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.
