Stoneshard Update – The Current State of Affairs

Seeing how Ink Stains Games, the studio behind Stoneshard, has members from both Ukraine and Russia, the ongoing hostilities between the two countries have resulted in a series of unexpected challenges for the developers. These are outlined in this here update, alongside a few animated teasers.

Here are the text bits:

Hello everyone!

Today we’d like to tell you about the circumstances affecting our studio and the future development of Stoneshard. It’s been almost a month since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, and it had a rather negative impact on the lives of our team. Let’s start with the most important part.

A significant portion of our team (our game designer, one of the coders, the promo artist) are Ukrainian citizens. The war caught everyone off guard: while some managed to quickly leave the war zone, others got stuck or simply didn’t want to abandon their homes. Right now these team members are in relative safety, but there are still issues with accessing the Internet and setting up a proper work space. There also wasn’t enough time to backup everything, so we lost some assets, although it shouldn’t set the development back too much.

Other than that, there are financial problems: as many of you already know, Steam no longer makes transactions with Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarus banks. Naturally, it affected our team as well, preventing us from receiving income from Steam. At the moment, we still have enough resources, but if we don’t find a solution to this issue, we won’t have enough money to continue outsourcing the specialists who’ve been helping us with the game – this might noticeably slow down the rate of updates, even if temporarily.

As for the Russian members of our team, most of them are currently busy with moving to other countries, which will require some time. However, the overall situation is more or less stable, and we most definitely won’t stop working on the game. For now everyone contributes as much as the circumstances allow, but once the most pressing issues are resolved, we’ll continue developing Stoneshard’s at the usual pace.

Now let’s talk about more distant plans. Before the war, we already began working on an interim content update that was supposed to add interiors to key buildings on the Mint Square in Brynn. After that, we wanted to implement some of the long-planned city quests, and then – to start working on the next major update, “Rags to riches”, which was meant to introduce random encounters, a functioning Caravan, tweaks to contracts and the economy, and more.

The Mint Square interim update is already partially complete, so it will be released relatively soon. The rest of the original plan will have to be readjusted – we’ll make sure to share the details and post an updated roadmap once everything is said and done. All we can say for now is that some features will likely be added in a different order and that major updates might end up divided into smaller ones.

And finally, some teasers[…]

In conclusion, we’d like to say that your support and sympathy are extremely important to us right now. We love and appreciate our community, and we hope that this sentiment is mutual. Stay safe!