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(http://stonehearth.net/images/tig/sh-logo.png)

Devblog (http://stonehearth.net) | Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/pages/Stonehearth/331291483657543) | Twitter (https://twitter.com/radentupdates) | Prototype Video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCFjqtj8i6M)

Hi TIGSource.  Long time lurker, first time poster!  Stonehearth is our sim/RPG/strategy hybrid set in a voxel, fantasy world.  We are inspired by Dwarf Fortress and the tactics games of the SNES and PS1 generations, as well as table top RPGs.

Our goal is to combine simulation and city management elements with a great, tactical combat  and RPG-like progression for your town's citizens and heroes.   Here (http://stonehearth.net/stonehearth/) is a longer description of our ambitions for the game, if you're interested.

Primary Features

• Randomly generated, destructible worlds built with voxels
• Scripted RPG-style adventures to discover
• RTS-style combat with an emphasis on tactics over micro and speed
• Robust class trees for both combat and civilian units
• Mod friendly

Long Live Mods!
We love mods, especially for sandbox games.  So we’re building everything: UI, unit AI, scripted scenarios (everything!) as a set of "1st party mods" to our core engine.  As a modder you will be able to anything we've done, including introducing new content (items, monsters, scripted events, etc), reskinning or adding to the UI, adding new character classes, you name it.

Screenshots
These screenshots are from our Nov 2012 prototype (here's a video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCFjqtj8i6M).  Sorry, no download).

(http://stonehearth.net/images/tig/prototype-ss-1.png)

(http://stonehearth.net/images/tig/prototype-ss-3.png)

(http://stonehearth.net/images/tig/prototype-ss-2.png)


Current Status
In 2012 we fleshed out the game concept and build a C++ prototype that demonstrates the building mechanics.  Now that we've defined the core game, we are integrating LUA scripting and implementing the core game features like crafting, AI, and combat.

I would say our ETA for something playable is "when it's done," but that's always such an annoying answer, so I'll instead say ambitiously "sometime in 2013."

Absolutely looking forward to this!

Enough said... following!

Those are some beautiful renderings of voxels. Looking forward to how this turns out.

looks great cant wait to play

dat art style

Don't change anything...It's so perfect.

Wow thanks!  There's lots more art on our devblog (http://stonehearth.net).

You're doing a great job! I'm going to keep an eye here!

Here's a dev update.  As always, you can find out what we're up to by visiting our devlog (http://stonehearth.net).

Our short-term goal is to implement a "first pass" of the three pillars of the game: resource gathering, building/crafting, and tactical combat.  We're doing this so we can start tuning the overall pace and feel of the gameplay as early as possible.  Resource gathering and building are complete, and we've moved on to combat!

So while Ponder (the coder) focuses on monster AI and threat tables, I've been working on both our UI infrastructure and modelling the basic enemies and combat units.

Combat Models
The first monsters we're adding are goblins.  Goblins will always attack in packs, and will coordinate their actions.  Here are a few different goblin variants along with some weapons and a battle standard.  

(http://i.imgur.com/kRxoGrM.png)

And here is a set of models showing the gear progression for a melee combat unit.  So you will be able to gear up your townsfolk and army through crafting and looting monsters.  The progression shown is no armor -> leather -> iron -> steel

(http://stonehearth.net/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/footman-progression.png)

UI Progress!

Here's a video demonstrating the current UI and tech (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iicRqFhQ4U)

First, yes, the world is tiny and ugly as crap!  We haven't ported proper world generation to the production code.  Don't worry, the real world will look even better than our prototype.

This kind of simulation game has a lot of management sections, so there are two big goals of the UI.

• Different parts of the UI should be easily discoverable
• Stay out of the player's way!

UI Tech

Our UI is 100% HTML and JS, using the Chromium Embedded Framework (https://code.google.com/p/chromiumembedded/).  Basically the UI runs in an offscreen chrome window and communicates with the game via a tiny embedded http server.  Every frame the game renders the chrome window to a texture and overlays it on top of the game.

As you can see from the 2nd half of the video, this gives us all kinds of goodies for free, like an excellent debugger.  We also get to take advantage of the many great UI tools that exist in the browser: jquery, css, html5 canvas, etc.

Looks really nice. I'm very interested to see how this develops.

Looks incredible!

Mmmm

I really like your voxel work.
Those Goblins are super cool and funny looking, lovely style.
Also, judging from the video, you have very good animations, considering you are using voxels.

This whole thing looks fantastic!
Love those goblins!

Saw this on one of the Reddit ScreenShot Saturdays a while back. Very impressive. Colour tones are great, shading is amazing, really makes everything look soft. I feel that's something other voxel art games lacked.

Looking good gents.

Incredible!

Please, add mages! Please!

Like, dark wizards or so. Oh, it would be so nice  :wizard:

Wow! I'm loving the art style!

Keeping an eye here!

This looks amazing! :)

Thought I bet the first mod will be a one where it's turned into Minecraft XD

What does the art pipeline look like? Is that a custom-built voxel modeling program?

Noooooooooo...

I use Qubicle Constructor to model (http://qubicle-constructor.com) and 3DS Max to animate.  We have a custom pipeline that imports .qb files directly into the game.

Awesome, didn't know that existed!

You mean like this?

(http://i.imgur.com/DpJGLer.png)

The graphics look absolutely lovely~ I am totes digging the style and effects that you have applied. The voxel characters are wonderful too! I'm trying to find things to critique but after reading your dev blog and learning about the game I am coming up short; you've definitely got a winner here!

A few questions, though: I imagine you are going to try to sell this game (I know I would try, haha), so have you and your team given any thought to potential prices? Will you be running a Kickstarter at some point? If you did indeed do something like Kickstarter it might very well be the first project I ever give money too ahead of time.

Also, how long does it take you to create each character? Is the graphics system such that you can easily knock out new graphics or does it take more time then that?

(That made looks badass  8), btw ; the "dark face" look is cool but I wonder if it's a little too flat? Perhaps make the face come out just a bit to give it a little depth? I dunno, just a thought.)

Yes, we quit or jobs to make this game, so selling it at some point would be nice.  Our most likely scenario is a Kickstarter or some form of alpha funding so that we can continue working until Stonehearth is everything we want it to be.  It will be priced competitively with other sim-type indie titles.  More than $5 but much less than $50 or anything outrageous like that.

It's hard to say, because I constantly revisit my work as I learn new tricks, especially in the color palette.  The initial version of a character usually takes 2-4 hours.  Here's a link to a speed sculpt of a troll, which took around 2 hours.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LBgmrpEa8g8

But this guy still needs a lot of work.  Here's a screenshot of about another hour of tweaking to define a jaw and clean up the definition of his features.  Still not done, but getting there.

(http://i.imgur.com/yRGpSIQ.png)


I agree!  The mage needs some more work.  See above.  ;)

Wow... I guess I never considered how much extra work there was when pixelling in 3D; I mean voxelling, haha. After watching that video I am in awe of just what goes into making a single character. That doesn't even cover animating it, either! Yeesh~ :crazy:

Turbo gamma hyper double :handthumbsupL: thumbs up :handthumbsupR:, though! With the level of dedication you're showing I'm sure this game will be a major success and an indie hit. :)

Looks amazing.  Really pulled off a unique look within the style.

Awesome! I can't wait to see how combat is going to look.

Yooooo,

So "the coder" continues to crank away at the combat system, which has left me some time to work on some terrain concepts.  These have two purposes:  First is to act as our own internal reference point for the kinds of things that we want the player to achieve.

More importantly, our current perlin-based terrain makes it really difficult to place your buildings, because there are no big flat areas.  We need terrain that is "more or less flat" for easy building and road placement, but that also looks interesting and beautiful.

So, here are the concepts.  The first shows off a new proposed terrain model, where we chunkify elevation changes into largish plateaus with fewer, larger elevation changes.

(http://i.imgur.com/goqiVgS.jpg) (http://i.imgur.com/goqiVgS.jpg)

The second just shows off what we hope an end-game city would look like, with different building styles and whatnot.

(http://i.imgur.com/g3xm6Y5.jpg) (http://i.imgur.com/g3xm6Y5.jpg)

The amount if detail in those concept pictures is amazing. Will you be able to achieve anything close to this in game?

I think you're on the right track with the world generation. Oh hell, you're on the right track with all of it :)

:-* Those pictures are amazing!
Was there not a way to terraform in the previous terrain model to make flat land to build on? But i do think the chunky elevation is better.

We believe we can come close.  The people may not be so detailed at that zoom level due to LOD, and the reflections in the water may have to go...

Ha, landscaping actually is not in the game yet.  But even when that feature comes online, we want players spending their time expressing their creativity through building and battle tactics, not clearing rows and rows of voxels just to build the house the size they want.

Thanks, I like the new terrain style too!

Christ, I might as well just quit now.

Cool look, idea. Reminds me of another game that is Minecraft meets village management. I forget its name though. Its youtube vid had a million views. I'm sure you can find it seeing that it belongs to a competitor.

I don't like being able to see a house finished before it is finished. That takes away the joy of actually seeing it finish. The "plan" version of houses/buildings should be uglier or bare-bones or simpler I think.

I know, this game looks so great it makes me feel worse about my own projects!

Woo hoo! Yes! Just like that :)
I wish for some cool, dark spells now!  :)

Also, incredible castle-city!

Nice, very nice :coffee: . Just a suggestion for this type of game(because nobody did it with games that I've played). You can add a king/player avatar just so you can view your town from first person, that would be pretty cool. Imagine... walking through town as npc running around, working. ...beautiful :beg:

And then there's a jester dwarf that has to dance for you.
Also, when you walk by everyone stops what they're doing and bows.
(Not really)

Nice idea with the FPS unit.  Our initial concept for the game was that you always played as an avatar with an over the shoulder view, but we couldn't figure out how to resolve a zoomed-in, single-unit view with the wide view that would be required for building.

And actually, the jester/bard unit that makes everyone laugh/dance as they walk by is one of our reference cases for user mods.  You should be able to write that mod yourself in < 100 likes of LUA, package it up, and share it with other players.  We call it the "dance party" mod.  :)

Posting to follow. I really like the level of detail you get out of voxels.

Back with another update.  The basics of combat are in!  So far we only support melee combat, but combat gear, AI, animations, and damage dealing are all working pretty well.  Here's a quick teaser video.

http://youtu.be/-3aghno9X_0

We totally wen't overboard here, but it was fun and should pay off.  The combat engine is closer to something like Street Fighter or Tekken than a traditional RTS-like combat system.  We hope this makes combat more dynamic and epic.

Some details on our implementation are on our devblog (http://stonehearth.net/2013/04/02/first-look-at-the-combat-engine/).

In other news, we're planning a Kickstarter for around the end of the month!  Basically it's been just the two of us plugging away at this, and some additional support would really move development along.

Edit: also, hey look we have a new logo!

(http://stonehearth.net/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/new-logo.png)

How did that with blizzard go? I see you gonna stick to Stonehearth?

Yup, we really like the name and it's starting to gain traction, so we're sticking with it!

It's been a long road, but we're making good progress in converting our prototype build engine into the real thing.  Here's a demonstration of the AI worker scheduler coordinating the construction of a house.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djAVxgQm1qM

In our AI system, each unit has their own little brain, complete with observations about the world, goals about what they want to achieve, and ways about getting what they want.  If they're tired, they'll go to sleep, and if they see something scary they'll run away.

For coordinated tasks like building, we have a gang scheduler which coordinates the jobs of the workers.  You can think of this guy like the foreman, who picks out the best thing to work on next.  It has a dependency tree of all the projects the player has diagramed out to make sure things get built in the proper order.  For example, it makes sure the two columns between supporting a wall get built before the wall itself and that all 4 walls of the house are built before someone starts working on the roof.

In the video, you can see the workers coordinating their actions via the gang scheduler to cooperatively build a house.  Though they each have their own, independent agendas, one item in their priority list is to help out with the construction of the house.  Right now it's still very early days for us, so that's about all they care to do. =)  In the real game, there will be all sorts of real-life interruptions.  If an invading force gets too close to your town, they'll of course all run for their lives.  If they get hunger, they'll go looking for food to eat instead of working themselves to death.  You get the idea.  We're striving for this ant-farm quality to the game, where building and exploring are super fun, but just watching your citizens running around doing their thing should be just as engaging and surprising for the player.

(http://i.imgur.com/Hl5X3GU.png)


(http://i.imgur.com/AP4d310.png)


(http://i.imgur.com/GPoBJ84.png)

Yes!

I love watching AI like that work - and in this case it's amazing. Will definitely support the Kickstarter!

I know the house building is supposed to be the focus but man, those rabbits take my heart :)

Fantastic job guys!

Whelp, our Kickstarter has just gone live!

The page and video share a lot more information about the game, including...

- Details on our mod story
- Bosses!
- How our tech trees will work
- Lots more screenshots and concepts.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1590639245/stonehearth (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1590639245/stonehearth)

Pledged, bought the kitten :)

Reminds me of Timber and Stone

I wasn't impressed until the town shots... then I got excited. :)

Backed! Good luck fellas!

I'm fascinated by the concept and art :)

This is really pretty. I'm surprised you went with Qubicle for your editor - I found the free edition to be rather limited, but it seems like you've really managed to master it.

Good luck on the Kickstarter! I'll make sure to pledge something.

This looks AMAZING!!!!  :handmoneyL: :handmoneyL:

I saw a reference to this posted on another forum I follow earlier, and all I have to say is that it looks amazing. You've really nailed the voxel-world aesthetic in a way very similar to 3D Dot Game Heroes. Keep up the good work, I'm really looking forward to seeing more of this.

Looks amazing.
Is there any chance to get that beta for free test? That´d be awesome! ;)

Well, I backed it!

I hope that mods can allow for an expansion on the economic side as well, since I'm not that interested in RTS but I'm really into city building games (with production chain management, resource management, supply and demand management and traffic management).

Also, building new models to use in-game like Lego is brilliant! (Something Minecraft lacks, imo, with its hardcoded crafting.)

Thanks for the backing!!

Could you describe in more detail what you mean by modding the economic side?  We want as much of the game to be moddable as possible.  Our original thinking on economy is that "gold" would be an abstraction which let you get access to other parts of the game that you may need occasionally, but not want to invest a lot of gameplay in.  For example, if you're really into the military combat game, you would go out questing and killing monsters for gold, then use the gold to buy food.  Conversely, if you're really into the farming game you could create a surplus of food to sell to raise money to hire protection for your crops (or to pay off invaders who want to sack your city).

Did you have other ideas for the economy game?  How would you like to mod it?

Thanks again for the backing. 

Many economy games use gold as a general purpose accelerator that is more difficult to get than the direct means of producing something. Like the food you mention is something you could buy with gold, but cheaper to produce yourself directly. So, to continue with your example of hiring protection by other means than gold would perhaps mean that that outfitting soldiers of a certain level would require leather armor that at the most basic level needs hides from the livestock. Then in an economic scenario, the interesting bit would be adding a slaughterhouse, a tanner and then a leather crafter, which would complete that production chain. And to complicate matters, for example, the tanner might need salt for curing which intersects with another production chain. Then the delivery of all these goods would require a traffic management portion, because you'd need to get swords or spears as well which entails a whole mining operation and that makes things really interesting for those wanting to fiddle with the economic side.

As for modding, well, I saw the farming mini-game prototype and that was wonderful. Do you have anything similar for raising livestock? And if not, can you mod that into the game? And can you mod things that the livestock produces into the game? And in turn, can you mod buildings/crafters which need what the livestock produces to produce other things? Modding whole new mini-games is perhaps asking too much, though, unless you have full scripting support.

Also, if you use gold as the central thing you can purchase anything with, perhaps people would want to "cheat" by say modding a goose that lays golden eggs so perhaps you'd want to analyze every mod that a player adds to their game for a gold/minute ratio that could ramp up monster frequency accordingly. ;)

PS. games which use what I reference above are the Settlers series, Anno series, Caesar/Pharaoh series, Patrician series and the Stronghold games, for example.

holy awesome! i really like the visuals,which software did you use to make the models :) ?

Well you guys are definitely on your way... $215k with 23 days to go... haha

I might need to up my pledge to get the beta... pretty exciting.

Just watching your kickstarter page for a few minutes... you guys are getting a backer a minute. This is going to be enormous.

Congrats fellas! I guess quitting your day jobs paid off in this case. :)