Hey everyone, Alpha 17 is inches away from being complete!
This release brings us to a milestone place with building: before this week, we weren’t sure WHAT it would take to get to a place, technically, where hearthlings could build most, if not all, of your structures. Thanks to incredible efforts from Chris, we believe we DO have this technology, and that the remaining issues are now bugs, not insanity-inducing-dark-unknowns. (Which means, as usual, that if you have a building that won’t build we want to know about it!)
This alpha also brings us the STAIRS TOOL, courtesy of Yang, the Engineer, courtesy of Linda, and a whole array of new fountains and Ascendancy templates, courtesy of Allie. And of course, plenty of leftover A16 combat-related AI improvements, from Albert, Steam trading cards from Brad and Allie, and a ton of bugfixes, performance tweaks, and optimizations from the whole team. It’s been quite a journey, and to celebrate all of this, we have a brand new splash screen from Allie. Let’s take a look at the making of that splash screen today!
Alpha 17 is Stairs, Engineers, and Building Madness
Recap from the video:
- A17’s splash was originally going to be about the engineer, creating a fiendish, Escher maze for the goblins out of crazy stairs. The final product is the goblin’s revenge! Let’s see how we got here
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- Allie started with Escher’s relativity, which reminds many people, as it turns out, of the end of the movie Labyrinth.
- In the original sketch, she sets up the general composition and the main focus beats–where all the action will be happening.
- Next, she defines the engineer’s illustrative look, and introduces Cthulu.
- What is Stonehearth Escher? With tons of stone and straight lines, would it feel too constrained? Allie borrowed some inspiration from Legend of Mana and Bravely Default, who both have very organic, wiggly stone staircases. She also took pains to avoid horizontal and vertical lines. All the stairs are diagonals!
- Allie then lightboxed the sketch out into the real world, redrawing it with pencils on bristol board.
- After scanning it back it, she did some color composition and was just about ready to start coloring it for real, when we did a desktop Tuesday about the engineer, and heard tons of feedback from all of you about the look of her turnip turrets. To avoid cementing the existing turret as the final design for the engineer, Allie erased the engineer and their tools from the sketch, used the clone stamp tool to get the paper back in, and then redrew those areas with new points of interest,
- The engineer is still in the center, but goblins have made off with her goggles, and another goblin’s after her wrench.
- The final lineart showcases Allie’s excellent instinct for storytelling: much like A16, this painting has a ton of tiny vignettes in it–goblins still are making mischief with a worker’s hammer, and getting spied on by Cthulu, goblins stealing the knight’s helmet, and goblins’ stealing the shepherd crook and drawing the attention of some very confused sheep.
- The final piece should be in your hands, along with Alpha 17 stable, very soon.
- In the meantime, while Allie was making this art, the rest of the team was MAKING SOME INCREDIBLE updates to building!
- I don’t have time to go into the details this week, but we are now fully committed to getting all your crazy shaped buildings built, and with no scaffolding left over, either. Last week, Chris made some key improvements to a building’s scaffolding usage and build-able-ness, the whole team helped him test stuff, and we pushed those to Steam Unstable late last week.
- There are still many issues blocking buildings, such as when furniture gets in the way of scaffolding, but this was a huge step forward for us. Post any issues you have, and especially your problematic templates, to our building thread at discourse.stonehearth.net.
Other Announcements
As I mentioned last week, our team schedule in July is crazy. This weekend is EVO, so this week’s streams will happen as usual today, Tuesday 7/12, at 6:00pm PST, and Wednesday, tomorrow, at 8:30am PST.
Thursday’s stream and next Tuesday’s stream are both cancelled.
Streams will resume on Wednesday of next week, 7/20, at 8:30AM.
Thursday, 7/21, will be the long awaited STREAM 200. 
Expect us to start early, at 5:00PM PST or so.
See you all there!