Hey everyone, welcome to our final Stonehearth Desktop Tuesday! Since it’s the last Desktop Tuesday, let’s take a quick look at the very last feature we’ve checked in for 1.0: seasons, plus some of the things we learned along the way.
Seasons and Cathedrals and Stuff
When you first start the game, you will be asked to select which season you wish to embark in: Spring, summer, fall, or winter. Each season changes the colors of the terrain and the trees, alters the growing patterns of crops and influences the sorts of weathers that occur at those times. Seasons last different lengths in different biomes, so give them all a try, or play them all through in one long trio of re-embarkations. Engineer Max and Artist Allie took a little extra bonus time to jam out, in particular, really lovely transitions as the trees and terrain slowly change color.
As we watch the seasons change, and since the game is about to exit early access, it also seems like a good time to take a moment and reflect on the very long journey that got us all here, standing around this hearth together.
For those of you who didn’t already know, my name is Stephanie and I’ve been working on Stonehearth since the very first day of its Kickstarter, back in the spring of 2013. By that point, I’d already been a software engineer in Sillicon Valley for almost a decade, and I had a really awesome job at a large tech company that was building the infrastructure behind the cloud services we all use today. When my friend and mentor Tom, along with his brother Tony started Radiant Entertainment, however, and began to put out Desktop Tuesdays showcasing their ideas for their adorable, voxel building-simulation game, I was filled with nothing more than the desire to dump all my many, many, many responsibilities and go make that game with them.
So I did.
Just as Artist Allie struggled to make the colors of the trees look right under the radically different colored lights from different seasons and weathers and times of day, building Stonehearth turned out to be way more difficult than we ever expected. Every day though, Tom, Tony and I, and later Albert, Chris, Brad, Yang, Doug, Winnie, Linda, Allie, Malley, Nikki, Richard, Justin, Ana, Morgan, Angelo, Luke, Max and Aaron found in the game–in its tone and in its radically weird tech–something precious, something that made us all want to get up every single day to bring it to life. We also got so much energy from interacting with all of you. We found inspiration in the things you built, from mods to templates to villages. We gained so much strength from your enthusiasm for what this game could be, that even through the game’s darkest hours, when we were, multiple times, over multiple years, on the verge of giving up, we managed to persevere until we’d built something we could legitimately feel proud of. And finally, I think, all of us found in this game, something special in each other, the kind of family of friends that is celebrated in media and that, until now, I thought was only possible to find inside RPGs and in the company of fictitious people.
I guess I’m sharing this with all of you because one, clearly, watching enough Desktop Tuesdays can change your life, and two, because I sort of wonder how many of you watching these also toy with a dream of laying down all your many, many responsibilities to go do something that speaks to your soul?
A brief digression: I come from a very pragmatic immigrant family, but the schools I grew up in, the teachers I had, the media of the world around me, and even this one famous guy who spoke at my graduation were so passionate when they said: “you’ve got to find what you love” that for most of my life, I’ve wondered if there’s any truth in it. The full quote from that graduation is something like:
“You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.”
That quote stuck with me, not just because it was great, but because back when I first heard it, it made me so angry. At that point in my life, I had made the pragmatic decision thousands of times already, and was proud of my plan to make it consistently for another eighty years. Who was Steve Jobs, one of the most successful people in the world, to chide me for settling? Human beings exist in webs of dependency and obligation; it seemed to me, that to do only the things that move the soul seems a luxury of self-indulgence. I wondered: is passion for your work really a guarantee or necessity for success, when sometimes, any sort of work at all seems like an incredible blessing? Do we only hear this platitude from the most powerful and successful people on earth, because silence is all you hear from everyone who has failed?
Anyway, if you wonder these things, or if you fantasize about making a game or are making one already, or if you’re me from the past, or if you’re wondering if someday soon it will be you behind a mic, talking about the project that sits at the center of your heart–If this is you, then I hope it won’t make you as angry as Steve Jobs made me, if I share this one last chunk of hard, game-development learning, derived from a sample size of one: which is that though each person must weigh when in their life it is feasible and responsible to take a risk like dropping everything to make a game with a group of people who have never done so before, that yes, it is in fact, at least survivable. I hope it is not too hard to hear that yes, you might not succeed to the degree that you wished; you will probably not, become the next Steve Jobs or build the next Minecraft, but again yes, it is possible to have doubts, to do what you love anyway, and to look back on your work and be proud, no matter what everyone else might think. But finally, and perhaps most importantly, the takeaway I think gets the least press on this subject is that over the last five years, all of you have proven to me that people who pursue what they love naturally draw together others who love those things as much as they do, and therefore, may discover along the way, as I did, the best of friends, the best of people, and maybe even the best of themselves.
I had this opportunity because of all of you; Stonehearth exists because of all of you, and I will be forever grateful. In a world full of media, thank you for your time. The internet is very small, and the world of games even smaller. I look forward to meeting again when we all have more to say to each other, and if that is too far from now, you can find me here in the comments, or on discourse.stonehearth.net. Team Stonehearth will post the 1.0 announcement for the game very soon, and will also have one last, all-day stream on Thursday, July 26th, that starts at 9:00am PST. There will also be a 1.1 release in December, with bug fixes, performance improvements, a modding guide, and probably a few more other little treats. See you there, and if not, certainly again someday.