I have been playing a very cute game: StoneHearth. I paid $24 for it on Steam, its in Very Early stages, and I don’t regret the purchase.
However, be aware that, as it stands right now, its not very challenging once you learn how to stay alive.
I put together one farmer (prevent starvation) and one footman (prevent death by first attacker), and then mostly left the game alone after that, and … everybody lived. Overnight. I’m sure they would have died of cold eventually as the seasons changed, if that were implemented. But as it is, the game settles into a sustainable state, doesn’t devolve into chaos.
Comparatively, I left City : Skylines running overnight and it did descend into chaos. How? by the one simple rule of “no-auto-bulldoze-condemned.” It’s the one thing that left unmonitored, will destabilize everything.
Also, if you do silly things like dig tunnels to then fill with water, some algorithms crash (you can see some of that above) and stuff and things generally go haywire and people stop picking up stuff etc. Performance and Bugs.
The concept, though, is solid. I love watching the little hearthlings do their little lives.. I guess this is what the Sims was like.
The build tree took a little getting used to. I couldn’t find a nice graphic on the web, so I tried making one in LucidCharts:
However, LucidCharts (Pro) does not appear to have an auto-re-flow option, and if I started getting the level of detail I wanted .. it would not have worked.
What other options do I have? A little google searching found: http://bl.ocks.org/d3noob/5141528, So I downloaded that code, and plugged in my own CSV file. But ran into cross-origin problems.
So then I went with http://jsfiddle.net/skysigal/k3kdeu9L/ which I forked into my own .. http://jsfiddle.net/roLmyovw/2 :
Which is just not quite pretty. Not as pretty as this kitten, anyway:
Which is my Princess Fifi Toupee. She kept trying to step on the keyboard as I wrote this post. https://www.instagram.com/p/BB27Zh1Fvko/?taken-by=mollymcmahan
So, I think I’m giving up on this game for now. I played it for 8-9 hours. Maybe not the best return, but I suspect I’ll play it again in the future.
