Hey everyone, as we enter our second week of intense Alpha 14 bug fixing and performance optimizations, I thought it would be a nice change of pace to take a behind-the-scenes look at the evolution of one of Alpha 14’s new monsters: the stone golem and his stoneling friends.
The Stone Golem
Recap from the video:
- The Stone Golem originaly came from a series of sketches Allie made for us, focusing on different nature-themed monsters
- Tom modeled and animated the concepts, focusing on how the golems get more and more human-like as they get more complex
- Linda then took the models and animations and turned them into in-game entities. She gave them stats, grouped them into encounters, and added in a few surprises
Other News: Giant Towns and Building Templates
Many thanks to everyone who posted bug reports, feedback, and buggy save games on our forums at discourse.stonehearth.net.
Thanks to Yang’s vigilant efforts and hours and hours of hours of investment, we’ve managed to keep saves backwards compatible through all of A14’s development. This means that we’ve been able to load and debug and monitor your enormous late game saves for gameplay bugs, memory leaks, and performance drags. Please keep them coming, and as always, post us inspiration pictures of your giant towns! They keep us going through our bugfixing sessions.
Also, we continue to look at problematic building templates. We appreciate all your sleuthing and especially your templates. Building has taken a backseat to performance optimizations this Alpha, but Chris and Tony have created a test program that will automatically try to build all the templates loaded into a game, so we are all prepped to look more closely at that when we next have a chance. Keep the templates coming too!
Lastly streams will happen as scheduled this week. See you online at 6:00pm PST!