve also introduced quite a number of changes to the tutorial. For instance - more visible and descriptive popups, explaining games mechanics. We hope that it will provide a better introduction to the game.

As for game systems and mechanics, everything is now up to date with the current build of the main game. Reworked UI, relevant stats and abilities, new health and injury system, more transparent display of hunger and thirst, better dungeon generation, destructible objects and enemies opening doors it will all be included in the updated Prologue.



Content wise there are many noticeable changes, especially for those who didnt take part in the closed beta test. Since the release of the original Prologue weve added a huge number of new equipment and also changed most of the old stuff, so youll see lots of new items. Weve also changed starting enemies. Now instead of vampires youll fight against a cult of Proselytes, boasting fresh new enemy types and abilities. Other than that, all dialogues were rewritten to better accommodate story and setting changes.



And finally, the boss fight. Its safe to say that it has been improved the most. First of all, the Cursed Chapel was completely remade in accordance with our increased quality standards. Second, weve added a few tweaks to the fight with the statues. For instance half the spells is tied to one statue, while the other is to the second one. Respectively, by destroying one of the statues, youll prevent the Archon from casting blood bolts and puddles or stop him from summoning and healing zombies.



Third, the battle with the reborn Archon which used to be an optional secret, is now a mandatory second phase of the fight. The Archon himself was naturally changed as well, now possessing quite a few new abilities. You should be able to beat him by strategically exploiting his weaknesses. What are those? Youll have to find out yourself.

Thats it for now. Well announce a date for the Prologue very soon, so stay tuned.
Until next time!

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Greetings everyone!

Over the last month weve got lots of news to share. Since September 20th weve been conducting a Closed Beta Test. Thanks to our testers, weve collected a lot of feedback and fixed many bugs. Therefore, this devlog is split in two parts: well present weapons and weapon abilities for those, who havent seen beta version gameplay, and then well get to our future plans for the game.

Overall there are 13 types of weaponry planned for the game: swords, axes, maces, daggers, greatswords, greataxes, greatmauls, spears, bows, crossbows, staffs and shields. In turn-based games the majority of weapons functions in a similar manner, so we tried our best to bring as much variety to stats, crit effects and abilities as possible. Specifics go as follows:


Click for fullscreen

At the moment weve implemented 8 skill trees out of planned 12. Skill trees more or less share the same structure: one-handed weapons have 8 abilities 4 actives and 4 passives. Two handed weapons have slightly more abilities, 10 of them overall. Its been designed this way to compensate for more narrow build paths. While a player with an one-handed sword can also learn shields (or dual-wield with any other one-handed weapon), two-hander warrior has fewer options.

The same principle applies to daggers they are more effective when dual wielded, so their skill tree also has 2 extra abilities. Other than that, weve combined bow and crossbow abilities into a single large skill tree. This will provide archers with an extensive and engaging leveling path and will allow them to use two weapon types.

Now lets have a closer look at the abilities in question. We are striving for a reasonably realistic setting, so weapon skill trees are mechanically and conceptually more limited than magic. Though each skill tree is built around distinct mechanics and implies special skill rotations which you discover as you invest your skill points. Unfortunately, abilities are quite numerous and we wouldnt want to stretch out this devlog, so well skip passives and have a quick look at active abilities, supplementing it all with gifs, showing complete skill rotations for each skill tree. Please keep in mind that on most of these gifs characters are overpowered to make GIFs shorter and more entertaining to watch.

Swords


Swords are distinguished by their versatility and mobility.

Onrush a swift dash towards the enemy.
Keeping Distance a defensive maneuver with an attack on retreat.
Cleaving Strike a mighty AoE attack, which increases you Counter Chance.
Fencers Stance a powerful buff to Block and Counter chances, which stacks on successful attacks.

Axes


Axes are focused around crippling enemies with injuries.

Mutilating Lunge lets you open a fight with an injury.
Cut Through does bonus damage to armored and wounded enemies.
Massacre increases Bleed Chance and Bodypart Damage with each strike.
Execution deals tremendous damage to injured foes.

Maces


Maces are the best crowd weapon as most of their abilities are focused around Dazing and Stunning your opponents.

Onslaught allows you to burn enemys Energy, Knock them back, move one tile forward and then apply Daze.
Armor Break does significant damage to Armor, especially if the target is Stunned or Dazed and also increases further damage taken by the enemy.
Finish Off does bonus damage for each remaining turn of Stun or Daze affecting the enemy and also puts their abilities on cooldown.
Hammer and Anvil does bonus Armor Damage with a chance to Daze as with the rest of the weapon buffs, its stacked by delivering attacks.

Clarification: Stun forces enemies to skip their turn. Daze is comparable to silence effect, preventing enemies from using abilities.

Daggers


Dagger abilities were designed to rely on skillful execution to compensate for their low damage.

Double Lunge allows to deliver two strikes with high Bleed Chance.
Deadly Trick switches places with an enemy, burns their Energy and grants you 100% Dodge Chance for the next turn.
Gaping Wound applies an effect, which makes enemies bleed when they use their abilities.
Coup De Grace deals bonus damage to wounded and bleeding enemies.
And finally, Painful Stabs is a stacking buff to Bleed and Crit chances.

Greatswords


Greatsword is a powerful and self-reliant weapon. Inability to wield it with a secondary weapon or a shield is compensated by high damage output and a wide variety of abilities.

Feint Swing lets you trick an enemy with high Block or Dodge, delivering a guaranteed strike with slightly lower damage.
Heroic Charge allows you to instantly close the distance to an enemy, dealing bonus damage for each tile traveled.
Feast of Steel lowers you damage but increases your Crit Chance to 100%, granting AoE cleave for your attacks.
Parry increases Block Chance and Block Power with each blocked attack. It also allows you to perform a guaranteed Counter on block.
And finally, Arc Cleave strikes up to five adjacent enemies with high Bleed Chance an indispensable skill for when you find yourself surrounded.

Staffs


Staffs mostly serve as a support weapon. This idea is reflected in their skill tree, mostly built around mobility and crowd control.

Hail of Blows delivers three blows with special properties: Energy Drain, Daze Chance and Knockback Chance.
Step Aside! charges towards a target with a chance to Knock all adjacent enemies back on arrival.
Unwavering Stance decrease Damage Taken and increases Fortitude and Block Chance.
And Peacemaker Dazes all adjacent enemies and lets you retreat a tile back without triggering Attacks of Opportunity.

Ranged Weapons


A fairly extensive skill tree which consists of 14 abilities just like skill trees for magic.

First ability, Taking Aim, increases damage and Accuracy, compensating for the inherently low Accuracy of ranged weapons.
Distracting Shot is essential for archers survival, allowing you to retreat two tiles while shooting a parting arrow at an enemy with lower damage and Accuracy.
Long-Range Shot increases firing distance and grants bonus damage for each tile between you and your target.
Piercing Shot deals damage to all targets standing in the way of an arrow and causes Bleeding. Headshot always targets the head (unexpected, isnt it?) and has bonus Bodypart Damage.
Suppression is a stacking buff which adds Knockback Chance to your arrows.
Hunters Mark is well suited for lonely, resilient targets as it increases damage to them with every subsequent shot.

Shields

Yep, double shields are an option. Though probably not very viable.

Not a weapon per se, but they sure deserve a mention.

Raise Shield provides high Block Chance against incoming blows and arrows for a few turns.
Shield Bash deals small damage with a chance to Daze.
Breakthrough strikes three adjacent enemies with a shield, dealing damage and Knocking them back.
And finally, Defensive Stance will decrease Damage Taken and raise Counter Chance when your character is hit.

CURRENT PLANS

At the moment we are preparing the final (or semifinal) patch for the Closed Beta. After that we will start on giving the Prologue a makeover. Dont expect radical changes, but some things will actually be very different and we are not talking about all these new mechanics which appeared in the game over the last year and a half.

We plan to complete it in a few weeks. At the same time, we also plan to update some of the existing mechanics... But its a story for another time.
For now, heres a teaser for the updated main menu:


See you soon!

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Greetings, everyone!


Heres a message from our partners at HypeTrain Digital - their top-selling survival title, The Wild Eight, is coming out of Early Access later today!

To celebrate, The Wild Eight 1.0 will be sold with a -15% discount for a week, until Oct 10th.

Act now, while the offer lasts!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/526160/The_Wild_Eight/

Heres whats awaits both new and old players in the The Wild Eight 1.0:

• The conclusion to The Wild Eight's story - continue the main questline to uncover the mystery of the Dark Matter
  
  
• Discover new side-quests and locations in an all-new biome, filled with exciting creatures and resources
  
  
• Find and make use of the new ranged weapons and equipment;
  
  
• Stability improvements & optimization fixes
  

• The Wild Eight Digital Artbook
  
  
• The WIld Eight Original Soundtrack
  
  
• The Wild Eight Exclusive In-Game Content: Animal Hat Pack
  
  

Greetings everyone!

Our monthly devlog has arrived. As was promised, we present the second magic skill tree Geomancy. In fact, the development progress over the last month was rather substantial (overall we have finished or have nearly finished a dozen of skill trees), so it doesn't all fit in a single devlog. As a result, we settled on presenting one of the more interesting skill trees.



To be frank, creating Geomancy wasn't easy. Each skill has gone through at least a couple of reworks and many of them now differ greatly from the original intent. Nevertheless, the skill tree benefited greatly as a result. As we see it, we have achieved our goal to make an interesting and visually impressive magic school, backed up by some unique mechanics.
The main idea behind geomancy is that most spells of this school require a conductor, a runic boulder which has many uses. All in all the skill tree ended up fairly versatile: there are buffs, disables, an extremely effective single target spell and some powerful AoE effects.

===================

Runic Boulder



A foundation for the entirety of the skill tree. A caster raises a boulder from the ground, knocking back adjacent enemies and dealing some magic damage. Runic boulders don't have a cooldown, so they can be raised in a quick succession though only three can exist simultaneously.

These summoned entities have three possible functions:

• Support. Each runic boulder within your range of vision grants a single tier of Runic Empowerment to the character, increasing magic power and energy regeneration. It also reduces received damage and your cooldowns.
  
• Positioning. Boulders can strategically shape the battlefield, serving as obstacles wherever required. However this option should be used with care. If the boulder is destroyed, a sudden severance of the link with it will stun the caster for three entire turns.
  
• Magic. Boulders are used as a resource for some of the more powerful geomancy spells . However maintaining the buff or blocking an enemy can sometimes prove more strategically sound than an opportunity for direct damage. The choice is yours.

• Rune of Enfeeblement reduces physical and stun resistances for enemies adjacent to runic boulders.
  
• Rune of Binding raising a boulder slightly decreases energy cost of the skills used during the next turn.
  
• Rune of Absorption reduces geomancy spells' cooldowns by 1 for each enemy hit by Stone spikes.
  
• Rune of Fortification increases base duration for Stone armor, increases blunt damage delivered by stone spikes as well as improves maximum durability of runic boulders and stone spikes
  
• Rune of Destabilization enemies affected by Earthquake take increased damage and have a higher fumble chance.
  
• Rune of Cycle reduces geomancy spells' cooldowns for each enemy affected by Runic explosion.
  
• Rune of Sustention killing an enemy restores durability of runic boulders. Also reduces energy cost for skills used during the next turn.
  

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Hello everyone!

Recently Verren, the protagonist of the Prologue and the one who employs you in the main game, started sending peculiar letters to everyone who accepted the contract.

He may sound grumpy but he is trying to prepare you for the quest ahead by sharing his numerous stories and other valuable information. He also intends to give you his heirloom ring with his last letter.

Maybe itll aid you on your journey and theres only one way to know how!

Hello!

There was a period of silence recently, but for a good reason we are very busy adding and calibrating new skills. Therere still some tweaks to be done, so in meanwhile we decided to show another important aspect equipment. So let's not protract the introduction any longer and jump right to the interesting stuff.


Press F for Fashion

All this time our games setting was smoothly drifting towards a rather realistic and gritty low fantasy which of course affected the equipment. Over the past weeks we have added a huge number of new items (100+!) and most of the old ones youve encountered during your Prologue runs were reworked from scratch. Now we try to rely mostly on historical sources for references and inspiration: specialized literature, museum exhibits or some historical re-enactment. Of course, there are exceptions too this is especially true for various legendary and set items, which will feature a more fantasy-ish design.



Chestpieces are, of course, the most important part of your armor. We gave up the idea of independent light, medium and heavy armor rosters, and instead decided to take a more logical approach, redistributing all armor by the defense level in a single roster. Thus, the high-level Royal Rangers Gambeson wont protect your better than some starter tier heavy armor it will be superior to the rest of the light armor but wont match even mediocre chain mails or brigandines.



In addition, different armor will differently protect against various types of damage for example, chain mail is very resistant to slashing blows, but is almost useless against spears; while plate armor offers well-balanced protection against most physical weapons. But be wary: plate armor is incredibly expensive, so maintaining it in good condition will cost a pretty penny too.

There are some other disadvantages as well: hostile pyromancers and electromancers will possess much more danger to you. Heavy secondary equipment will also have some drawbacks: visoreal helmets reduce visibility (though youll be able to lift the visor up), the sabatons are significantly noisier, and plate gloves make fencing a bit more difficult.



The same applies for weapons. Swords, for instance: home-made blades and cheap falchions will be your starting point, but in the endgame youll have a possibility to wield some mighty arming swords. Weve also created a whole bunch of so-called Exotic items equipment of non-Aldor origin in other words. The idea is to encourage world exploration: randomly met elven merchant may offer you some famous Jibean scimitars, and a group of dwarven hirelings may be armed with some well-crafted nordic swords. Such items are usually slightly superior to their Aldor counterparts stat-wise.



And now something for all you shield-lovers shields initial roaster is represented by unpretentious wooden samples, but at high levels there will be more choices: from elaborate bucklers and heater shields to pavises and kalkans.


Could you guess the magic schools these staves belong to?

And, of course, mages. At the games start their equipment progression isnt very diverse; however, everything changes during endgame, when you will be able to purchase more expensive garments. A wizard dressed in his Circles mantle and wielding an appropriate staff will receive a significant boost to his schools spell power.


From left to right: apprentice, arcanist, pyromancer, electromancer, geomancer, psimancer, cryomancer

Thats all for today! Well, not quite: here comes this sweet little GIF, demonstrating swords skill rotation in action (WIP). By the way, what weapons skills would you like to see next? Let us know in the comment section!



See you soon!

================================

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Hello!

In this devlog we will talk about the health system changes since the Prologues release, weve made lots of fundamental changes.

Almost from the very start, the health system was one of the main features of Stoneshard. Its main purpose isnt about realism and difficulty for the sake of realism and difficulty, but to help you immerse in your character. It's one thing to watch your hero being a potion-consuming damage sponge, and the other to watch your hero getting gameplay-affecting injuries, while also suffering from pain and nasty side effects. We wanted even survival outside the battle to require well-considered and thought-out decisions, since it drastically changes the general gamefeel.

In the Prologue, the injury system was almost entirely based on randomness. You took damage; the injury chance depended on its amount; after receiving a trauma there was a chance for it to worsen or stabilize. Such an approach left little of planning you could only stock up as many consumables as possible, and hope you wouldnt need them too often.

Since then, the health system has gone through many iterations, changing drastically during the process. Lets start with the recently added health tab, showing all aspects of your characters health:



Each body part now has its own health pool, decreasing upon receiving damage. If the bodypart condition falls to half or less, you will receive an injury that reduces some stats. Upon reaching 25%, this injury will turn into a wound with increased effect, and upon reaching 0% you will receive a maim with a special property. Maimed head makes it impossible to cast spells, and maimed hand means you cant wield weapons with it anymore. Maims still can be reverted though, but its much harder.

Attacks now also inflict damage not only to your health pool in general, but also damage specific body parts. The damaged body parts, in turn, reduce the Health Threshold the stat responsible for the maximum limit of your current health. Thus, a character with multiple injuries wont be able to restore health to the maximum, even after using some healing potion first he will have to treat all damaged body parts. Also, being low on health increases the maximum Pain Limit so being badly battered means youll suffer from stronger pain as well. Because of these changes, injuries, health points and pain began to work as a coherent and consistent system.



Passive injury healing now depends on any healing your character receives, including natural regeneration. If your character has restored health to the maximum threshold, all the excess healing will be evenly distributed between all damaged body parts. This makes it possible to survive, even if you run out of medicines for example, by huddling in a safe corner to rest and recover. Also this change Vitality builds more viable, since boosted Health Restoration and Received Healing stats allows to heal injuries much faster.

The bleeding mechanic was also reworked. First of all, it isnt some abstract status effect caused by skills anymore now bleeding is tied to body parts. If your injured limb takes some damage, theres a chance itll start bleeding thanks to this, bandages arent situational vampire dungeon consumables anymore.



Some aspects of the health system are still to be implemented (like maladies), but most part of it is already working the way we like it.

Thats all for today. Stay tuned!

=======================

By the way, we've recently created a Steam page for our development studio. Follow us so you won't miss any updates from us!

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Hello!

Finally, weve polished our first abilities branch well enough, so this devlog will be completely devoted to the mighty fire magic Pyromancy. Beware though: many heavy GIFs!

===================

First wed like to tell you how the ability system has changed in general in a recent year. As you remember, the Prologue used a so-called Tier-system all ability branches were divided into 4 tiers, with each including one active and one passive ability. By investing a single SP you could unlock both skills at once.


Before & Now

However, the feedback was mixed, so it became clear for us it wasnt our best idea: many players wanted more flexible system of levelling. Perhaps the old system would be just great if we were making short-sessional dungeon-crawler of some sort... But we arent, therefore we decided to take a more traditional approach.

Thanks to this, we made trees more diverse and interesting, since we were no longer strictly limited by rigid linear progression of exactly 8 abilities. Now each Sorcery branch contains 14 abilities 7 active and 7 passive ones. Weapon and Utility abilities branches have fewer abilities: around 8-10.

And now let us explain the design philosophy behind the abilities branches especially magical ones. There were lots of heated arguments over the general vision, but in the end we concluded that we should aim to make all magic branches as tactically different as possible. After all, its very boring if every magic school uses the same pattern of 2 AoEs, 2 nukes and some occasional debuffs, or something like that. So we tried to diversify magic branches in terms of intended playstyle.



For instance, Pyromancy is all about powerful AoE-spells, dealing tremendous damage when used at the right time in right combinations. If you love killing crowds of enemies with just several skillful casts, look no further thiss the branch for you.

So, the most interesting part the actual abilities! Also, unbelievable truth: we managed to do just great without even a single fireball.

Fire Barrage



Fire Barrage is the only non-AoE pyromantic ability. It consequentially launches three firebolts at the target, each dealing some minor damage. However bolts do increased damage, if the target is already on fire so if youre lucky to have your target set aflame by the first bolt, the other two will deal much more damage. Or maybe youd set the target on fire with some other spell. Its up to you, really.

Hellbreath (aka Firewave RIP 2018-2019)



Prologues not so silent workhorse, the Firewave, has been reworked. This spell still deals decent area damage, but the shape of the zone was changed. Weve also improved it with an interesting property: each target damaged by Hellbreath reduces active cooldowns of other pyromantic spells by 1 (including Hellbreath itself). An irreplaceable spell for keeping your spell rotation always ready for action.

Flame Ring



Doomsday weapon of some sort. This spell sets all neighboring cells aflame along with the enemies, of course. Enemies affected by Flame Ring also have their Fire Resistance significantly reduced. You need to use this spell wisely the pyromancers arent fully immune to fire, so an unthoughtful cast could lock you between the raging flames and cut off all possible retreat routes.

Melting Ray



This spell releases a fiery ray into the target tile, igniting and damaging everything on its trajectory. At the end point the beam explodes the more targets were hit during the ray phase, the more damage the explosion would cause.

Incineration



Incineration is quite an interesting spell. It allows you to extinguish the selected enemy ... and then use the released thermal energy to cause an explosion of terrible power. The longer the extinguished burning lasted, the stronger the explosion and the higher the chance that it will set aflame all affected enemies.

Magma Rain



Fiery rain covers the chosen area, leaving a magma puddle afterwards. Each turn enemies caught in the magma take minor damage and have their Fire Resistance slowly reduced with a chance to be set aflame.

Inferno



Finally, the apex spell of Pyromancy a terrifying Inferno. It creates a fire storm in the large area, dealing great damage each turn whats even better, the more enemies are trapped within Inferno, the hotter are the flames.

===================

And, of course, some passive abilities insight:

• Feed the Flames if the enemys on fire, each Fire Barrages bolt increases burning duration for 1 turn.
  
• Flame Saturation restores some energy each time an enemy is set aflame within the vision range.
  
• Scorch causes Hellbreath to debuff Fire Resistance of all damaged targets.
  
• Excess Heat each enemy killed with Pyromancy restores some energy.
  
• Safe Distance - increases casting range of pyromantic spells by 1 tile.
  
• Baptism of Fire taking fire damage reduces the duration of all active pyromantic cooldowns.
  
• Pyromania increases Magic Power and Crit Chance for every burning enemy in sight (yes, casts can also become critical).
  

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Through pain, blood and broken bones prevail and become a legend deciding the fate of Aldor! Stoneshard is coming to Steam on November 7th for $14.99!
(price may differ depending on the region)

To accompany the announcement weve also made a new trailer. Take a look!
https://youtu.be/VTeNIyVCsPo

https://store.steampowered.com/app/625960/Stoneshard

We at Hypetrain Digital have exciting news for both Police Stories and Stoneshard coming your way!

Next Monday, JUNE 10 5:30 pm PT (Tuesday, 11 June 2:30 am CEST), we will announce the exact release dates for both games and also a new gameplay footage! Tune and be the first to learn all the details!


Feel like you could've forgotten some aspects of these games? We're glad to help you with a quick rundown!



Stoneshard is an immersive hybrid of roguelike and RPG. In it you travel through procedurally generated world of Aldor as an opportunistic adventurer with his caravan. On your journey you will manage your own needs and those of your followers, fight relentless enemies while trying to preserve your own life and sanity. All while creating your own unique hero and shaping the fate of the whole country.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/625960/Stoneshard/



Police Stories is a top-down tactical shooter, in which you play as on-duty police officers John Rimes and Rick Jones. Create a unique loadout out of multiple equipment choices and carefully coordinate your actions with your partner to fulfill your task. Just remember that you don't have permission to shoot on sight less-lethal approach is preferred.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/539470/Police_Stories/

In order to not get lost in all the news coming from E3 subscribe to HypeTrain Digital publisher page and our Twitter and Facebook. We will make sure you don't miss any important bits of information from us!

Hello!

This devlog isnt dedicated to some specific topic instead well tell about many things we had worked on during the last month. Some stuff has not yet been fully completed and thus is left behind the scenes, so for now let's focus on more or less complete aspects.

NPC Schedule

This seemingly small and not very important feature took us a decent amount of time and efforts but it was crucial to make settlements more alive and believable. Previously, we used a much simplified variant of NPCs daily routine: at a certain time they just left their workplaces to go home.



Now their daily routine is much more varied and rich: for example, in Osbrook, the first village the player encounters, local artisans like to have a good drink before going to bed so after finishing their work they close their shops and first go to the tavern, then go home.



Weve also introduced interiors for the whole village now you can enter any house or even barn. Most artisans will be waiting for you inside, and not on the street like before if their craft allows working outside, of course.

Road System



Another important improvement, designed to give integrity to the game world and ease navigation. No more sudden crypts in the middle of a forest or castles completely isolated from the outside world most of the settlements and dungeons are now automatically connected by road network. Because of this, youll need to actually make an effort to get lost if you keep the road, you are guaranteed to come across something sooner or later.



Of course, some places in the world will remain isolated so, if you decide to abandon the road and delve deeper into the wilderness, theres a good chance you may stumble upon a mysterious hut or some uncharted cave.

Content

In addition, we are working on adding lots of new content: encounters, new weapons and skills. Its too early to talk about it in detail, but heres sneak peek at some of this new stuff:




Hopefully, by the next time we'll be ready to show off one of the most exciting parts of our game: skills. So until then!

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Hello!

In this post we will continue to reveal the lore of Stoneshard. If in the past devlog we told about the different factions of Aldor humans, this will be about other races: elves, dwarves and orcs. Though they wont be factions you can maintain relationships with in the full game (because of fewness and remoteness of the dwarves and elves, and total hostility of the orcs), theyre still an important part of our setting. It is worth recalling that elves and dwarves will also be playable races alongside with humans.


"If you stumble upon a dwarf who isnt willing to start a fistfight right off the bat, look at him more closely. My best guess - he's probably dead for a couple of weeks."
- Jurg the Innkeepers favorite joke


Once the Fjall mountains were a birthplace of a prospering dwarven kingdom, famous for its skillful craftsmen and stonemasons. Dwarves carved many cities in the rocks and connected them by a network of mountain roads truly a miracle, considering Fjalls harsh climate and difficult terrain.

However, Fjall crumbled to dust and the dwarves were forced to leave their mountain vaults in search of a better life on the surface. Little is known about the last days of the once great kingdom, but in the dwarven sagas one often hears the mention of the Exodus, the Extinct Flame and the Great Famine whatever that means.

Descended from the mountains to the frozen wastelands, those who survived Exodus quickly became savages. Spacious stone passages were replaced by huts and dugouts, skillful jewels by hides and furs, and the famous smelting halls with bonfires and primitive furnaces. Ancestors heritage was almost completely forgotten as well as the spirit of unity once inherent in their folk. Forced to compete in order to survive, the dwarves divided into many fiercely warring tribes. The most numerous ones are Draggar and Skaar.

Draggar dwarves have earned notoriety for their passion for pillage and raids alongside with other dwarven tribes, northern Aldor suffers the most from it. But because of this, theyre also known as dauntless and ferocious warriors. Aldorean nobility gladly hires them to their service for a decent fee, the Draggarians will fight fiercely even against their own former brethren.

Skaar dwarves are more peaceful. They spend most of their lives on the high seas, tracking down all sorts of sea monsters and leviathans. Gathered meat and blubber is enough to survive even the longest winters, and skins and bones are used to make surprisingly durable weapons some Skaar masters wares can compete even with their steel counterparts.

In Aldor dwarves could be met, but very rarely small communities of dwarven folk can be found only in several northern settlements. These villages are also a common meeting points for Fjall traders and hirelings, who often stop by to exchange pillaged loot for human materials and supplies.


"You better be eating that damn soup, Bertie, or else I'm calling the orcs!"
- Unknown peasant mother


In ancient times the entire territory of Aldor was densely covered with a thicket. For centuries people conquered forest lands inch by inch for their settlements, fields and pastures. However, there were those who resisted the new ways, sparing neither themselves nor the newcomers. These tribes, known as the Forest Folk, were numerous once, but now only three of them remained - and one of them is the orcs.

Orcs are the most powerful, hardy and mysterious inhabitants of the Aldorean woods. If you ask any peasant whom he fears the most, the answer most likely will be orcs. Common folk, forest patrols and unruly children - everyone fears the orcs alike due to their unfathomable mysticism, disgusting rituals and inhuman cruelty.

Perhaps they would not have caused such terror, if at least it was known what makes them tick and what gods do they worship. However, it remains a complete mystery, and their actions seem to be absolutely devoid of any logic, moved only by meaningless violence which makes them even more frightening.

Though orcs remained a serious threat to the people of Aldor for many years, they did not show themselves too actively. Devastating raids and forays happened from time to time, but rather rarely most of the time orcs seemed to be unwilling to leave their native forests. However, everything changed in the last year, when a certain shaman managed to unite orcish tribes and declare the Sacred Warpath. Aldor, completely devastated by civil war, had troubles organizing resistance during the first months of the incursion, so orcs managed to won back over the centuries of persecution, laying waste to many peaceful settlements.

In six months the orc advance was finally stopped. But as long as the grandees of the Council and the Magistrate vied with each other in bragging about their merits in saving Aldor from orcs, the border guards are preparing for the worst: as the soldiers say, its not us who stopped them; they just stopped attacking. Who knows perhaps after this sudden respite, Aldor will have to face an even more ferocious onslaught. Therere rumors of some weird, chaotic piles of branches, animal bones and human bodies found in the forests all across Aldor so orcs must be really getting ready for something...


"Damn, Im dying to see those pointy-eared bastards finally invading our good ol Aldor. Would be a bloody good reason to hang all those hagglers"
- Some Brynn citizen expressing famous southern hospitality toward local elven merchants


If the traveler thinks of setting off in the direction of the rising sun, crossing the mountains, and then the eastern steppes and deserts, sooner or later he will find himself in the Jacinth Kingdoms the great elven empire, occupying endless expanses.

Few people have visited Aldor however, those very few who can boast of such an adventure, tell of many small kingdoms and principalities united under the rule of a single despot. Desert oasis cities, quaint temples-fortresses far to the east, and even steppe elves nomadic caravans Jacinth is manifold.

Thanks to the undivided power over the most of the known world, Jacinth managed to accumulate untold riches - some of which he lets on for further expansion. Some princes became elven vassals voluntarily; some were bribed by generous gifts. The fate of the most stubborn was unenviable so far no one has been able to hold back the might of a thousand elven armies.

Recently, as the peace in Aldor is becoming more and more fragile, Jacinth is apparently very willing to do anything to us this moment of weakness to get the local lands in its sphere of influence. Elven mounted scouts are more and more often being spotted on the borders, and elven goods have recently flooded the markets which is unusual at the very least for a war-torn country. Evil tongues claim therere reasons behind this as they say, the Magistrate nobles are ready to do anything to enlist the elven support to win the civil war.

In Aldor itself elves are not uncommon, especially in large cities, where they are often make successful merchants, jewelers or mercenaries. The largest diaspora resides in Brynn, where one can found an entire elvish quarter. Those elves who reside in Aldor are very similar to humans in terms of culture, but they are still treated with suspicion and open hostility which is greatly facilitated by the spreading rumors of their Jacinth collaboration.

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Hello!

While more large-scale features are still under development, weve decided to start a series of posts dedicated to the Stoneshard setting to finally share some bits of lore with our community.

Since the start of development, the games lore changed several times, until we come to the variant suiting everyone. If at first we planned to show a rather typical high-fantasy sword-and-sorcery world, we distanced from this initial concept the more and more as the development went on. Maybe some of remember something about the Last King, an undead army and other things at the moment everything from the list was either scrapped or completely reworked.

As a result, we came to a rather mundane medieval world, where the influence of the magical and otherworldly is rather small, and Aldor is a small once-kingdom, stuck in a civil war between three rivalling factions. In the game youll have to constantly balance between them, because gaining allies in one particular faction will always mean making some enemies in the other ones.


"Loyal to the end"

The Council is a group of the most influential Aldor feudals, united around the Regent-Queen and her young son Verne allegedly the legal heir.

Inora, King Etbert's last wife, married him several months before his untimely death. This marriage was a complete surprise for the whole court - even the nosiest gossipers were surprised by the news. The sudden death of the monarch, soon to follow, became the basis for the rumor that Inora had killed her husband and her son Verne, born after the Etberts death, doesnt have even a single drop of royal blood in his veins.

Nevertheless, there were plenty of people who believed the Queen. Thanks to her natural cunning and diplomacy, she managed to find many influential allies among nobles who formed the Council later.

The backbone of the Council consists of two seemingly opposing groups. The first is the Etberts old guard the loyalists who held important posts during his reign. They see Verne as the legitimate successor of the dynasty, which they faithfully served all their lives. The second group consists of those who fell into disgrace during the King Etberts rule. For them supporting Inora is a reliable way to regain lost influence and reintegrate into the court life.

However, all of them pursue the common goal: to put down the insurrection and destroy the rebels; restore the crowns power throughout Aldor; and raise Queen to the throne.


"Free man's wealth is a tyrant's demise"

The Great Magistrate is a union of city councils, rebellious aristocrats, as well as artisan and merchant guilds all fighting for their independence from the royal court.

The roots of Great Magistrate formation lie in the long-standing conflict of King Etbert and the city of Brynn. Having come to power, Etbert deprived Brynn of its free city status. This autocratic move earned him enemies among Brynns influential families. And all these years they only waited for the right moment to restore trampled justice.

After the king died and the Inora laid claims to the throne, the Brynns city council unanimously voted to quit Aldor, if it would be ruled by an impostor. Surely, the burghers were somewhat deceitful they werent going to tolerate any more power over themselves, and Vernes unclear origin was just a good excuse. Many neighboring settlements, tired of feudal oppression, followed their example. This union was called the Great Magistrate since any decisions are discussed by representatives of all the member settlements.

Thanks to the rich treasury and the wide use of mercenaries, the Magistrate fought with the Council on an equal footing, not yielding even an inch of its land. The obtained status quo was finally consolidated after the outbreak of the Crimson Plague frightened by the unprecedented illness, the parties declared a truce to curb the epidemic.

Taking advantage of the resulting respite, the Magistrate only grew in power, rebuilding everything destroyed by war and sending ambassadors abroad. By the way, this gives the Council another significant reason to call Magistrate followers traitors as they say, the Magistrates ties with Jacinth elves are much closer than is required for commerce.


"Purge the immoderate"

The Gray Army is a folk uprising that has taken on an enormous scale recently. The composition of the Gray Army is quite dissimilar the majority are peasants and artisans, but there are other groups as well: former brigands, clerics-in-doubt, broke feudal lords and Magistrate or Council armies deserters.

For several years, the common people meekly endured all the war: they fought under the banners of the Council and the Magistrate, paid wartime taxes, watched lawlessness and violence, suffered from hunger and disease, and died by thousands. However, the longer the war went on, the louder the grumbling became.

These moods were skillfully used by Nir a man of unknown origin, and therefore even more mysterious and frightening. A former monk; runaway slave; criminal on the run; feudal lord, who lost his mind after losing his title there are so many rumors regarding his possible past, the safest bet is not to believe any of them.

The philosophy of the movement is quite confusing and controversial mainly because only Nir himself grasps it fully. The rest only has to interpret the scattered fragments of his statements the so-called Words. The Gray Army considers immoderation and incontinence in all its manifestations to be the most important cause of all evil. Nir believes that the ability to find and keep a fine line is paramount, and only in this way people can protect themselves from corruption.

Due to the multiplicity and desperate courage, the Gray Army managed to occupy numerous territories, having won several settlements from the Council and the Magistrate. Now the Army is looking forward to the end of the truce to finally finish off all those who deny their dogmas.

=====

That's all for today. Stay tuned for the next update about some game mechanics in two weeks!


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Hello!

For the past month and a half we were very silent since we were busy preparing, releasing and supporting closed alpha test. Because of this we didnt have enough time to develop new features, and thus there was nothing to tell you about. Today weve released the last patch for alpha version, which means were back into action again! Therefore, today's devdiary is an filler one - we'll talk about alpha test results and plans for the future.

In general, were pleased with how the alpha test went. Despite the limited content, every 10th player spent 10+ hours playing the game, and weve also collected lots of suggestions and ideas - that well try to consider during further development. Soon well also send another devpoll to our alpha testers in order to get a detailed feedback on all the aspects we're interested in.



As many had noticed, weve changed the release date from the Q1 2019 to 2019 in general. As it turned out, were bad at making predictions its quite hard to keep up with the deadlines while constantly experimenting and tweaking things and without such tweaks its hard to make such a large-scale game work well enough. Therefore, for now, we prefer not to give any exact dates, but to focus on the development. We still intend to go Early Access before the end of the year, and a specific date will be announced only when we feel the first public build is almost complete.

The next step in our plan is the transition to the closed beta, which we intend to launch in a few months, late spring or summer. It is unclear how much well be able to fit in a few months, but the minimum roadmap looks like this:

• Transferring to a new engines version and then fixing related bugs and crashes
  
• Adding at least half of the abilities for the most part of planned skill branches
  
• Adding all the non-yet implemented types of weapons and equipment
  
• Complete rework of the dual weapon combat mechanics
  
• Finalization of the ranged combat
  
• Some new dungeons
  
• Additional content
  
• Many minor improvements and fixes that take too long to list (such as barter system for trade, for instance)
  

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Hello!

This devlog is a bit late and therefore kind of off-schedule, as we were busy polishing our today's topic of discussion bounty system and the associated dungeon, the Crypt.

First, let's clarify the terminology. In our game therell be two types of missions: quests and bounties.

First category includes all quests with a scripted storyline and various special content. They are unique and can be completed only once per walkthrough. These tasks include both main plotline missions and various secondary story arcs.


Please keep in mind all English texts are WIP and hadn't been yet professionaly translated and proofread.

And bounties are procedurally generated repeatable quests. Their structure always remains unchanged, but the place and the participants will change. Bounties are offered mainly by village elders, and usually revolve around solving their settlements problems. This is one of the best ways to make quick money and improve your relationship with a settlement or a faction.


Some of the bounty-related relics.

As for now, all bounties can be divided into four conditional categories:

• Headhunts. To eliminate a threat, sometimes its enough to deal with its leader, an elite enemy who may give you a lot of trouble. By the way, elite mobs are also generated procedurally, but well talk about it some another time.
  
• Rescue. Locals often fall into various dangerous situations. Your job is to get them out of the mess.
  
• Search. Lost relics, stolen artifacts, treasure hunts - you will have a chance to take part in all of this. By the way, nothing prevents you from breaking the contract and leaving the found valuables for yourself
  
• Interaction. In such bounties youre required to find a certain place and make a number of special actions to achieve a needed outcome. Sounds pretty abstract, but, well, thats how it works.
  

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Hello!

In today's devlog we will talk about items: food, consumables, valuables and their impact on the economy.



Let's start with the most delicious part: food. Cooking system isnt that far away, so weve added many new types of food, almost all of which have their own properties, rarity and value. The meat is very nourishing and slows hunger accumulation after being consumed; fruits quench thirst and increase immunity; vegetables also strengthen your immunity and often have special effects. For example, garlic will slightly increase your resistance to unholy damage, and leek will slightly increase the speed of detoxification.

Dishes are separate subcategory of food. They usually greatly satisfy hunger, occupy less inventory space and spoil more slowly (or dont spoil at all when it comes to pickled and smoked products) or have powerful special effects. For now, you can only buy them from merchants, but in the future we will add the ability to cook them by yourself.

Some types of food are highly valued for their healing properties and rarity. Usually, they have an elven origin: figs, ginger, citruses and dragon fruits will be difficult to find anywhere except from stocks of rarely encountered elven traders.

Alcohol deserves a special mention. Since the war was raging around not so long ago, there is not much quality alcohol left and therefore its highly values. You will have a choice: to keep alcohol for yourseld to relieve pain and keep morale high enough, or to sell it for additional income. The more exquisite the alcohol is, the weaker are its side effects: drinking country moonshine is well, very different from consuming brandy or rare elven icy wines.



By the way: we finally added the ability to merge used consumables with each other. Now, if you have two half full bottles, their contents can be poured into one, freeing up a place in the inventory.



And now, the valuables. We want them to become the main engine of the in-game economy: it will be much more profitable for the player to seek various rarities than to collect rusty junk sold for a penny. First, they take up much less space than massive armor and weapons. Secondly, its way more profitable: almost all merchants are interested in valuables and are willing to pay pretty well for them.

Different locations will have different sets of valuables you may encounter. In the crypts you can profit from the plundering of sarcophagi - perhaps, among the decayed bones you may find some old jewelry. In the brigand hideouts you may find a lot of different stuff, including rare goods from the plundered elven caravans: porcelain, silks, ivory and spices. And in the abandoned mines its possible to find gems and precious ingots.



And to carry all that loot far enough, do not forget to get a roomy bag in advance. And, perhaps, equip some good armor: with such a load you can easily get into a brigand ambush.

That's all for today, see you soon!

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Hello!

Today we will show another new feature, and this time its quite a massive one: trade system. Trade is the vital force of our game economy, so we paid a lot of attention to its development. We faced a difficult task to make trade system both user-friendly and moderately realistic, and were quite happy with the result.

Let's start with the context. The game takes place in a country ravaged by a bloody civil strife. But the war is still not over: due to some unfavorable events, all factions were forced to declare a temporary truce, thereby securing a precarious status quo. But at any time their confrontation may resume again. All this impacts the economy: currency is devalued, because of the chaos and production slump many commodities are in acute shortage, and the prices of essential goods are greatly inflated.


Trading with merchant. Clickable.

In Stoneshard you can trade with almost all neutral and friendly characters: from merchants to simple peasants and city guards. But at the same time, it is worth remembering that the wartime economy is pretty brutal: because of limited resources, everyone is primarily interested in securing personal gain so NPCs tend to overprice their goods a lot and prefer to buy your goods far below their true value.

NPC role also influences trade prices. Depending on what craftsman youre dealing with, you may expect some price fluctuations on goods hes interested in. A blacksmith, for example, works with metal, so hed buy iron equipment more expensively and also sell it cheaper, while merchants and wandering traders, due to their versatility, tend to trade at less favorable tariffs for you. In addition, your reputation level with a particular settlement and faction, some local and world events, and the quality and condition of the item itself will have their impact on the final price too.

Trading with common folk is mostly about bartering few cheap items like food. Clickable.

Other important aspects of trade are NPC interests, their stock and wealth. These parameters are different for each NPC, depending on its role, settlement and faction.

Ordinary peasant possess very few items: usually, food, drinks and tools. They tend to buy the same kind of stuff from your character and wont be interested in buying armor or potions. Theyre also very limited in their funds, so you should probably seek some another person to sell an expensive gem to peasant wont have enough money to make this deal possible.

However, the blacksmith's stock is much more impressive: he sells a huge variety of various equipment, is quite wealthy and is willing to purchase some of your spoils of war, though he wont be interested in buying scroll and potions too. Its worth mentioning that there are some items which are demanded by almost everyone due to wartime conditions such as food, alcohol and different valuables.

Trading stock will be regularly refilled: NPCs will purchase new goods instead of the sold ones, and the speed of this process will also depend on the situation in the settlement and the world around.


Repair in action. Clickable.

And finally, repair function. Now battered items can be repaired by a certain artisan for a fee: metal equipment can be fixed by blacksmith, while carpenter and tanner would work only with wood/leather and cloth items respectively. The repair cost depends on the items condition and its base price. By the way, youll also have an opportunity to fix the item by yourself using a repair kit or an appropriate skill, but the efficiency of such amateurish repair is much lower, and items max durability will degrade a little too. Therefore, its a good idea to have your most valuable equipment to be repaired by professional craftsmen only.

That's all for today. Until next Saturday!

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Hello!

Firstly, we would like to wish all of you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year (we hope youll have great holidays) and take stock of the past year. The 2018th was full of events: the Prologues release, a successful Kickstarter campaign, porting to a new engines version, huge revamp of many game systems and implementation of many new features. Without your support all of this would hardly have been possible, and its an awesome thing our community consists of so many cool people! 2019 should be decisive due to the planned release, so all the most interesting is yet to come!

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Now lets turn to the current news. This devlog was preceded by a long period of silence. The reason is simple: we simultaneously worked on many different features, but until recently, they were all too rough around the edges to show them publicly. Now the situation has changed, so in the coming weeks devlogs will be published much more often and stably. And todays Saturday will be dedicated to the updated UI.

Initially, we did not plan to change with the interface before the Beta. However, when it came to the introduction of trade and the dialogue system, it became clear it's impossible to continue on without the total rework of the entire UI. So in this iteration we tried to take into account the most frequent problems and suggestions of the community.



First lets inspect the general points. The GUI design has become more dark and monumental in order to better match the game worlds spirit. For example, weve added two atmospheric statues to support health and energy scales they will constantly remind you of how close death is in Stoneshard.

Inventory has undergone notable changes as well. First of all, weve added a new equipment slot the back. Theres a choice what to equip there: a bag for some additional inventory slots or a cape for extra stats and resistances.



Small changes have affected the old weapon slots too. They were increased to a size of 5x2 so the especially large types of two-handed and polearm weapons could fit. The amulet slot was increased to 2x1 thanks to this, talismans and necklaces would become much more detailed.

Weve also added autosort button, which was requested by many players. Upon clicking on it, all items in your inventory will be optimally arranged to leave as much free space as possible. This should ease the management of all your hard-won loot. Weapon loadout switch has moved to the upper panel as well.

Another new feature gold counter: it allows you to quickly track the number of coins in your inventory, which is very useful when trading.

By the way, as you can see, weve changed the font of the game too. The old pixelated font had its own charm, but we were forced to abandon it for the sake of better text readability. Also, this is necessary for future localizations: some European and Oriental characters turned out to be impossible to be adequately pixelated.

That's all for today. Stay tuned for more devlogs in the future!

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Hello!

In this devlog we will continue to discuss Stoneshards 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 arentt that nice, and this devdiary will be dedicated to them.


I repeat: these are NOT political coordinates.

I think its 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.

High Morale + Low Sanity



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.

Sadism

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%
  

• 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.
  

• 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 isnt learnt)
  
• Damage Received -50%
  
• Pain Resistance + 90%
  
• Weapon Damage + 33%
  
• Critical Damage + 75%
  

• 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%
  

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

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

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

• 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?
  

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Hello!

Yup, it's new devlog time. Currently our team is working on some big features that we arent yet ready to showcase, so therefore in today's development diary we will discuss several small improvements and fixes weve 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.

Destructible Environment


You dont have to fix the impassable objects being generated if you can make them destructible.

Firstly, weve 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, lets say, iron maidens are way tougher.

Enemies & Door Interaction


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

Mysterious vampires doorphobia has long been a target of our communitys 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 weve told the mobs that doors dont present any threat to them and can be actually interacted with. However, the type of door interaction depends on enemys 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 wont 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.

Attacks of Opportunity


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, weve 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.

Durability system change

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 wont receive any penalties; at >25% <50% durability, items will receive a 30% stat penalty; at <25% durability, items will receive a 60% stat penalty. This will make it easier to determine the state of the equipment just by taking a look on its appearance: depending on the durability tier, the sprites of the equipment will become more shabby and battered.

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, youre 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

Settlement Generation



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 ;)

Alpha and Beta Date Shift

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.

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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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Hello everyone!

In today's devlog we’ll continue to explain different changes we’re making to current game system. This time we will go through the health system (except for the system of injuries, as it will be described in a separate devlog).

The health system is one of the core features of our game, so we especially attentively analyzed players’ feedback regarding it. Most often people complained about unfair randomness and some other flaws (such as the interaction of injuries and pain system).

The chance-based system of health was introduced by us at a rather late stage of Prologue development. At that time it seemed like a good idea to us, since we thought it will make the health system a lot more understandable and accessible. However, playtesting showed it was a dubious change: on the one hand it indeed made the system easier to understand. On the other hand, it often worked not as it was intended to.

For example, similar circumstances could result into your character getting agony in 2 turns – or in 10, if you’re lucky enough. Such dispersion seems unacceptable to us, so we decided to return to a strictly deterministic system, where each health scale will depend on the actions of your character in linear fashion.

If earlier hunger and thirst worked randomly (although there was a mandatory interval between the ticks), now they will grow gradually. Skipping the turn will accumulate less hunger and thirst than moving, and moving – less than the attacking someone.

The same applies to pain with toxicity mechanics. Pain will also become a scale, the accumulation rate of which now will depend on how much damage (and which type of damage) your character receives. Fire damage, for example, will be more painful damage than frost damage, etc. By the way, you’ll aslo be able to check the exact values of your hunger, thirst, pain and toxicity levels on a separate Health tab, which we plan to add to the character's menu.

We’ve also slightly simplified the system of health conditions, so it may fit better with the new system of attributes. Now there’s only 3 stages of each health scale, instead of 4 – light, medium and severe.

That's it. Since this devlog didn’t really need any illustrations, have a look at a teaser of our next devlog, which we’ll publish next week.


Could you guess what will we discuss in a week? It's really obvious.

Have fun!

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Hello!

From now on we return to our practice of regular devlogs. We successfully ported the game to GMS2, and while the rest of the team fixes some remaining problems, I decided to write about what changes of our attribute system should you expect in the full game. I emphasize that everything described below is so far mostly a concept and can change in the course of direct development.

So, what are the most important problems we have identified based on the feedback from the players?

Many stats were too situational. For instance, if you play as a pure warrior (I speak of the full game, where you won’t have Firewave from the very start) in the current system you have literally no reasons to level Intellect or Willpower at all.

And now to the changes. First, let's see how the new system of attributes will look like:

Some attributes will work differently. In short: Stealth and Health / Mana Restoration will no longer be chance-based, and are now strictly deterministic. I will tell more about their new mechanics some other time. Spell Power was renamed to Magic Power, since now it will affect any magical damage dealt by your character. Accuracy is called Hit Chance now, and it also became more transparent, since it shows your default to-hit chance.

Well, seems like everything was covered. Now let's move on to the main new feature – perks.



Perks are special traits and abilities that your character is guaranteed to receive after reaching a specific thresholds of the primary stats. This will make levelling system more deep and variable, and give players more meaningful choices regarding character development.

Many of these perks are not final (especially the numbers), and I even marked with stars those we are especially unsure about. Also, if you have carefully read all the descriptions, then for sure you will notice a lot of hints of unannounced new mechanics or changes to existing systems.



Stay tuned, and also have this little pretty travelling merchant's tent as a bonus!

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https://store.steampowered.com/app/625960/Stoneshard/

Hello everyone!

We’re happy to announce the long-awaited Settings update is now live! We faced many issues during its development so it took more time than was initially inspected. But we’ve made it in the end and even managed to fit some new content into it. Now to the changelog:



MAJOR:

• Added Settings menu. You can now rebind most of the controls, and also tweak some other options to your liking.
  
• Added Game menu.
  
• Reborn Archon was reworked so he’s totally killable now without exploits. Killing him won’t softlock the game as before, and will result in an alternative ending.
  
• Added new secret achievement (well, not anymore) for killing Reborn Archon.
  

• Rest Mode now automatically cancels after clicking on any tile.
  
• If player flees when fighting Archon, Darrel will warn him and beg to come back. If player will continue to flee, transformation will happen.
  
• Many new sound effects.
  
• Some rare bugs and crashes were fixed.
  
• English translation rough edges were smoothed a bit. Some lines were re-recorded.
  
  
  
  Have fun!
  
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Hello!

Recently we finally closed our late backing service, so we’d like to sum things up in this post.

Firstly, many thanks to all who supported us during these two months! This campaign was a huge success for our team, and, frankly, we hardly hoped that we could ever achieve such results. Our Kickstarter backers have contributed $101,186, while late backers pledged for $12,695 – $113,881 in total. Thanks again!

Pitifully, we didn’t manage to achieve our next stretch goal at $120,000 – an add-on called "Of Wind and Sands", which was supposed to add new race, new locations and dungeons, new type of weapons and many other things. Right now we are not sure whether we will develop it in the future, but if it does happen, we will also make it free for all the backers as a token of our gratitude – since we were really close to reaching it.

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So, crowdfunding stage is finally over, and this means we can wholly dedicate ourselves to development again. In a few days Prologue will receive a new update, which will add long-awaited options, tweaked boss fight and a variety of fixes, and after that we will concentrate entirely on working on the main game.

Stay tuned!

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Little teaser for all of you. Cheers!

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Hello everyone!

There was no news from us for a long time, so in this post we will gather all current important announcements.

The main news: our late backing service closes in a week, on the 22nd of July. If you wanted to support our team, but still didn’t do it – it's time to catch up. This is the last chance: after that date there will be no other opportunity to receive the unique backer rewards with the game’s purchase. Oh, and by the way – only $9000 left to reach our next stretch goal, “Of Wind and Sands” expansion pack, adding a whole new race, biome, dungeons, weapon type and much more. It would be really great if we manage to achieve it in the last week! We’ve also sent our game key polls to Kickstarter backers today, so don’t forget to log in and check your private messages.

The settings update is still being worked on, but due to a number of arisen problems, it took us much more time than we initially planned. Nevertheless, the main part of the update is almost ready and is currently being tested – so get ready, as it will be out really soon. Too bad we still need to work more on adding fan translations, since we’re still updating our fonts to work correctly with special Polish, Spanish and Italian symbols. Bu eventually they will become available for you to test as well.



Also, it’s a nice opportunity to remind you of oAur roadmap, published some time ago. Our next step is updating our game engine to GMS2. Unlike the GMS 1.4 we’re currently using, GMS 2 is more stable, convenient, has many useful functions and, which is very important, is still supported and constantly updated.

See you soon!

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Hello everyone.

Despite of the astonishing success of our Kickstarter campaign, we haven’t even had a drop to drink, so we’re in a good shape and still working on adding actual Options to the game. But there were plenty of problems that needed to be dealt with, so here goes a patch with numerous important tweaks and fixes.


- Your SP are now set to 0 after entering the Archives. You can no longer have a free SP by abusing the possibility not to learn Pyromancy during the tutorial.
- Fixed crash associated with a death from a trap.
- Spell mana cost is now correctly calculated.
- Being stunned no longer interrupts the cutscene.
- Fixed exploit allowing to swap loadouts for free when hitting switch button too frequently.
- Chests should no longer spawn near the exits.
- Fixed numerous table spawn issues.
- Fixed crash associated with attacking enemies using keyboard controls.
- Fixed crash happening if the player died prior to the cutscene start.
- Fixed AP leveling exploit.
- Pain Resistance should work correctly now.
- Stuns should work correctly now.
- Bars should now correctly display the percentage of player’s current HP/MP
- Blood Lancet now cause Bleeding for 4 turns instead of 5.
- Leeches restore 10% HP per turn instead of 5%. Their duration was reduced to 7 turns instead of 10.
- Antitoxin now reduces Toxicity level by 2 instead of 1.
- Nerfed Vampires accuracy. Slightly increased their Fumble Chance.
- Vampire Noble’s (halbierd-wielding one’s) health and armor was slightly reduced.
- Buffed low level maces, axes and daggers.
- Nerfed Summoned Zombie’s health. Now they should die after spending two turns in Blood Pools – the way it was supposed to be.
- Nerfed Vampire Initiate’s and Fallen Warrior’s block chance. No more bumping each other for 0 damage for the eternity.
- Slightly nerfed armor of the Undead. Part of their Absorption was replaced by less reliable Defence.
- Now each level up gives 1 SP. More skills for the skills throne! (this change applies only to the Prologue)
- Numerous text tweaks (more to come).


Best wishes!

Greetings!

This is a truly special moment — the last hour of our campaign has begun.

It's the last chance to support Stoneshard on Kickstarter! Let's make it $100.000!

We're truly glad that you've joined us on this amazing journey, and we can't wait to tell you more about what's yet to come.

Hooray!

Hey everyone!

Our Kickstarter campaign is quickly approaching its end with only 24 hours left to support our game. If you've been thinking about backing Stoneshard, now's the time.

The closest stretch goal ($90.000) will unlock a new mode called Divine Trials — it will allow players to complete different challenges in procedurally-generated dungeons and earn favour of Pantheon. This is a classic 'randomly-generated-almost-endless' roguelike gameplay mode where you can spend time honing your skills to prove worthy.

And one more fun fact: if each and every one of you raises the pledge by just $10, we can instantly reach the next $120.000 stretch goal — it will add a whole new story expansion with new race, classes, weapons, biome and much more content!

And for those of you who're waiting to support the game via PayPal, we're enabling this option tomorrow by adding a Humble Widget to our site, it supports different payment options including PayPal. We'll tell you more about it in the next update.

Take care!

Greetings!

We've just reached 3000 backers, this is unbelievable! Huge thanks to all of you who've joined us on this incredible journey! The work on Stoneshard just keeps gaining momentum, and we will do our best to bring you a truly magnificent roguelike experience.

Today, we're publishing our first development roadmap:



When we first approached our planning for Stoneshard, we wanted to get the first build of Early Access version ready for Late 2018. Since then, your support has exceeded all our expectations, and, after a thoughtful discussion, our team decided to move the launch of Steam Early Access to February 2019. This decision ensures that we will be able to truly focus on quality of the first version of Early Access build and implement some of your feedback ideas that we've gathered during Kickstarter campaign.

Again, thank you all for the tremendous support, this is just a beginning!


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Stay tuned and don’t forget to:

Hello everyone, we’ve got some huge news!

First of all, we’ve reached $75.000 Stretch Goals thanks to guys and gals who backed Stoneshard on Kickstarter! It means that Stoneshard will receive a big story expansion ‘Ancestors Forlorn’ available to all Kickstarter backers (Mercenary and above) for free! We will start working on the expansion after the game is fully released on PC & consoles in 2019.

We have 3 more days to go, so there’s still time to support the game!

Next, there’s Reddit AMA (AskMeAnything) we’ll be hosting tomorrow. We will be answering all community questions about Stoneshard for two hours and we will announce a winner of our Creative Contest. You can still submit your dungeon boss fight concept — maybe it’s your idea that will be implemented in the game with your name in credits!.

Tune in to r/pcgaming tomorrow at 10:00 am PDT.

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Stay tuned and don’t forget to:

Hello!

In this unscheduled post we would like to address some problems found on the Prologue, and explain thoroughly their causes and possible solutions. Below I list the most frequent complaints we’ve received lately, and how we’re already working on improvements.

1. Settings are absent

Releasing the Prologue without an option menu was definitely not our best decision, to put it mildly, but we simply didn’t have enough time to implement it. This issue was already listed amongst the first in our To-do list; good news is we plan to roll out the “Settings Update” next week. Here’s a screenshot to show you we’re already working on it very hard.



2. Lack of fullscreen option and other resolutions support

When choosing the art style, we decided we wanted to make a 100% pixel perfect game. In brief, this means that every pixel of in-game sprites (including interfaces) must correspond to one pixel of the user’s display. This greatly complicates developing interfaces: different resolutions assume different amounts of free space, which makes the addition of each new resolution variant a rather complex and time-consuming task.

Since we are going to rework many core game-systems based on your feedback (which means inevitable UI change), working on other resolutions is simply pointless at the current moment: any minor edit will require us to manually edit dozens of other versions of this resolution. So we are forced to postpone it for the future – until we’ll have the final iteration of GUI. For now, if you don’t mind playing the Prologue pixel perfect just press Alt + Enter to enter the system’s fullscreen mode.

3. Clumsy controls and loot interaction

Current controls were designed by our beloved Ahruz

We won’t argue there: at the moment they’re plain clunky and counterintuitive – the natural result of not holding mass playtests and the game growing bigger and bigger than it was initially planned. When you play your own game for two years, you get used to even the most uncomfortable control scheme. However, mass feedback complaining about this issue showed us that the situation really needs to be changed, and we will do our best to improve the current controls scheme (starting with the introduction of customized settings - see point 1 above).

4. Lots of brutal RNG: game relies on luck and loot drops way too much.

Flip the coin to win.

Keep in mind that the Prologue is just a general taste of some basic game mechanics, an introduction to the lore and a general feel of what the game will be, but it’s not the final game. We plan to significantly revamp current system of attributes, making it more transparent to players and less random. We plan to do this shortly, right after the end of the crowdfunding campaign, and within a few months we will present you to the changes and improvements made on your constructive feedback. As game designer, I myself don’t really like the current RNG situation as well, so we will try to reduce the reliance on RNG to a more reasonable, yet interesting level.

Now to the “luck factor” problem: this issue is just a Prologue’s exclusive problem, and it’s caused by the story and tutorial exposition, since Verren begins to explore the dungeon without having anything at all. But in the main game, the gameplay cycle of the dungeon crawling will be completely different: aside character creation and customization your characters will also have an opportunity to prepare their inventory and skills in advance, amongst many other mechanics, which will significantly diminish the role of random loot drops.

5. No saves upon exiting the game. No checkpoints.

His ward magic disrupted our save system. Well, not really.

There’s a very good reason behind this. If you have read our Kickstarter, our Steam page, or some of our Devlogs, you probably remember that we are going to introduce a global open world into the game at some point. This means that the open world needs to be included to the core code of the save system as well. Right now, the global map is at a very early stage of development, so it is impossible for us to take into account all of its variables in advance, just for the Prologue. As soon as we finish working on the global map, we will immediately start implementing the save system.

Checkpoints are somewhat more complicated, as they’re conflicting with our initial game design philosophy. We want our game to follow the spirit of classical roguelikes, and permadeath is an integral part of it. However, it seems many people would like to have their progress saved at least while they’re just learning how to play the game. We will discuss this issue within our team and, perhaps, we will introduce a mode with checkpoints into the game, in order to make it more accessible to the less hardcore player. Ironman permadeath mode will still persist, though – its how our game is meant to be played.

6. “Weird” ranged combat, movement and bugs, dumb AI, etc.

Working hard just like Darrel.

The ranged combat is still at a very early stage of development – we implemented it not so long ago and have not yet improved it ever since. Many of its planned features are just absent at the moment in the Prologue: for example, there are no missile trajectories, no aiming, reloading mechanics, and many other planned features. In fact, ranged combat currently works like a melee attack with an increased range, but of course we will definitely change this when we finish working on more high-priority tasks.

The movement/turns/tiles grid-systems will also be completely reworked after the Kickstarter campaign, and we’re also updating our engine to a new version (GMS 2). This should probably solve most of the bugs and problems associated with these aspects of the game. Also, we plan to make environmental objects destructible, and teach mobs to interact with them. This will make situations with impassable rooms, mobs spawned “locked” between the furniture, etc. much less common.

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As always, we appreciate very much your support and constructive feedback: from the beginning we wanted to have you trying out the game as we build on your suggestions. And if you have not yet done so, we’d like to invite you to check out our social media pages and other useful links:

Great news everyone!

Stoneshard: Prologue is now available on Linux. We've also fixed some issues with boss fight cutscenes and looting.

Stay tuned!

Hey everyone!

Stoneshard’s story on Steam is off to a great start — more than 20000 players have experienced Stoneshard: Prologue in just two days! We’ve got into Popular New Releases section and received an overwhelmingly positive feedback from the community.

If you like what you’re seeing in Stoneshard: Prologue, please consider supporting Stoneshard on Kickstarter and add full version of the game to you Steam wishlist. Stoneshard is due to release on Steam Early Access in Late 2018.

We’re also hosting a Creative Contest on Reddit, where you can design your own boss fight for one of Stoneshard’s dungeons!

And don’t forget to:

Hello everyone!

We received lots of feedback these days, and we continue working on improving the Prologue. This update is minor one, but it fixes some of the most notorious and frequently occuring bugs.

CHANGELOG