The spirits of the Dark World have become most festive!
From now until October 31st Stone Story RPG will be running a 2x Loot Event. Complete runs in the Haunted Halls to earn this extra loot (which also includes 2x Lost Item drops).*
If you already wield Pallas’s imposing weapon, you may find a curious addition during this event…
*For the duration of the Halloween Event, Pallas will drop two treasures. Delta Treasures dropped from Pallas have double the chance of dropping Lost Items.
Though many Pushers found their fates frozen upon the frigid path of the Icy Ridge, one Pusher endured the icy winds. She’s been spotted on the repaired Bridge, staring into the Stream of the Silent.
Could this stranger know what mysteries await at the end? Do they perhaps dream of Ascension?
Ascension
In Stone Story RPG’s newest Legend, "Ascension", players will aid this wayward Pusher in their quest to reach Acropolis, the fabled city among the clouds.
What crazy scheme could they possibly have? And what does it have to do with all these chests?! Guess there’s only one way to find out...
[previewyoutube="0_a5QUPm_w4;full"]
New Scripts Added
In this content drop, we’re adding some scripts from our community event, StoneJam 4, as official scripts in-game!
Check them out below and try them in your own games~
New cosmetic: Pet Snail by Agerak
To use in-game, add the following line to your Mind Stone: import Cosmetics/PetSnail
New mini-game: Digits Puzzle by Okamiroy
To use in-game, add the following line to your Mind Stone: import Games/DigitsPuzzle
New UI: Doom HUD: Dr Abandonment
To use in-game, add the following lines to your Mind Stone: import UI/FaceHUD
The Quest Update Continues
Three Legends in-game, several more yet to come. Look forward to more adventures in the Dark World!
-SSRPG Team
New Quest Arriving Oct. 22 - Ascension
In ignorant servitude, Pushers knew nothing beyond their loop of endless work. With the fall of the Bronze Guardian and the arrival of the player, they quickly gained the impetus and curiosity to discover what lay beyond the Bronze Gate.
They could scarce imagine they might one day achieve Ascension.
[previewyoutube="0_a5QUPm_w4;full"]
Though many Pushers found their fates frozen upon the frigid path of the Icy Ridge, one Pusher endured the icy winds. She’s been spotted on the repaired Bridge, staring into the Stream of the Silent.
Could this stranger know what mysteries await at the end?
Roguelike Celebration Sale - ASCII-Art with a Modern Twist!
This year we're humbled and happy to be part of the lineup for Roguelike Celebration! Until October 19, Stone Story RPG will be on sale at a 20% discount.
40+ years of ASCII-art: From "Rogue" to Now
Though Stone Story RPG isn't a roguelike, it draws from many of its hallmarks. Looking back to the progenitor of the genre, Rogue, our primary inspiration is clear: We love ASCII-art!
Techniques and technology have come a long way from Rogue, the groundbreaking seminal 1980 dungeon crawler. Stone Story RPG sits at the crossroads of new and old, a confluence of retro and modern gaming. Nowhere is this more evident than in the game's animation style.
The stark minimalism of black and white ASCII art strikes just as clearly as when Rogue first released:
In developing Stone Story RPG we wanted to stretch the limits of this style. Using a combination of traditional animation techniques and clever Unity tricks, ASCII art can work just like pixel art!
Much of the process behind ASCII animation is the same as with any other medium:
Find references
Establish keyframes
Determine length of each animation
Go frame by frame and fill the inbetweens
Letters, numbers, and even Unicode symbols all work together to evoke an ethereal feel, something borne out of the era of DOS computers and floppy disks.
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Still curious about the ASCII animation process and wondering how you can incorporate natural-looking ASCII-art in your own work?
Check out this talk from Stone Story RPG's creator, Gabriel Santos, from Roguelike Celebration 2019!
[previewyoutube="5sFVVQcUWVE;full"]
-SSRPG Team
"Remnants of Five" Now Available
The Council once held dominion over The Dark World, from the lowest Canyons to the highest Ridges. Their influence remains, a presence that tells of the Remnants of Five.
Lootmeister Hans, a former member of The Council of Five, has need of a delivery made to a destination unknown.
Surely a hero like you can handle a simple package… right?
Remnants of Five
In Remnants of Five, players will have a chance to meet Uulaa, the Ember Eye. Once a member of the esteemed Council of Five, the Matron of Flame has not been seen for many cycles. However, some say she’d prefer to keep it that way...
Hans has tasked you with discovering the location of his long-lost friend. Where in the Dark World could someone like Uulaa be hiding?
[previewyoutube="5d2zBlN0A2g;full"]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5d2zBlN0A2g[/previewyoutube] Along with this Legend, Stone Story RPG will also be adding a new shop, the Hotspring Shop, that uses a resource many of you have already been saving up: Ki Crystals!*
*You can find more details about Ki Crystal economy further down in the post
The Hotspring Shop will stock rare and hard to find items that players can purchase with their crystal currency. The inventory found here is of much higher quality than will be found in the Mushroom Shop; intrepid adventurers can expect to purchase valuable loot like nametags, legendary enchantments, and even Lost Items!
Since the items in the Hotspring Shop will be of greater quality, the way the Ki Crystal economy works will be a bit different. Crystals, however, can be obtained both through playing the game, completing weekly quests, and finding them in Delta treasures.
But that’s not all: this content patch also introduces Weekly Quests! Each week you’ll get a new set of objectives that, upon completion, will provide you with a Crystal Treasure.
New Scripts Added
As part of this content drop, we’re also including a few of our favorite entries from the StoneJam 4 as official scripts in-game!
We hope you give them a try~
New cosmetic: Knight by: Mind Stone Thief, Gergő, XX, standardcombo
To use in-game, add the following line to your Mind Stone: import Cosmetics/Knight
New mini-game: Mystic Sword by: Flan Bi
To use in-game, add the following line to your Mind Stone: import Games/SwordGame
New UI: Free Chest Tracker by: 10100111001
To use in-game, add the following lines to your Mind Stone: var freeChest = import UI/FreeChestTracker freeChest.Main()
The Quest Update Continues
Two down, many more to come. We hope you look forward to more adventures in the Dark World!
Shop Mechanics and Game Economy (design talk ahead!)
While we want to make use of certain idle/mobile mechanics, PC players can rest assured that we have no intentions of adding microtransactions to the desktop client.
We do have a mobile port with monetization in mind further down the line, but we took what was necessary for mobile (e.g. the Ki Crystal shop) and instead of excluding it from the PC, we've reframed it.
Not as a monetization tool, but as an engaging mechanic; formatted for a different purpose, with different balance values, that we hope adds to the game's fun.
As discussed in a previous post, Stone Story RPG is a metrics-driven project. This means that we base many of our design choices around trends and statistics that we notice in how players progress through the game.
Changes are made in order to engage players through the 1st day of playing to the 7th day to the 30th day (the D1 > D7 > D30 funnel).
Major factors in this design are shop mechanics. Functionally, they are a way to give players options: the option to brute force a challenge, the option to farm and stockpile, the option to choose how they progress.
In Stone Story RPG we want players to have room to experiment and play around. The Mushroom Shop does that for the early-mid game; it gives you a way to buy items like runes to overcome a difficult combat encounter that you might not have figured out the optimal solution for yet.
The Ki Crystal shop is a way for us to add this kind of flexibility to the mid-late game, going hand-in-hand with Quests and their respective rewards.
We’re still experimenting with how these systems and mechanics work in tandem with each other, which is where the Quest Update comes into play. Slowly, but surely, we’re filling Stone Story RPG’s design out and bringing it one step closer to the full vision we have in mind.
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As always, thank you for playing. We appreciate your continued support and feedback as we continue to chip away at the game.
The Council once held dominion over The Dark World, from the lowest Canyons to the highest Ridges. Their influence remains, a presence that tells of the Remnants of Five.
“Remnants of Five” will be added to Stone Story RPG as a playable Quest on October 13th
[previewyoutube="5d2zBlN0A2g;full"]
Lootmeister Hans has need of a delivery made to a destination unknown.
Surely a hero like you can handle a simple package… right?
Checking in with players & sharing our thoughts in a dev log
Hello Stonefriends!
We hope you’ve enjoyed the Quest Update so far. Dealing with squatting Stoneheads and frenetic frogs is no joke!
Last Friday, we added “Mr. Pallas’ Wild Ride”, the first of many Legends to come. The Wild Ride Challenge Event will continue for a few more days (ending on October 10th), so you’ve still got a bit of time to complete your goals and your reward.*
*All loot gained through events can still be obtained in-game. Events may also repeat in the future.
StoneJam 4 Wrapup
A couple weeks ago, we hosted our fourth StoneJam, an event where community members gathered to create custom content using the in-game scripting language, Stonescript.
We received all sorts of neat creations, including cosmetics, minigames, pets, and UI tools! We’ve put together a video where we look at each submission, so you can see what kinds of projects people worked on:
[previewyoutube="Ob60pbxtSqM;full"]
What’s Next?
We've got more Legends to come in the following weeks (be on the lookout next week for "Remnants of Five"!). We plan to add a total of 16 Legends: full-scale adventures featuring unique narrative experiences.
Everything that gets added in the Quest Update further builds out Stone Story RPG as a whole. More events that will repeat, new mechanics and systems, and expanded Stonescript features are just some of the things that will become core to the final version of the game.
Why are we staggering development like this? Well, we’re indiedevs!
This is not meant as an excuse or a joke, but rather a sincere explanation. We are a small team that takes pride in the quality of our work, and Early Access allows us the opportunity to work in constant conversation with our players to iterate and improve on Stone Story.
That kind of quality, however, calls for fairly rigorous testing and experimentation. Balance that with busy lives and a world that’s on fire, and you can start to see why we’ve taken as long as we have.
This is especially important when it comes to one of our primary concerns: Player Engagement & Fun.
The Game Funnel (light game spoilers)
Stone Story RPG is a niche game. “ASCII-animated incremental auto-RPG with programming elements” is a hard enough sell as it is, and while it helps us stand out it also makes it extremely challenging to get players invested.
We receive lots of valuable feedback from you guys. What we don't receive is feedback from players who did not become engaged with the game.
These are people who, for whatever reason, didn't have fun playing. They leave and don't come back, almost never giving the developers direct feedback. This might be the single largest challenge to solve as a game dev! No game can please everyone, but we know we can do better.
To tackle this issue, we track a set of usage data that is both aggregate and anonymous. For instance, when players begin a new story, they all go through the first location, gather several items, then craft their first item.
Those steps are added to a collective pool of data. Correcting for things like piracy, this tells us a statistical story of how players, as a whole, are interacting with the game and allows us to see where folks are getting stuck.
This process is called Funnel Analysis, where science intersects with art, to inform some of our game design decisions. This tells us where problems exist, but not what those problems are, or how to fix them. What comes next involves some detective work.
We've identified and fixed several minor drop-off points, where players give up, but there is one STARK drop-off that persists. It appears right after upgrading your workstation, and we believe this is the Waterfall Puzzle, where currently 18% of new players are leaving (probably in frustration).
The Waterfall Puzzle is a unique moment in Stone Story, since it’s one of the few times where we introduce a non-combat challenge. We've attempted various changes to solve the issue, with partial success. If we're going to crack this case it's going to take more than just a few text and number adjustments. We have to re-think the whole section.
Fun and Enjoyment, Through the Lens of Data
It's certainly hard to quantify "fun", but we believe Retention Rate gives us a measure of that, albeit indirectly. Retention in games is often expressed in the sequence D1 > D7 > D30, or what percentage of players are returning to play again after 1 day, 7 days, and 30 days.
D1 retention is all about ensuring the game has a fun and engaging hook. Stone Story RPG’s base game content can be completed in roughly 8 hours, meaning that someone can “beat” the game in about a day or so. The progression needs to be as smooth as possible, so fixing bugs and conveying the gameplay without confusion is crucial.
D7 retention focuses on giving people a reason to come back. This is where things like Quests and higher difficulties come into play. The goal at this part of the experience is to expose players to the deeper parts of the game, where their breadth of choices unfolds to infinity. Our work with the Quest Stone and the 3.0 release is designed to boost this area of the experience.
D30 retention focuses on the long-term. This is where we strive to get all our players: using Stonescript, creating custom content, theorycrafting, and generally being invested in Stone Story RPG as a whole. Community events are one way for us all to have fun at this stage of progression.
In terms of future development, we believe Green difficulty locations, quality of life systems, an expanding arsenal of complex items, as well as a new game mode are some of the ways in which Stone Story can deliver long-term enjoyment.
We love data, as it helps us understand the full picture and keep improving!
Stone Story Worldwide
On TOP of retaining players, we spend just as much time ensuring that people all over the world can play the game. We’re lucky to work with such a great localization team, Warlocs, who’ve made the game accessible in so many different countries.
If you’re a game dev and not localizing your game you’re missing out on a HUGE audience. However, it’s not as simple as just translating! Good localization involves a deep understanding of dialogue, tone, and mechanics so you can properly convey it all to a completely different audience.
Having Stone Story localized for so many languages doesn’t just increase how many players we have; it also increases the amount of data we receive!
Iteration and localization are all in service of the eventual ports and ensuring this can hit as wide an audience as possible. This process takes time and we ask that you please continue to be patient with us as we work to bring Stone Story RPG up to the ambitious vision we have for it.
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Whew, that was a lot of text! If you made it this far, thank you for reading.
Stone Story RPG continues to be a labor of love in an industry that demands so much for even a chance at success. We deeply appreciate every one of you that has stuck with us so far and continues to come back.
"Mr. Pallas' Wild Ride" Now Available + Challenge Event IV
Something is stirring in the Haunted Halls…
Scotty the Skull has sent you the information of an associate of his- a skeleton named Auggie in need of a hired hand. Included are directions to the Skeleton Chest Factory.
Are you prepared to venture down once more and go on Mr. Pallas’ Wild Ride?
The Wild Ride
The Quest Update continues with the addition of “Mr. Pallas Wild Ride”! Players that have unlocked the Quest Stone will be able to access this new Legend and once more confront the Fallen God himself, the flayed titan Pallas.
In addition to the new Quest, Stone Story RPG will also be running its fourth Challenge Event - The Wild Ride, from October 1st until October 10th. All players who participate in this event will receive the Skeleton Arm, a powerful Lost Item that further deepens your arsenal.
Lost Items are rare pieces of loot that can be obtained outside of limited-time events. For information on Lost Items and their drop rates, please see here.
Event Details:
Each player is given their own Skeleton Arm at the beginning of the Challenge.
At the end of the event, participants will receive special loot for completing “Mr. Pallas’ Wild Ride”: a shiny treasure with an enchantment (uniquely “signed” from the event).
To proceed with the Challenge, players must complete a series of goals. Each goal completed further improves the loot’s enchantment bonus (up to a +11 enchantment).
There are a total of 4 goals, each one requiring you to use the Skeleton Arm in creative ways.
(Note: Events may repeat, and all gameplay-related rewards can still be obtained through normal play. Enchantments can also be removed from the event loot and placed on another item.)
The Quest Update Continues
“Mr. Pallas Wild Ride” marks the first of many Quests to come. We hope you all look forward to more adventures in the Dark World!
Something is stirring in the Haunted Halls… Ghastly ghosts and spooky scary skeletons lurk below. Are you prepared to venture down once more and go on Mr. Pallas’ Wild Ride?
Mr. Pallas' Wild Ride will be added to Stone Story RPG as a playable Quest on October 1st. This Quest Drop will also feature an accompanying Challenge event.
[previewyoutube="eK33zZi2ZK4;full"]
Scotty the Skull has sent you the information of an associate of his- a skeleton named Auggie in need of a hired hand. Included are directions to the Skeleton Chest Factory.
Time to see what’s got them so rattled.
The Quest Update - Available Now
Dive into the newest major content release for Stone Story RPG: The Quest Update. Available now!
[previewyoutube="ufJbtYvV8Mo;full"]
Launching with four all-new adventures, the Quest Update will take players on journeys spanning the breadth of the Dark World. Uncover mysteries both magnificent and mundane as you meet old friends, wield powerful new artifacts, and get up to plenty of mischief. (Keep an eye out for a new achievement as well!)
Content that launches today is only the beginning. Updates will continue over the next few months as we add content and events to the game; you can look forward to something new nearly every week!
Several balance changes have also been patched into the game. For further reading on what’s changed, please see the full release notes: https://stonestoryrpg.com/releasenotes/
So what exactly are Quests? Good Quest-ion! (hohoho)
Quests are self-contained adventures that can be played alongside the main story content. Accessed in-game via the Quest Stone, they can be split up into two types: Basic Quests and Legends.
Basic Quests present players with a goal (e.g. “Kill 45 Mosquitos”) that, upon completion, will reward you with a small loot haul.
Legends, however, are much larger in scale. Legends are full narrative adventures that put players in contact with curious characters, both new and old. The Dark World is fraught with peril, and sometimes you need a reliable Stonehead to get the job done. In exchange, you’ll be rewarded with powerful prizes (not all of them items!).
Our primary focus when creating the Quest system was twofold: to further flesh out the Dark World and give players more choice with how to progress.
While Stone Story allows for grinding, we found that people would simply farm locations to bruteforce their way through a difficult encounter. Now with Quests, players can pursue different options for progression. Earn powerful loot while embarking on adventures throughout the realm.
The Quest Update launches with a batch of Basic Quests and 4 Legends:
Croaked: From the Deadwood Canyon, a symphony of croaks dance across the water, led by a conductor of annoyed moans. Investigate the disturbance!
Stone-Head: A Roof Overhead: There's a knocking at your shelter door, followed by the quick patter of footfalls. Someone may be in need of your help.
Bad Business: A panic-scrawled note from Lootmeister Hans beckons you back to the Mushroom Shop. What could have Hans in such a hurry?
Throwing Stones: A lone Pusher has been spotted by the Deadwood River, a remnant of those who did not make the climb. Perhaps it’s worth talking to them.
There are a total of 16 Legends, the rest of which will be released over the following months along with in-game events and challenges. Make sure to be on the lookout for new additions to Stone Story!
Thank you to everyone who participated in StoneJam 4! We had some great submissions that we're very eager to check out. Here are just a few of the entries we received:
Cozy Cave by link2_thepast
Doom Style Face HUD by Franklin Ludo
Knight by Mind Stone Thief (with help from standardcombo, Gergő, and xx)
We're excited that so many people created such awesome scripts! We've got more entries to share, so keep an eye out for a StoneJam 4 showcase soon.
The Quest Update is something we’ve been working on for a long while now, and we’re still not done! As it was for all of you, the past couple years have been challenging to both work and live in. The reality of the situation is that Stone Story RPG is and always has been a passion project.
Without you, our community, we would not be where we are today, nor would we still be working on this game after all this time. We believe in Stone Story and we’re so glad to see that many of you do too.
Stone Story RPG launched into Early Access over 2 years ago and it’s been an incredible journey every step of the way. For indie game developers, that journey is an uphill climb with obstacles and obstructions (ones that we oftentimes don’t see until they happen!).
This is our biggest content release to date, and there are so many talented people that made it possible. From all of us on the team: Thank you for playing.
We’re just getting started with The Quest Update and we can’t wait to share more!
