Trash Goblin News

Welcome fellow Goblins to another exciting update! This time we thought it'd be really cool to look at something that is a pretty hot topic in our game dev workshop - Upcycling! As we showed a little bit about the gameplay in a rough form last time, it makes sense to show you something much more in-depth and finalised - the Tool you use for Upcycling itself! Much like with Chipping and Cleaning this tool needs to be obtained and then used for the job in hand, so you'll be spending a lot of time using it, and maybe even upgrading it!

Let's take a walk through the process of making something like this, from the first design to the final in-game asset.

[h3]THE UPCYCLING TOOL[/h3]

Unfortunately for everyone involved, most of these gameplay-specific elements have to start with a Designer specifying the function. To do so, we use whatever methods communicate our goals most clearly to the team. Visuals, as ever, are king... so we end up with an eyesore like this that we make everyone look at for far too long:



What we're trying to show here is that during Upcycling play the player is holding a unique and specific tool for the job, it allows them to attach, remove and perhaps rotate (spoilers?!) elements of a Trinket, and it should be visualised as something that obviously reads as 'grabby'. Now I think this image works for the most part - the tool used is a "sugar cube plier" for anyone interested - but one thing it does wrong is it suggests that the tool might be ornate in some sense. We're all clear on what Goblin tools should look like within the team, but it's a wrinkle in this process that is worth pointing out, and something we do have to be careful about when making assumptions. to be clear, our Upcycling Tool is not intended to be ornate!

Anyway, once that step has done its job we can hand the work over to the real artists on the team! In this case, it goes to Donnie first, for exploration and refinement of the tool:


We pick the best ones:


Donnie expands upon them:



And once that's all been fed back on - led by the brilliant Kat - the final concept is delivered to a higher finish with colour and construction detailing, ready to be handed to Tahlia for 3D modelling and texturing!


Tahlia has a very thorough and multi-stepped process to bring the concept to life and into the game:

1 - Modelling it in high poly, to capture all the details, shapes and nuances ready for the various materials:


2 - Then a low-poly version is created, which is the mesh used in the game:


3 - We then generate UVs. Think about this a bit like turning the 3D model into a papercraft layout, which can then be painted onto and wrapped back around the model later on:


The UV wrap displayed on the low poly - we use a chequerboard pattern to try to find any distortions and fix them:


4 - Then the LOD variant is created. This is used so that there is a version of the model with even fewer polygons that taxes the game's performance less in situations where it is far enough away from the player camera that you won't tell the difference:


5 - The model is then baked and here you can see the tool with the hand-painted textures applied to it! So nice!


And then finally, this is the Upcycling Tool in-game, with all the glorious lighting and materials showing it off!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

And that's it!

If that's getting your Goblin brain all a-tingly, please do consider coming and talking to the dev team and all the other lovely Goblins in the community on our discord, and if you're sad you missed our very successful Kickstarter and want a special edition of the game, or maybe even to become a character in it, head on over to our Patreon!

Hello Goblins! This one's a day late because in the UK we've got Easter Bank Holidays that are wrecking 2 weeks in a row, planning-wise 😅

Anyway let's dive into what we've been up to on Trash Goblin!

[h2]Upcycling Gameplay First Look[/h2]

We've completed the first pass of Upcycling gameplay! It's still a little rough around the edges and we want to add some polish & features, but the player can combine a Trinket with... any other Trinket, as long as their sockets match up correctly! This unlocks so much creativity for the player, and also means we can get customers requesting some really weird mashups!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

We can't wait to see what you make using this system, and we're going to add a few more things including the ability to spin/rotate Trinkets once in place so you can choose which way each piece faces.



Here you can see how we're working on some ideas of how to show the sockets/attachment points. One of the challenges is not obfuscating a socket icon when one is on the other side of a Trinket, but also ensuring the player understands that only those they can reach are 'valid' - meaning they have to rotate the Trinket around a bit during this process.

Meanwhile please do come on over and talk to us about the game on our discord!
And if you missed the Kickstarter, head over to the shop on our Patreon!

Another two weeks, and another update! We've been working hard like good little Goblins since we last spoke, having officially moved into Production on the game (woo!) and so far things are going really well! Of course they are, we're like 2 weeks into the Big Plan so there's not been time for anything to go wonky yet. Still, I'm very pleased and the team are feeling confident 😁


[h2]Progress[/h2]

Let's get into some neat specifics!

• The paper design for the player's progression is done. This covers things like the long-term saving goals that drive the main route through the game, and considerations like access to new Tools and new Gameplay, making sure we know how best to lead the player through satisfying purchases and keep doling out fun things in a way that feels good. Of course, as soon as we get this into the game and people play it for real, it could all change - but the structure and the tools are a strong foundation.
  We've also laid out the design (using Flowcharts!) of the first Golden questline - it consists of a lot of steps! This first Golden Quest is also (sort of) the tutorial and onboarding phase of the game, and we know it can change dramatically as we see how people are playing it. That said, the focus here is for the systems that drive Golden Quests to be built, which includes things like quest steps, key moments, unlocks, character interactions... an awful lot of interweaving systems!
  
  
• We've designed our first two new Named NPCs, and there are already some early concept sketches of them as well. If you're in the discord (see below!), you might've already seen some of these because we're huge teases 🥰
  
  
• There are a ton of concepts for new Trinkets, including a range of Charms and Lockets for you to find and customers to buy.
  
  
• Several brand new Trinkets and their icons are in the game and ready to be turned into Chipping challenges, alongside a new material type we're calling 'goopy' which is very exciting as we're always looking for ways to surprise you and keep the Trinkets feeling varied and rich in their various aesthetics.
  
  
• We've designed our dynamic music system (we use Fmod for anyone interested), and have even got first drafts of music in! We're trying to keep the game feeling chill, and are looking at games like Tears of the Kingdom for inspiration in how to keep music part of the experience and reinforcing the player's emotion, but without being just a traditional soundtrack. At the moment, the music changes and adapts to the time of day, as well as each of the main gameplay sequences - chipping, cleaning, talking/selling to customers, and talking to /buying from Aimon. This is all to ensure that over the many hours of playtime you'll be spending in the world we're building, you'll never get bored of the music, and hopefully never notice it looping.
  
  
• We've fixed up our build machine. This might sound really boring, but as of this moment, we have a constantly playable game deployed to a development branch on Steam, built every time someone commits any work. This means we can test on-platform which is super helpful (sometimes bugs that occur in Unity don't in the actual game, and vice versa) and also the build machine will notify the team if a build ever fails. Super useful automation, it keeps things moving nicely.
  

[h2]Rewards on Discord![/h2]

We're gently but insistently nudging all you lovely Goblins to come and join the Discord! We've started rolling out the Discord Rewards - an exclusive role and access to a private channel which everyone who has backed the game on here gets; it's a lovely little space to share work-in-progress snippets and behind-the-scenes glimpses with you, and just generally all be total Goblins together.
So if you haven't joined yet, please head on over to discord.gg/spiltmilk so we can give you access!


The sort of fun tidbits we show in the exclusive backer discord area!

That's all for this update, and until next time - stay lovely!

Apologies for being a day late on this! We've been very busy planning, tweaking, and tweaking plans, and planning tweaks and tweaking tw- ah you get the idea.

[h3]WHAT'S BEEN HAPPENING[/h3]

Well, we're about to move into the first sprint of Production! As of Monday, we'll all be working really hard to make the game a reality. Wait. I mean, or course we've been doing that this whole time but now we're done with the planning and pre-production phase!

We have a load of dates in mind for exciting moments along the way, plus of course the Early Access launch date itself. It's incredibly satisfying to be moving ahead with this - no small thanks to your amazing support - and to be sharing a glimpse at the roadmap with you is both thrilling and a bit stressful.

Having a plan is one thing. Writing it down is another because it becomes way more real. Showing people the plan is just... you can't go back! We can't un-show you this 😅

[h3]DAT ROADMAP[/h3]

But we can caveat the crap out of it, and say - seriously now - all of this is up for change, tweaks, things might get dropped or shifted around. As we move into production we get a better idea of what we can and can't do in the time we have, and we will be adapting these plans to fit almost constantly. More on that below.



We're presenting this in a way that does not overpromise. You'll notice there are no numbers of Trinkets or Quests or whatever. If there's stuff that's seemingly not mentioned at all or is skated over, it's because of that. We want to make sure we're transparent about progress and if possible we overdeliver rather than underdeliver 💖


[h3]KEY DATES[/h3]

MAY - Beta
Very exciting for any of you who will get access to it as part of your rewards! We'll be granting access to the game, and gathering lots of lovely feedback. This is one of the key moments that will impact our plans from there onwards because if you love something or hate something, we'd be mad not to double down on it or address it!

JUNE - Next Fest Demo
This demo will be built off the feedback and hopefully shows the game in a brilliant light, and should contain loads of content too! We will also be leaning into your support and asking you to help us spread the word. The better we do during Next Fest, the better a launch we'll have!

JULY - Early Access Launch
Um, trying not to think about this too much and get all nervous! But also we've got so much to do in preparation. Again, we'll be looking to you lovely lot to help us in any ways we (and you!) can think of!

AUGUST - Continued development
This gets very loose, but in terms of the current goals, we'd love to drop weekly patch updates to the game, which would contain bug fixes, quality-of-life updates, tweaks, balancing and polish. Then alongside that, but spread out to every 2 months, we'd drop a huge update with a new Feature (something like being able to Haggle with Customers, or perhaps Customise Trinkets, all those dream features!) with tons of new content to support it (new customers, quests, trinkets, etc). That way we keep improving the game every week, and expand the content and add new mechanics every 2 months.

This phase could go on for a very long time! We've got tons of cool stuff we'd like to put in the game, and no doubt you'll all have loads of amazing ideas too!

[h3]HOW WE WORK[/h3]

As we move into Production, we start with all the tasks listed out in Miro, with virtual Post-it notes. Then we estimate their complexity very roughly, with the smallest being XS and the largest being XL. An XS task should be less than a day, an L might take almost 2 weeks, while an XL is so big we're not actually sure, and we need to dive into more detail.

So then we lay out a calendar that splits our production time into 2-week sections called Sprints. This combined with the sizing gives us a really simple and fast way to spread the tasks out and see if they all fit into the time we have.

When that's all done and agreed, we plug the first Sprint of tasks into our project management tool (Hack N Plan for anyone interested), and we break those tasks down into tikes as small as is sensible, so that we all individually and as a team know what we're doing for the next two weeks.

As we progress through those tasks, we'll see how accurate our guesses were, and that accuracy (or lack of!) will be passed back up to the Miro calendar, and the remaining elements will get nudged and moved and resized. As we do more work, we get a more accurate idea of the time things will take, and we can adjust easily using this method, rather than rummaging around in reams of individual tickets, plus it means we're not front-loading the planning so we're able to always dedicate time to making the game better even at this point.

While a Sprint is going, we look to plug the next one into Hack N Plan using the same process, and that way we're always ahead of any problems in terms of the next work, but also we're not bogged down in details and wasting time breaking down tasks that may or may not be moved, delayed or brought forward.

This is all done to keep us nimble, keep us making good and focused progress on building the game, and any tasks that are more or less complex than we originally thought they were get caught early, and the resulting shift in the rest of the planned work is known nice and early, so that as things do inevitably change we can keep you in the know!

PHEW

Thanks for attending our Goblin Production lecture! Your homework is to take break from work around 4pm and treat yourself to something nice - a good cup of tea and a biscuit, or maybe that new cardigan you've been eyeing up on Etsy!

That's it for this update,

Stay warm, cosy and healthy!

The Spilt Milk Goblins 🥰

[h3]Dev Progress[/h3]

We're hard at work (as always) but the thing that stuck out for us to share this time was a look at the progress we're making on the cleaning audio. This is very incomplete, showing the systems and responsiveness rather than the intended audio quality or assets, but the crucial thing to notice is that the sponge noises now react to your motions!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

It's soooooo much more satisfying now, we're super stoked to see how you like it in play!

We've also really started digging into the planning of the Early Access launch features, and while we still need to measure the complexity against the time we have to make it all, we're confident of being able to present a pretty accurate roadmap sometime soon!

[h3]Backer Surveys are sent![/h3]
We sent out the basic surveys for all backers last week, so please check your inbox, junk mail, and the like for the link if you're a Kickstarter backer. We've made sure this survey gives us what we need to cover the majority of the rewards, but it's worth going into some detail here:

"Toss A Coin To Your Goblins", "Trash Goblins", "Collector Goblins", and "Beta Access Goblins" - you're all set! We've got everything we need once you've responded to the survey! Yay!

"Delver Goblins", "Doppelgoblins", "Quest Goblins", "Very Important Goblins", "Fashionably Late Goblins" and "Eureka Goblins", you're more complex. Because we will need to gather images and go into feedback and iteration for Trinkets, NPCs and Quests, we're going to have to build and send a different survey for each of you. So you can expect that in the not-too-distant future.