Hey everyone, now that we’ve stuffed in our last few features and a ton of performance and bug fixes, our game is finally complete. Team Stonehearth is proud to announce that our cozy, quirky, and sometimes epically heroic building simulation game is finally ready to leave Early Access and go 1.0.
This has been an incredibly long journey for everyone on the team, everyone who backed us during our 2013 Kickstarter, and everyone who has joined us on Steam Early Access. I think it’s safe to say that building Stonehearth turned out to be way more difficult than we all expected. For many of us, this was our first game, and the things we learned about game development and about ourselves and each other could probably fill at least 99 Leather Storage Chests(™). Every day though, Tom, Tony and I, and later Albert, Chris, Brad, Yang, Doug, Winnie, Linda, Allie, Malley, Nikki, Richard, Justin, Ana, Morgan, Angelo, Luke, Max and Aaron found in the game--in its tone and in its radically weird tech--something precious, something that made us all want to get up every single day to bring it to life.
We also found all of you. We gathered so much energy from interacting with all of you. We found inspiration in the things you built, from mods to templates to villages. We gained so much strength from your enthusiasm for what this game could be, that even through the game’s darkest hours, when we were, multiple times, over multiple years, on the verge of giving up, we managed to persevere until we’d built something we could legitimately feel proud of. And finally, I think, all of us found in this game, something special in each other, the kind of family of friends that sets out repeatedly into the great unknown together, with dreams of building something that brings joy to ourselves and everyone around us.
So what comes next? Well, the game is done, but the story isn’t quite over yet. On Thursday, 7/26, we will have one last all-day stream on our twitch channel, www.twitch.tv/stonehearth. starting at 9:00am PST and running until 7:00pm PST. This stream will be focused on all the beautiful things you have built in the last five years, and we hope to see you all there.
After the stream, between now and a planned December 1.1 release, a subset of our team will continue working on performance, bug fixing, polish, the MacOS port, and an expanded modding guide. We also want to do whatever we can to support your modding efforts (looking at you, ACE!), so if there’s anything you need from us, or if you’d like to report a bug or issue, please continue to find us on discourse.stonehearth.net. We love seeing your save files, especially ones that reliably reproduce issues or that show off gorgeous cities and happy towns.
It’s hard to say goodbye, so let’s not say goodbye. Instead--
Thank you all for everything, and Happy Re-Embarkation Day!
Love,
Team Stonehearth