Below the Stone - A Pixelart Caving Roguelike about Dwarves
Created by Strollart Studios
A hand-drawn pixel art roguelike about dwarves, mining, and resource gathering.
Latest Updates from Our Project:
First Stretch goal reached! Bestiary goal next.
almost 5 years ago
– Wed, Sep 15, 2021 at 08:53:40 AM
First Stretch Goal reached!
My trip at PAX West this year has been amazing overall, but now I'm back, and get to write for our first Stretch Goal post. I was given the opportunity to thank many of you in person for joining us on this adventure, as well as take lots of pictures of the event to share!
We approach our other stretch goals, we make a stop by our first new set of features, the lush caverns inspired by Edger Rice Burroughs's 'Pellucidar', the place where 'hollow earth theory' originates from -- a place where Dinosaurs still live, ancient minerals lie, and long extinct flora grow for dwarves to find and collect.
Early concept for "pellucidar" biome
Along with these additions will come the Thornroots biome, a dangerous place where players will need to make careful step through the twisting jungle of thorns. Both of these biomes will be the home of rare plants that can be used by the new "Grower" NPC, who will let you bring back raw plants in order to grow them yourself at the kingdom.
Early concept of the "Thornroot" biome
Both environments will give a different taste to the usual stone walls that dwarves are used to mining, and will make each adventure even more exciting when descending below the stone.
We also have some recent fan art to share!
I love seeing fan art of our project, so here is a section dedicated to the people with artistic talent who love Below the Stone!
An angry Kobold by 'MorbidMist'
Love this piece because it shows that careful balance I wanted when creating the Kobold -- of both cute, and hangry. Now I want a kobold plushie... Great work Morbid!
Diggin' it Dain by Eric from 'JenEricLive'
After talking to Eric at PAX West, I found out he was an artist as well as a streamer, and Eric didn't undersell! A great reimagined version of Diggin' it Dain in a new style. Eric did an amazing job with this one! Thank you for sharing!
Rabbit by @ProcessingPixel
The time and patience needed to make such a thing! A fully animated Perler Bead rabbit from Below the Stone. This was amazing to see, and from what ProcessingPixel said, they have more planned! Can't wait to see them!
Thanks & Other Kickstarters section!
Ratten Reich
Ratten Reich is set in a grim and unforgiving world where an ongoing war is fought between anthropomorphic rats, mice, roaches, and lizards. Inspired by the World Wars of our own history, this RTS game is set to make its bloody mark on the industry with superb aesthetics, gritty realism, exciting gameplay mechanics, and more.
This Kickstarter page is powered by Crytivo - a California-based Indie Game Publisher running successful Kickstarters since 2014.
Ratten Reich is nearly half way funded, and with your help, they can get over the edge and into the battle for 100%! Hope they do well, and appreciate their help on our Kickstarter as well!
"Chubby is back! 15 years after his first appearance, the fearless Snowboy is ready to complete his Mission in Snowdriftland. The long forgotten retro platformer advent calendar shines in new splendor. A pixel art tribute to classic platformers like Super Mario."
Mission in Snowdriftland is a pixel art platformer with a similar history to us on Kickstarter. Despite not making their first Kickstarter goal, they continued to develop the project, and came back again twice as strong as they originally did!
Stories like this are what inspire us as game developers, and with 51 days to go, with above 90% funding, there is no doubt they will succeed!
And of course, thank you to all the fans who stuck with us.
We still have more than three weeks to go with the Kickstarter, and we can already see the bestiary on the horizon! To those who stuck with us, thank you! and if you would like to join our awesome discord community, remember to join here!
Thank you!
-Mike @ Strollart; Below the Stone
Our Buffet of Weapons (also some cross promo)
almost 5 years ago
– Wed, Sep 15, 2021 at 08:42:37 AM
One of the things that not many people know about Below the Stone is how much art content already exists, but hasn't been implemented yet in the game. I personally (Andrew) am quite impressed, and wish more people knew about these weapons. And what these weapons look like. Because the designs are pretty cool.
This is the root folder that holds all the weapons PNGs. You can see that there are already a bunch of categories. Some of these categories **may** not make it into the game, depending on how things go. But it gives you a peek into the ideas we've had.
The most notable, of course, being pickaxes:
A lot of these pickaxes are yet to make it in, but we plan on starting to add a lot more pickaxes in the next year. Some pickaxes might even be ones you can only find in dungeons (un-craftable). Or there might be "relic pickaxes" that have terrible stats but are rare and worth a lot of money in trade.
I could show swords next... But I feel like some of you would rather see some axes ;)
Some of the designs may change. But there is already quite a bit of variety of axes here. We do want a have a large variety of styles so things don't feel repetitive. Each weapon feels like it has its own character.
As you can also see, some of the axes don't fit the "linear metal progression" pattern. Like the "Troll Bane Axe". This could be an un-craftable item that you can only find in the caves, or maybe it could be a special craftable that requires a lot more of a certain material to make and has special properties.
There are also a variety of cool-looking swords as well. Because a dwarf doesn't discriminate on good craftsmanship! Here are a *few* of those swords.
Pretty nice, yes?
There is also a multitude of different hammers, maces, morningstars, spears, GUNS, and various other fancy weapons the dwarf can wield to take out its monstrous foes.
There are plenty of other weapon types I haven't shown yet, but I don't think I can show them all. Plus, we gotta have *some* secrets!
But we do plan on having good weapon variety, magic staffs, spell books, THROWABLE DYNAMITE, crossbows, and other arrow propelling devices. And different arrow types as well. Oh, and I forgot to mention throwing knives, throwing axes, boomerang??, and maybe shurikens...
But for now, this is all I'm gonna show, it's quite a lot. An amazing collection of weapons crafted by our talented artist Mike.
A story-driven, mystery-packed, RPG action game where understanding how your enemy fights is the key to beating them. A lively ingame world you can explore with many friendly residents that can give you quests. You can change your player's combat style to adjust the game's difficulty. And there are many different collectibles and tradable items. Plus minigames.
A really cool looking 3D/Pixelart retro first-person shooter inspired by games like Hexen and Quake. With giant levels and intense fast paced action. And over 70 different weapons to rip and tear with! You can also play as 1 of 3 different characters with different skills and perks.
A modern Japanese-RPG which aims to break the "linear story" pattern of story-based games with 4 interconnected stories that can be played in any order. Which I assume have relevance to each other. So depending on which story you pick. Different combinations of unique outcomes may occur. I do like seeing the different ways developers try to bring more replay value to story games. It's indie innovation at work!
Do check out all of these games. They have all done VERY well with their Kickstarters/IndieGoGo's
I'm kinda surprised by Project Warlock's goal. But kudos to them for smashing their goal out of the park!
And thank you to these devs for also promo'ing Below the Stone as well!
And thank you all for tuning in!
- Andrew
Implementing Ore Sparkle Effects
almost 5 years ago
– Wed, Sep 15, 2021 at 08:24:55 AM
One thing we talked about adding for certain ores is an effect where they will sparkle a little bit. To maybe draw attention to the player.
Doing so requires a bit of logic which simply checks if a particular block has an ore on it, and of course, limiting the effect to a certain set of ores if we want to. Right now I have It doing the effect for all ores, but that can be changed relatively easily.
This is only the first iteration, of course, so the function/effect of the sparkles may change. But this does a good job at articulating the creative idea I had in mind.
Also, I want to say thank you to everyone for helping us reach our goal!
While looking at our daily stats, I was unsure when we would pass 20k. It seemed like it was going to taper off very quickly. But I had vastly underestimated the power of our community ༼ つ ◕_◕ ༽つ
It seems we had some people who noticed we were very close and decided to go all-in and help us finish the last legs of our goal.
So big thanks to those who came in for the clutch ;D
Very soon we will have our musician Karam writing another update for you guys; maybe talking a bit about his music? Stay tuned for that!
We will also maybe try and show off some parts of the game many people haven't seen yet, like all the weapon art.
But anyway, thank you all for tuning in to our Kickstarter. This has been an exciting experience. What makes me the happiest is seeing our community grow every day. I always believed that a strong developer/community relationship is important in the success of a game. When developers put in the time to show their community that they are genuinely listening and that their input matters, that is when you know a game will go down in history (on a strong positive note).
So thank you all for supporting us, and we'll see you later!
PS: If you haven't seen it yet, we put some up-to-date footage of the game on YouTube for yall to watch.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pvRtXK6kjA
- Andrew
100% FUNDED IN 81 HOURS!
almost 5 years ago
– Wed, Sep 15, 2021 at 08:21:58 AM
To all the amazing people who have supported our camapaign so far: THANK YOU.
Ever since our first Kickstarter in 2019, where we were only able to make 50% of our goal, we always wanted to come back and give it another try - because our fans believed in what we were making. With everyone joining our community, it shows us we're on the right path with this game, and as we see more and more fans come it to support us, we are going to use this to expand the scope of the game tenfold.
With 100% funding being hit, we are releasing our stretch goals up to $30,000, and more to come as we hit our next goals!
Thank you so much to all of you who helped us know we have an awesome project we are working on, and that there is a big place for small dwarves like us.
-Mike @ Strollart; Director of Below the Stone
P.S. Apologies for the fourth update in the space of a day, but we simply could not contain ourselves!
PAX WEST Day 1 update
almost 5 years ago
– Wed, Sep 15, 2021 at 08:21:14 AM
Day 1 of PAX West has been a wild ride
After getting up 6:00 in the morning, we left as a group of developers from Apogee to the booth space. We spent the previous two days preparing the booth and ourselves for the wild journey that would come this day. To my surprise the event was packed despite the pandemic - not just packed, but packed with Indie games.
From start to finish, We managed to only have an empty chair for a maximum of 30 seconds, with players looking forward for more (many of which are reading this after backing us at PAX!)
It was great getting so much constructive criticism, and also loving new fans who will be part of this Below the Stone journey. I hope to see many more of you over the course of the next three days of PAX West!
It was great meeting awesome fans in person for the first time. Surely more pictures to come as the event elapses. Fortunately, no elves decided to go to the booth, but humans seem to find the game appealing!
Day one has been an amazing convention so far, and I can only see it getting better with time, More updates to come as time goes on!
-Feat: Dwarfurious, and many other awesome attendees
