14 months of progress on my goblin game

if you're new here my name is Matt and I'm a full-time electrical engineer making this Goblin game where you play as a goblin whose island is being invaded by nasty humans it's a Sandbox game where you explore the island for resources fight bosses build up your town and befriend the NPCs and do all the standard RPG stuff like farming and fishing and livestock and whatever overall I usually describe it as a blend between stardo Valley and Terraria if you've played either of those the game is of course multiplayer with up to eight friends and my goal is to just make something that's fun to play alone or with your pals now today I wanted to show you some of the new stuff in the game but I also wanted to show you what an average day looks like for me since I'm a busy little Goblin boy and how I actually make any progress on this thing while slaving away at my full-time job so stay tuned for that but the first thing I did was add a new sub biome welcome to the mushroom forest biome full of giant mushrooms and these little mushroom people this biome will be particularly wild and Untamed the humans have struggled to expand deep into it due to the warlike mushroom folk who generally keep to themselves but will attack you if you trespass I wanted to make you feel like a bad person for bothering these native mushroom people so I made it so the exploding mushroom enemy sheds a single tear before making his Noble sacrifice for his Brethren he does after all have a family you monster if you go deep enough you'll encounter the mush mother clicking on her starts a swarm where she'll summon plenty of her mushroom babies to defend her defeating all of her minions causes her to explode and you get a mysterious reward and with that I of course added a bunch of mushroom furniture and a mushroom hat but nobody wants to waste an armor slot on something that just looks nice so I added vanity armor slots where you can place stuff that looks nice but isn't very useful and it'll visually override the actual armor that you're wearing pretty standard for games like this after all that was done I took a couple weeks and added anime mode to the game that's right you can now change the language to any of these languages in the settings menu and it'll pull the correct translation from these magic spreadsheets I have basically I type any text I need here in my game engine and it populates it into this spreadsheet I then paste in the translations and put the spreadsheet back into the game and the game displays the correct text depending on what language you choose right now it's Google translated nonsense garbage I only took two years of Spanish but I'm pretty sure that's not right but eventually I'll send these spreadsheets to real translators to get them to fill it out now you may wondering why I did this when the game isn't even done yet the problem is I was making all of these menus but I was baking them in English so when the game is done I'd have to go back and change all of them since I've implemented it now though I can prep things as I go wasting less time in the long run now once translation was done I added a new boss we already have the huntress who's a druid and The Bard who's well a Bard now we have the Barbarian and cleric Duo forming the third and fourth members of the party of attacking human villains as the fight Begins the cleric grows the Barbarian with magic and he slams you with his massive fists while flies around annoyingly shooting you and healing him it needs some tweaking it isn't incredibly fun yet but we'll get there eventually I'm leaving it alone for a few weeks so it can Fester as a moldy stain in the back of my mind until I come back to it later in the meantime I've gone ahead and done something that's been on my list for a while now I need to make it so you can find your lost or captured Goblin friends out in the wild I already have NPCs that arrive in town and go about their daily schedules they can be given gifts and can follow you around on walks different goblins will come to your town when certain requirements are met claying the blacksmith for example will arri when he hears you first use the Anvil the problem is they currently can only come to you it isn't possible yet to save them so I dove into fixing that one fear I had though was that if I just pre- place them somewhere on the map the player May scrouge every square inch of the map and not find them until they check the last little spot where they were the whole time this could get really annoying if you're unlucky so I instead made it so that they'll spawn in a few places and then when you come across one for the first time the others will disappear this way the player feels luckier than they actually are here you can see I can walk up to this captured Goblin kill his captors free him and he'll tell me that he'll meet me at the beacon in town few hours later he shows up there asking me to make a house for him now the next thing I did was a distracting excuse to not work on the things that I should be working on sometimes I just need to add stuff that looks pretty to keep me motivated even though it may not be the most strategic use of my time I added these little Cloud Shadows that float around during the day it's super small and dumb but I like how it makes the game feel just a bit more alive I also added these fog particles at night that fade in and out making it look ominous and foggy both of these are just particles that float around using unity's particle system nothing super difficult so it only took me a few hours I then needed a wait for NPCs to express that they want things in their houses right now each Goblin shows up at the green Beacon asking for a house you have to make a house and put a bed in it and then you can assign them to it but I don't want them living in little pathetic prison cells I want them to be able to ask the player for Stuff fig the farmer who's obsessed with mushrooms for example will likely want some mushroom furniture but how do I get her to ask for it I considered maybe a town request board where they can post the requests or perhaps they send you letters But ultimately I decided on Diaries you could put a diary in the home of any Goblin and then they'll write in it expressing their deepest desires they can write about furniture they want in their house or they can wish for their house to be closer to a river or they can say that they want to be closer or further from a goblin neighbor that they like or hate you can sneak in and take a peek at their diary and give them what they want resulting in gifts and more friendship I think sneaking in and reading journals is a bit more Goblin than a town Message Board now speaking of writing down your desires my video layout template is telling me that it's time to sh for interaction so feel free to write down your desires and secrets in the comment section Maybe somebody will read them and fulfill them to gain friendship and gifts from you who knows and if you're too shy or lazy to write a comment smashing the like button goes a long way to making YouTube show the game to more people so if you do that I'll think about you fondly as I drift off to sleep each night but yeah once that was done I needed some way for your inventory space to go from small to large but I didn't want the player to just buy a bigger bag or something I wanted it to be flavored in a more fun way I ended up making it so from the start of the game you have some nasty varmints in your inventory throughout the duration of the game you just have to deal with them being there but eventually I'll research fancy VAR repellent that makes them leave your inventory and become pets instead I already had a research system all done so this was pretty easy to do now you may recall that human chests contain human gizmos which can be put in your pockets of your armor and give you cool abilities like glowing in the dark or letting you go in hot areas without damage or whatever these items are confusing to a goblin and need to be appraised by the goblin named Gizmo in town who's an expert in such matters he of course acts like an expert but completely misinterprets the function of the most basic human items but that's just my super original funny idea that came completely from my own brain and nowhere else at all well I've added a ton of them as some examples you've got this Innovative human Arro head that increases range damage or this sacred holy orb that's so heavy that it reduces your knockback and so on along a similar vein I added some crops and with them potions these crops will be scattered around the island here and there and eventually you'll be able to buy seeds from the farming NPC coming up with crops is a bit hard I usually try to think of a buff that I want like say glowing in the dark and work my way backwards to a crop that serves that function like a glowing mushroom this way every crop has a purpose and I don't make anything useless and waste time just like how it's kind of easier to make a joke by starting with the punch line I find I need to make items by focusing on their end goals but I guess that's kind of obvious now that I say it now speaking of wasting time I previously had a stamina mechanic in the game where every time you rolled you'd lose some stamina and if you rolled too many times you wouldn't be able to roll anymore for a bit until it recharged kind of like Monster Hunter I decided I didn't like this very much Monster Hunter pulls this off since positioning is a huge part of the combat you need to rely Less on last minute Dodges and more on knowing the enemy mooves so well that you're in the right place already if you're dodging to the point where you're running out of stamina constantly you're probably doing something wrong in this game however I'm going for a combat that's closer to a blend between Hades and enter the gungeon where dodging is pretty frequent and important I've made it so you can dodge to your heart's content but there's a bit of a delay after you land until you can dodge again there are of course gizmos that allow double or triple Dodges or speed up the Dodge but that's how it'll be now as promised it's time to cover what a typical day looks like for me and show how I make progress on the game well I usually wake up each day at 8:30 and drive on over to work I like listening to not another D&D podcast while I drive but I've lately been taking a break and listening to the Andy Circus narrated Lord of the Rings audiobooks it's been a while since I read them so I'm enjoying it a lot I'll then work from 99: to 5ish my work is usually me writing documents testing some components or designing some new circuits nothing too mentally taxing I spend most of the day they're alone since I'm one of only two electrical engineers at the company but my boss usually checks in once a day once work is done I get home at like 5:15 I'll then eat my one big meal for the day while watching anime or something and at 600 I do my 30-ish minutes of violin practice I've been taking violin lessons for about a year and a half now but I still kind of sound like garbage I don't think I'll show a clip here but you might be able to convince me to send one in the Discord Channel just be warned it's uh not it's really not great I then take a shower and work from 7:00 p.m. until midnight and go directly to sleep to get ready for the next day sometimes I'll have something planned with friends or we'll spontaneously play games but I'm usually working all night on weekends I usually try to get about 10 hours of work done each day on the game but that rarely happens these days usually one of the weekend days gets consumed by some sort of event or spending time with my friends or girlfriend or driving 2 hours back to San Diego to see my family I also sometimes get super into playing a game and just hardly get any work done but that usually only lasts a week or so and then I'm back on the wagon so ultimately I get maybe 33 to 40 hours of progress done on the game and average week which is about the same amount of time as a full-time job so it's a huge time commitment but we'll see if it pays off now speaking of it paying off I want to as usual show my wish list count for the game this month to be transparent wish lists on Steam are a great way of estimating future sales and gauging general interest they say 10 to 20,000 wish lists is kind of of the bare minimum to maybe succeed so I'm currently aiming for about 50,000 to be safe as I record this audio I'm at about 23.6 th000 but it may have gone up a tiny bit by the time I get my screenshot we're almost halfway to the goal that I thought would be completely impossible and I couldn't be more excited about it honestly I just really hope I can live up to the expectations for the game I've never made something this complex before so it may take me a while to tweak everything and make it perfect so bear with me just know I won't stop until it's great and I'll make sure to keep adding to it even after release even if it's a total flop now make sure to do the whole like comment subscribe thing to make Daddy YouTube algorithm like me I have it set so every single comment pops up on my phone and while I can't always respond to them I do see every single one so try to make me laugh as I sit in my office board at work and with that thanks everyone for watching and I will see you all next time hello everyone the time has come to shout out our eternally gracious patrons I'd like to give a super special shout out to our Goblin deity patrons for April of 2024 namely Zachary nce Zack Fox Sarah charfi Kraken fall Brett Hudson Jackson Singleton Joseph scobby Megan Palmer random 8408 Reddit slime on YouTube Sierra Kovach teddy bear Enigma 77 snout Guardian chendra player unnamed Colton Reagan and Gilbert Frank you're all amazing and I appreciate all of the support

Channel: Watt Designs

Views: 104,037

Keywords: devlog, development log, indie gamedev, indie game, developer, unity, programming, making games, procedural generation, perlin noise, indie, goblin game, cute goblin game, goblin stardew, cleanup on isle goblin, isle goblin, goblin, dungeon generation, multiplayer, terraria, stardew valley, stardew, indiedev, indie dev, top down terraria, sandbox, godot, game engine, scandal, unity drama, ea, freelancing, day job, quitting day job, full time art, full time artist, leaving, work, 9-5, quitting

Id: VxIlvWWrWN4

Length: 10min 17sec (617 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 06 2024