New year and new updates!
about 5 years ago – Mon, Feb 04, 2019 at 12:03:43 AM

Hey all you wonderful Stonekickers

Just a quick update here as almost everyone is now getting their news and updates either directly on Discord or on Steam;

Hope everyone had a great festive season and has settled back to work/school/whatever well and happy. We had a small break with family and been hard at work on the latest update which was released this morning. This latest update focused on bug fixes - mainly around AI and job behaviour and several balance changes which should make the game quite a bit easier for you veteran players.

Hope you enjoy and see you at the next update!

Alpha 9.0: Spring Cleaning is out now!
over 5 years ago – Mon, Oct 01, 2018 at 02:27:57 AM

 Greetings clan!  

It sure has been a long time since the last update! Always feels like time flies by us way too fast however. Spring is upon us here in the southern hemisphere and Elderstone needed a good old spring clean as well. This update we put a priority on cleaning up more of the UI - a process we started with the needs and goblin UI changes we made last update - and also digging deeper into our navigation and pathfinding bugs that cause us all so many headaches.  

The needs wheel has been swapped around showing what the clan has and needs much more clearly now.  

Although it's still not perfect (and will take a long time still to get closer to perfect) you will find your goblins are much more responsive to jobs and will get stuck or go braindead a lot less often now.  

We also made several visual improvements to the snow, water and forests that you will hopefully like.  

Our new pine forests have a lot more charm now The game start has had an overhaul - now the game will start paused and give you time to look for an ideal starting location before placing your campfire. The inventory in the UI now shows the total resources in your village more accurately and new job priorities have been added to the job management window to further help you control your growing tribe.  

Several balance changes have also been made to the game, the most significant of which is a change to what goblins burn for firewood. They will now require logs instead of sticks to keep the goblins warm and cozy in their homes and at the campfire. 

This update therefore does not have too many “shiny and new” features but instead should be more robust and nicer to play. We always have this battle between wanting to put in new feature and focusing on improving what we already have, so we hope you are happy with the new update and we look forward to doing smaller updates going forward where possible to keep things interesting as well as improved. 

 Thank you as always and good luck with your villages!

Alpha 8.0: A New Winter
almost 6 years ago – Tue, Jul 24, 2018 at 11:50:55 AM

Hey all you wonderful Stonekickers!  

A new winter has arrived in Elderstone and its prettier than ever!  

We have been super hard at work and outdid ourselves yet again with the biggest update to the game yet, even bigger than the previous update. All the suggestions and feedback and bugs reports have been taken in an listed and although we obviously can't address every single issue with each update, we certainly are working our way through them. 

A few key highlights we have added in this new Alpha are a brand new and much improved UI for the goblin stats and moods, these should be much more clear to you now and will help you better understand what affects the goblins’ mood and behaviour. Goblins now also all have randomised faction attributes known as the WTF levels. These are levels in War, Trade and Faith and influence the goblins stats in various and important ways. High War attribute give a goblins more hit points and damage, while high trade will make the goblin a harder worker and a high faith score will mean more healing and magic if they are assigned to faith jobs such as priest and shaman. On top of that goblins can now occasionally be born with traits that affect them in either positive or negative ways. These traits include “lazy”, “berserker”, “worker” and some other with more to come.  

The big new art upgrade is a new snow shader and particle system. Winter will now look even better with falling snow and the snow slowly collecting on the ground and on all the buildings and rocks and terrain. The goblins also make deep paths in the snow as they wade through it. We worked really hard on making this look nice and still be performant so we hope you enjoy this updated winter look - more improvements like this will come over time. Some of the smaller but equally important improvements include new loading screen hints to help you, slower day and night to give you more time to prepare for each winter, lots of small balance changes to make the beginning of the game easier and many more small changes.  

We have fixed a lot of bugs and goblins behaviour issues and improved performance overall. Of course this is still Alpha and there will always be bugs and issues as we develop the game, every time we add new features or improve something, there is a risk of breaking something else, this is how development works and we will keep doing our best to make sure the bugs are low but also not stop from pushing forward and adding exciting new content and features.  

Rewards

The book I mentioned in my last post is now available to the backers that supported at that tier and I will post a link to you just after sending out this post. So look out for that! You can see the book listing here and please share with your friends and family to help support our amazing writer Edwin! 

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07DYKB4JV

I want to take a moment to thank our amazing community of fans, players and testers, especially the clan on discord who have been invaluable in providing feedback, suggestions and bug reports. Please join us there to help us if you haven't already and make some wicked new friends.

Jenny of Elderstone
almost 6 years ago – Tue, Jul 24, 2018 at 02:00:34 AM

This post is for backers only. Please visit Kickstarter.com and log in to read.

Alpha 7.0 - A Goblin Tale
almost 6 years ago – Sat, Jun 23, 2018 at 09:25:37 AM

Alpha 7.0  

Greetings Stonekickers!

Alpha 7 has been a focus on improving and adding to our story moment system. The story moment system is really important to us and has gone over several iterations over the course of development. These stories are written by Edwin Mcrae who is releasing his novel Stormbane this month. Stormbane is a dark yet humorous soft LitRPG novella set in a fictional version of Elderstone. The story follows the adventures of a heroine named Stormbane who will be featured in our game when we release the heroes feature. Those of you that backed at the appropriate tier will be receiving your free copy of the book as soon as its available.

We’ve added more story moments and rebalanced some of the results. The results also matter more now. Previously some story moments would cause goblins to get certain conditions like “hiding” but this didn't really have any impact in the game as the goblins would not really change their behaviour in a noticeable way. Now the goblins will stop working and run to their warrens and actually hide. More of the story moments also have results that are more tangible like giving or taking resources from you, adding new members to the village or killing goblins. We’re not quite done with this system yet however, we will be improving the look and UI of these screens and adding more stories over the next few months.  

Alpha 7 was a really big update for us and we would like to share a few more key features we’ve worked on with you; We have done a fair number of balance changes, the most impactful will be a more stable and consistent, but slower population growth for your tribe. We found many villages having problems when you have a sudden and unexpected population boom which lead to riots due to overcrowding and starvation due to lack of food. We think players will have a more manageable time dealing with a growing tribe now.  

Many resources are unavailable in winter but now you will be able to at least see where they are because we’ve finally added winter versions them, similar to the berry bushes being empty in winter. Winter versions now exist for hemp and herbs and the frog spawning pond is now larger and more easy to identify.  

Town watch are now finally posted on top of the watchtower as they’ve always meant to be. We had a bug in previous versions which prevented us from making them shoot from the top of the tower properly. This has been changed and fixed so the watchtower now serves as a stationary defensive position as intended. You will have to build guard towers to have more powerful guards who patrol in that area to defend the village later in the game.  

The skeletons have been made more easy to identify with a spooky new blue glow to them. This will help you differentiate them from the white goblins and easier to see when they attack. We also fixed some pathfinding bugs which sometimes prevented them from attacking when they were too far away from the village.  

We have reshuffled the tutorial build order in order to help new kings and queens get through winter a little more easily. The Trade Hall and extra Warren are not at the end of the tutorial, along with the slower population growth this should mean more success for our inexperienced village leaders.  

We added many more notifications to help you keep track of what is going on with your clan and village. We also added a few more shortcuts for quality of life improvements and a host of UI and sound effects improvements and additions.  

The buildings now have a different lighting set up making them look much nicer at night and this also improves graphics performance a lot!  There are a bunch of other smaller new things and lot and lots of bug fixes to improve your experience.   

The last few months since we released into early access have been a tough challenge for us and we have a long road ahead of us yet but we are inspired by our growing community of players and fans and we are confident our game will only become better.

We are hard at work on our next update which focuses on the user interface around the goblins and their moods and stats. We are going to be making it much more clear to you what's going on with the goblins and what affects their behaviour. We are also finally adding their first traits which are randomly allocated to some goblins. These can either be positive or negative and gives them permanent bonuses or disadvantages. Part of that work is also reworking the clan creation screen and it will now be a lot more interesting and important in choosing the right goblins to start your clan with. We’ll share more about this in the next post.  

We are currently taking part in the steam summer sale, so it's a good time to tell friends and family to get a copy! :D   

We're very proud to have received our beautiful Play by Play laurels for being finalists in the design category "that game like clockwork"

Remember to join us on discord to take part in the conversation and help squash bugs and improve our game and maybe make a few new goblin friends :)