Timber and Stone v 1.52 - 05-07-14.zip

About Timber and Stone (From the Developer)

Timber and Stone is a project I started in March of 2012. I wanted to play a city building game with the feel of a real time strategy game, but with more depth; more resources, more control, and most importantly: more complexity. All set in a medieval world with some fantasy elements thrown in.

I wanted to see trebuchets destroy castle walls, trees, and earth. Fire used as a realistic weapon. A game where I not only get to build an army but also have to feed that army, by farming, fishing, hunting, and foraging. With an intuitive crafting system that allows me to engineer siege equipment by felling trees for wood, create brick to fortify my kingdom’s walls using the raw stone I’ve mined, and blacksmiths who forge armor and weapons for my military.

Such a game didn’t exist in a form I wanted to play. So I decided to create it. Inspiration comes from games like Caesar, Zeus, Age of Empires, Dwarf Fortress and Minecraft.

The game’s graphics are built with procedural cube meshes (sometimes called Voxels), which make the gameworld quick and cheap to render, and gives the game a look that reminds me of the old pixelated computer and console games that I grew up playing.

Timber and Stone is essentially a sandbox game, where the player is allowed to create any style of settlement, village, or kingdom he wishes. My goal is to provide a city building game that rivals roguelikes in terms of difficulty and randomization. You start the game with a procedurally generated terrain and are given a small group of workers and resources. To survive, you’ll have to collect food and building materials. The more wealth you amass, the more likely you’ll be besieged by marauding goblin hordes or by necromancers controlling undead armies. Alter the land with large quarries or deforestation and you risk awakening the spiders and wurms that live deep underground. Or perhaps that’s your intent, to collect their scales and silk to craft powerful armor and bows?

From the beginning I wanted siege and castle defense to be a large part of the game. Produce food, gather resources and riches, build farms and villages, even decorate the workers’ houses; but remember that it must all be protected. Siege towers, ladders, catapults, trebuchets, ballistas, drawbridges, and moats will all be available to both the player and the enemies. The benefit of a voxel based world is that all of these weapons can damage the terrain. Trebuchet fire will carve holes into the earth. Catapults will be loaded with boulders, tree stumps, and dead bodies. Fire arrows will scorch farms and burn wood buildings to the ground. Recent battles will be evident by the devastated terrain.

The game is something I’ve become very passionate about, and currently takes up most of my free time. I’m very excited about how far it’s come in the last few months. And simply put, I would love to work on the game full-time so I can have people play it as soon as possible.


1.52 – Pathfinding
Posted on May 7, 2014

1.52 is now available.

The update for this version is short and sweet: 1.52 fixes pathfinding.
All pathing is now being calculated on a separate thread from regular game logic, and across multiple frames. It is now virtually impossible for your settlers to become lost. In fact, the only situation where a path-find could possibly fail is when attempting to path to areas that are quite literally unpathable, if you wall in your settlers, for example. Another major benefit to this is that settler path-finding will now always have near zero impact on your frame-rate.

Other changes include:

Designation textures have been changed to display the grid they occupy, and are no longer influenced by lighting.
The road designations are now blue, and have been consolidated into a single designation. Road blocks can be removed the same as other designations, using ALT + SHIFT.
Selecting a spotted enemy will now display their relative health, and provide the option to “charge” this enemy. What this now allows is for your military to come out and attack that enemy (or group of enemies) regardless of whether or not they can be seen by each soldier. It’s now possible for your forager to spot a group of goblins, and essentially have a preset squadron of your infantry and archers charge out to slay them. All done with a couple of left clicks.
New preference for military: “Attack charge target enemies.” Which allows for the above mechanic.
You might also notice the beginnings of the GUI overhaul, fonts in particular, this is still very much a work-in-progress.