Hey everyone! This week, our team is working hard on tuning Alpha 20 with your feedback, and on a bunch of Alpha 20 bugs! One of the things we’re tuning in particular is the brand new hearthling rescue mechanic, which allows you to save hearthlings who have fallen in battle as long as you act quickly and are able to devote some resources in order to do so. So for this Desktop Tuesday, let’s take a closer look at the mechanism behind the feature, so you guys better let us know whether it’s working as we intended.

Hearthlings to the Rescue

Recap from the video:

Stonehearth is a game about a small band of settlers making a home in a vast wilderness. We want you to care about each hearthling, so one of the very first things that Designer Richard suggested when he joined our team was that we should offer players a chance to save hearthlings who have fallen in battle.

For those of you who haven’t yet experimented with the feature in Alpha 20 on the Steam Unstable Branch, here’s how it works: when a hearthling falls in combat, they no longer immediately turn into a tombstone. Instead, they faint onto the floor and gain an incapacitated timer, which shows you how long you’ve got to rescue them before they die.

To save the hearthling, select them and click on the + icon in their unit frame, which tells a worker from the village to come and carry them home.

Not only does this prolong the story of the traumatically fallen hearthling, it creates a relationship between that person and their rescuer.

It also means that keeping your hearthling alive is a gameplay choice–to get your fallen hearthling back, you must invest all sorts of resources into them: a currently healthy hearthling, who must be deployed into a potentially dangerous situation to bring them back; a military escort, if the area is really all that dangerous; a bed, where they will stay for quite some time as they recover; and the attention of an herbalist, if you want them to recover faster.

One of the most interesting pieces of technology involved in this feature’s creation is the fact that it’s the first feature in SH that involves two hearthlings physically interacting with each other. This was really challenging for Artist Malley, who had to create animations that would sync perfectly.

As a team, we think the end result is very moving–even though our hearthlings don’t have faces, the care the rescuer takes with the rescued hearthling is clear in the way they gently pick them up and put them down, and the way they allow the injured hearthling to delicately adjust themselves as they’re laid down.

When UX Designer Nikki first saw the put-in-bed animation, she was so affected that she pressed her hands up to her mouth, and Malley took that and put it straight into the game that very day, resulting in the full animation you see here.

Another challenge inherently involved in this feature was the number of states a pair of hearthlings can be in during the act of rescuing and recovering. There’s incapacitated, when they’re on the ground, which has special cases for everyone in combat and a timer; there’s the rescuing state, when they’re being carried; and then there’s a number of recovering states–being actively tended or not, while the hearthling is in the bed.

Yang and Chris encounterd a large number of edge cases regarding save and load, resulting in hilarious bugs like: incapacitated hearthlings popping back to their feet after load, and becoming invulnerable, or resting hearthlings getting teleported onto the floor after load.

Working on this, Chris realized that if our components were actually state machines, and we may build more tech to better reflect this, and make our states more save/load safe to reduce bugs in future features, and this may be something we look into in the future!

Other Announcements

This week, the Stream will happen as usual on Thursday at 6:00pm PST. It will probably be Richard, doing design things!