Kickstarter Devlog 9: Road to Release 2023
over 1 year ago – Wed, Nov 30, 2022 at 03:27:51 PM

Splash on into the new content, Water updates, new enemy behavior, & a look at the new dungeons!

(3-5 minute read)

Below the Stone has some more mind blowing updates heading your way after expanding our team almost double what it was before. We've been hard at work setting up everything we want and need to make sure that the first experience that you, and new fans will have with Below the Stone will be an amazing and unique roguelike experience you hadn't felt before. Come join us below and see all the new stuff we've added!

What we want for the Below the Stone Demo.

Below the Stone has been a huge journey for us, one that we hope the game itself gives the feeling of when you're delving deep and risking it all in the underground! We have a list of major priorities which will be shown in this update. These priorities include:

Dungeons: The Dungeons in Below the Stone are the major milestone of progress. Dungeons are required to be conquered by dwarves in order to get to the deeper floors of the game. 

Bosses: Not only are dungeons required to be completed, there will be an ultimate test of dwarven progress with a boss who defends their treasure hoard within dungeons -- as well as access to the deeper levels of the caves. For a demo, we want to make sure that we give the full experience prior to delving to the next part of the game!

Exploration and mining improvements: Mining and exploring are 50% of what makes Below the Stone the game that rocks your world, so we need to make sure it is as exciting as the rest of the game. (More on this later!)

Combat improvements: Combat as it is now is functional, but nowhere near the strategic movement we and players want involved. Actual strategy should be involved with fighting groups of monsters. As it is now, kiting and swinging your melee weapon is the best strategy, but the improved combat will involve much more footwork and timing of your swings. (Addressed in our 'New Enemy Behavior section!)

Bug fixing: An obvious one but one worth mentioning. We do our best to avoid a buggy experience by you, the players. We hate it when a game is released with 100 bugs, and we'd hate it if you had to deal with this too. Indie-devs should know better than our Triple-AAA cousins!

The best experience for YOU READING THIS!: The most important person of all, are those who are reading this now. Whether you're a backer of our Kickstarter, a fan checking our the latest news, or someone simply cheering us on with dwarven spirit -- Below the Stone is a game FOR YOU to enjoy, and we're here to cultivate that.

MINING -- The lifeblood of Below the Stone and dwarves alike.

We also discussed many ideas we want to feature which we want to use to make mining and exploring far more exciting! This is a list of those ideas:

✨ - Glitter Traps : ores glitter in dark parts of the caves, and occasionally we will have false glittering ores, which will lead players to dark cavities and crypts within the walls which will be filled with enemies

💥 - Boom Stone : Small pockets of naturally forming highly explosive stone within walls which will shock players who don't pay attention and hit it while mining in the dark. Think of this like hitting a pocket of sulfur, it will sizzle, and blow up if you stay around!

🪨 - Cave-ins : Occasionally while mining the player may find some stone which seems already cracked/mined. BE WARNED! Hitting this will lead to a small cave-in event which will have boulders falling from the ceiling. A small shadow will give a warning as to where these boulders will land. 

🧱  - Living Walls : There will sometimes be walls which will hold stoney creatures within them, lying dormant for hundreds of years until someone decided to stick their pick in them.

⭐ - Rich Ore Veins : This was a certified Miller idea, Occasionally players will find extra dense ores inside walls, mining these will give WAY more material than regular ores, and will slowly drop ores as you hit them during mining.

💀 - Fallen Dwarves : Players will occasionally find the skeletonized remains of previous dwarven adventurers. They ill have a nearby backpack which you can open for supplies (Like a new pickaxe! or weapon!) Be warned, even the dead dwarves are greedy enough to come back to life and stop thieves!

🍯 - Vases, abandoned camps, and small ruins : Classic RPG treasures, no explanation needed.

 These are but a few of the big things coming up to reward exploration, and to make treasure seeking dwarves keep themselves on their toes. More big things coming up!

New Enemy Behavior

We are in the works of adding a 'warning system' to most of our current creatures, and also including these same systems on newly made monsters. We want to take advantage of audio and visual warnings on all our monsters for now on, giving each creature it's own unique way of attacking and warning experienced dwarves. We hope that the demo had roughly 10-15 unique enemies to encounter and face off.

We've also been making new design documents on these creatures, which you can read below, this gives a bit of insight on how we design these creatures, and how much detail we put into each one.

Dungeon & Water updates:

Dungeons, being one of the most important parts of Below the Stone, deserve a huge amount of love from us developers. What you are looking at is the work in progress version of the randomized dungeons. Before, each dungeon required us to hand-make the entire design of the layout, but this made dungeons very predictable, as there would only be so many designs until you could figure out which way to go. 

This new way will let us design individual rooms, but also randomize their placement, making it so that we get the best of both worlds -- hand designed, and randomized. Due to this, each dungeon you enter will be as dangerous as the last, you might see a familiar room once in a while, but more likely than not you will have to approach it completely different from the previous time!

This video also shows the new water that Scott Host, the developer of Raptor Remixed, helped put together! He put a lot of time and energy into making this water look amazing for Below the Stone, so he deserves all the thanks in the world for making it happen! His Kickstarter is LINKED HERE, I will also be personally helping him with it -- So make sure to sign up and support him!

LAST UPDATES & Demo:

I want to close this devlog with a HUGE thank you to you guys. We will be working throughout the rest of the holidays to make sure Below the Stone can get to your hands as soon as possible! For all of you whom kept up with us for so long, we will be emailing EVERYONE a demo to try out as an early December gift. Check your emails after reading this, and keep up with us on Discord and Twitter . 

Again, thank you all for supporting our dreams as developers, and making Below the Stone a game we love working on. It really is due to the fans that we kept going on this journey together.

Thank you, Depth Dwellers!

- Mike @ Strollart; Below the Stone

Kickstarter Devlog 8: New Artist, New Programmer, Road to Early Access & Steam Nextfest!
over 1 year ago – Thu, Oct 27, 2022 at 03:33:41 AM

Steam NextFest around the corner!

(2-4 minute read)

Below the Stone is continuing its route to release, steadily making progress toward selling on our planned launch year of 2023. Of course many things still need to happen, including some of the things we'll talk more about in this update! Come join us on the BtS adventure down below!

New team members and support!

As Below the Stone is getting closer to release, we been lucky enough to have added a few new team members to Strollart Studios! These members would include our new artist, Matt (who was originally a fan and supporter here on Kickstarter!), as well as Eric "Vecima", our new programmer working on Below the Stone (who we had met while showing Below the Stone at Boston earlier this year). We also had Scott Host, developer of Raptor: Call of the Shadows temporarily lend us more than a decade of experience in shaders to help the new water tiles in the game.

On top of all this great news, we recently had a new community manager join the team, DiggyVT, who made this amazing art for us! He plans on helping us around Discord and with future Below the Stone content/events, so look forward to seeing more of this!

They all have helped us a ton, and have added so much to our team. Much of this updated is dedicated to them, and what they have brought to Below the Stone. We'd love to see what you think of their work in the comments! Without further delay, here is some of the new content!

Art Updates:

New 'Elven Mummy' enemy coming to the 'arid biome' of floor 2 of the caves.

 The arid caverns are going to be a subsection of the caves which spawn rare and unique resources. You can see a bit of our early concept below. What sort of cool enemies do you think could also join our Elf Mummy here?

We also discussed plans on adding pets to the game, which will assist by giving passive buffs during your runs Below the Stone!

We explored many new enemies over the course of the month. including the Imp and Cave Crab!

We also completely revamped the old dirt biome. Before it was quite generic, but now we added much more life to the game, while also balancing out the resources that will exist there. Each biome will have its own unique ecosystem, with enemies, creatures that live there, and resources to collect. The dirt/soil biome will be one of the first places many people (like you reading this) will encounter when first starting the game!

Below the Stone's water is also getting a big update visually. We don't have any screenshots to show in-game yet, but here is our almost finished work! Scott Host, the original creator and developer of Raptor: Call of the Shadows is lending us a hand with his decade+ experience with creating shaders like this. We plan on the different liquids such as lava, acid pools, and more having similarly cool effects.

New world generation

Biomes are an important part of Below the Stone, along with the variety of creatures, resources, and equipment you can get. We're inspired by games like Terraria, but to an even grander scale as we make our spelunking roguelike.

We want the biomes to get more difficult as you explore out to the edges, while also making it so there is a balanced difficulty curve, this is where the "Donut" solution has come in -- Where biomes will form something close to imperfect 'circles' around the middle where you enter the caves. Each layer will have its own version of this, so every descent will have a totally new combination of zones!

BOX ART & Merch update

 As for the progress of rewards, we've been hard at work on the design of the Kickstarter Big Box! Here is an early preview of what that will look like!

We still need several physical items to be produced, such as the art book, physical edition of the game, shirt, and several other things. We're considering making our physical edition of the game the original Beta release of the game for archival purposes, so those who originally supported the game will have an 'OG' copy of the game that first comes out to the public. Myself, and the whole team cannot wait for the Big Box to be done!

Closing⛏️

Many more things are happening in the background, even with all this big news to share. Please keep up with us on Discord & Twitter. We still have a few months before we get to Steam Nextfest, and we wouldn't be anywhere close to where we are now without supporters like yourselves. 

Thank you, and see you soon!

- Mike @ Strollart; Below the Stone

Post-PAX West update! + Mini Dev Log
over 1 year ago – Sun, Sep 18, 2022 at 04:48:15 PM

PAX WEST + DEMO!

(4-5 minute read)

Below the Stone just recently got back from PAX West last week, and I want to share not only the experience of Apogee, Seattle, and development on Below the Stone, but I also wanted to share the PAX Demo with all our Beta Testers! We met many of you who supported us last year, and I was happy to get the chance to thank many of you again for stopping by and supporting the project!

Without hesitating further, let me show you what Below the Stone's experience at PAX West was like this year.

 1 YEAR AGO IN SEATTLE: 

It had been almost exactly a year since I last stepped foot on the west coast to show Below the Stone with Apogee. A lot has changed since then, and I wanted to show what the original booth layout and what team Apogee looked like 1 year ago!

Many people reading this got their first looks at Below the Stone at this show, and many more helped support our Kickstarter. I was very excited to see all the same people who supported us nearly a year ago in person again. Many of these people are still with us on the official Discord, even after the big discord security breach that happened at the time.

We've grown a huge amount since then, a lot has changed, and the game has only gotten more polished since all that time ago. Instead of a private demo only at PAX, we can finally release public demos for you guys to try out at home!

WHAT US AND APOGEE ARE NOW: The contrast is surreal!

There were many awesome folks to meet up with this year -- ones we had met at PAX East and West last time, as well as new faces to welcome to the Apogee family. I had an incredible time with everyone involved, and have so much more to show!

Building the booth:

The Apogee booth started as a pallet of unopened boxes, a 20x50 black carpet, and several couches and chairs ready to be placed. I personally arrived as the boxes were first being opened, This is where I met Below the Stone's Apogee Producer, Haydn (Who has been a massive help with testing the game!), as well as Mitchell, Bryan, and Chris (Who would later help me in running the Below the Stone area of the Apogee booth!)

Later on, we had more Apogee devs and producers arrive and help us out. After many hours of building, hanging banners, hooking up laptops, monitors, keyboards, and uploading demos, the booth was finally ready for the event. We spent a good chunk of the day hanging out and catching up after it was all set up.

Chris helped me a lot during these days at the booth, and by the end he became somewhat of a Below the Stone expert! I had several suggestions from him, and fans that came by that I wrote down, and spoke about the week after PAX on how we could implement these ideas. Every time we go to one of these shows, I end up filling a notepad on my phone of all the comments and suggestions we get, because we know they're all important to make sure the game is perfect!

Right next to Below the Stone was Turbo Overkill, our friend Sam's project, as well as the Pokemon booth. Many people came to see both Turbo and BTS, as well as the games on the other side of us (Elements, Dead Fury, Bread and Fred). 

We met many old and new fans of the game. I particularly remember this young group as folks who visited us nearly a year ago at the original Apogee booth. It was awesome to see them visit us again a full year later!

New fans also came, from all walks of life. We had so many people enjoy the demo this time around, and those who played it before loved all the new changes that we featured. Moments like this make us realize we have something special that we're working on, and in the words of Samwise, "it's worth fighting for!"

At parts of the day the booth was absolutely swarmed with people -- the middle of the weekend in particular. By far this was one of the greatest booths Apogee designed so far. Loved every moment of being a part of this show.

Kyle, the announcer in the video above, is one of the big new additions of Apogee, helped in giveaways, and posting about Below the Stone during the entire trip. We'll be working with him on much more in the future! Kyle also helped us all find a special guest for this PAX...

Horn Guy blessed the Apogee booth with his presence, standing in front of the Below the Stone banner. By the end of PAX West, everyone knew his name. Some called him a menace, some a blessing -- to us he was something in-between, a walking contradiction between angel and devil. It was quite a poetic moment for us all to witness.

Dinner with Apogee:

Each night after the event we would go out to eat as one big Apogee family, it always amazing me to be a part of this big group of friends, and to experience all of this because of a game about pixelated mining dwarves.

We spent time together talking about plans for our games, as well as our flights in. We needed a big meal to prepare for the next few days of the event! A lot of great game ideas come from a table and company like this!

Closing thoughts on PAX West:

I often ponder what would be if we had not done this Kickstarter a year ago. -- or if we had given up sometime before that. I truly think it was due to our original supporters that gave us the hope and push we needed to continue working on what we had, which lead to being contacted by Apogee. All of the stories you read above are partially due to all of you reading this -- each of you share a similar appreciation from myself, and my entire team for making this a reality, and we thank you for that.

MINI DEV LOG:

We intend on adding a new artist to Below the Stone, as well as a new Programmer! Both of these people were very carefully selected from, and we have some cool news to give about both of these people.

The artist (whom we plan on revealing soon) had worked on several new enemies already, one which we will show below:

We also are in talks with a potential programmer which will bring a massive surprise to the game as time goes on. Half of you are asking for the feature he may work on in the future, so be ready to have your beards knocked off!

CLOSING & Demo:

I wanted to give another big thank you to all the fans who supported us last year! Kickstarter has changed Below the Stone and its community forever, and we wont forget those who were kind enough to support us at the show, and online!

We will be sending our PAX West exclusive demo out for Saturday as a weekend surprise for all our Beta Testers! Keep an eye on your inboxes, and feel free to share your suggestions and ideas on Discord or on here!

Please visit our Discord for more Below the Stone news between these updates!!!

- Mike @ Strollart; Below the Stone

Kickstarter Devlog 7: Early Access plans, Explosions, PAX West, & Onward!
over 1 year ago – Mon, Aug 22, 2022 at 07:48:09 PM

A mighty 'ROCK AND STONE' to all our Depth Dwellers!⛏️

Story below: (2-4 minute read)

We've been quite busy, as many of you might be able to tell, and I wanted to write an update before our travel into Seattle/PAX West in a little over a week. Below the Stone has been keeping us working on many different things over the last month, and we wanted to write an update on all the happenings as we lead up to PAX West, and the entire team is excited to show what we've been working on!

New Content💎⛏️

Lets start this update with an explosion:

Dynamite is just one of the new weapons/tools we will be continuing to add to the Below the Stone arsenal. We plan on having this be craftable by combining Sulfur, Bat guano, and coal. This deadly concoction will creation a super charged mining and enemy detonating tool -- but be careful of the blast radius!

New weapons and tools are going to continue to be added to Below the Stone, including dynamite like you see in the above video, and new weapons like the crossbow and gun which are seen below. Many varieties of these weapons will be craftable and found in the underground of Below the Stone. With ranged combat comes more deadly enemies however!

🍄Biomes-o-plenty🍄

We also have several new environments and creatures to show. One being that of the new derpy shroom that resides in the fungal forest biome. He has no official name yet, but we'd love to hear your suggestions!

So far this is one of my favorite biomes! I am a huge fan of the blue + pink contrast, and I am a huge fan of funky mushrooms in video games. We will soon have Karam composing an incredibly funky new track for this biome!

We also have a new revised Clay biome which will be seen soon as well! We hope to have this done for the new Kickstarter demo we will send out, as well as people who will be there at PAX West this year! Tell us what kind of enemy you think you'd see here!

We are currently testing different enemy assets to see what would look best for this biome, My current top pick is the Mole enemy -- Any game that takes place underground needs a mole! The mole will stealthily move underground to throw boulders and rocks at unsuspecting dwarves who wonder too far.

Animation work is already underway and many of you on the discord will see more of this!

💎Below the Stone at SEATTLE PAX West 2022!⛏️

Below the Stone will be coming back to the surface at Pax West Seattle this September 2nd - 5th!

I will personally be there as the Director for the project again this year. We will not only be there with our great publisher, Apogee who has been kind enough to invite us out for our third big show! -- who will be situated by the main skybridge, but we will be directly facing the Pokémon Company too! So we expect a lot of new folks to find out about Below the Stone this year!⛏️

With this in mind, I had decided to create special giveaway for each day of the event -- For each of the first 3 days of PAX West, I will be giving out a special Below the Stone card, as well as an even more rare Cave Worm card for people who sit down and take the time to play the demo!💎

PAX has always been an amazing event to attend over and over again, and I am incredibly excited to see many of you there this year, including some of you who had supported us there 1 year ago on this very Kickstarter! Since it has been more than a year, I want to lay down a clear path for what we have in mind for our Early Access release:

Early Access Roadmap:

Many fans have been asking, and the entire Strollart Studios team will be putting together a rough timeline for what we expect Early Access to release in. Video games (Indie games in particular) are an incredibly difficult medium to predict timelines for release, as many issues and bugs can pop up randomly and eat away at weeks of time that could be used for implementation of features. As of now, we have spoken about March/April of next year for Below the Stone's Early Access release -- In time for PAX East of 2023.

We have been digging away at this game for a long time, all the way back in late 2019/2020 when all we had was a tech demo and a big dream of being able to say we had a successful Kickstarter. We will continue to work on this game past release, and we hope to make a big impact on the roguelike genre!

Closing⛏️

I make sure to write it in every single devlog I post here -- Thank you for all the support you have given us, and your continued interested in our dream project! Much of our development is due to you supporting us that we continue working on Below the Stone!

I will be posting an update after PAX West with pictures and details of what it was like, and I will be sending out a Demo of Below the Stone within a week of the event's conclusion for everyone at home! For more news please keep up with us on our Discord and Twitter!

Thank you and I hope to see you many of you in Seattle very soon! 

- Mike @ Strollart; Below the Stone

Kickstarter Devlog 6: TMG, New features, & Preparing for PAX, ~ Oh my!
almost 2 years ago – Sun, Jul 17, 2022 at 03:22:15 PM

TooManyGames, Pax West, and a new demo???

Another month, and another big dev update to get to you guys. We have a lot of fun things that happened between the previous update and now, and we'd like to share some of it in this update!

(6 minute read below)

After attending the amazing OTK Expo, and later the TooManyGames Expo,  we had many new Below the Stone fans join our community, as well as met many new awesome game devs who are on a similar journey as us! We got recognized by so many of the folks who were there at TooManyGames expo, since we got into the OTK expo. (I have to give a HUGE thank Tips Out from OTK, the WePlay staff, as well as the entire OTK team for giving us the opportunity!) We ended up winning Third Place(!!!) at OTK, which came with a lot of recognition for Below the Stone! We came SO CLOSE to winning the prize money at 2nd place, which we hope is a good review of the game by everyone watching the event!

After being part of the OTK expo, we ended up winning Second Place at TMG, which came with a prize pool! Many people came over to congratulate us, and the entire time I was thinking of all the fans that helped get us here. It isn't an easy thing being a game developer, its a lot of stress, deadlines, and seemingly never ending work, but when I think of all the fans who love what we do, it makes it all worth it!

We met up with The Newton Mystery developers earlier in the show and talked about the OTK Expo, and learned that we both won awards at TMG! Placing directly next to one another was an awesome experience, and they totally deserve it for their amazing game! 

We also learned they were running a Kickstarter alongside the event. You can support their Kickstarter here at this link! I already pitched in, and hope you guys do too!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/thenewtonmystery/the-newton-mystery

New Features!

Of course we haven't stopped working on the game either, and a lot of new things have come!

We recently added character customization after TMG, and wanted to get your guys opinions on if there are any beard types or hair styles you'd like to see in the game! Please feel free to write any suggestions in the comments, or on our Discord server.

We also added new enemy attacks to the game. More variety of attacks from the enemies we already have add a lot to the diversity of combat. Here are some examples:

We also added a new descent event, where when you are calling to escape the caves, you will need to battle one last wave of enemies. Here is some video:

Beyond what you see here, we are also planning on adding our first boss to the game, as well as floor liquids (such as water, lava, acid pools, and more) And more enemy variety and general polish. 

We will also be filling out the Bestiary of the game, giving additional lore and side quests to complete as you descend into the mines of Below the Stone!

Preparing for PAX West in Seattle, Wa!

We're also announcing our intent on going to PAX West in Seattle this year! Last time was an awesome event, and this time we hope to bring an even more awesome demo. Apogee says their booth will be next to the Pokémon booth this year! We are VASTLY looking forward to seeing many of you in-person there!

Feel free to stop by and chat, as I will be there all four days of the event!

Demo News!

We are also intending on releasing a demo for all our Kickstarter backers in the coming week or two. There have been a few delays, which we will announce the reasons to shortly in more detail. Right now we are focusing entirely on adding new features to test and try out this time around. Remember to check your emails from Backerkit!

Thank you so much for supporting us, and helping us go to events like TMG and OTK! I hope to write again very soon about PAX, and add more devlogs here!

Thank you all for your time, and enjoy your weekends! 

Remember to follow us on Discord and Twitter for more live updates!

- Mike @ Strollart; Below the Stone