It’s been a long road to development for Radiant Entertainment’s Stonehearth. The townbuilding strategy game had a massively successful 2013 Kickstarter campaign. Nearly 23K backers pledged $751,920 to bring the Minecraftesque sandbox crafter to PC, Mac, and Linux.
The first playable PC version of Stonehearth, alpha 1, arrived in December 2013. Since that time the developers have continued releasing alpha updates, but only for Windows. Now, the most recent announcement of an upcoming alpha 20 build, has frustrated backers.
The Kickstarter update details what a great 2016 the team at Radiant Entertainment has had and all of the features they’ve been working on for Stonehearth. Conspicuously absent from the update is any mention of progress in bringing Max and Linux builds of the game to backers. There’s also no timeline for the game’s release.
“As we head into 2017 we double down on our goal, which is to make Stonehearth a complete, deeply enjoyable fantasy townbuilding game. We don’t know how long this will take us, because we’d much rather the game be good than finished prematurely, but we’ll continue to be transparent as we add new things and make further plans.”
The Stonehearth dev blog offers a similarly vapid layout of the team’s upcoming goals and projects. None of which have any specified due dates or deadlines. Despite touting how many new members have joined development and their acquisition by Riot, the update reads more like a design document than a progress report. Admitting that the devs still, “need to understand multiplayer,” doesn’t inspire much confidence.
Later Is An Excuse, Not A Plan
Radiant doesn’t want to commit to Mac and Linux support while Stonehearth is still in development. This means that not only are the ports not currently being worked on, the devs can’t even give backers an idea of when they will start on them.
This seems like a massive oversight from a team that is constantly cheering their own transparency. Technically, they are being upfront and honest with backers about their lack of deadlines, but it’s hardly a satisfactory result. Particularly for a project so overfunded and long past due.
