May 09, 2008 Directed by Kari Skogland. With Ellen Burstyn, Christine Horne, Ellen Page, Dylan Baker. A 90-year-old woman, rapidly losing her memory and knowing that sooner or later her life will be over, returns to the Manitoba farmhouse she grew up in to try and make peace with her dysfunctional family.
Overview Angel Stone OverviewAngel Stone is a 3D stage-based action RPG developed and published by Fincon, the creators of the popular social RPG, Hello Hero. Join the Resistance and save the world from an onslaught of undead and demonic creatures. Play as one of three unique classes (Berserker, Gunslinger, and Shadow Mage). Play through over 60 stages in a beautifully rendered, fully 3D world. Immerse yourself in the dark fantasy setting, lore, and story. Collect over 100 skills and mix and match them for the ultimate combination. Defeat your foes with innovative tap and gesture controls designed for mobile devices.
With many different weapons and armor for your character. Full Review Angel Stone ReviewBy, Herman Y.Angel Stone is a free-to-play, 3D dark fantasy action RPG developed and published by Fincon, a Korea-based mobile game developer most known for their social RPG, Hello Hero, one of the first hero-collecting RPGs on mobile. Prior to Angel Stone’s release, Fincon released a stunning CG trailer that depicted the game as a Devil May Cry and Bayonetta hybrid, which created a lot of hype, although the actual gameplay is more like the Diablo game series. Angel Stone launched globally on July 30, 2015 for mobile and PC (via Facebook) and reached over 100,000 downloads within the first week.
The game is cross-platform and Android, iOS, and PC players can play with other, as well as continue their character’s progress on any of these platforms. Although the game was designed with mobile in mind, the controls work well on PC too. Angel Stone features high quality graphics, casual gameplay, and unique features that makes it a compelling mobile (and PC) RPG to try out. Character Creation and ClassesPlayers can choose one of three classes and male or female when the game begins. These classes include Berserker, Gunslinger, and Shadow Mage. Berserkers are headstrong, melee warriors equipped with heavy armor and great swords and gauntlets. They have a special Rage bar to use for skills and have strong defense, but low attack power and crowd control.
Are swift, ranged shooters equipped with muskets and revolvers. They depend on Focus (which regenerates every 5 seconds) for their abilities and have high attack power, low defense, and great crowd control.
Finally, Shadow Mages are mid-ranged, dark magicians armed with scythes, spears, and wands. Their Mana regenerates every second and they have powerful spells even though they fight in melee range. They are the most balanced of the three classes and have average attack power, defense, and crowd control.
Each class plays very differently, has different abilities and strategies for combat, and are fairly unique compared to other games. Although players can customize their character’s appearance with various in-game weapons and armor, there is, unfortunately, no appearance customization during the Character Creation. Unique Stage Pathing SystemLike most free-to-play mobile RPGs, Angel Stone’s world is divided into instanced stages, which are further divided into Acts represented by various locations on the World Map. Each Act has 10 stages and each stage is fairly linear although players can go back and replay stages using a different path. Angel Stone has a unique Pathing system upon beginning a stage, in which players must draw a path from their start point to the finish.
Each stage/map is depicted as a 3x3 grid before the stage begins and each cell can have an object, such as equipment, Angel Stone shards (for unlocking skills), enemies, and more. Some of the grid cells are grayed out such that players cannot choose to go through every cell and are forced to make a forked decision.
Therefore, players cannot obtain every item on the grid the first time around. After drawing a path, players are placed into the stage and move through the map as indicated by their drawn path.
Each stage is filled with waves of enemies and a boss battle at the end. Completing stages give gold, experience, and loot, and each stage is fairly short, lasting from 1-5 minutes. Each stage also takes up some energy to play, which gradually refills on its own, but limits how much players can play each day. High Quality GraphicsAngel Stone has really top notch graphics. It was made with Unity Engine and features some of the best looking visuals in a mobile game. Angel Stone takes place in a dark, apocalyptic fantasy world and players will fight through a world filled with undead creatures and demons including zombies, imps, zealots, and mythical beasts.
The environments are very atmospheric with a dark, gloomy look and each map is highly detailed with buildings, ground designs, rain/water effects, flame and smoke, plants, a wide variety in objects such as gravestones, and more. The skill effects are flashy and the game has a lot of cool AOE skills.
The bosses are big and ugly in a good way and all the undead monsters and characters are well-designed. The animations are also very fluid and the attacks are impactful. High quality visuals await future players of Angel Stone.
Tap-based, Gesture-controlled Action CombatUnlike the usual “joystick to move and button to attack” mobile RPG controls, Angel Stone uses more unique tap and gesture controls. Players can tap the ground to move and tap on enemies to attack them and there are gesture controls, such as swiping in different directions, to activate specific skills.
Personally, I would have preferred a virtual joystick to move for a game like this but the tap movement definitely works better with the gesture controls. There is also an “Auto move and attack” button which makes your character automatically move and attack enemies but leaves players to manually use skills on their own. There is also a “Move to nearest enemy” button without the auto-attack, which is useful for guiding players to where they need to go. Initially, the “Auto move and attack” option makes the game feel very casual and automated, but it becomes less useful at higher levels. As the game becomes more difficult, players will have to manually control their characters in order to dodge enemy attacks and fight more efficiently. Because of this, I would say that the game is not completely automated.
The combat itself is quite fast-paced, similar in style to Diablo, and can get fairly strategic and challenging as the game becomes more difficult. Certain skills can also be used in combination to deal more damage. SkillsEach class has a separate set of abilities that can be unlocked via Angel Stone Shards.
Previously, I mentioned that Angel Stone Shards (for random skills) can appear in the “stage pathing” before beginning a stage and that is mainly how players will unlock new skills, with the exception of some story-based skills. After collecting a certain amount of Angel Stone Shards for a specific skill, that skill can be unlocked, and collecting more of these Shards can be used to upgrade the skill.
Skills can be leveled up with gold in the Angel Stone menu but upgrading a skill to make it even more powerful requires a certain amount Angel Stone Shards for that skill. Once a skill is unlocked, players are free to use and level it up to their liking. Skills in Angel Stone include single-target damage/debuff, AOE damage/debuff, poisoning, healing, self-buffing, and more. There are also skills to summon companion pets that fight by your side. These skills can either be activated by pressing the skill icon or by using the proper swipe gesture. Because the gestures are simply swiping in one direction, the gesture skill control works well and is simple to use. Co-op PartyingIn addition to the global chat system, Angel Stone has a party co-op mode in which players can interact with each other.
The co-op mode is in real-time and players can party up with 2 other players via an auto-matchmaking system. However, instead of being able to party in every stage in the game, players can only party in 1 map per Act, which is a custom map for the Act.
The co-op version of these stages are significantly more difficult and longer, but are more fun, although it still lacks interaction due to most people just using the “Auto-move and auto-attack” feature. Players must complete each 10-stage Act in the single-player campaign in order to unlock the co-op mode for that Act, which ensures that they are ready for it. Unlike the single player stages, the co-op stages have a predetermined path and give out a lot more gold, experience, and equipment. However, the co-op mode has a separate form of energy and players can only party for a few times each day.
There is also real-time PVP, but it is odd and feels more like playing a PVE stage with some other players around that can attack you. Cash Shop/In-App Purchases (IAP)The in-app purchases in Angel Stone are quite reasonable and the game is very generous in giving out free Carats (premium currency). The first section of the Shop is the “Magic Shop,” which consists of equipment and Angel Stone Shards for random skills that can be bought with gold or Carats that resets every couple of hours (as in the list of items changes every couple of hours). The Magic Shop starts with 4 item listings and more slots (for more items) can be purchased with Carats. With Carats, players can also purchase and open chests that contain Angel Stone skills, in-game gold (for upgrading skills or purchasing from the Magic Shop), 30% gold and experience boosts, and energy.
There is also a free chest with random items players can open every 7 hours (which can include Carats). The game also gives out a lot of Carats for free from login rewards, achievements, and completing quests.
Overall, the in-app purchases are fair and Fincon gives out quite a bit of Carats for free. Spending money will give players slight advantages in better skills and equipment and will allow them to fill up their energy to play longer. From what I’ve seen, Angel Stone doesn’t really have a paywall as long as players are willing to grind and farm like most other online RPGs. Additional Information Angel Stone Additional InformationDeveloper: FinconPublisher: FinconPlatforms: Android, iOSRelease Date: July 30, 2015Angel Stone was developed and published by Fincon, a Korea-based mobile game developer and publisher founded by Chung-gil Yu, a gaming enthusiast who put together an all-star team of people that had worked on such as, Archlord, and Reign of Revolution. Fincon is most known for their first mobile game, Hello Hero, a mobile hero-collecting RPG with over 14 million downloads worldwide. Angel Stone is Fincon’s second mobile game produced with similarly high production value.
Angel Stone had a short closed beta testing from June 11, 2015 to June 15, 2015 and launched globally on July 30, 2015. Angel Stone reached over 100,000 downloads within one week on Google Play, and considering the huge popularity and success of Hello Hero, Angel Stone will likely reach over 1 million downloads within a month.
Hey Newgrounds, we're back with another devlog/guide that we hope you find interesting!The other week, we sat down with Stone Story's sound designer, Rafael Langoni Smith. Rafael has a long and storied career with music, and he brings an incredible spread of talent and experience to the project. We picked his brain about the role of music in video games, how to compose for games, and the evolution of game music at large.If you'd like to hear some of the music that was composed for Stone Story, check out this playlist on our YouTube channel:Additionally, if you'd rather listen to this talk instead of reading it, we've uploaded the Q&A on our channel:-Who you make your music forYou don’t have to be a composer to make a soundtrack, you have to be more of a dramatist. You have to manipulate music in a way that it reminds people of things, where it makes them associate with something they lived in the past.
It’s not about doing your music or making your print in the world. It’s not about self-expression, as much as it is expressing whatever the listener has to feel. When you make soundtracks, you work with the cultural references of whoever is listening. Not yours.As a sound designer you cultivate an emotional, evocative experience in the player by tapping into shared cultural contexts. Stone Story has these anchor points that much of the soundtrack is based in.The beautiful thing about making music for our generation is that we have a pool of shared knowledge that’s very deep. Everyone shares a group of influences that comes from the start of video game music, and we have this very emotional, nostalgic connection to each other. We can listen to the same things and communicate; video game music is a very universal means of expression.Exploring a shared cultural connectionComposing music is somewhat like playing a game withyour audience.
It’s true of a lot of creative processes, where you have to imagine how the listener is going to think and feel.It’s all based on expectations. When you write music and it’s easy to understand, when it’s very referential, when it’s easy to apprehend, it’s like you’re losing the game. You’re letting the listener win, because the music is so easy to “get” and the audience is in a superior position to you as the composer. When you up the bar and make it not so easy to understand, you’re in a more balanced game.
You’re dealing with expectations, you’re surprising the person at times, you’re presenting new stuff.Be confident in your shared cultural background with your listeners in order to explore the language you have from all the games you’ve played throughout your life. You can be pretty sure that everyone who listens to the soundtrack will understand everything that you did.
It won’t be easy for them, but that challenge can excite and entice them. The role of sound and music in video games can be thought of as opportunities to make people listen to different stuff and widen their musical horizons.That might sound contradictory when we say that we’re trying to get people to listen to new things while at the same time tapping into this shared body of knowledge. But it’s like this: everyone that’s playing Stone Story, presumably, will have part of the culture that the development team has.
You don’t really get to our game as the first game in your life. It’s likely that if you’ve looked into playing Stone Story it’s because the fact that the graphics are in ASCII mean something to you.So this person that’s going to play Stone Story has lived throughout decades of video game music that are meaningful.
When creating the soundtrack, that can be an advantage. It’s like talking to old friends: you have so much shared history. You can tell them new things, but they’ll have enough in common with you to care about it. Music, when it comes to video games, has developed into a pretty universal language as a way to communicate feelings and thoughts. It’s beautiful to be able to be verbose in that language by bringing new things.Creating a soundtrack based around the concept of “progression”One suggestion that came up in the process was each location having seven different incarnations, corresponding to appropriate levels of difficulty. When you start a location in-game, it starts at difficulty 0.
Each time you beat it, it gets harder and gains a star. Each time the location gets harder, the music gets more complex. Initial thoughts were “That’s crazy”, as there are eight levels in the game, each with eleven difficulties.It was a pretty big undertaking that was harder than expected.
The original tracks were fully realized, and there wasn’t much to take or put in. They were effectively “full packages” that couldn’t just have instruments removed or added at will. The soundtrack ended up being multiplied.When the decision was made to create a progression-based soundtrack, most of the music was already done. This made for a bit of a problem, as the music that already been composed was made with equipment that had been setup in a specific way. Once a track was recorded it was near impossible to replicate that exact sound.(Video showcasing Rafael's gear setup - )Some of the music had to be redone in order to simulate what was done before because Rafael, the sound designer, didn’t note down how sounds were created or recorded. With his gear setup, that was rather difficult to do, as it’s basically an old telephone switchboard: lots of jacks and cables that you can connect to and meters to adjust.There are so many moving parts to the music that you can’t exactly keep static and have on-hand to reference.
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They all interact with each other in a way; they’re all distorting together, modulating together, etc. It’s never an accumulation of parts, it’s more of an engine that runs with different parts that all play off of each other.Stone Story’s Temple location is one of the best examples for this concept of soundtrack progression.
At the lowest level of difficulty, the Temple’s music probably has the least amount of action. It begins with these ambient tones that convey an ominous feeling of dread, where the soundtrack has taken a much more suspenseful, dramatic turn.
Over time it evolves into a huge, bombastic, overwhelming track.(Supercut of the Temple's music, showing off track progression - )The style of Stone Story’s music and “post-chiptune”The style of the music in Stone Story is considered to be 'post-chiptune': it's what happens after chiptune has gotten through all its cultural consequences. Chiptune has done its original phase, where the technical limitations of the game would dictate what was and wasn’t possible. Back then, people were trying to transcend the limitations of chiptune. They were trying to make the hardware do what it couldn’t do musically.A few years ago there was a revival of the chiptune style.
Everybody started to simulate the limitations again. They made music as if it was for a chiptune platform. What Rafael is calling “post-chiptune” is going past this phase of simulating the limitations and trying to use the style for what it was aesthetically, but with no limits.It's the same for the visual style of the game, which is ASCII art without the limitations.
It’s true to the style in a certain way, but we can go beyond ASCII with things like unicode characters or special effects where it makes sense to do so. Things that weren’t possible on DOS back in the day.Influences and how to make use of themAs far as influences go, Stone Story’s music draws upon several different cultural contexts in order to cultivate a specific kind of mood. The Temple, for example, features Indonesian gamelan, which is a pretty new set of sounds to a lot of people. However, Rafael was able to use those sounds and have it not be foreign to whoever’s listening. The kind of rhythmic scheme used for the Temple is very tense, and the fact that it’s a foreign sound adds to the atmosphere of something bizarre going on.There are many other influences playing into Stone Story’s soundtrack, but it mostly boils down to this idea of a shared culture: what all of us have played in the past and what we can use to talk between ourselves in a musical way. Sometimes you have an influence and you don’t even realize it. Self-analysis is tough!
It takes a lot of thought to sort out where those inspirations can come from.Synchronizing sound cues for the player experienceSome scenes in Stone Story were done like a movie: video was captured, then Rafael scored it like he would a film. Most of the music in the game, however, consists of loops and doesn’t synchronize with the action in any way.What’s nice is that when you do get to those moments in-game where the music syncs up with the action on-screen, it’s pretty dramatic. You’re not expecting it to go that way. They create these beautiful moments, these revelations when someone is playing Stone Story for the first time.In some of these scenes, there’s a certain amount of cinematography, a kind of visual poetry that works independent of the game. These scenes, in conjunction with an accompanying score, create powerful moments because you need to reward the player for spending their time. This is an important part of the game design as well: Stone Story is a game that sometimes makes you wait and have patience, which, in this day and age, is something that people may not be used to.
When you do that you’re rewarded with beautiful visuals and an awesome soundtrack!Creating sound effects to make the world come aliveThe thing about Stone Story’s sound design is that early on in the process, it was decided that the characters were living in a naturalistic world with a veneer of fantasy added on. As a result, that necessitated a sort of realistic sound design in a way where the wind would sound like the wind, grass would like grass, and things hitting things would sound like things hitting things!There are some synthesized sounds happening on top of the realistic stuff, quite a lot of reverb, and it’s used to simulate the game’s environments. Lots of soundscapes were done for the game’s locations; there’s music, but there’s also this underlying bed of sound that represents the natural world around the character.For example, one of the scenes in-game involves a massive, rushing waterfall. In Rafael’s design process for what this waterfall’s audio design, he honed in on the unique sensation of seeing ASCII characters falling down and what that would sound like. You look at this very unreal scene and you obviously can’t fool yourself to make believe it’s a natural environment, but you listen to it as if it was.The original direction for the game’s ASCII art was to represent what’s in peoples’ subconscious; how the mind deconstructs what it sees. It’s sort of a cartoon expression of the world. The role of audio is to add the realism that the visual doesn’t deliver.
It’s a juxtaposition, which is important.When a sword hits an enemy, the audio needs to convey what material the sword is made of. You can’t show that, there’s no texture on the sword; visually you can’t tell! But is it wood, is it metal: what are these things made of? When a chest bounces on the ground, you can hear what’s inside the chest.As you play Stone Story, you’re accumulating resources and thinking about stockpiling things like wood, stone, and tar. It’s all stuff that you can’t really see in the game, since it’s represented by symbols. You’re always looking at the game and forcing yourself to think of reality within the game that is realistic and naturalistic: it’s a departure from what it looks like.While this approach to sound design may not be necessary for the game, it does make some things easier and helps to keep the immersion. The main function of the audio in Stone Story is to add this layer of gravity, emotion, tension, and realism to the visuals in order to draw the player in even more.