Stoneshard Update #39 – New Interface

The end of year Kickstarter update for Ink Stains Games’ roguelike RPG Stoneshard starts with some holiday well wishes and then proceeds to talk about the game’s recently revamped UI that now has a new equipment slot, an autosort button, a gold counter, and more. And then, the update lets us know that Stoneshard’s upcoming alpha release had to be postponed until January 2019.

Check it out:

Hello!

Firstly, we would like to wish all of you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year (we hope you’ll have great holidays) and take stock of the past year. The 2018th was full of events: the Prologue’s release, a successful Kickstarter campaign, porting to a new engine’s version, huge revamp of many game systems and implementation of many new features. Without your support all of this would hardly have been possible, and it’s an awesome thing our community consists of so many cool people! 2019 should be decisive due to the planned release, so all the most interesting is yet to come!

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Now let’s turn to the current news. This devlog was preceded by a long period of silence. The reason is simple: we simultaneously worked on many different features, but until recently, they were all too rough around the edges to show them publicly. Now the situation has changed, so in the coming weeks devlogs will be published much more often and stably. And today’s Saturday will be dedicated to the updated UI.

Initially, we did not plan to change with the interface before the Beta. However, when it came to the introduction of trade and the dialogue system, it became clear it’s impossible to continue on without the total rework of the entire UI. So in this iteration we tried to take into account the most frequent problems and suggestions of the community.

First let’s inspect the general points. The GUI design has become more dark and monumental in order to better match the game world’s spirit. For example, we’ve added two atmospheric statues to support health and energy scales – they will constantly remind you of how close death is in Stoneshard.

Inventory has undergone notable changes as well. First of all, we’ve added a new equipment slot – the back. There’s a choice what to equip there: a bag for some additional inventory slots or a cape for extra stats and resistances.

Small changes have affected the old weapon slots too. They were increased to a size of 5×2 – so the especially large types of two-handed and polearm weapons could fit. The amulet slot was increased to 2×1 – thanks to this, talismans and necklaces would become much more detailed.

We’ve also added autosort button, which was requested by many players. Upon clicking on it, all items in your inventory will be optimally arranged to leave as much free space as possible. This should ease the management of all your hard-won loot. Weapon loadout switch has moved to the upper panel as well.

Another new feature – gold counter: it allows you to quickly track the number of coins in your inventory, which is very useful when trading.

By the way, as you can see, we’ve changed the font of the game too. The old pixelated font had its own charm, but we were forced to abandon it for the sake of better text readability. Also, this is necessary for future localizations: some European and Oriental characters turned out to be impossible to be adequately pixelated.

Alpha Shift

We want to fit as much content into the closed alpha as possible, so, unfortunately, we won’t be able to release it before the New Year. By a rough estimate, we need a few more weeks to bring all current systems to acceptable state, connect them into a stably functioning whole and add some new content as well. We don’t go on New Year/Christmas holidays, so we’d continue to work at the usual pace without any breaks.

Therefore, the new alpha release date is mid-end January. During this period we will show our progress in detail in regular devdiaries, so the development process will be much more transparent. Anyway, we guess no one is interested in receiving raw alpha in the end, so hope you understand this.

That’s all for today. Stay tuned for more devlogs in the future!