Goblins & Grottos continues to roll along at a great pace, and we have now moved to Early Access on Steam. The graphics, audio and level designs are more-or-less 50% complete, with 10 maps completed in the built-in story “A Goblin’s Tale”. Initial feedback from the Steam community is very positive.

A number of people have asked me how we have managed to do so well with a team of people who have not worked together before, nor ever met face-to-face. The main thing, in my opinion, is that we have a committed team with excellent and totally complimentary skills: every necessary development skill is covered, yet there is almost zero overlap between any of our skills. So we’re all totally valuable to the process, and as progress is good everyone feels enthused to keep pushing. I suppose getting this perfect mix may have been luck to some extent!

Björn – is responsible for all of the game sprites and environment artwork. He’s also much more of a gamer than me or Ian, so feeds a lot into the level design, replete with geeky in-jokes.

Ian – does everything audio-related. He is vastly experienced as a musician, but has not done game sounds before, so it’s fantastic how well this aspect is working out. His ability to produce all manner of funny voices is also a huge bonus – I assume his experience in stage drama is helping here!

Jonas- does numerous pieces all over the game. His role might be best called ‘producer’. Specifically he does the interface designs, a lot of the level editing, video trailer design and editing. But in a small team, I think it’s essential to have a jack-of-all-trades who can fill in all the little gaps where other people can’t.

Me – I’m responsible for everything programming-related, which of course is what I’m best at.

The one thing we’re not great at is marketing/PR. Jonas and I have been doing the best that we can in this regard, but we may need to consider a better approach as we near full release.

Holding our Skype meetings weekly has been perfect for us. Typically we run thru our progress over the past week, do a bit of playtesting, and then brainstorm ideas for development over the next few weeks. It’s always a fun meeting and I think this contributes to the stream of fun/silly ideas that we seem to keep coming up with!

For our Steam page, we are using three separate video trailers. This one is my favourite: ‘Goblin Begins’ as a spoof of Batman Begins. Top quality design and editing, plus awesome voicework and music. I think Jonas and Ian had loads of fun making it too, which was an essential part of why it came out so well.