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[Wayfinder]

Hello everyone!

Stoneshard is a turn-based RPG about exploring a vast, procedurally-generated medieval world, managing your own caravan and surviving by managing both physical wounds and trying to stay sane.

You start out as an ordinary mercenary, travelling across the medieval world of Aldor. The kingdom is about to fall, when a mysterious stranger makes you an offer you can’t refuse. Set off on a dangerous journey, explore beautiful lands as the leader of your own caravan, recruit new allies and fight hordes of monsters. This adventure won’t be easy, as you will have to deal with physical diseases, psychological traumas and disputes within your party.

Features:

• Explore the kingdom

Embark on a journey through the vast procedurally-generated world of Aldor. Explore the dungeons, cities and forests of this once magnificent land, now ravaged by war.

• Lead your caravan

Recruit new allies to your own caravan. Be a true leader and keep morale high, so you can get help and unravel the mysteries of your loyal followers.

• Treat your wounds

Take medication or even drugs to treat physical wounds and diseases. Spot symptoms early and don’t let your hero die of fever, blood loss or broken bones.

• Build an unrivaled hero

Develop your hero however you like, be it an axe-wielding mage or a potion-brewing ninja. Choose from more than 100 weapons and build a unique skill set for your character.

• Get tactical

Create your own play style, marching to victory with sword, sorcery or stealth. Study your enemies, learn to use the environment to your advantage and emerge victorious.

• Pray for victory

Follow the will of ancient Gods and gain some of their astounding power in return… if you are ready to pay the price, of course.

• Die to fight another day

Don't let death frighten you. Should your hero perish, another shall rise up and take over the caravan, continuing your quest.

Follow us:

• Twitter
• Facebook group
• Our Discord channel
• Steam Store page

[Phonetic Hero]

The screenshots and art are looking great! Also love the idea of having equips modify character appearance, and I'm always a sucker for item durability.  Definitely looking forward to more progress :D

[Pixel Noise]

Nothing wrong with another Dungeon Crawl/rogue-like. The screenshots look great, I think!

[Wayfinder]

Devlog #1: Combat and Hunger

Hello, everyone!

We are going to issue short devlogs, devoted to current developments.

The latest and the main ones are combat system and hunger mechanic.

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The gameplay of our combat system has been quite easy for a long time and looked precisely like a kind of Pixel Dungeon or some mobile roguelike. The attack could get only three results – successful hit, critical hit and miss. This minimum did not contribute into the depth of the gameplay obviously. We improved it partly by widening attribute system, thus the combat is more interesting and unpredictable now.

Each hit now can lead to several results: attacks could be blocked or counter-attacked, swings can be fumbled and damage much less than they supposed to.

Moreover, we realized an ability to critically fumbled and missed. Critical fumble means that your hit doesn't just damage less, but also damages the weapon itself.
If the character exhausted with battle misses an enemy he accidentally may hit his own leg instead, for instance, and thus commit fatal fumble.

Probability of all these results depends on many variables that can be changed dynamically in correspondence with the character's development, his equipment and enemies’ stats.

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Hunger at the first glanceis not so important addition which influences gameplay dramatically.

Character gathers hunger conducting different actions. And the significant point is whether these actions are exhaustible or not. The character starts feeling hungry faster while fighting or clearing debris than while just walking.

The hunger has three levels. They affect the character differently and can lead to the character's death if he doesn't manage to find any food. So, if the character is really precious to you, never forget to check the amount of provision - there always must be a ration in your inventory.

Variety of food is also worth writing about, because there is plenty of it and each variant copes with hunger differently. Apart from it, food can get stale, so its consumption can lead to intoxication and poisoning.

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In the nearest future we are going to add some more interesting mechanics, and we will tell you about it certainly as soon as possible.

[Pineapple]

I love the art, especially the look of the UI.

Keep it up!

[Wayfinder]

I love the art, especially the look of the UI.

Keep it up!

Thank you!

[Wayfinder]

Added a couple of gifs. Hope you like it!

[Pixel Noise]

Nice! I really like that skeleton's death animation.

[Wayfinder]

Thanks!
Also, more gifs to come this saturday (along with new devlog).

[Wayfinder]

Devlog #2: Modifiers and Pain

And here is the next devlog!
This time: modifiers and pain mechanics.

Modifiers are different temporary buffs and debuffs. Reasons for modifier to appear are diverse: spells,potions and a lot of other things. All modifiers are divided into three big categories: physical, mental or magical. Those of the first group are effects, which change body parameters of the character. The second one influences a consciousness, and the third group is united by supernatural nonmaterial sources of their appearing.


Modifier category influences gameplay differently. For instance, character with some physical debuff is not able to regenerate health. Mental debuffs lead to the loss of concentration and stopping mana regeneration. Magical modifiers may also lower the resistance to the definite types of spells.

Some modifiers stack if being used twice, and even transform from one into another. As an example, if the character drinks the potion of the stoneskin, he gets mighty temporary addition to his armour. However an attempt to drink a few of it at once petrifies the character. We are planning to add a plenty of similar combinations to make learning such moments really enthralling.

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Pain is our new system, created to deepen the gameplay. We didn't want to overdesign gameplay by the addition of damaging separate parts. Thinking about it we came to the conclusion to implicate intermediate system - pain barrier.

The pain is expressed as a scale, which is being filled up while character is suffering from different kinds of damage. Once the definite marks of this scale are achieved, character earns specific pain modifiers. For example, mild pain modifier slightly interrupts character's concentration, and pain shock is very dangerous, because character extremely weakens and may even disobey player's commands in his pain-induced madness. If the pain shock is not relieved in proper time, agony comes, which can kill the character in several turns, if nothing is done.

Pain calms down in course of time if character doesn't have any uncured injuries, active physical debuffs and his HP level is high enough. But sometimes you have to get rid of that awful pain urgently. We added many consumables for this purpose. There's a lot of stuff to help to ease player's sufferings: from common booze to more unusual ether flasks, leeches and even exotic narcotic incenses (that's exactly why those weird elves are called high). Each item possesses its own features and nuances of usage, which should be taken into account, depending on current situation.

Also it  is worth mentioning that character reacts differently to the different types of damage: burning is much more painful process than getting cut, so the pain amasses several times faster when being damaged by the fire, acid or some morbid magical transformation.

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That's it, thank you for attention. See you next time!

[Pixel Noise]

That sounds pretty intricate and detailed! Great system, though I'm sure it will be a pain to balance (heh).

Also...

Pain calms down in course of time if character doesn't have any uncured injuries, active physical debuffs and his HP level is high enough. But sometimes you have to get rid of that awful pain urgently. We added a lot of consumables for it. There's a lot of stuff to help to ease player's sufferings: from booze to more exotic ether flasks, leeches and even excotic narcotic incenses (that's exactly why those weird elves are called high).

Mind blown

[DrDerekDoctors]

Ooh, lovely looking! Replied to subscribe!

[Wayfinder]

Devlog #3: Mobs, Matter and Classes

Hello everyone! We haven't posted devlogs lately: so it’s just the time to catch up on!

Last few weeks we were polishing visual part of our game. Different effects,  a proper appearing of numbers, more advanced blood system - all these points are important to create necessary atmosphere and perception of our game.

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Also we've seriously tackled reworking enemies with whom you will meet in the Crypt - the first location of the Stoneshard. Apart from the rebalance concerning character's advancement, mobs have gone through some additions as well. Monsters now possess not only different sets of characteristics but also have a row of different functional features. For instance they interact differently with closed doors. For some of them a door is an inpassable barrier, however others can just knock it out, if the door keeps mob from reaching the character. Pain which we were talking about previously can also be felt by the most part of creatures now.

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We also introduced the category of the "matter" of a creature - put it otherwise, it is a substance which a mob is made of. Each kind of the matter has its own qualities. For example, undead consist of bones, which doesn't feel pain, but can be broken into pieces more easily with crushing damage; equipment sinks in acid and spoils there; ectoplasm of phantom enemies is sensitive to magic energy, but hardly can be harmed with usual weaponry. We've added seven types of the matter yet, but this number will grow in the future as we add new creatures.

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Well, as the last news for today - slowly but surely we are passing to realization of classes. You will meet a system a bit untypical for this genre: class here is a particular combination of an archetype and a race. To illustrate: archetype Rogue in combination with human race opens Duelist class, but just switch the race to dwarfs and Duelist becomes Berserk, which supposes absolutely different gaming style. We want to give players more latitude, so classes don't bring in any restrictions and differ only in sets of bonus characteristics and couple of unique abilities. For now four archetypes and three races are planned, but later we are going to increase this number.

[Davi Vasc]

The pain system sounds very interesting. Its cool how different types of damage can cause more or less pain, seems like a great way to make some kinds of damage more dangerous without simply making them do more damage.

Also, the pixel art looks gorgeous. Nice work   

[Wayfinder]

Thanks!

[Alexandre Belmonte]

Woah! This is great!

I always had the impression that classic roguelikes needs just more appealing visuals to make them a success. It is an incredible genre but it is really hard to convince my friends to play with the charming but not sellable visuals Nethack and others have. I'm glad user-friendly UI is one of your priorities too.

[wizered67]

Love the look of the game! Following!

[DragonDePlatino]

Wow, this looks really well-polished! I love the transparency trick you did to keep things from being hidden behind walls. It's an issue I've wrestled with myself and this is a nice solution.

Are you guys considering a release on Android? We're a bit starved for good mobile roguelikes at the moment and your interface looks simple enough for one. It wouldn't be the first time a nice mobile roguelike came from Russia, either. Are you guys familiar with Caves by 36dev? :D

[Wayfinder]

Thanks a lot!

We do, however it's postponed after PC release. UI is simple-looking for now, as it misses many things that will be added in the future (like skillbar, for example).
Yes, quite familiar

[sbeast]

The game looks pretty interesting, gonna follow this one! Also, you made any considerations for the music yet?