We hope you'll be diggin' the demo of Below the Stone this week for Steam Nextfest. We have a short update for all the fans following our game.
We will be streaming on our store page to answer fan questions, take suggestions, and talk about the origin of Below the Stone and its team! If you'd like to take part in this event, and stay up with the latest Below the Stone news, drop a follow on our store page!
We will be updating the demo again for Nextfest, as well as dropping a Changelog for everyone interested in all that is new before Early Access!
Thank you all for making this game the success that it is!
- Mike @ Strollart; Below the Stone
⛏ Dwarf Party! ⛏ - Developer Stream
Ahoy bearded brethren!
We hope you'll be diggin' the demo of Below the Stone this week for Steam Nextfest. We have a short update for all the fans following our game.
We will be streaming on our store page to answer fan questions, take suggestions, and talk about the origin of Below the Stone and its team! If you'd like to take part in this event, and stay up with the latest Below the Stone news, drop a follow on our store page!
We will be updating the demo again for Nextfest, as well as dropping a Changelog for everyone interested in all that is new before Early Access!
Thank you all for making this game the success that it is!
- Mike @ Strollart; Below the Stone
Below the Stone Dev/Art stream!
Matt, our deputy artist on Below the Stone, will be working on his art live -- on the front of the Below the Stone store page! He will be around to dig into your burning Below the Stone questions, and to talk about what it's like being the artist on Below the Stone. A lot of new enemies, creatures, and features are being worked on for Early Access, and this will be your sneak peek into the depths of what is to come!
Show you support and come watch us live, starting 8pm EST!
Below the Stone Dev Stream
Ahoy bearded brethren!
We hope you'll be diggin' the demo of Below the Stone this week for Steam Nextfest. We have a short update for all the fans following our game.
We will be streaming on our store page to answer fan questions, take suggestions, and talk about the origin of Below the Stone and its team! If you'd like to take part in this event, and stay up with the latest Below the Stone news, drop a follow on our store page!
We will be updating the demo again for Nextfest, as well as dropping a Changelog for everyone interested in all that is new before Early Access!
Thank you all for making this game the success that it is!
- Mike @ Strollart; Below the Stone
HUGE demo update! Coming to Steam Nextfest.
A big update is coming to Below the Stone's demo!
Below the Stone's demo was a massive success for us, with an average playtime being well above the typical time seen on Steam demos.
We actively listen to all our fans and players who take the time to play our demo, so we have many new features, player suggestions, and quality of life improvements added to Below the Stone's early preview. This new demo will likely drop next week, so keep your eyes peeled for updates here on Steam, and in our Discord.
To thank our fans, we have several streams we're hosting here on Steam for Nextfest! We want to talk with YOU the fans, the people who know this game best other than the developers themselves. We're going to get the whole dev team to stream during the event as the week goes by, so get ready for some fun, wild, unfiltered times at Strollart Studios.
We hope to see you there on stream during Oct 9-16!
Pre Alpha 0.7.1 Hotfix is Now Live! (change log)
We want to thank the thousands of players who have come to play our first public demo, and for all those who reported bugs to us on our Discord and gave tons of great feedback!
This update is our way of saying thank you to those who've played, and making the experience just a little bit better by fixing a bunch of bugs and issues that many people have reported.
We don't want this demo to be a static thing that is the same from day one. We want this to be a show of what the overall development of Below the Stone is going to be; Listening to the community, talking about our plans. And then delivering updates that are strongly based on player feedback to show that we are listening. Though, with full disclosure, it needs to be clear that some updates may be more strongly focused towards our own internal plans for things that need to be done. But the importance of devs listening to the community will never be forgotten, and will always be a priority. We know this very strongly, because we are also gamers who've witnessed studios/devs slowly loosing touch with their community. And we believe that is a sign of the downfall of a studio.
Community always matters, when it comes to games on the internet.
So with all of that being said, I now present the change log for this update. So everyone can go out and witness these changes for themselves.
Change Log
Below The Stone - Pre Alpha 0.7.1
* Those really annoying explosions that would happen in the caves? Yea those, we call them "weak walls". Those were intended to be "cave-ins" that were easier to avoid, but also just as freaky. So we have replaced the explosions with a longer "cave collapse" sequence which is fairer in terms of avoidance, but at least twice as thrilling and enjoyable to encounter.
* "Weak walls" (the things that used to explode) now spawn 2.5 times less than previously. [from 0.5% to 0.2%] (Trust me, those percentages are small, but it's a considerable difference)
* Tweaked the loot tables for normal/gold chests in dungeons; you'll have to work a little harder for that good armor now. Gold chests will also have some more goodies, though.
* Also tweaked loot tables of "bonus chests" that you get in the kingdom
+ Added "remainder bar" to shopkeep ui (Imogen) to indicate that when you sell some items, the gold amount may have a little left over that doesn't go over into the next whole number.
* Selling items at the shopkeep will have a value reduction of 40% now (as was originally intended); hence the need for a "remainder bar".
* Addressed an issue where eating healing items (mushrooms) would cause the health bar to randomly show more health than there actually was, which made it appear that you would lose health when eating another mushroom. (should be fixed)
+ Added numerical health display along with the existing health bar
* Updated the "shadow texture" that appears over wall tiles, to give a more fair view of what ores or other things could embedded in the walls. (just not ears)
* Addressed an issue where walls would sometimes be broken/unminable, combined with distant explosions (no, that was not the game self-destructing). Long story short, the distant explosions were related to the bug. Things weren't being unloaded properly.
* Torches now burn enemies when hit!
+ Added some extra description to some items
* Made descent end screen (escape drill pod) ui sounds a bit more quieter. Hopefully, it's not as jarring now.
* Adjustments to creature ai to try and fix object avoidance
* Updated colors of "object selectors" to be more consistent
+ Added special "can't mine" icon to "mining selector" to indicate that a wall can't be mined. (helpful for our color-blind peeps)
* Kroz the Grizzled Miner (in caves) now has a light and tries really hard to not occupy the same space as another rock. 🤞
* Updated wood sprite to now be an image of a plank. (you're welcome Jonny)
+ Added Dopefish.
* Spiders no longer machine-gun their spider webs rambo-style into a wall when their view of the player is obstructed.
* Reduced the health of skull spawners (skeletons) and tent spawners (kobolds), so you might have a fighting chance now.
* Fixed a bug where dead kobolds may still move around and attack even though they are clearly laying face flat on the ground.
* Spawners (skull and tent) now act a bit more like Minecraft spawners; their respawn timer only counts down if their "total entities spawned" counter is not at its maximum. So you can kill a spawned monster, and another one won't instantly spawn right as it dies, which should make dealing with spawners more fair.
* Fixed a bug where the player would sometimes get flung at high speed after closing a dialog window. This was due to the dialog window pausing the physics simulation (as intended), but for some reason, the velocity of the player would "accumulate".
* Fixed a bug where players would be stuck frozen if they exited the game while in a dialog window (physics was still paused, and would never unpause).
* Updated dynamite recipe to require guano 🤤
+ Added a literal trash can to the kingdom that you can throw items into.
* Updated newsletter button on the main menu (now directs to a webpage with form).
FREE DEMO AVAILABLE NOW
We are so excited to have finally made it to this point! We want everyone who has been following us over the years to not miss this opportunity and join the community in playing the game. Also, we want to hear your thoughts on the game and see what kind of progress you make while playing!
You can try out the free demo on our Steam page, and we want you to join our Discord and let us know what you think!
Pax West 2022 has arrived! Which means more people getting their hands on playing the game for the first time.
But for those of you who could not attend Pax this year and still want to see more from the game, we have an alternative. We will be sharing our Pax Demo build with a few streamers to play and stream during the month of September.
I am personally excited to see what they have to say about Below The Stone!
The order of the links above is roughly the order at which they will stream the game. I will list some more streamers below, but when exactly they will stream is not known at the current time.
As you can see, quite a few of these streamers are Dwarf VTubers. We're really diggin' that!
We hope you can stop by and watch some of these streamers, so we'll see you then!
Below the Stone's Kickstarter
[previewyoutube="AZEI_GibNoY;full"]
Below the Stone has just 10 days left on Kickstarter. and in the last 23 days, and attending PAX West, has raised more than 30,000 dollars in additional funding from our amazing community to expand the scope of the game. ːpickaxː
With more and more support coming in, we hope to see you join in as well to support the campaign, and get some sweet limited edition Kickstarter-only Below the Stone merch as well!
Our Co-op Stretch goal is still within reach if we have enough support from fans like you reading this, and if you'd like to pre-purchase a copy for Steam or Switch, our Kickstarter is the best way to do it!
Thank you for your support, and make sure you don't miss out on our Kickstarter here!:
We still have a lot to go from this point on, but we now have a chance to see (with our eyes) our game's complete image.
For a long time, Below The Stone went without many things. Most notably:
Sounds
Armor
Animations
There are probably other things I'm missing, but these are important to this post ;)
Animations for our game have been a thing that we've been trying to implement for a long time, but our game engine seems to make it really difficult to do things in the particular way that we need them to be done. We use Unity Engine, to be clear.
WARNING: RANT ALERT
Unity assumes that we use its sprite rendering system a certain way, and they make it difficult to use it a slightly different way. On top of that, they also make it not easy to make your own "Sprite Rendering Component" so you can fully customize it the way you prefer. Think about the block-breaking particles you get when breaking blocks in Minecraft (because I do, a lot). All it is, is the block's texture with random UV coordinates inside the texture. So it renders these extremely unique individual particles that fly off. If you wanted to do something like that in Unity, you could do it, but don't expect it to be straight forward. Because Unity basically forces you to use their Sprite objects for everything, and they don't give you any tools to custom control the sprite rendering process.
Anyway, I could rant about this forever. Rant Over.
The way animations work is not super different, but the key idea is that anything the player can wear (this includes other characters) has to have its own texture animation. And the idea is that we layer the textures over each other to customize the player with whatever we want (including armor).
The way we handle this layering is with multiple Sprite Renderers. A long time ago, I had the idea of making my own Sprite Renderer that could make multiple sprites, but I discovered that wasn't as possible as I first imagined, due to not being able to make my own Sprite Renderer. I put off animations for many months so I could stew over it while adding other core features that needed to be done. Since then, I have decided on just having multiple sprite renderers, and controlling them using other scripts. This allows me to be able to change the sprite animation from the main dwarf body, and all the other sprite renderers will switch to using the same frame, so everything is always lined up.
If I can, I do want to possibly switch to using a more elegant system, but this will do for now.
The other thing that has been giving me a hard time is animations. Unity has its own way of handling animations, and it's a pretty good system, but not right for us. Unity's animation system is best for rigging, but it can also do sprite animations. The problem is that it natively animates Sprites, and with the way it's designed. I would have to make animation clip files FOR EACH piece of clothing, which is super redundant and time-consuming. My new sprite "synchronizing" code would actually allow me to not have to worry about this though, but there are still some nuanced issues.
Without going into immense detail, I will say this. Consider what I would need to do if we had different dwarf main body textures, maybe one has a darker skin tone. I would still need to make animation clips for each body texture. And all dwarf body textures, and the clothing, all have the same animation, so all I really need to "animate" is some data telling me the animation sequence for the dwarf, and I should be able to apply any body, helmet, shirt, pants, etc to it. and have it animate properly. So in reality, I shouldn't be animating spites, but instead, I should be animating some data that is used to pick the right sprites from some other data structure. This is the ideal system, and it is what I will be aiming for in the future.
For now, I will use some very basic code to dictate which animation to run, so I have full control over that matter.
Either way, the game is finally starting to look really nice, and it has been long overdue for some of these features. For the near future, we plan on continuing to work on animations, armor, and combat. So we can maybe get the kobold animated as well. Add more sounds, improve old sounds, add some more ambiance to the game. And prepare the caves so that there is be some degree of progression. Then we will start to add a very rudimentary "dwarven kingdom" that will be used to complete the gameplay cycle. And you will be able to take and complete jobs that will reward you when you return to the kingdom.
Thank you all for following our development, and have a good rest of your day!
