We launched Goblins & Grottos on Steam last Thursday. The next couple of days were pretty hectic, as expected, and involved some late nights and early mornings. But overall we’re pleased with how things went and how the game has been received. I wanted to capture here some of the highlights and lessons learned, as these may be useful to other developers.

Reddit AMA

We ran a launch-day AMA (‘Ask Me Anything’) thread on reddit which went really well, and I’d recommend this approach to anyone releasing a game. I was very impressed by the very varied and thoughtful questions posed by the /r/pcgaming subreddit community, and we received a nice amount of traffic to our Steam page from this. Our thread sat high up on the first page of the subreddit for the full 24 hour period that it was live, and undoubtedly contributed to the ‘legitimacy’ of our game. In the longer term, it serves as an excellent repository of information nuggets about us and the game – I noticed that the RPS article, for example, used it as a source of info.

Local Game Dev Community = Awesome

We received an awesome amount of support from the Galway Game Development community, and also from some of the wider Irish community. My good friends from Galway rallied round, posting and tweeting about the game over the launch period. If you don’t have a local community of mutually supportive game developers, then you’re missing out. In Galway, our community has built up from pretty much nothing to a situation where 10+ studios are actively developing games, running events, meeting socially, and generally helping each other out. If you don’t have a community like this, then make one; that’s what we did.

Youtubers

We received enquiries about the game from two very large youtubers. They haven’t yet confirmed whether they will be covering us, but communication lines are open, which is half the battle.

Rock Paper Shotgun

We got a nice mention in Rock Paper Shotgun. This lead to a substantial spike in traffic to our page, and was followed 20 minutes later by one of the two youtuber contacts mentioned above. I’m not sure whether RPS noticed us directly on Steam, or whether they saw our press release or tweets that we had tagged them in; possibly all of these. As mentioned above, they made use of information from the Reddit thread, and may indeed have been influenced by it to cover us at all.

Mistakes

Someone with my amount of experience at game dev should have known better, but despite ourselves we made some small (insignificant, we thought) tweaks to the game in the last couple of days before launch. One of these (removing the ‘black movie bars’ from the top/bottom of the screen during cutscenes on smaller screens) lead to a game breaking bug which I ended up troubleshooting in the middle of the night.

Another mistake was not getting really detailed with the testing of game controls. We had assumed that the early access players (or ourselves) would notice/report unintuitive things, but actually they didn’t. I suppose the lesson is that early access players are fans who expect glitches and don’t necessarily report them, so you can’t expect to treat early access as a rigorous playtesting process, even if hundreds of players are involved. When you have left early access, your userbase switches to being the general public, and if anything doesn’t work exactly how they expect it, their assumption is that the game is ‘broken’ – and they may well give a scathing/damaging review on that basis. Again, this lead to some middle-of-the-night coding

Here’s our launch trailer, which was unveiled at the time of launch:

There have been lots of cool things added since my last post here. The four ‘regions’ are now complete (dungeon, forest, village, mountain/castle) along with appropriate decorations, interactive items, environmental effects and traps. The main bulk of the game’s development is now complete. We have held back some new features to announce on full release, including a fully configurable boss battle editor for final showdowns with the Paladin, as well as a neat minecart system for Indiana-Jones type shenanigans. Apart from this, I have been doing lots of tweaking and clearing up of bugs, and polishing of the user interface and map-making tools… all the glamorous stuff us programmers get up to, y’know. The game’s Official campaign is nearly complete.. kudos to the fantastic creativity of Jonas and Bjorn, who take the map elements I provide and twist and combine them in all sorts of fun ways.

Ian, Bjorn and Jonas have also been making a really slick cinematic trailer which will be unveiled on full release day.. I’m really excited about that!

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.

 My Backgound

I have worked as a musician and written and recorded music since I first learnt how to use a tape machine. I got involved with Goblins and Grottos earlier this year and since then I’ve created voices for various characters, made numerous sound effects and written a series of catchy goblin complimenting tunes.

Music: Goblin Dance

Silly Voices

Audio: Knight #1 chat

Each character in the game has a number of triggers and each trigger has to have a number of expressions to choose from to avoid repetition. So the number of sound files soon mount up. Each character needs to sound different to the next and this requires some fairly foolish behaviour on the microphone along with some pitch shifting effects. None of the characters say actual words as these are shown in speech bubbles above their heads so this means that I can’t use actual words. Instead I have to express the feelings they would have in a given situation – EG: finding the Goblin, killing the Goblin as well coming to a sticky end. (Literally! They can fall onto pointy sticks and die).

Audio: Wizard sees the goblin

Noise Noodling

This is my first time working on a computer game. For the sound effects I’ve had to learn quickly. Sounds were needed for the various game elements; a creaking plank, a marching knight, a fireball etc. This has introduced me into the fascinating world of Foley (sound effects). I looked for some sounds online (freesounds.org), but found that these rarely worked on their own. They might be the wrong length, have too much ambient noise or could just be missing a certain something. However, I’ve found they are a good starting point and sometimes work when slowed down, speeded up, cut before the ambient part is heard or mixed with other sounds.

Audio: Paladin uses his ‘holy smite’ spell

Most satisfying of all are the sounds that are completely homemade and these can come from an unlikely source.   For example, I was looking for a sound for the checkpoint statue which, when the Goblin reaches it, ignites 3 flames. I recorded some actual flames igniting and looked online but they all had too much of a thump and not enough whump. So what sounds whumpy? A sheet being shaken open? How about a blanket? Perfect! It’s not a flame but it does sound like one when timed nicely with an animation.

Audio: Checkpoint activated

Thinking this way has led me to listen to everything with new ears – hmm that automatic handbrake on the car sounds interesting and could be useful someday. So more and more I find myself leaving the house with my trusty Zoom portable recorder just in case I stumble upon something that may not work on it’s own but combined with something else might just be what I’m looking for.

goblinsandgrottos.com
G&G on Facebook
G&G on Twitter

What I will focus on here though is our cutscene system, which has been becoming more detailed over the past few weeks. We’re putting a lot of work generally in making the map editor as user-friendly and fun to use as we can, and to encourage players to build stories into their maps. Cutscenes will be an important part of this.

Cutscenes are triggered when the goblin moves into the invisible trigger identified during map-editing by the clapperboard icon. You identify which ‘actors’ will be part of the cutscene, and these characters have their normal game behaviour over-ridden with the rules specified in the cutscene. Actors can include enemy heroes, friendly creatures (other goblins, imps, etc.) and also the goblin himself. If the goblin is included as an actor, then the screen zooms in and normal game controls are frozen for the duration of the cutscene. If the goblin is not included as an actor in the cutscene, then the cutscene plays out while you are playing as normal – this allows us to make little stories and interactions occur which you can choose to eavesdrop on or simply ignore. It’s a simple but pretty cool idea and we can already see how it brings the maps to life and gives a feeling that the world around the goblin is alive.

So far, our cutscenes let you define where actors move to (identified by invisible flags that you place in the map) and what they say. You can also open/close doors, have heroes kill creatures, and have heroes ‘log out’ (the joke is that they’re playing an online game and – in an act of ultimate insult – they log out straight after killing the goblin’s family, leaving him the quest to track them down and seek revenge). You also define the amount of time that elapses between each step, and centre the camera on different spots on the map – so you can accurately control how the cutscene action plays out.

We also put the game up onto Steam Greenlight and would appreciate it if you could vote for us there!

The reception so far has been really positive, and the quality of the trailer video (above) has certainly helped this! I’m delighted with the video editing skills of Jonas and the fantastic original music of Ian, and the way they synced these together in the trailer gives a very professional look.

And of course our main artist Björn has been busy too, working up some new ideas for enemies!

Including this Druid character who launches a pet owl as a scout. And changes into a bearded reindeer

And remember folks…

Goblin Portal have created a clean pixel style for the game, and I’m the programmer (of course). It’s working out well under control of a 2D physics engine: we have spent a lot of time getting the core animations and interactions with the environment as good as possible; the goblin runs, jumps and climbs walls, swings from chains as he attempts to escape the numbskull adventurers .. who in turn have no respect for the goblin, seeing him only as a quick kill for 10xp which brings them along the road to their next level and unlocking their next skill.

I’m using the same core set of technologies as I have for several recent projects: it’s written using HTML5/Javascript packaged into a desktop executable using nodewebkit and with pixijs for pretty efficient WebGL rendering. Nodewebkit gives access to things such as local file reading/writing, which isn’t normally possible from a browser. I’m using the matterjs javascript physics engine to move stuff around, but other than that there’s no actual game engine to be seen. I have found this suits me well for the 2D games I have been making lately – I can construct my own architecture rather than having to learn someone else’s; and the lightweight nature of Javascript suits me.

The near-term plan for Goblins & Grottos is to make a playable one-level demo, and to engage with players while expanding this into a complete multi-level adventure, starting with the goblin’s parents being hacked down by a merciless bunch of greedy adventurers, and ending with an unexpected and heart-wrenching moral dilemma. Or something.

We’re also planning on releasing the map editor as a core part of the game, and on making an on-line repository for player-made levels. There’s plenty of creative freedom in the map editor I have been creating, including customising the skills and chat text of the adventurers.

You can sign up as a tester over at goblinsandgrottos.com, or follow us on Facebook. A playable demo should be available within the next few weeks.