State of Dev August 2024

Hi everybody! Time flies. It has been over a month since our last dev update but that doesn't mean we haven’t been hard at work. Here’s what’s been going on in Gobland over the past thirty plus days.

Milestones reached in the last month

• Input prompts - We’ve got a system for proper input prompts. While we still recommend a gamepad, hopefully this will help keyboard and mouse players learn how to be a goblin.

• Rebindable controls - We implemented a system to rebind gameplay controls. This will help people customize the controls the way they want, especially on mouse and keyboard- where player preferences are king.

• Goblin customization - We added a bunch of cosmetic/customization options for the goblins. We have a fair number of clothing options already, and have plans for many more. For some reason goblins wearing sunglasses are very funny to me.

• Quick respawn - By opening the fancy new goblin menu (press select), you can quickly respawn at any checkpoint you’ve previously activated.

• New goblin verbs - Goblins now have hand IK that helps them grab nearby objects. This especially helps them catch objects when in the air. When carrying something while airborne, jumping again spikes the object into the ground. It’s fun!

All these features and more are live on our public playtest. Oh yeah! We have a public playtest. You can sign up from the WOFG! store page. If you’d like to help us by providing feedback as we continue development we’d greatly appreciate the support.

So what’s the plan for the next month of dev?

Dev goals for August

• Level design - This is our main focus for the month, we want to fill out a level with lots of wacky physics set pieces, loads of collectables to discover, quirky goblin NPCs to interact with, and at least a few tricky platforming challenges.

• Climbing - We love how the goblins can grab and hang from platforms, but they need to be able to pull themselves up. We need to get some new animations implemented, but we are excited to see goblins climbing all over the scenery.

• Spend that mud - The aim is to let goblins spend their mud/other collectables to do cool stuff like: new cosmetics, more levels, to respawn items in the scene, and more. This is the big part of the game loop that’s missing- and once it’s in we think people will have a lot of good reasons to explore.

Thank you all for your interest in our goblin game. We are coming into the homestretch towards our demo build, and we couldn’t be happier with how it’s progressing. There’s still a lot more to do– so I better get to it. Until next time. Always, always: Watch Out for Goblins!