Hey everyone, Team Stonehearth continues to work hard on A21, wrapping up traits and moving hard into bugfixing mode. Last week, we briefly showed you the new embarkation UI that we created to go with our new trait feature. Not only did we want you to be able to see the traits during embarkation, tweaked the screen to offer you a greater level of customization in your starting party as well. This week, let’s take a look at this customization feature in greater detail.
Hearthling Customization
Recap from the video:
- Stonehearth is a game about guiding a disparate set of hearthlings as they optimize their environment to flourish, and investing in each hearthling as an individual is a big part of that story. It’s pretty cool when a hearthling singlehandedly fends off a group of goblins, and it’s even cooler when that hearthling is Tony Cannon, a optimistic fighter who only eats meat.
- Allowing you to design your hearthling starting party so that you could better identify each member–modeling them after your family, or your teammates, or your favorite TV show characters really helps with this!
- The majority of the new customization screen was done by Linda, with designs from Nikki.
- You can re-roll you whole party as before, but you can also select and re-roll individuals. Once you’ve selected an individual, you can also change their clothing preference, their skin color, and their hairstyle.
- We talked for a while about whether or not traits and stats should be randomly assigned, or individually bought. In the end, we decided that randomly assigning traits and stats made for a stronger gameplay experience for a couple of reasons: First of all, as anyone who has played a PC RPG knows, manually assigning traits and stats is a huge responsibility to put on a beginning player. Understanding the systems enough to make decisions that make you happy takes multiple playthroughs, and we didn’t want people to feel paralyzed the first time they start a game. Second, for returning players, we didn’t want the game to feel stale. If you found your favorite set of traits and always played those people, this would create similar-feeling playthroughs, and just as we randomize each map, we want you to play with and adapt to the hearthlings you get in each game.
- If you’re not interested in this feature, no worries! As always, a diverse starting party with balanced stats is generated by default.
- A related feature we debated, in the course of this design, was whether to allow you to customize town immigrants, as well. In the end, we decided not to do this, again so that each of your playthroughs would be marked by the new stories created in that world–of your stories of your starting hearthlings, defining themselves against the world around them.
- Unlike your starting hearthlings new immigrants people also have stats with a greater random distribution, just to create greater suspense.
- One of the coolest things about the customization feature is that now, there is new reason to download mods that alter hairstyles and colors, like Wiese2007 and KittyODoom’s Locks of Many Colors. Go download it here!
Other Announcements
The team schedule should now be back to normal! This means we resume our regular Desktop Tuesday schedule, and streams every Thursday at 6:00pm PST.