Hey everyone, welcome to another Stonehearth Desktop Tuesday! Last week was pretty big: the new builder hit the unstable branch, and multiplayer is available on a separate special branch. See our forum at discourse.stonehearth.net for details. While we’re fixing bugs about all of these things in the background, today I want to talk about the end of the town progression quest: Tier 3, and our new Re-embarkation feature.
Tier 3 and Re-Embarkation
Recap from the video:
Let’s do the simple stuff first! As some of you may have noticed in an update to the Steam Unstable branch from a couple of weeks go, we updated the last third of the town progression quest arc so that each shrine is now associated with a quest given by a cool NPC. These NPCs were designed by Artist Allie and Designer Luke to represent organizations within Hearth that would be interested in your new settlement, so that when you accept the quest and build the shrine, the narrative becomes that your town has become a proud contributor to a specific element of larger Hearth society. At the moment you finish the quest, the shrine, which was quiet, is imbued with cool lights and effects by that NPC, accompanied by an unlocking celebration that the NPC attends in person. The shrine also grants a gentle gameplay bonus, like the ability to create masterwork items which sell for 5x base value, or recipes for legendary weapons, or random buffs that generally help your town. All the bonuses are balanced to be an enhancement on your existing strengths, but should not be necessary to completing other quests; for example, all combat encounters are balanced so that you can win them without using the legendary weapons. Finally, the shrine quests unlock a whole bunch of craftable decorations–one unique set per shrine per faction–so that your town can shine in accordance to its accomplishments. So that’s how the tier progression campaign ends! There may be a bit more tweaking we want to do here, like adding more templates or moving the bonuses a bit, but it’s working pretty much as intended.
An in-game week later, the NPC who started you on your journey shows up, congratulates you on a town-well-built, and invites three of your hearthlings to move on with them. If you want to take them up on their offer, you pick the people, and their supplies, which may include a shred from the original banner with bonuses that will carry over to your next town. Your hearthlings throw a goodbye party, the people leave the settlement, and when you select to play a new game, those people are visible again on the roster screen the next time you start a game. By this mechanism, you can create new town seeded with three high level characters. You can also choose to embark with people from a different kingdom than you had before, allowing for parties of mixed ascendancy and Rayya’s Children settlers, and perhaps more when we get other kingdoms and races into the game. If you choose a different kind of banner during your second banner ceremony than the one you carry forward, you can create a city with two or eventually three different bonuses, accelerating and gently altering your second and third Stonehearth experiences. Finally, re-embarkation serves a narrative purpose: a lot of people have asked us whether we could have infinitely expanding Stonehearth maps, or a meta-game in which you settle a vast land one screen at a time. The giant maps don’t work in Stonehearth for performance reasons, and adding a layer of metagame removes our focus from the townbuilding that we love so much, but through re-embarkation, you can create a story about a small kingdom slowly spreading throughout the great frontier.
Now let’s talk about the complicated stuff: At a high level, why do this? The tier stuff is an easy win: all cities benefit from bonuses and decorations, but wow, our team had a lot of debate about the re-embarkation features: for example, though having the people move on makes it feel like a real world, Engineer Angelo was like, “I don’t ever want to lose 3 awesome people from my town, it feels like ruining my save: and Designer Luke was concerned by things like: “what does it to do balance for the next game?” it also makes recurring villains like Ogo Skullbonker kind of weird, and it encourages some people to feel like they can’t get the perfect city till they’ve re-embarked with all the bonuses to collect them all.
In the end, however, the answer to why we decided to create the quest encounters and re-embarkation actually starts with a question: in a game like, ours, which is a building simulation game, when do you know when you’re finished? Back in early 2017, I did a Desktop Tuesday where I said that in order for SH to become a fully functional game, it needed 3 things: a basic game loop that can be used to tie together a potentially infinite number of moddable systems, an understanding of multiplayer and how it fits into the game, and a conclusion. We got the game loop with the hearthling mood and thoughts system–your hearthlings now tell you how to progress across all the games systems–food, safety, shelter, appeal–and we figured out that co-op synchronous multiplayer is the mode in which the game really shines–so that leaves the last open issue, the conclusion. In a game like ours, where you’re building your own story according to your own motivations, how could you ever be done? We did a survey of the other things in our genre, and we came up with two answers: First, some games like Dwarf Fortress or Oxygen Not Included tend to end in catastrophic system failure–monsters came and annihilate everything or everyone asphyxiates, or everyone goes crazy and kills one another. Stonehearth didn’t seem to us like this type of game–though we’ve always planned, for example, to have an awesome titan attack your people somehow, combat isn’t the point of our game, so it would be inappropriate to end it with a series of monster attacks. Likewise, hearthlings are generally upbeat people, having them attack and kill each other has been much better done elsewhere!
Luckily, it seemed like there was honestly a second answer, which is that when games in the genre do not end in catastrophic failure, they end because you, a very special and very invested player, brought your own goals and story to the table, and because you satisfied everything you wanted to do. Essentially, these games end because you decide for yourself, that you’re finished and want to start over or move on. This is the ending that we wanted Stonehearth to have. In the tier system, we hope to build a narrative arc with just enough gameplay motivators to encourage you to hit the in-world goals, but that was open ended enough to accommodate whatever story you were already telling, and whatever story all your collective mods were telling–one in which zombies, candyland, bees and the hush–could all coexist together. This is why, in the tier progression quest, the first banner essentially asks what kind of town you aspire to make, why the hearth quest asks how you want your town to be known, and the last shrine quest asks you to confirm what your town has actually become good at. As a player experiencing it, or as a modder adding to it, we hope you think of this town progression as an arc with a beginning, a middle, and an end, celebrating your particular goals and achievements, in the context of the overriding tale of a small group of people to set off into the wilderness, become established, and then later grow self-sufficient enough to contribute back to the larger kingdom from which they came.
The story could end at Tier 3–all stories about a kind of growth inevitably end when that growth is achieved, or at least, when your CPU is maxed out–but there are times when you’ve had such a good time, and created such a great story, and found so many good friends–that you don’t yet want to say goodbye to the people you’ve become closest to. Or maybe, as I referenced above, instead of a story about a single city, you want to tell a story about an empire grown bit by bit; you want the feel of expanding the explored area of the map and staking wider territory. It is for this reason that we implemented re-embarkation; as an acknowledgement that though the story of THIS city is done, that another story awaits, that your kingdom shall grow, that there are new mods and encounters and experiences to try, that the cycle of Hearth shall continue.
Other Announcements
In case you missed it above, you can now play Stonehearth Multiplayer on a special unstable branch! Head over to this thread for details.
This week, Max is streaming! He’s been working hard on a ton of stuff, including performance fixes. Ask him all your optimization questions. In addition, he’s super interested in enhancing everyone’s ability to mod the game, so if you’re a modder and you need a piece of functionality to make your life easier, consider bringing that to his attention as well.