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.

A lot has happened in Goblins & Grottos since my last blog post. In July we went onto Steam Greenlight and were greenlit in just 4 days, with hundreds of positive comments from Steam users. Of course this is hugely encouraging and gave us a nice motivational boost as we started moving past our one-level demo and planning the game proper. We also entered a small competition (Indie Revolution Expo) and won the ‘best design’ award.

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 have reached an important milestone with Goblins & Grottos: our first public release prototype! You can download this for Windows and OSX over at GoblinsAndGrottos.com. The prototype has one game map built in, and the map editor component has been removed for the moment. The plan is to work on getting the map editor up to the standard needed for public release within the next month or so, and look towards another prototype at that stage.

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…