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

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

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.

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!

Nice, very nice . 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

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. 

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.

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!

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

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...

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.



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

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.

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.

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?

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.

(That made looks badass  , 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.)

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

Incredible!

Please, add mages! Please!

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

You mean like this?

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

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.

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

Noooooooooo...

[devlog]

Here's a dev update.  As always, you can find out what we're up to by visiting our devlog.

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.  



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



UI Progress!

Here's a video demonstrating the current UI and tech

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.  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.

dat art style

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

Wow thanks!  There's lots more art on our devblog.

[Primary Features]

Devblog | Facebook | Twitter | Prototype Video

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 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.  Sorry, no download).








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."