Goblin Stone News

Greetings, Gobbos!

As we prepare for the Early Access launch on May 2022, we're eager to welcome players to join us as we hold our first ever Closed Beta Test. We're excited to share new features and content we've added since our last demo update. We would like to invite participants to play Goblin Stone and share their experience and feedback during the Closed Beta.

[h3]Access[/h3]
This Closed Beta Test will have a limited number of participants and any game progress will not carry over to Early Access. We will be selecting participants from our Discord community, through the Closed Beta sign-up form and personal invitations will be sent out for video game streamers and content creators. Participating is 100% free and chosen Closed Beta Testers will be mentioned in the game credits.

Recruitment for testers begins February 9, 2022. We look forward to your application, testers!

[h3]Details[/h3]
Recruitment Period: February 9 - February 27, 2022
For interested participants, please sign up HERE.

Closed Beta Period: March 1 - 7, 2022
Platform: Steam / PC / Windows

Features & Contents:

• Story Chapter 1 - 3
  
• New Characters & Locations
  
• Breeding & genes
  
• Lair Management
  
• Shrines
  
• Ability Deck
  
• Improved Goblin Details UI
  

※The schedule and content for this test are subject to change. For interested participants, please join our Discord community for any updates and announcements for Closed Beta.

[h3]Closed Beta FAQ[/h3]
Where can I sign up for Closed Beta?
https://forms.gle/k96g6BDY2wRiEd2t7

How to join your Discord community?
Please follow the invite link HERE

What language is the Closed Beta available in?
The Closed Beta will support English text and voice-over.

Can I talk / post / create content about / or stream the Closed Beta?
Yes, we highly encourage everyone to share, record or broadcast any beta content or gameplay. Please do not forget to share it with us so we can properly record any feedback or bug findings.

How do I know if I am selected for Closed Beta?
We will be announcing when the keys are already sent out. If you have been selected to participate, please expect to receive the beta key access from us through email or discord. We plan to conduct a questionnaire after completing the Closed Beta Test.

See you in the world of Goblin Stone!

Hello, everyone! We are back with another development blog post of Goblin Stone. In this post, we’ll be introducing to you the new Mortal Wound system and give you a better understanding of how it will work during combat.



Just like any living being, taking a heavy blow or constant damage from enemies will leave your goblin heavily wounded. When your goblin receives lethal damage or any damage that is higher than your goblin’s current health points, a status effect called Mortal Wound will be permanently applied.



Instead of dying from lethal damage, your goblin’s health points will instead be reduced to 1 point and they will be inflicted with the Slow status effect. This gives the player an opportunity to heal their goblin and increase their chance of survival.



Mortal Wounds is a permanent effect that remains with the goblin for the rest of his life. Once a goblin has a Mortal Wound, their Max Life is permanently reduced to half of its original value.



You will also be able to see the status of your goblins at the end of your adventure and or in the goblin details UI.

The Slow status effect will reduce the goblin’s movement on the time bar by 50%.

Mortal Wounds opens up a new level of strategy for the combat system that is more forgiving to goblins when facing very difficult encounters. Goblins can get pounded pretty hard in fights, and this system allows the player to recover from an otherwise devastating situation. It also allows us to balance the fights in a way that puts the player in more interesting situations, giving the player more choice points and more options.



Goblins by nature are short-lived and most often have short careers. Features like permanent death and Mortal Wounds are not meant as a penalty or punishment. In fact, injured goblins can still be as useful as the rest of your healthy goblins and can contribute to the lair even without adventuring. But if the player decides it's time to retire the injured goblin, they will be awarded valuable Ancestry Points, a resource required to advance the Lair, a resource that can be gained from retiring goblins.



By design, the Mortal Wound system is meant to encourage players to keep a healthy roster of goblins and keep the cycle of acquiring new goblins going. This will also prompt the players to utilize other game features such as the recruitment, retirement, and breeding system. We will be talking more about that in our upcoming development blogs. So stay tuned!

Remember to follow and wishlist Goblin Stone for more development updates. You can also join our discussion on our Discord server and get involved with the development by sharing your thoughts and feedback.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1521970/Goblin_Stone/

It’s been a while since our last update. Most of the team took their well-deserved holiday break so the development for Goblin Stone is a bit slower than usual last month. Now that we are all back refreshed and full of energy, we’re ready to work our way towards the Early Access release.

Before 2021 ended, we did a lot of big and small fixes and of course game optimization. Even with the increasing number of assets and features being implemented in the game, we managed to reduce the game’s build size to almost one-third the size of its previous builds. This is an impressive feat as this will allow us to do more performance improvements later and make the game run better, smoother!

Another notable addition to what we’ve been working on is the gamepad support. Steam’s recent updates and improvements of input features easily increased the number of players who use gamepad controllers.



In the past, we received a good number of inquiries from our community about gamepad controls as well as porting Goblin Stone to consoles. Implementing the gamepad controls is a good head start if we wanted to port the game to different platforms in the future. One way or another it’s killing two birds with one stone so we decided to step right into implementing gamepad support.

Gamepad support, however, presents an interesting challenge for us. Goblin Stone UI was originally designed with a mouse in mind and later in development was adjusted to include keyboard controls.

Implementing the gamepad support has required us to rethink the functionality of the game’s user interface to make sure that it does not exclude important features such as tooltips. Interface objects such as the buttons, texts, 3D objects, and such have been made selectable so a player using the gamepad can interact with the UI and have access to all the features that a player using a mouse interface has.


Selectable objects have been given highlights for easy navigation when using a gamepad.

For the most part, The basic controls for movements and interactions are already very straightforward for the gamepad. We assigned a dedicated “use” button to interact with world objects while on adventure mode, and other dedicated buttons for certain game features. For example, pressing the ‘Y’ button will let you access the inventory, the ‘left trigger’ button allows you to Sneak, ‘Left Bumper’ to access the Minimap, combat abilities can be selected with the directional pad, and so on.


The first iteration of the gamepad button assignment.

Navigating the tooltips, on the other hand, is especially tricky. Unlike selectable game elements, the way we went about tooltips is we require pressing a combination of buttons to access them. This may not be the ideal setup but it works, and we might go on and improve it further as we continue to work on the system.


Ability card tooltips

At the moment, we are simultaneously improving the gamepad and the keyboard support. Although players will not be able to customize the button assignments yet, they will be able to fully navigate the entire game with a keyboard or any gamepad controllers for Early Access.



The first iteration of the keypad button assignment.

There is a lot of learning and experimenting involved in developing the gamepad support. In particular, we are aiming for the user interaction to be a pleasant intuitive experience. So there might be some changes with the assignment of buttons and its overall functionality later on.

We would love to share more with you about the development of the gamepad support but in the meantime, we will save the rest of our progress for our next blog posts. Thank you so much for reading and look forward to our next game development updates of Goblin Stone.

If you haven’t followed and wishlist Goblin Stone yet, please click here. You may also join us on Discord for any major updates about our game.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1521970/Goblin_Stone/

Great news everyone! Goblin Stone has been nominated for the Game Development World Championship's Fan Favorite category!

We are one step closer to winning the Fan Favorite award and we need your full support. Voting for this week's Fan Favorite is now live on the GDWC website and you have until December 20th to vote.

Don't miss this chance to vote for Goblin Stone here as your favorite game!



Please don't forget to share this and invite your friends to vote for us too! Remember to use the hashtag #GDWC2021 #goblinstone and tag us and GDWC when posting.

[h3]About GDWC 2021[/h3]
The Game Development World Championship is an annual competition for Game developers, game development students, game development hobbyists, and anyone interested in game development to join in. Each week 9 games are selected to participate in the Fan Favorite category.

Watch the Fan Favorite Voting 39 Nominees here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQ26LdJYqzc

Thank you so much! We greatly appreciate the support and help. ːsteamhappyː

Hello Gobbos!

It’s the season of giving and with the holidays coming fast, we’re taking this opportunity to give back to our community. We’ll be giving away Digital Steam gift cards worth $20 to five lucky winners.

[h3]Giveaway rules:[/h3]
1. Follow us and share any of our social media posts no later than December 19, 2021 (GMT +8).

• Instagram
• Facebook
• Twitter
• OR share this post with your friends by clicking "Share" under this post, then "Share directly to my status" and post. This news will appear in your Steam profile activity feed.
  

2. Add the game to your wishlist.
3. Tell us your holiday wishes in the comments to confirm your participation.

We will randomly select 5 lucky participants and announce the winners on December 20, 2021 (GMT+8). We will directly contact the winners so keep your profile and messages open. Don't forget to follow the news or join our Discord to stay updated!

[h3]Additional notes:[/h3]

• Winners will be selected randomly using the service https://www.random.org/
  
• Prizes will be awarded within 3 days in accordance with the rules for transferring Steam gift cards.
  

We wish you good luck! ːsteamhappyː