So the alpha time is Monday. Who’s ready?
I’m going to check it out, but I’m not expecting it to be very interesting in terms of gaming. From the sound of it they have a long way to go and it’s not clear this build will have enough in it to be fun.
Yeah I expect a good 2-3 hours of messing around with it then waiting for some solid content before going back.
You can’t save your progress so I think it is intended purely as a basic test rather than any kind of sustained gaming experience.
This is the link where you can redeem your steam key.
https://www.humblebundle.com/store/keyresender
It worked for me. The current steam binary you load in steam is the “graphics test”. They have announced they are “hours away” from uploading the real deal.
I suspect they planned for it to be EOD.
Just checked and it is up now.
not much to do at the moment. You can chop trees and pick berries, make a carpenter and a couple items (bed, table, gates, sword, shield). You can try to build a simple house but I haven’t been successful in finishing one yet. No saves. Nice to see it firsthand but there’s a long way to go to get to true playable form.
It’s cute but obviously not much to do until more is implemented. I like the pleasant music though.
Agreed.
My favorite moment was when they lit up the firepit. I wasn’t expecting that at all, and the voxel fire effect worked out great, plus the warming hands animation was a very nice touch. My second favorite moment was when the carpenter was in the middle of building a bed, she’d brought over her lumber, and then decided to take a nap and while she was sleeping one of the other characters came over, grabbed the lumber off the workbench and stuffed it back into the storage area.
Using beds seems kind of hit and miss. Dee, one of their programmers, says that if they’re too tired, they don’t make it to bed, but just fall asleep wherever they’re standing. Although I’ve had them fall asleep on the ground just around one body length from the nearest bed. They seem to do a much more reliable job using chairs for eating then beds for sleeping.
Will this be on steam? I really dig the looks of it. I noticed it uses paypal, but I can’t get paypal to work anymore, after my account isn’t verified or somesuch.
My folks never once sat down but they did use the beds half the time. They were starving most of the time, even though I kept telling them to grab berries. After about an hour everything kind of fell apart when the game wouldn’t let me select anything.
Looking forward to more updates though!
I can only assume so because the Alpha activates on Steam.
It definitely should be at some point. Right now for Kickstarter backers you checkin to Humble Bundle and then can either download a copy directly there or get a Steam Key which you can use to download a copy from Steam. I got my copy via Steam. So they’ve definitely got Steam approval it’s mostly a matter of them giving Steam the go ahead to start charging people. It may be a long while though before Steam can be used to purchase it, since it’s clearly very Alpha and it might make people unhappy paying for something with such limited play value.
Anybody checked this out recently? Initially it looked very promising, but there’s been a definite lack of buzz around this lately.
I totally forgot about this, there is a roadmap on their site.
http://stonehearth.net/roadmap/
Seems to be a long way off still.
Yeah, it’s weird that they’re still claiming that the full release would be next month.
I’ve been following, just haven’t been playing it.
I follow it fairly closely. Every Tuesday there’s a developer video out. I played around with the unstable branch release about a week ago. Rough status is:
[ul][li]Building is starting to look pretty good. You can build buildings with a variety of different looks, manipulating the roof (such as choosing how the roof is sloped - just to one side, traditional two sides, or all four, and how much sloping), wall material, and floor material. They are starting to put in a fair bit of furniture and other flashier items if you like to do Sim style decoration the latest Developer build has wall tapestries, curtains, rugs, writing desks, wall lanterns, garden lanterns, and flowers for the garden. Picket fences and garden gates were in, but for some reason have been temporarily removed.[/li][li]Current crafters in the game include Carpenter, Weaver, Farmer, and Trapper. Currently under development is the Mason and Shepherd. Rocks for the Mason are currently scattered across the landscape, so he seems like he should be fairly quick to get in. Wandering sheep for the Shepherd are already in, or were in in an earlier build, I haven’t seen them in the current build, although I assume the mechanics of sheepherding will be more difficult to workout than building with the Mason.[/li][li]Combat is in, but needs tuning, and enemies are very limited. At this point AFAIK only goblins are in. And while there are a fair amount of stories on the bboard of towns getting wiped out by goblins, I haven’t seen it, although I haven’t played any single game all that long. I’ve only seen goblins show up in ones and twos to steal stuff. On your side, you can promote a worker to a “Footman” and then equip them with a wooden sword and then give them padded armor, the developer build also has leather armor.[/li][li]Food sources include the original berries, jerky from the Trapper catching rabbits and other small animals, turnips (easy Farmer crop) and corn (longer-term Farmer crop). More variety in food sources increases town health and increases chances of additional settlers joining your town. Town members can starve to death if things go badly, although I haven’t experienced this in my own playthroughs. If you pile up too much food the Goblins will show up and try to steal it.[/li][li]Weaver source is silk-weed which can be gathered wild in the short term or grown by the farmer. Developer build also appears to use leather from the Trapper, but AFAIK this isn’t in any released version yet. We should also be able to use Wool for the Weaver when the Shepherd gets in the game.[/li][/ul]
I think the latest developer video gives a pretty good idea of what things are like at least from a building and decorating standpoint:
The foundation all seems very solid, but they’ve got a long way to go before there’s a challenging game there. Some of the parts such as the buildings are starting to look pretty polished. But others need more work. For example, all the goblins look the same even though we know they’ve got both the art assets to make them look different and the technology to make them look different (see for example the wide variety of settlers). They just haven’t had a chance to focus on that part yet.
Sort of. What they’re actually saying is that they know they have a long way to go before they have a real fun and playable game, but that they promised non-beta folks that Stonehearth would be out in September of 2014, so what they’re planning to do is to release the beta in September for all Kickstarter backers to mess around with.
They are by no means claiming that the game is done or that September will be the end of development.
Even their roadmap has a nice art style.