Stonehearth

[Quinton]

I think you're just jealous that they don't have a $1000 ultra-voxel-limited-edition-mammoth that you can preorder!

[Sky]

Also sounds farther along than TUG, I just got a notice that after months of alpha you can finally climb stairs...they're trying to recreate everything in house. It has been entertaining with the naivete.

And that's still more game than space ponzi :p Though to be fair, I'm certain there will be a much better polished game from space ponzi than most of these little KS teams put out.

[Rendakor]

space ponzi

Wat.

[Quinton]

Also sounds farther along than TUG, I just got a notice that after months of alpha you can finally climb stairs...they're trying to recreate everything in house. It has been entertaining with the naivete.

The Stonehearth guys are also building everything in-house, but thus far they appear to be moderately competent.  It seems like they're building good groundwork which will allow them (and modders) to build a lot quickly once they hit critical mass.  Here's hoping!

[Sky]

A more realistic in-house project, though.

[Sophismata]

I'm thinking adding new classes and creatures will be very fertile ground for modders.  I'm actually looking forward to seeing their APIs; I haven't seen too many games ship with an SDK that doesn't seem like a perfunctory afterthought.

Every aspect of the game they implement seems to be handled in an open, customisable way. Considering that, the progress so far is amazing. It takes much longer to develop systems than it does to code features.

Most of game is LUA and JSON driven, including AI routines, and the scripts governing game states and actions.

[Quinton]

Yeah, they're serious about modability as a first class feature.  I'm looking forward to both the game itself and to see what others do with their engine.

[Teleku]

It's really the smartest way to go.  They can build the base and get a more simplified, yet graphical version of DF out and make some money on it.  Then let the aspergers crowd mod it up to toady levels of detailed stupidity for free.

[Samwise]

Necro!

Since I've been spending so much time in Gnomoria lately I thought I'd pop open the Stonehearth alpha and see how it's doing.  Much less crashy, and building actually works, unlike the last time I played.  They also added the ability to build ladders on cliffsides so your dudes can get to inaccessible parts of the map, and a few more crafting types, and farming, and automated animal trapping.  (The last time I tried trapping you had to manually point your trapper at an animal -- now you designate an area and the trapper will set traps within that area and periodically check them.)



It's still got way less depth than Gnomoria (and hence way way less than DF) but it is way prettier.

[apocrypha]

Arise! Again! I had no idea that we had a thread for this.

I'm giving it a whirl atm, and quite enjoying it. It's still somewhat buggy - I've taken to creating a fresh save every in-game day so that if something goes horribly wrong, which seems to happen on about 1/3rd of the days, I can redo that day.

There's a new playable kingdom now, Rayya’s Children, and a desert biome. There's still not a huge amount of depth to it and it looks as if the effective population limit is around 20-30 before performance grinds to a halt. But I suspect it'll keep me entertained for a week or three.

[Yegolev]

Pass.

[apocrypha]

Yeah my estimate of a couple of weeks entertainment may have been over the mark.

One to revisit in a year or two I reckon, if they can get a lot more content into it. Plus it'd be really nice to be able to place dirt/stone blocks as well as dig them up. One mistake when carving out stairs, for instance, and it's reload.

[Sky]

I've been well cured of my temporary insanity of video game kickstarters  This game will take another 10 years at this pace. At least TUG has made some significant improvements, though it took destroying the company and building it back up to do so...